Читать книгу The Complete Rougon-Macquart Cycle (All 20 Unabridged Novels in one volume) - Emile Zola - Страница 13

Table of Contents

Aristide Rougon swept down upon Paris on the morrow of the 2 December, like a carrion bird that scents the field of battle from afar. He came from Plassans, a sous-préfecture in the south, where his father had at length, in the troubled waters of events, netted a long-coveted appointment as receiver of taxes. He himself, still young, had compromised himself like a fool, without fame or profit, and could consider himself fortunate to have emerged safe and sound from the scrimmage. He came with a rush, furious at having taken a false step, cursing the country, talking of Paris with the ravenous hunger of a wolf, swearing “that he would never be such an ass again;” and the bitter smile which accompanied these words assumed a terrible significance on his thin lips.

He arrived in the early days of 1852. He brought with him his wife Angèle, a fair-haired, insipid person, whom he installed in a cramped lodging in the Rue Saint-Jacques, like an inconvenient piece of furniture that he was eager to get out of the way. The young wife had refused to be separated from her daughter, little Clotilde, a child of four, whom the father would gladly have left behind in the care of his family. But he had only yielded to Angèle’s desire on the stipulation that the college at Plassans should remain the home of their son Maxime, a scapegrace of eleven, whom his grandmother had promised to look after. Aristide wanted to have his hands free: a wife and a child already seemed to him a crushing burden for a man decided to surmount every obstacle, not caring whether he got rolled in the mud or broke his back in the attempt.

On the very night of his arrival, while Angèle was unpacking the trunks, he felt a keen desire to explore Paris, to tread with his clodhopping shoes the burning stones from which he hoped to extract millions of money. He simply took possession of the city. He walked for the sake of walking, going along the pavements as though he were in a conquered country. He saw before him clearly the battle he had come to fight, and he felt no repugnance in comparing himself to a skilful picklock who was about, by ruse or violence to seize his share of the common wealth which so far had been malignantly denied him. Had he felt the need of an excuse, he would have invoked his desires, which had for ten years been stifled, his wretched provincial existence, and above all his mistakes, for which he held society at large responsible. But at this moment, amid this emotion of the gambler who at last places his eager hands on the green cloth, he felt nothing but joy, a joy all his own, in which were mingled the gratification of covetousness and the expectations of unpunished roguery. The Paris air intoxicated him; he thought he could hear in the rumbling of the carriages the voices from Macbeth calling to him: “Thou shalt be rich!” For close upon two hours he thus walked from street to street, tasting the delights of a man who gives play to his vices. He had not been back in Paris since the happy year which he had spent there as a student. The night fell: his dream grew in the bright light thrown on the pavement by the shops and cafes; he lost himself.

When he raised his eyes, he found he was in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the middle. One of his brothers, Eugène Rougon, lived in an adjacent street, the Rue Penthièvre. When coming to Paris, Aristide had reckoned particularly upon Eugène, who, after having been one of the most active participators in the Coup d’État, was now an occult force, a lawyer of small account about to develop into a politician of great importance. But with the superstition of a gambler, Aristide decided not to knock at his brother’s door that evening. He returned slowly to the Rue Saint-Jacques, thinking of Eugène with a dull feeling of jealousy, contemplating his shabby clothes still covered with the dust of the journey, and seeking consolation in the resumption of his dream of wealth. But even this dream had turned to bitterness. After starting out for the sake of expansion, and being exhilarated by the bustling activity of the Paris shops, he returned home irritated by the happiness that seemed to him to fill the streets, intensified his ferocity, picturing to himself relentless struggles in which he would take delight in beating and cheating the crowd that had jostled him on the pavement. Never had he known an appetite so vast, an eagerness so pressing for enjoyment.

At daybreak the next morning he was at his brother’s. Eugène lived in two large, cold, barely-furnished rooms, that chilled Aristide to the marrow. He had looked to find his brother wallowing in the lap of luxury. Eugène was working at a small black table. All he said was, with a smile, in his slow voice:

“Ah! there you are, I was expecting you.”

Aristide was very bitter. He accused Eugène of leaving him to vegetate, of not even having had the charity to give him a word of good advice while he was floundering about in the country. He could never forgive himself for remaining a Republican up to the 2 December; it was an open sore with him, an everlasting confusion. Eugène had quietly taken up his pen. When the other had finished:

“Bah!” he said. “All mistakes can be set right. You have a career before you full of promise.”

He spoke these words in so decided a voice, with a look so piercing, that Aristide lowered his head, feeling that his brother was penetrating into the very depths of his nature. The latter continued with friendly bluntness:

“You have come here to ask me to find you an appointment, have you not? I have been thinking of you, but I have heard of nothing yet. You understand, I must be careful where I put you. What you want is a place where you can feather your nest without danger either to yourself or to me…. Don’t trouble to protest, we are quite alone, we can say what we like….”

Aristide thought it best to laugh.

“Oh, I know you have your wits about you,” Eugène continued, “and that you are not likely to make a fool of yourself for no purpose…. As soon as a good opportunity presents itself, I will give you the berth. Meantime, whenever you want twenty francs or so, come and ask me for it.”

They talked an instant of the rising in the South, through which their father had gained his appointment as receiver of taxes. Eugène dressed himself while they were talking. As he was about to take leave of his brother downstairs in the street, he detained him a moment longer, and said to him in a lower tone of voice:

“You will do me a favour by not seeking work on your own account, but by waiting at home quietly for the appointment which I promise you…. I should not like to see my brother hanging about in people’s waiting-rooms.”

Aristide had a certain respect for Eugène, whom he looked upon as an uncommonly smart chap. He could not forgive his distrustfulness, nor his candour, which was a trifle blunt; still he went home obediently and shut himself up in the Rue Saint-Jacques. He had arrived with five hundred francs which had been lent him by his wife’s father. After paying the expenses of the journey, he made the three hundred francs that remained last him a month. Angèle was a great eater; moreover she thought it necessary to trim her Sunday dress with a fresh set of mauve ribbons. That month of waiting seemed endless to Aristide. He was consumed with impatience. When he sat at his window and watched the gigantic labour of Paris seething beneath him, he was struck with an insane desire to hurl himself straightway into the furnace, in order with his fevered hands to mould the gold like soft wax. He inhaled the breath, vague as yet, that rose from the great city, that breath of the budding Empire, laden already with the odours of alcoves and financial hells, with the warm effluvia of sensuality. The faint fumes that reached him told him that he was on the right scent, that the game was scudding before him, that the great imperial hunt, the hunt after adventures, women, and millions, was at last about to commence. His nostrils quivered, his instinct, the instinct of a famished beast, dexterously seized upon the slightest indications of the division of spoil of which the city was to be the arena.

Twice he called on his brother, to urge him to greater activity. Eugène received him gruffly, told him again that he was not forgetting him, but that he must have patience. He at last received a letter asking him to call at the Rue Penthièvre. He went, his heart beating violently, as though he was on his way to an assignation. He found Eugène sitting before his everlasting little black table in the great bleak room which he used as a study. So soon as he saw him, the lawyer handed him a document, and said:

“There, I got your business settled yesterday. This is your appointment as an assistant surveying-clerk at the Hotel de Ville. Your salary will be two thousand four hundred francs.”

Aristide remained where he stood. He turned pale, and did not take the document, thinking that his brother was making fun of him. He had expected an appointment of at least six thousand francs. Eugène, suspecting what was passing in his mind, turned his chair round, and, folding his arms, exclaimed, with a show of anger:

“So you are a fool, then, are you?…. You indulge in dreams like a girl. You want to live in a handsome flat, to keep servants, to eat well, to sleep in silken sheets, to take your pleasure in the arms of the first woman that comes, in a boudoir furnished in a couple of hours…. You and your sort, if you had your way, would empty the coffers even before they were full. But, good God, why can’t you be patient? See how I live, and in order to pick up your fortune at least take the trouble to stoop.”

