There's no subject so rich in ideas as money. . . a very pure thing in its way. . . people have such a delicate love for money,"" muses the clever wife of Aristide, one of its more unstable acolytes, in this revival of Ms. Stead's 1938 antediluvian novel of manipulative finance in the Paris of 1931. To Jules Bertillon, of the Brothers Bertillon's Banque Mercure, there is more pleasure in moneymaking than in money itself, although he too has a reverence for its absolute and wondrous transcendence. "". . . the bank, this strange palace of illusion, temptation and beauty [which] is you, Jules. Its soul is you,"" declares Michel Alphendery, in a rare rhapsodic extravagance. Alphendery is Jules' brain trust and ""pet socialist. . . . Its insurance against the revolution,"" and he is fascinated and appalled when Jules, his staff, and intermittently collaborating financiers move through their intricate and often shady dealings with fastidious grace or jagged force. Meanwhile an odd assortment of clients of all nations, ""the parvenu and accidentally rich,"" prime the pumps for the ""raiders."" But eventually Aristide, prompted by his wife, goes for the jugular, although to Jules, Aristide is ""the only freak in [Barnum's] works."" Jules' fanciful empire collapses, but the Juleses of the world will surely die from boredom -- not the holocaust to come -- of which Alphendery, a Jew (and author Stead), caught only a few sparks. A shrewdly detailed (and exhaustive -- 787 pp.) topography of a never-never land of sand castles and their kings.