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sufficiently that by 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, the firm was named one of England's accepting houses and served on the Accepting Houses Committee, one of about seventeen such financial institutions so honored, an indication of how far Lazard Brothers had come from its origins as a lowly outpost of the French firm. In London's financial circles, this was a big deal.
    Kindersley also had more than a passing business relationship with Weetman Pearson, a major British international financier and industrialist. At some point between 1910 and the dawning of World War I, Kindersley introduced Pearson to David Weill, and Pearson made a small investment in Lazard Brothers. After World War I, the Bank of England developed strict new regulations about the degree of foreign ownership it would permit in the English banking system. As a result, Pearson, now known as Lord Cowdray, and S. Pearson & Son Ltd. increased its stake in Lazard Brothers to 50 percent, with the other half being owned by Lazard Freres et Cie. The consequences of the Pearsons' stake in Lazard Brothers would reverberate through the three houses for years, finally coming to a head some ninety years later.

    AS HAD BEEN preordained, Frank Altschul, whose father, Charles, had emigrated from London to San Francisco during the gold rush and become one of the first nonfamily partners of Lazard, joined the New York office after graduating from Yale. He became a partner the same day his father retired--July 1, 1916. Except in the case of the descendants of Alexander Weill and, for a time, some of the Lazard family, the passing on of the partnership seat was not the same as passing along an ownership interest in the firm.
    Still, the profitability of the Lazard partnership was even then an invitation to vast riches, and Lazard partners became among the wealthiest men in their respective countries, regardless of whether they had an ownership stake in the firm. Frank Altschul became fabulously wealthy at Lazard, too. During his lifetime, which spanned ninety-four years, he donated millions of dollars to Yale, his beloved alma mater. In 1913, Altschul had cemented his position in the upper reaches of the Jewish financial hierarchy of New York by marrying Helen Lehman Goodhart of the Lehman Brothers banking fortune. His sister married Herbert Lehman, the former Lehman Brothers partner who would later serve as the governor of New York and its U.S. senator. Over time, Altschul also contributed $500,000 to Williams College and $1 million to Mount Sinai Hospital. He also donated hundreds of thousands for the legal defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, an effort being led by Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard law professor and eventually a Supreme Court justice. One day Frankfurter showed up at Altschul's office at Lazard, eager "to see what kind of man in Wall Street could be sending money for Sacco and Vanzetti." Thereafter, Frankfurter and Altschul remained lifelong friends. Altschul lived at 550 Park Avenue, at the southwest corner of East Sixty-second Street, and owned a 450-acre estate--named Overbrook Farm--outside Stamford, Connecticut, where in 1934, in an abandoned pigpen, he started Overbrook Press, known for the graphic and technical excellence of its elegant publications.

    ONE OF THE first issues Altschul confronted after he became a Lazard partner, as early as October 1917, was the growing possibility that the French families would decide to liquidate and shutter either Lazard Brothers in London or Lazard Freres in New York. This was yet another life-threatening crisis for the fledgling firm. During a multiweek visit to Paris in October 1918 (as part of his war service in the U.S. Army), where these matters were discussed "in some detail," Altschul became well versed in the views of the French. In a three-page, single-spaced letter to George Blumenthal, the New York office's senior partner, Altschul was happy to report that the French partners were now far more sanguine