He spoke with a profound contempt for his brother’s schoolboy impatience. One could feel, through his rude speech, a higher ambition, a desire for unmitigated power; this candid craving for money must have seemed common to him, and puerile. He continued in a gentler voice, with a subtle smile:

“No doubt you have excellent propensities, and I have no wish to thwart them. Men like you are worth much to us. We fully intend to choose our best friends from among the hungriest. Set your mind at rest, we shall keep open table, and the most unbounded appetites shall be satisfied. It is, after all, the easiest way of governing…. But for Heaven’s sake wait till the cloth is laid; and, if you take my advice, you will go to the kitchen yourself and fetch your own knife and fork.”

Aristide still remained sullen. His brother’s metaphorical humour in no way raised his spirits. And Eugène once more gave vent to his anger.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “I was right in my first opinion: you are a fool…. Why, what did you expect, what did you imagine I was going to do with your illustrious person? You have not even had the spirit to finish your law studies; you bury yourself for ten years in a miserable clerkship in a sous-préfecture; and you come down upon me with the odious reputation of a Republican whom the Coup d’État alone was able to convert …. Do you think there is the making of a minister in you, with a record like that?…. Oh, I know you have in your favour your savage desire to succeed by any possible means. It is a great point, I admit, and it is that which I had in my mind when I got you this appointment in the Hotel de Ville.”

And rising, he thrust the nomination into Aristide’s hands, and continued:

“Take it, and some day you’ll thank me! I chose the place for you myself, and I know what you’ll be able to get out of it…. You have only to look about you and to keep your ears open. If you know your way about, you will understand, and act accordingly…. Now remember carefully what I am about to add. We are entering upon a period when fortune will be within the reach of anyone. Make as much money as you like: I give you leave; only no folly, no flagrant scandal, or I’ll exterminate you.”

This threat produced the effect which his promises had not been able to bring about. All Aristide’s ardour was rekindled at the thought of the fortune of which his brother spoke. It seemed to him that he was at last let loose in the fray, authorized to cut throats, provided he did so legally, and without causing too much commotion. Eugène gave him two hundred francs to keep him till the end of the month. Then he paused, reflecting.

“I am thinking of changing my name,” he said at last; “you should do the same…. We should be less in each other’s way.”

“As you like,” answered Aristide quietly.

“You need take no trouble in the matter, I will attend to the formalities…. Would you like to call yourself Sicardot, your wife’s name?”

Aristide raised his eyes to the ceiling, repeating the name and listening to the sound of the syllables:

“Sicardot…. Aristide Sicardot…. No, I wouldn’t; it’s clumsy and stinks of failure.”

“Think of something else then,” said Eugène.

“I would prefer Sicard simply,” resumed the other after a pause: “Aristide Sicard…. That’s not so bad, is it?…. a little frivolous, perhaps ….”

He thought a moment longer, and then, triumphantly:

“I have it, I’ve found it,” he cried …. “Saccard, Aristide Saccard!…. with two c’s …. Eh! there’s money in that name; it sounds as if you were counting five-franc pieces.”

Eugène’s was a savage type of humour. He dismissed his brother, and said to him with a smile:

“Yes, a name that ought to make either a felon or a millionaire of you.”

A few days later Aristide Saccard was installed at the Hotel de Ville. He learnt that his brother must have had great influence to get him admitted without the usual examinations.

And then the household entered upon the monotonous life of a small clerk. Aristide and his wife resumed their Plassans habits. Only they had fallen from a dream of sudden fortune, and their poverty-stricken existence seemed the heavier to them since they had come to look upon it as a time of probation whose length they were unable to determine. To be poor in Paris is to be doubly poor. Angèle accepted penury with the listlessness of a chlorotic woman; she spent her days in the kitchen, or else lolling on the floor playing with her daughter, never bewailing her lot till the last franc was reached. But Aristide quivered with rage in this poverty, in this narrow existence, in which he turned about like a caged beast. For him it was a period of unspeakable suffering; his pride was wounded to the quick, his unsatisfied cravings goaded him to madness. His brother succeeded in getting elected to the Corps Législatif by the arrondissement of Plassans, and he suffered all the more. He was too conscious of Eugène’s superiority to be foolishly jealous: he accused him of not doing as much as he might have done for him. Time after time he was driven by want to go to him and borrow money of him. Eugène lent him the money, but reproached him roughly for his lack of spirit and willingness. After that Aristide set his back up. He swore he would never ask anybody for a sou, and he kept his word. The last week of each month Aristide ate dry bread and sighed. This apprenticeship completed Saccard’s gruesome training. His lips became still more thin; he was no longer fool enough to dream of millions aloud; his emaciated person became dumb, and expressed but one desire, one fixed idea, that never left his mind. When he trotted from the Rue Saint-Jacques to the Hotel de Ville, his worn heels sounded sharply on the pavement, and he buttoned himself up in his threadbare frockcoat as in an asylum of hatred, while his weasel’s nose sniffed the air of the streets: a jagged symbol of the envious wretchedness that one sees prowling over the pavements of Paris, carrying abroad its plan of fortune and its dream of gratification.

In the early part of 1853, Aristide was appointed a surveying commissioner of roads. His salary was to be four thousand five hundred francs. This increase came in the nick of time: Angèle was in a decline, little Clotilde had lost all her colour. He kept on his scanty lodgings of two small rooms, the dining-room furnished in walnut and the bedroom in mahogany, and continued to lead a harsh existence, avoiding debt, not desiring to touch other people’s money until he was able to plunge his arms into it up to the elbows. He thus belied his instincts, scorning the few additional sous that came to him, remaining on the lookout. Angèle was perfectly happy. She bought herself some things and ate meat every day. She could no longer understand her husband’s suppressed anger, nor the reason why he wore the sombre expression of a man working out the solution of a formidable problem.

Aristide followed Eugène’s advice: he kept his ears and eyes open. When he went to thank his brother for his promotion, the latter observed the change that had taken place in him; he complimented him on what he called his sensible demeanour. The clerk, inwardly hardened by jealousy, had become supple and insinuating. A few months had sufficed to transform him into an admirable comedian. All his Southern ardour had been aroused; and he carried his cunning so far that his fellow-clerks at the Hotel de Ville looked upon him as an inoffensive fellow whom his near relationship to a deputy marked out beforehand for some fat appointment. This relationship secured for him the goodwill also of his superiors. He thus enjoyed a sort of authority above his position, which enabled him to open certain doors and to explore certain receptacles without any blame being attached to his indiscretions. For two years he was seen to roam about all the passages, linger in all the rooms, leave his seat twenty times a day to go and talk to a friend, or carry an instruction, or take a stroll through the offices, endless journeys that caused his colleagues to exclaim, “That devil of a Provençal! he can’t sit still: his legs are always on the move.” His personal friends took him for an idler, and our worthy laughed when they accused him of having but one thought, to despoil the services of a few minutes. He never made the mistake of listening at keyholes; but he had a way of boldly opening a door and walking across a room, with a document in his hand and a preoccupied air, with a step so slow and even that he did not lose a word of the conversation. This was a masterpiece of tactics; people ended by not interrupting themselves when this assiduous clerk passed by them, gliding through the shadows of the offices, and seemingly so wrapt up in his business. He had still one other method; he was extraordinarily obliging, he offered to help his fellow-clerks whenever they dropped into arrears with their work, and he would then study the registers and documents that passed through his hands with meditative fondness. But one of his favourite tricks was to strike up a friendship with the messengers. He went so far as to shake them by the hand. For hours together he would keep them talking between the doors, with little stifled bursts of laughter, telling them stories, drawing them out. The worthy men worshipped him, and said of him, “There’s a man who isn’t haughty.” He was the first to be told of any scandal that might occur. And thus it came about that at the end of two years the Hotel de Ville was an open book to him. He knew every member of the staff down to the least of the lamp-lighters, and every paper down to the laundress’s bills.

