Atlas Shrugged Part I, Chapter 5: The Climax of the d'Anconias (Part 1) - Francisco's Party Tricks
This chapter opens with a bomb going off. Not a literal one. A financial one.
Eddie Willers walks into Dagny’s office with a newspaper and a look on his face like the world just tilted sideways. The San Sebastian Mines, the ones Francisco d’Anconia spent five years and millions of dollars developing, are completely worthless. The Mexican government nationalized them, expecting to seize a fortune, and found… nothing. Empty holes in the ground. Not even enough copper to justify the effort of scraping it out.
And here’s the thing. Francisco is not stupid. Everyone knows that. Eddie says it out loud. Whatever else the guy has become, whatever nonsense he’s been pulling with his playboy lifestyle, he is not the kind of person who makes a mistake like this. So what just happened?
Dagny’s response is ice cold: “Phone him at the Wayne-Falkland and tell the bastard that I want to see him.” Eddie, loyal and sentimental as always, protests gently: “Dagny, it’s Frisco d’Anconia.” And she says: “It was.”
That exchange hits hard. Two words that carry the weight of everything that went wrong between them.
The Kid Who Won Everything
But instead of taking us straight to that confrontation, Rand does something interesting. She throws us into a flashback. A long one. And honestly, it’s some of the best writing in the book so far.
We get the full story of Francisco d’Anconia as a kid. And this kid is basically a legend. His family goes back centuries to Sebastian d’Anconia, who threw wine in the face of a Spanish Inquisition lord and sailed to Argentina to start over from nothing. Built a copper empire from a wooden shack. Sent for the woman he loved fifteen years later. She was still waiting.
Francisco is the peak of this lineage. Every d’Anconia heir was expected to leave the fortune bigger than they found it. Francisco was supposed to be the climax. The best of all of them. And as a kid, everything about him confirmed that.
He could pick up any skill in minutes. Baseball? Never played it, watched for a bit, then hit the ball over a line of oak trees on his first try. A motorboat? Jim Taggart struggled with it during a lesson. Francisco jumped in and took off like a bullet, making the instructor’s jaw drop. He built a pulley elevator system at age twelve. When Dagny’s father looked at the notes, he realized the kid had independently worked out a version of differential equations. At twelve.
I have to admit, growing up in the Soviet system, I knew kids like this. Not quite this extreme, but kids who were just on another level. The ones who could solve the physics olympiad problems in their heads while the rest of us were still reading the question. Rand captures something true here about what exceptional ability looks like from the outside. It looks effortless. And it makes everyone else a little uncomfortable.
The Real Aristocracy
Francisco had a worldview already forming at fourteen. He told Dagny, “We are the only aristocracy left in the world, the aristocracy of money. It’s the only real aristocracy, if people understood what it means, which they don’t.”
At fifteen, he went further. Standing in the woods, he told her that the coats-of-arms of their day were not on moth-eaten shields. They were on billboards. Industrial trademarks. That’s what he worshipped.
Jim, of course, tried to lecture Francisco about “social responsibilities” and how his millions were “a trust for the underprivileged.” Francisco’s reply is one of my favorite lines so far: “It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”
Cold. Surgical. And the kind of line you wish you could deliver in real life.
When Jim asked Francisco what the most depraved type of human being is (trying to use Francisco’s own “What for?” logic against him), Francisco answered simply: “The man without a purpose.”
Growing Up Together
The real heart of this chapter is the relationship between Dagny and Francisco. It starts as two kids who just get each other. They ride trains to watch factories. They dismantle cars in junkyards. Mrs. Taggart calls them from a hundred miles away because some stationmaster has “three young tramps” who claim to be Taggarts.
But it shifts. When Francisco is sixteen and Dagny is fourteen, he catches himself looking at her differently. She catches him looking. There’s a moment on a cliff overlooking the Hudson where she asks him “What do you like about me?” and he points to the Taggart railroad tracks in the distance. “It’s not mine,” she says. “What I like is that it’s going to be.”
That’s romantic in the weirdest, most Ayn Rand way possible. He’s not attracted to her body or her face. He’s attracted to her competence. To what she’s going to build.
The tension keeps building over the next summers. A tennis match that becomes this bizarre, intense thing where Dagny is playing like she wants to destroy him, and he’s laughing because he understands exactly what’s happening. She wins. He throws his racket at her feet. But the look he gives her says he won something else entirely.
The Night at Rockdale
Then there’s the night Francisco walks five miles to her station at Rockdale. Doesn’t say why. Sits in a corner while she works, watching her. They barely talk. When dawn comes, they walk home through the woods and end up at a clearing by a stream where the first sunlight is hitting the top of a hill.
And that’s where things happen. This is their first time together, and Rand writes it with a strange mix of inevitability and tenderness. What struck me is Francisco’s words after: “We had to learn it from each other.”
They keep it secret all summer. Not because they’re ashamed. But because it’s theirs, and nobody else has the right to an opinion about it.
What Rand Gets Right
Look, I’m not going to pretend this is the most realistic portrait of teenage romance. These kids talk like philosophy professors and act like they’ve already figured out the meaning of life. But there’s something Rand captures that I think is genuinely real: the feeling of finding someone who operates on your frequency. Someone who doesn’t need you to explain why the work matters more than the party. Who doesn’t think ambition is something to apologize for.
Growing up where I did, where ambition was officially suspicious and excellence was supposed to be collective, I would have killed to meet a Francisco at that age. Someone who said out loud, “There’s nothing of any importance in life except how well you do your work.”
The flashback sets us up for something painful, though. We know the present-day Francisco is a different person. The boy who built elevators and ran equations in his head is now the man who just sank millions into worthless mines. What happened to him?
That’s what Part 2 will dig into.
Previous: Part I, Chapter 4: The Immovable Movers
Next: Part I, Chapter 5: The Climax of the d’Anconias (Part 2)
This is part of a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (35th Anniversary Edition, ISBN: 978-1-101-13719-2). New posts daily.