The Paris of that period offered a most fascinating study to a man like Aristide Saccard. The Empire had just been proclaimed, after the famous journey in the course of which the Prince-President had succeeded in stirring up the enthusiasm of a few Bonapartist departments. The platform and the press were silent. Society, saved once again, shook hands with itself, took its ease, lay abed of a morning, now that it had a strong government to protect it and relieve it from the trouble of thinking and looking after its interests. The great preoccupation of society was to know with what amusement to kill time. In Eugène Rougon’s happy phrase, Paris had sat down to dinner, and was contemplating bawdiness at dessert. Politics terrified it, like a dangerous drug. Men’s enervated minds turned towards pleasure and speculation. Those who had money brought it forth from its hiding-place, and those who had none sought for forgotten treasures in every nook and cranny. And underneath the turmoil there ran a subdued quiver, a nascent sound of five-franc pieces, of women’s rippling laughter, and the yet faint clatter of plate and murmur of kisses. In the midst of the great silence, the absolute peace of the new reign of order, arose every kind of attractive rumour, of golden and voluptuous promise. It was as if one were passing in front of one of those little houses whose closely-drawn curtains reveal nothing beyond the shadows of women, whence no sound issues but that of the gold on the marble chimney-pieces. The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy-house of Europe. The handful of adventurers who had succeeded in purloining a throne required a reign of adventures, of shady transactions, of sold consciences, of bought women, of rampant and universal drunkenness. And in the city where the blood of December was yet hardly washed away, there sprang up, timidly as yet, that mad desire for dissipation that was destined to drag down the country to the limbo of decayed and dishonoured nations.

From the very beginning Aristide Saccard felt the advent of this rising tide of speculation, whose spume was in the end to cover the whole of Paris. He watched its progress with profound attention. He found himself in the very midst of the hot rain of crown-pieces that fell thickly on to the city’s roofs. In his incessant wanderings across the Hotel de Ville, he had got wind of the vast project for the transformation of Paris, of the plan of those clearances, those new roads and improvised districts, that formidable piece of jobbery in the sale of real property, which gave rise in the four quarters of the town to the conflict of interests and the blaze of luxury unrestrained. From that time forward his activity had a purpose. It was at this period that he developed his geniality. He even fattened out a little, he ceased hurrying through the streets like an attenuated cat in search of its prey. At his office he was more chatty, more obliging than ever. His brother, whom he visited in a more or less official manner, complimented him on putting his advice so happily into practice. About the beginning of 1854 Saccard confided to him that he had several pieces of business in view, but that he would require a rather large advance.

“Look for it,” said Eugène.

“You are quite right, I will look for it,” he replied, with entire good humour, appearing not to perceive that his brother declined to supply him with the preliminary capital.

It was the thought of this capital that now worried him. His plan was formed, it matured day by day.

But the first few thousand francs were not to be found. His will became more and more tense; he looked at the people in the streets in a nervous and penetrating manner, as though he were seeking a lender in every wayfarer. At home Angèle continued to lead her subdued and contented existence. He awaited his opportunity; and his genial laughter became more bitter as this opportunity delayed in presenting itself.

Aristide had a sister in Paris. Sidonie Rougon had married at Plassans an attorney’s clerk, and together they had set up business in the Rue Saint-Honoré as dealers in fruit from the South of France. When her brother came across her, the husband had vanished, and the business had long ago disappeared. She was living in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, in a little entresol consisting of three rooms. She also leased the shop on the ground-floor beneath her flat, a narrow and mysterious establishment in which she pretended to carry on a business in lace; and there were, as a matter of fact, in the window some odds and ends of guipure and Valenciennes, hung over gilt rods; but the inside looked like a waiting-room, with a polished wainscotting and not the least sign of goods for sale. The door and window were veiled with light curtains, which sheltered the shop from the gaze of the passersby and completed its discreet and secluded appearance, as of the atrium to some unknown temple. It was a rare thing for a customer to be seen calling on Madame Sidonie; most frequently even the handle was removed from the door. She made it known in the neighbourhood that she waited personally upon wealthy women and offered them her lace. The convenience of the place, she used to say, was her sole reason for hiring the shop and the entresol, which communicated by means of a staircase hidden in the wall. As a matter of fact the lace-woman was always out of doors; she was seen hurrying in and out ten times in a single day. Moreover, she did not confine herself to the lace-trade; she made use of her entresol, filling it up with a stock of things picked up nobody knew where. She had there dealt in gutta-percha goods, waterproofs, goloshes, braces, and the rest; and then followed one after the other a new oil for promoting the growth of the hair, appliances for curing deformities, a patent automatic coffeepot, the working of which had cost her a deal of trouble. When her brother called to see her she was selling pianos; her entresol was crammed with these instruments; there were pianos even in her bedroom, a very coquettishly-furnished room that clashed with the sale-room disorder of the two others. She carried on these two businesses with perfect method; the customers who came for the goods on the entresol came in and went out through a carriage-entrance that led into the house from the Rue Papillon; you had to know the secret of the little staircase in order to be aware of the twofold nature of the lace-woman’s dealings. On the entresol she called herself Madame Touche, her husband’s name, while on the door of the shop she had put only her Christian name, which caused her to be generally known as Madame Sidonie.

Madame Sidonie was thirty-five; but she dressed herself with so little care, and had so little of the woman in her manner, that one would have thought her much older. As a matter of fact she had no age. She wore an everlasting black dress, frayed at the edges, rumpled and discoloured by use, recalling an advocate’s gown worn out by the wear and tear of the bar. Clad further in a black bonnet that came down to her forehead and hid her hair, and a pair of thick shoes, she trotted along the streets, carrying on her arm a little basket whose handles were mended with string. This basket, which never left her, was a world in itself. When she raised the lid there came from it samples of every sort, notebooks, pocketbooks, above all handfuls of stamped documents, the illegible writing on which she was peculiarly adroit at deciphering. She combined the attributes of the bailiff and the commission-agent. She lived among protests, judgment summonses, and orders of court; when she had sold ten francs’ worth of lace or pomade, she would insinuate herself into her customer’s good graces and become her man of business, attending attorneys, advocates, and judges on her behalf. She would thus for weeks hawk about the particulars of a case at the bottom of her basket, taking the devil’s own trouble, going from one end of Paris to the other, with a little even trot, never taking a conveyance. It would have been difficult to say what profit she made from this sort of business; she did it to begin with from an innate taste for shady traffic and a fondness for sharp practice; and then she secured a host of little advantages: dinners on every hand, franc pieces picked up here and there. But after all her most distinct gain lay in the confidences she everywhere received, putting her on the track of good strokes of business and useful windfalls. Living in the homes of others, in the business of others, she was a real walking catalogue of wants and offers. She knew where there was a daughter that had to get married at once, a family that stood in need of three thousand francs, an old gentleman willing to lend the three thousand francs, but on substantial security and at a fat rate of interest. She knew of matters more delicate than these: the sad feelings of a fair-haired lady who was not understood by her husband, and who yearned to be understood; the secret aspirations of a good mother who wished to see her little girl comfortably married; the tastes of a baron keen on little supper-parties and very young girls. And with a pale smile she hawked these wants and offers about; she would do miles on foot to interview people; she sent the baron to the good mother, induced the old gentleman to lend the three thousand francs to the distressed family, found consolation for the fair-haired lady and a not too inquiring husband for the girl that had to get married. She had big affairs on hand too, affairs that she could speak of aloud, pestering everybody who came near her: an interminable lawsuit that a noble but ruined family had employed her to look after, and a debt contracted by England to France in the days of the Stuarts, whose figures, with the compound interest added, ran up to close upon three milliards of francs. This debt of three milliards was her hobby; she explained the case with great wealth of detail, launching out into quite an historical lecture, and a flush of enthusiasm would rise to her cheeks, usually flaccid and yellow as wax. Occasionally, between a visit to bailiff and a call on a friend, she would get rid of a coffeepot, a waterproof, or sell a bit of lace, or place a piano on the hire system. These things gave her the least trouble. Then she would hurry back to her shop, where a customer had made an appointment to inspect a piece of Chantilly. The customer arrived and glided like a shadow into the discreetly-veiled shop. And not infrequently a gentleman would at the same time come in by the carriage-entrance in the Rue Papillon to see Madame Touche’s pianos on the entresol.

If Madame Sidonie failed to make her fortune, it was because she often worked for art’s sake. Loving litigation, neglecting her own business for that of others, she allowed herself to be fleeced by the bailiffs, though this gave her, for the rest, a rapture unknown save to the litigious. All the woman in her vanished; she became a mere man of business, a commission-agent bustling about Paris at all hours, carrying in her fabulous basket the most equivocal articles, selling everything, dreaming of milliards, and appearing in court, on behalf of a favourite client, over a contested matter of ten francs. Short, lean, and sallow, clad in the thin black dress that looked as though it had been cut out of an advocate’s gown, she had shrivelled out of recognition, and to see her creeping along the houses, one would have taken her for an errand-boy dressed up as a girl. Her complexion had the piteous pallor of stamped paper. Her lips smiled an extinct smile, while her eyes seemed to swim in the whirlpool of jobs and preoccupations of every kind with which she stuffed her brains. Her ways, for the rest, were timid and discreet, with a vague reminiscence of the priest’s confessional and the midwife’s closet, and she had the maternal gentleness of a nun who, having renounced all worldly affections, feels pity for the sufferings of the heart. She never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, her personal concerns. There was only one thing that she never sold, and that was her person; not that she had any scruples, but because the idea of such a bargain could not possibly occur to her. She was as dry as an invoice, as cold as a protest, and at bottom as brutal and indifferent as a broker’s man.

Saccard, fresh up from the country, was unable at first to fathom the subtle depths of Madame Sidonie’s numerous trades. As he had read law for twelve months, she spoke to him one day of the three milliards with an air of seriousness that gave him a poor opinion of her intellect. She came and rummaged in the corners of the lodgings in the Rue Saint-Jacques, weighed Angèle with a glance, and did not return except when her errands brought her to the neighbourhood, and she felt a want to discuss the question of the three milliards. Angèle had nibbled at the story of the English debt. The agent mounted her hobby, and made the gold rain down for an hour. It was the crack in this quick intelligence, the sweet mad lullaby of a life wasted in squalid dealings, the magical charm with which she ensorcelled not only herself but the more credulous among her clients. Firm in her conviction moreover, she ended by speaking of the three milliards as of a personal fortune which the judges were bound sooner or later to restore to her; and this threw a wondrous halo about her poor black bonnet upon which a few faded violets curtsied on brass wires that showed the metal. Angèle opened wide her eyes. She spoke repeatedly of her sister-in-law to her husband with respectfulness, saying that perhaps Madame Sidonie would make them rich one day. Saccard shrugged his shoulders; he had been to see the shop and entresol in the Faubourg-Poissonnière, and had read nothing there but approaching bankruptcy. He tried to learn Eugène’s opinion of their sister; but his brother became grave, and merely replied that he never saw her, that he knew her to be a very intelligent woman, a little compromising, perhaps. Nevertheless, as Saccard was returning to the Rue Penthièvre some time afterwards, he thought he saw Mme. Sidonie’s black dress leave his brother’s and glide rapidly along the houses. He ran after it, but was unable again to catch sight of the black dress. The she-agent had one of those spare figures that get lost in a crowd. He stood pondering, and from this moment he began to study his sister more attentively. It was not long before he grasped the immensity of the toil performed by this pale, nebulous, little creature, whose whole face seemed to melt away into shapelessness. He respected her. She was a true Rougon. He recognized this hunger for money, this longing for intrigue, which was the characteristic of the family; only in her case, thanks to the surroundings amid which she had matured, thanks to that Paris where each morning she had to seek to make her evening black bread, the common temperament had deviated from its course, producing this extraordinary hermaphrodism of the woman grown sexless, man of business and procuress in one.

When Saccard, after having drawn up his schemes, set out in search of his preliminary capital, his thoughts naturally turned towards his sister. She shook her head, and sighed, talked of her three milliards. But the clerk would not humour her madness, he pulled her up roughly each time she got back to the Stuart debt; this myth seemed to him to disgrace so practical an intellect. Mme. Sidonie, who quietly accepted the most cutting satire without allowing her convictions to be shaken, next explained to him with great lucidity that he would not raise a sou, having no security to offer. This conversation took place in front of the Bourse, where she was about to speculate with her savings. One was certain to find her at about three o’clock leaning against the rail, on the left, at the post-office side; it was there that she gave audience to individuals as sinister and shady as herself. As her brother was on the point of leaving her, she murmured regretfully, “Ah! if only you were unmarried!…” This reservation, of which he scrupled to enquire the exact and complete meaning, made Saccard singularly reflective.

Months passed, war was declared in the Crimea. Paris, unmoved by a war so distant, threw itself with growing ardour into speculation and the commerce of harlots. Saccard stood by, gnawing his fists, as he watched this increasing mania which he had foreseen. The hammers beating the gold on the anvils of this gigantic forge gave him shocks of fury and impatience. So tense were his intellect and his will that he lived in a dream, like a sleep-walker stepping along the edge of a roof under the influence of a fixed idea. He was surprised, therefore, and irritated, one evening to find Angèle ill in bed. His home life, regular as clockwork, was upset, and this exasperated him like a thought-out spitefulness of Fate. Poor Angèle complained gently; she had caught a chill. When the doctor came, he appeared very anxious; he told the husband on the landing that his wife had inflammation of the lungs, and that he could not answer for her recovery. From that moment the clerk nursed the sick woman without any feeling of anger; he no longer went to his office, he stayed by her side, watching her with an indescribable look on his face, whenever she lay asleep, flushed and panting with fever. Mme. Sidonie found time, notwithstanding the overwhelming nature of her work, to call every evening and make decoctions which she maintained to be sovereign in their effects. To all her other professions she added that of a heaven-born sick-nurse, taking an interest in sufferings, in remedies, in the brokenhearted conversations that linger round deathbeds. She seemed to have taken a tender liking for Angèle; she had a way of loving women, with a thousand caresses, doubtless because of the pleasure they gave to men; she treated them with the delicate attention that merchants bestow upon the more precious of their wares, calling them “Pretty one, sweetheart,” cooing to them, and behaving with the transports of a lover in the presence of his mistress. And though Angèle was one of those out of whom there was nothing to be made, yet she cajoled her like the others, on principle. When the young wife took to her bed, Mme. Sidonie’s effusions became tearful, she filled the silent chamber with her devotedness. Her brother watched her moving about, his lips tight, as though crushed with silent grief.

The illness grew worse. One evening the doctor informed them that the patient would not live through the night. Mme. Sidonie had come early, preoccupied, watching Aristide and Angèle with her watery eyes, illumined by momentary flashes of fire. When the doctor was gone, she lowered the lamp, and there was a great hush. Death entered slowly into the hot, moist room, where the uneven breathing of the dying woman sounded like the spasmodic ticking of a clock that is running down. Mme. Sidonie desisted from her potions, letting the illness take its course. She sat down before the fireplace, near her brother, who was poking the fire with a feverish hand, throwing involuntary glances the while towards the bed. Then, as though unnerved by the closeness of the atmosphere, he withdrew into the adjoining room; little Clotilde, who had been shut in there, was playing with her doll, very quietly, on a fragment of carpet. His daughter was smiling to him, when Mme. Sidonie, gliding up behind, drew him to a corner, speaking low. The door remained standing open. They could hear the faint rattle in Angèle’s throat.

“Your poor wife….” the agent sobbed out. “I fear it will soon be over. You heard what the doctor said?”

Saccard made no answer, but dismally bowed his head.

“She was a good soul,” continued the other, speaking as though Angèle were already dead. “You may find many richer women, and more fashionable women; but you will never find another heart like hers.”

Seeing her stop, wipe her eyes, and seek an excuse for changing the subject, Saccard asked her, simply:

“Have you anything to tell me?”

“Yes, I have been working for you, in the matter you know of, and I think I have found…. But at such a moment…. Believe me, my heart is broken.”

She went on wiping her eyes. Saccard let her have her way quietly, without opening his mouth. Then she came to the point.

“There is a young girl whom her people want to see married at once. The sweet child has had a misfortune. She has an aunt who would be prepared to make a sacrifice….”

She interrupted herself, she had never ceased lamenting, weeping out her words, as though still bewailing poor Angèle. Her object was to make her brother lose patience, and to compel him to question her, so that she should not have all the responsibility of the offer which she had come to make to him. And in fact the clerk was seized with an unreasoning irritation.

“Come, out with it!” he said. “Why do they want to marry this girl?”

“She had just left school,” continued the agent, in a dismal voice, “and a man seduced her, in the country, where she was staying with the relations of one of her schoolfellows. The father has just discovered her condition. He wanted to kill her. The aunt, in order to save the dear child, became her accomplice, and between the two of them they made up a story and told the father that the guilty one was a man of honour whose one desire was to atone for his momentary offence.”

“In that case,” said Saccard, in a tone of surprise and seeming annoyance, “the man in the country is going to marry the girl?”

“No, he can’t, he is a married man.”

A pause ensued. The rattle in Angèle’s throat sounded more painfully in the quivering atmosphere. Little Clotilde had ceased playing; she looked up at Madame Sidonie and her father, with her great pensive child-eyes, as though she had understood their conversation. Saccard began to put brief questions:

“How old is this young girl?”

“Nineteen.”

“How long has she been in the family way?”

“Three months. It is sure to be a miscarriage.”

“And is the family rich and respectable?”

“They belong to the old-fashioned middle-class. The father used to be a magistrate. They are very well-to-do.”

“What would this sacrifice of the aunt’s amount to?”

“A hundred thousand francs.”

There was another pause. Mme. Sidonie had ceased snivelling; she was doing business now, her voice assumed the metallic tones of a secondhand clothes-woman haggling over a bargain. Her brother took a sidelong glance at her, and added, with some hesitation:

“And you, what do you want out of it?”

“We shall see later on,” she replied. “You can do something for me in your turn.”

She waited a few seconds; and as he did not speak, she asked him straight out:

“Well, have you made up your mind? Those poor women are at their wit’s end. They want to prevent an outburst. They have promised to give up the culprit’s name to the father tomorrow…. If you accept, I will send them your card by a messenger.”

Saccard seemed to wake from a dream; he started, and turned timorously towards the next room, where he thought he had heard a slight noise.

“But I can’t,” he said, with anguish in his voice, “you well know I can’t….”

Mme. Sidonie looked at him fixedly, with a cold and scornful gaze. All his Rougon blood, all his eager covetousness, rushed to his throat. He took a visiting-card from his pocketbook, and gave it to his sister, who put it in an envelope, after carefully scratching out the address. Then she went down the stairs. It was barely nine o’clock.

Left alone, Saccard went to the window and pressed his forehead against the icy panes. He forgot himself so far as to beat a tattoo with his fingers on the glass. But the night was so black, the outer darkness hung in such strange masses, that he experienced a feeling of uneasiness, and returned to the room where Angèle lay dying. He had forgotten her; he received a terrible shock on finding her half raised up against her pillows; her eyes stood wide open, a flush of life seemed to have returned to her cheeks and lips. Little Clotilde, still nursing her doll, was seated on the edge of the bed; as soon as her father’s back was turned, she had quickly slipped back into that room from which she had been removed, and to which all her happy childish curiosity attracted her. Saccard, his head full of his sister’s recital, saw his dream dashed to the ground. A hideous thought must have shone from his eyes. Angèle, seized with terror, tried to throw herself back into bed, against the wall; but death came, this awakening in agony was the last flicker of the expiring lamp. The dying woman was unable to move; she sank back, keeping her eyes fixed wide open upon her husband, as though to watch his every movement. Saccard, who had dreaded a resurrection, a devil’s device of destiny to keep him in penury, was reassured on seeing that the wretched woman had not an hour to live. He now felt nothing but intolerable uneasiness. Angèle’s eyes told him that she had overheard her husband’s conversation with Mme. Sidonie, and that she feared he would strangle her if she did not die sufficiently quickly. And her eyes still retained the terrified amazement of a sweet and inoffensive nature that learns at the last moment the infamy of this world, and shudders at the thought of the long years passed side by side with a miscreant. Little by little her look softened; she was no longer afraid, she seemed to find an excuse for the wretch as she thought of the desperate struggle he had so long maintained against Fate. Saccard, followed by the dying woman’s gaze, in which he read so deep a reproach, leant against the furniture for support, sought the dark corners of the room. Then, faltering, he made as though to drive away the nightmare that was maddening him, and stepped forward into the light of the lamp. But Angèle signed to him not to speak. And she continued to look at him with her look of terror-stricken anguish, to which was now added a promise of forgiveness. Then he stooped to take Clotilde in his arms and carry her into the other room. She forbade him this, too, with a movement of her lips. She insisted that he should stay there. She expired gently, without removing her gaze from him, and, as her sight grew dimmed, that gaze became more and more gentle. At the last breath she forgave him. She died as she had lived, colourlessly, effacing herself in death as she had effaced herself during life. Saccard stood shivering before those dead eyes, still open, which continued to follow him in their immobility. Little Clotilde nursed her doll on the edge of the sheets, gently, so as not to awaken her mother.

When Mme. Sidonie returned, it was all over. With the trick of the fingers of a woman used to this operation, she closed Angèle’s eyes, to Saccard’s intense relief. Then, after putting the little one to bed, she deftly arranged the mortuary chamber. When she had lit two candles on the chest of drawers, and carefully drawn the sheet to meet the chin of the corpse, she threw a glance of satisfaction around her, and stretched herself out in an easy-chair, where she slumbered till daybreak. Saccard spent the night in the next room, writing out the announcements of the death. He interrupted himself from time to time, forgetting himself, and jotting down columns of figures on scraps of paper.

On the evening of the funeral, Mme. Sidonie carried off Saccard to her entresol. There great resolutions were come to. The clerk decided to send little Clotilde to one of his brothers, Pascal Rougon, a doctor who led a solitary life at Plassans, sunk in research, and who had frequently offered to take his niece to enliven his silent scientific home. Mme. Sidonie next gave him to understand that he must no longer remain in the Rue Saint-Jacques. She would take an elegant set of furnished rooms for him for a month, somewhere round about the Hôtel de Ville; she would try and find some rooms in a private house, so that the furniture might seem to belong to him. As to the chattels in the Rue Saint-Jacques, they would be sold, so as to efface the last traces of the past. He could use the money in buying himself a wedding outfit and some decent clothes. Three days later Clotilde was handed over to an old lady who just happened to be going to the South. And Aristide Saccard, exultant and rosy-cheeked, fattened already in three days by the first smiles of Fortune, occupied in the Marais, in the Rue Payenne, in a severe and respectable house, a smart five-roomed flat, which he perambulated in embroidered slippers. They were the rooms of a young abbé, who had left suddenly for Italy and had sent instructions to his housekeeper to let them. This woman was a friend of Mme. Sidonie, who affected the cloth a little; she loved priests with the love she bestowed on women, instinctively, establishing, possibly, a certain subtle relationship between cassocks and silk skirts. From that time Saccard was prepared; he had thought out his part with exquisite art; he awaited without flinching the difficulties and niceties of the situation he had accepted.

On the hideous night of Angèle’s last agony, Madame Sidonie had faithfully related, in few words, the case of the Béraud family. Its head, M. Béraud du Châtel, a tall old man of sixty, was the last representative of an ancient middle-class family, whose pedigree went further back than that of certain noble houses. One of his ancestors was the friend of Étienne Marcel. In ‘93 his father had died on the scaffold, after welcoming the Republic with all the enthusiasm of a burgess of Paris in whose veins flowed the revolutionary blood of the city. He himself was a Republican of ancient Sparta, whose dream was a reign of universal justice and sound liberty. Grown old in the magistracy, where he had contracted a professional inflexibility and severity, he had resigned his chairmanship in 1851, at the time of the Coup d’État, after refusing to take part in one of those mixed commissions which tended to dishonour French justice. Since that time he had been living alone in retirement in his house on the Île Saint-Louis, situated at the extremity of the island, almost facing the Hotel Lambert. His wife had died young. Some secret tragedy, whose wound remained unhealed, added still further to the gloom of the magistrate’s countenance. He was already the father of an eight-year-old daughter, Renée, when his wife expired in giving birth to a second. The latter, who was called Christine, was taken charge of by a sister of M. Béraud du Châtel, the wife of Aubertot the notary. Renée went to a convent. Madame Aubertot, who had no children, took a maternal fondness for Christine, whom she brought up by her side. On her husband’s death, she brought back the little one to its father, and continued to live with the silent old man and the smiling, fair-haired child. Renée was forgotten at her school. During the holidays she filled the house with such an uproar that her aunt heaved a great sigh of relief when she had at last escorted her back to the ladies of the Visitation, where she had been a boarder since her eighth year. She did not leave the convent until she was nineteen, and went straight to spend the fine season at the home of her friend Adeline, whose parents owned a beautiful estate in the Nivernais. When she returned in October, her Aunt Elisabeth was surprised to find her serious and profoundly melancholy. One evening she discovered her stifling her sobs in her pillow, writhing on her bed in a paroxysm of uncontrollable grief. In the unconstraint of her despair the girl told her a heartrending story: how a man of forty, rich, married — his wife, a young and charming woman, was there — had violated her in a field, without her daring or knowing how to defend herself. This confession terrified Aunt Elisabeth; she accused herself, as though she felt herself to be to blame; her preference for Christine made her deeply unhappy; she thought that, had she kept Renée also beside her, the poor child would not have succumbed. Henceforth, in order to drive away this exquisite remorse, which was rendered still more acute by the tenderness of her nature, she sustained the erring one; she bore the brunt of the anger of the father, to whom they both revealed the horrible truth by the very excess of their precautions; she invented, in the bewilderment of her solicitude, this strange project of matrimony, which to her idea would settle the whole affair, appease the father, and restore Renée to the world of honest women, and she refused to perceive its shameful side or foresee its disastrous consequences.

Nobody ever knew how Madame Sidonie had got wind of this good bit of business. The honour of the Bérauds had been dragged about in her basket among the protested bills of every strumpet in Paris. Once she knew the story, she almost forced her brother, whose wife lay dying, upon them. Aunt Elisabeth ended by believing that she was under an obligation to this gentle, humble lady, who was devoting herself to the unhappy Renée to the degree of finding a husband for her in her own family. The first interview between the aunt and Saccard took place on the entresol in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. The clerk, who had arrived by the carriage-entrance in the Rue Papillon, realized, when he saw Madame Aubertot coming through the shop and the little staircase, the ingenious arrangement of the two entrances. He was full of tact and propriety. He treated the marriage as a matter of business, but in the fashion of a man of the world settling his debts of honour. Aunt Elisabeth was far less at ease than he; she stammered, she had not the courage to mention the hundred thousand francs she had promised him.

It was he who first broached the question of money, with the manner of a solicitor discussing a client’s case. According to him a hundred thousand francs was a ridiculous sum for the husband of Mademoiselle Renée to bring into settlement. He laid a little stress on the “mademoiselle.” M. Béraud du Châtel would still more despise a poor son-in-law: he would accuse him of having seduced his daughter for the sake of her fortune; perhaps it might even occur to him to make some private enquiries. Startled and dismayed by Saccard’s calm and polite phrases, Madame Aubertot lost her head and consented to double the amount when he declared that he would never dare to propose for Renée with less than two hundred thousand francs in his pocket; he did not wish to be taken for a contemptible fortune-hunter. The good lady departed quite confused, not knowing what to think of a man capable of so much indignation, and yet willing to accept a bargain of such a nature.

This first interview was followed by an official visit which Aunt Elisabeth paid Saccard at his rooms in the Rue Payenne. This time she came in the name of M. Béraud. The ex-magistrate had refused to see “that man,” as he called his daughter’s seducer, so long as he was not married to Renée, to whom furthermore he had also forbidden his house. Madame Aubertot had full powers of treaty. She seemed pleased with the clerk’s luxurious surroundings; she had feared that the brother of that Madame Sidonie, with her draggled skirts, might be a disreputable-looking person. He received her swathed in a delightful dressing-gown. It was at the time when the adventurers of the 2 December, after paying their debts, flung their worn boots and frayed coats into the sewers, shaved their eight days’ beards, and became respectable men. Saccard was at last to join the band; he cleaned his nails and washed exclusively with powders and perfumes of inestimable value. He made himself gallant; he changed his tactics and shewed himself wonderfully disinterested. When the old lady began to talk of the contract, he made a gesture as though to say what did he mind. For a week past he had been studying the Code, pondering this serious question on which would depend his future liberty of action as a sharp business practitioner.

“I beg you,” he said, “let us hear no more of this disagreeable question of money…. My opinion is that Mademoiselle Renée should remain mistress of her fortune and I master of mine. The notary will put that right.”

Aunt Elisabeth approved of this manner of looking at things; she trembled lest this fellow, whose iron grip she could vaguely perceive, should wish to thrust his fingers into her niece’s dowry. She next entered into the matter of this dowry.

“My brother’s fortune,” she said, “consists mainly of houses and landed property. He is not the man to punish his daughter by reducing the share he intended for her. He will give her an estate in the Sologne valued at three hundred thousand francs, in addition to a house in Paris which is worth about two hundred thousand francs.”

Saccard was dazzled; he had expected no such amount; he turned half away so as to hide the rush of blood that came to his face.

“That will make five hundred thousand francs,” continued the aunt; “but I am bound to add that the Sologne property yields only two per cent.”

He smiled, repeating his disinterested gesture, implying that that could not concern him, as he declined to interfere with his wife’s property. He sat in his armchair in an adorable attitude of indifference, absent-minded, balancing his slipper on his foot, seeming to listen from sheer politeness. Mme. Aubertot, with her simpleminded goodnature, spoke with difficulty, picking her words so as not to wound him. She continued:

“And lastly, I want to make Renée a present myself. I have no children, my property will some day revert to my nieces, and I am not going to close my hands now because one of them is in trouble. Both their wedding-presents were ready for them. Renée’s consists of some extensive plots of land up Charonne way, which I can safely value at two hundred thousand francs. Only….”

At the word land Saccard started slightly. In spite of his assumed indifference he was listening intently. Aunt Elisabeth became confused, apparently at a loss for the right expression, and continued, blushing:

“Only, I wish the ownership of this land to be settled on Renée’s first child. You understand my reason. I do not wish this child ever to be of any expense to you. In the event of its dying, Renée would become the sole owner.”

He made no sign, but his knit brows revealed great inward preoccupation. The mention of the land at Charonne had aroused within him a world of ideas. Mme. Aubertot feared she had offended him by speaking of Renée’s child, and she remained abashed, not knowing how to follow up the conversation.

“You have not told me in what street the house worth two hundred thousand francs stands,” he said, resuming his smiling, genial air.

“In the Rue de la Pépinière,” she replied; “almost at the corner of the Rue d’Astorg.”

This simple sentence produced a decided effect on him. He could no longer conceal his delight; he drew up his chair, and with his Provençal volubility, in coaxing tones:

“Dear lady,” he said, “have we not said enough, need we continue to talk of this confounded money?…. See here, I want to tell you my story quite frankly, for I should be most unhappy if I failed to deserve your regard. I lost my wife recently, I have two children left on my hands, I am a sensible and practical man. In marrying your niece I am doing good all round. If you retain any prejudice against me, you will lose it later on when I have dried everyone’s tears and made the fortune of all my family. Success is a golden flame that purifies everything. I want M. Béraud himself to shake me by the hand and thank me….”

He lost himself. He talked on for a long while in the same bantering strain, whose cynicism from time to time shone through his genial air. He dragged in his brother, the Deputy, his father the receiver of taxes at Plassans. He ended by making a conquest of Aunt Elisabeth who, with involuntary joy, saw the tragedy under which she had been suffering for the past month ending, under this clever man’s fingers, in a comedy that was almost hilarious. It was arranged that they should go to the notary the next day.

So soon as Madame Aubertot had gone, Saccard went to the Hotel de Ville, and spent the day in turning over certain documents that he knew of. At the notary’s he raised a difficulty, he said that as Renée’s dowry consisted entirely of landed property, he feared it would give her a deal of worry, and that he thought it would be as well to sell the house in the Rue de la Pépinière in order to secure her an investment in the funds. Mme. Aubertot proposed to refer the matter to M. Béraud du Châtel, who continued to keep his room. Saccard went out again till the evening. He went to the Rue de la Pépinière, he walked about Paris with the preoccupied air of a general on the eve of a decisive battle. The next day Mme. Aubertot declared that M. Béraud du Châtel left the whole matter in her hands. The contract was drawn up on the lines already discussed. Saccard brought in two hundred thousand francs, Renée’s dowry was the Sologne property and the house in the Rue de la Pépinière, which she agreed to sell; and further, in the case of the death of her first child, she was to be the sole owner of the land at Charonne given her by her aunt. The contract was in accordance with the system of separate estates by which the husband and wife retain the entire management of their respective fortunes. Aunt Elisabeth followed the notary attentively, and seemed contented with this system, whose provisions apparently assured her niece’s independence by placing her fortune beyond the reach of any attempts. Saccard smiled vaguely as he saw the good lady nodding her approval of each clause. The marriage was fixed to take place at the earliest possible date.

When all was settled, Saccard paid a ceremonial visit to his brother Eugène to announce his marriage with Mlle. Renée Béraud du Châtel. This masterstroke took the deputy by surprise. As he made no attempt to conceal his astonishment, the clerk said:

“You told me to look, and I looked until I found.”

Eugène, bewildered at first, began to get a glimpse of the truth. And in a charming tone he said:

“Come, you’re a clever fellow…. I suppose you have come to ask me to be your witness. You may rely on me…. If necessary, I will bring the whole of the Right of the Corps Législatif to your wedding; that would launch you nicely….”

Then, as he had opened the door, he lowered his voice to add:

“I say…. I don’t want to compromise myself too much just now, we have a very tough bill to pass…. The lady is not very far gone, I hope?”

Saccard gave him such a savage look that Eugène said to himself, as he shut the door:

“That’s a joke that would cost me dear if I were not a Rougon.”

The marriage was solemnised in the Church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. Saccard and Renée did not meet till the eve of that great day. The introduction took place early in the evening, in a low reception-room at the Hotel Béraud. They examined each other curiously. Renée, since her marriage had been arranged, had regained her light-headedness, her madcap ways. She was a tall girl of exquisite and tempestuous beauty, that had grown up at random through her schoolgirl caprices. She thought Saccard small and ugly, but ugly in a restless and intelligent way that she did not dislike; and moreover, he was perfect in manner and deportment. As for him, he made a little grimace at the first sight of her; she doubtless struck him as too tall, taller than he was. They exchanged a few words, free from embarrassment. Had the father been present, he might readily have believed that they had long known each other, and that they had a common fault in their past lives. Aunt Elisabeth, who was present at the interview, blushed in their stead.

On the day after the wedding, which the presence of Eugène Rougon, whom a recent speech had brought to the forefront, magnified into an event in the Île Saint-Louis, the newly-married couple were at length admitted to the presence of Monsieur Béraud du Châtel. Renée shed tears on finding her father aged, graver, and sadder. Saccard, whom up to that point nothing had put out of countenance, was frozen by the chill and gloom of the room, by the sombre austerity of the tall old man, whose piercing eye seemed to penetrate to the depths of his conscience. The ex-magistrate kissed his daughter slowly on the forehead, as though to tell her that he forgave her, and turning to his son-in-law: “Monsieur,” he said, simply, “we have suffered greatly, I trust you will give us reason to forget the wrong you have done us.”

He held out his hand. But Saccard remained timorous. He thought how, if M. Béraud du Châtel had not given way under the tragic sorrow of Renée’s shame, he might with a glance, with a gesture, have annulled Madame Sidonie’s manuœvres. The latter, after bringing her brother and Aunt Elisabeth together, had prudently effaced herself. She had not even come to the wedding. Saccard adopted an attitude of great frankness towards the old man, having read in his face a look of surprise at finding his daughter’s seducer ugly, little, and forty years of age. The newly-married couple were compelled to spend the first nights at the Hotel Béraud. Christine had been sent away two months since, so that this child of fourteen might have no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in this house, peaceful and serene as a convent. When she returned home, she stood aghast before her sister’s husband, whom she too thought old and ugly. Renée alone seemed to take but little notice of her husband’s age or his mean aspect. She treated him without contempt as without affection, with absolute tranquillity, through which was visible an occasional glimmer of ironical disdain. Saccard strutted about, made himself at home, and really succeeded, by his frankness and vivacity, in gradually winning everybody’s good will. When they took their departure, in order to install themselves in an imposing flat in a new house in the Rue de Rivoli, M. Béraud du Châtel had lost his look of astonishment, and Christine had taken to playing with her brother-in-law as with a schoolfellow. Renée’s pregnancy was at that time four months advanced; her husband was on the point of sending her to the country, proposing afterwards to lie as to the child’s age, when, as Madame Sidonie had foretold, she had a miscarriage. She had so tightly laced herself to dissimulate her condition, which was moreover concealed under the fulness of her skirts, that she was compelled to keep her bed for some weeks. He was enchanted with the adventure; Fortune was at last on his side; he had made a golden bargain: a splendid dowry, a wife of a beauty that should be worth a decoration to him within six months, and not the least encumbrance. He had received two hundred thousand francs to give his name to a fœtus which its mother would not even look at. From that moment his thoughts began to turn affectionately towards the Charonne property. But for the time being he devoted all his attention to a speculation which was to be the basis of his fortune.

Notwithstanding the high standing of his wife’s family, he did not immediately resign his post as a surveyor of roads. He talked of work that had to be finished, of an occupation that had to be sought for. As a matter of fact he wished to remain till the end on the battlefield upon which he was venturing his first stake. He felt at home, he was able to cheat more at his ease.

His plan of fortune was simple and practical. Now that he had more money than he had ever hoped for in hand to begin his operations, he reckoned on putting his designs into execution on a large scale. He had all Paris at his fingers’ ends; he knew that the shower of gold which was beating down upon the walls would fall more heavily every day. Clever people had but to open their pockets. He had enlisted himself among the clever ones by reading the future in the offices of the Hôtel de Ville. His duties had taught him what may be stolen in the buying and selling of houses and ground. He was well up in every classical swindle: he knew how you sell for a million what has cost you five hundred thousand francs; how you acquire the right of rifling the treasury of the State, which smiles and closes its eyes; how, when throwing a boulevard across the belly of an old quarter, you juggle with six-storied houses amidst the unanimous applause of your dupes. And in these still clouded days, when the canker of speculation was but at its period of incubation, what made a formidable gambler of him was that he saw further than his chiefs themselves into the stone-and-plaster future reserved for Paris. He had ferreted to such an extent, collected so many clues, that he could have prophesied the appearance the new neighbourhoods would offer in 1870. Sometimes, in the street, he would look at certain houses in a curious way, as though they were acquaintances whose destiny, known to him alone, deeply affected him.

Two months before Angèle’s death, he had taken her, on a Sunday, to the Buttes Montmartre. The poor woman loved dining at a restaurant; she was delighted whenever, after a long walk, he sat her down at a table in some hostelry on the outskirts of the town. On this particular day they dined at the top of the hill, in a restaurant whose windows looked out over Paris, over that sea of houses with blue roofs, like surging billows that filled the vast horizon. Their table was placed at one of the windows. The sight of the roofs of Paris enlivened Saccard. At dessert he called for a bottle of Burgundy. He smiled into space, he was unusually gallant. And his looks always returned amorously to that living, seething ocean, from which issued the deep voice of the crowd. It was autumn; beneath the great pale sky the city lay listless in a soft and tender gray, pierced here and there with dark patches of foliage that resembled the broad leaves of water-lilies floating on a lake; the sun was setting behind a red cloud, and, while the background was filled with a light haze, a shower of gold dust, of golden dew, fell on the right bank of the river, in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine and the Tuileries. It was like an enchanted corner in a city of the “Arabian Nights,” with emerald trees, sapphire roofs, ruby weathercocks. There came a moment when a ray of sunlight, gliding from between two clouds, was so resplendent that the houses seemed to flare up and melt like an ingot of gold in a crucible.

“Oh! look,” said Saccard, with a laugh like a child’s, “it is raining twenty-franc pieces in Paris!”

Angèle joined in the laughter, saying that that sort of pieces was not easy to pick up. But her husband had stood up, and leaning on the handrail of the window:

“That is the Vendôme Column, is it not, glittering over there?…. There, more to the right, you can see the Madeleine…. A fine district, where there is much to be done…. Ah! now it is all going to blaze up! Do you see?…. You would think the whole neighbourhood was boiling in a chemist’s retort.”

His voice became eager and agitated. The comparison he had hit upon seemed to strike him greatly. He had been drinking Burgundy, he forgot himself; stretching out his arm to show Paris to Angèle, who was leaning by his side, he went on:

“Yes, yes, I said so, more than one district will be melted down, and gold will stick to the fingers of those who heat and stir the mortar. That great noodle of a Paris! see how big it is, and how quietly it goes to sleep! What fools, these large towns! It has no suspicion of the army of picks that will fall upon it one of these fine mornings, and certain houses in the Rue d’Anjou would not shine so brightly in the sunset, if they knew that they have only three or four years to live.”

Angèle thought her husband was joking. He sometimes showed a predilection for colossal and disquieting pleasantries. She laughed, but with a vague terror, at the sight of this little man standing erect over the recumbent giant at his feet, and shaking his fist at it while ironically pursing his lips.

“They have begun already,” he continued. “But it is nothing much yet. Look down there, over by the Halles, they have cut Paris into four ….”

And with his hand spread out, open and sharp-edged as a cutlass, he made the movement of separating the city into four parts.

“You mean the Rue de Rivoli and the new boulevard they are building?” asked his wife.

“Yes, the great transept of Paris, as they call it. They’re clearing away the buildings round the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville. That’s mere child’s play! It serves to awaken the public’s appetite…. When the first network is finished the fun will begin. The second network will pierce the city in every direction so as to connect the suburbs with the first. The remains will disappear in clouds of plaster…. Look, just follow my hand. From the Boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, that’s one cutting; then on this side another, from the Madeleine to the Plaine Monceau; and a third cutting this way, another that way, a cutting there, one further on, cuttings on every side, Paris slashed with sabre cuts, its veins opened, giving sustenance to a hundred thousand navvies and bricklayers, traversed by splendid military roads which will bring the forts into the very heart of the old quarters of the town.”

Night was falling. His dry, nervous hand kept cutting through space. Angèle shivered slightly before this living knife, those iron fingers mercilessly slicing up the boundless mass of dusky roofs. During the last moment the haze of the horizon had been descending slowly from the heights, and she fancied she could hear, beneath the gloom that was gathering in the hollows, a distant cracking, as though her husband’s hand had really made the cuttings he spoke of, splitting up Paris from one end to the other, severing beams, crushing masonry, leaving behind it long and hideous wounds of crumbling walls. The smallness of this hand, hovering pitilessly over a gigantic prey, ended by becoming disquieting; and as, without effort, it tore asunder the entrails of the enormous city, it seemed to assume a strange reflex of steel in the blue of the twilight.

“There is to be a third network,” continued Saccard after a pause, as though talking to himself; “that one is too far off yet, I do not see it so distinctly. I have heard only a little about it…. But there will be a sheer orgy, a bacchanal of millions, Paris drunk and overwhelmed!”

He lapsed into silence, his eyes ardently fixed upon the town, over which the shadows were falling more and more deeply. He was apparently interrogating that too-distant future which escaped him. Then night fell, the city became confused, one heard it breathing heavily, like the sea when the eye no longer distinguishes anything but the pale crest of the billows. Here and there a wall still stood out white; and the yellow flames of the gasjets pierced the darkness one by one, like stars lighting up in the blackness of a stormy sky.

Angèle shook off her feeling of uneasiness, and took up the jest that her husband had made at dessert.

“Well,” she said, with a smile, “there has been a fine shower of those twenty-franc pieces! The people of Paris are counting them now. Look at the great heaps they are laying out at our feet!”

She pointed to the streets that run down opposite the Buttes Montmartre, whose gaslights seemed to be heaping up their specks of gold in two rows.

“And over there,” she cried, pointing with her finger to a swarm of stars, “that must be the treasury.”

The jest made Saccard laugh. They stayed a few moments longer at the window, enchanted with this torrent of “twenty-franc pieces,” which had ended by setting light to the whole of Paris. On the road home from Montmartre the surveyor of roads no doubt repented of having spoken so freely. He put it down to the Burgundy, and begged his wife not to repeat the “nonsense” he had been talking; he wanted, he said, to be a serious person. For a long time past Saccard had been studying these three arteries of streets and boulevards, of which he had so far forgotten himself as to lay bare the plan to Angèle with tolerable correctness. When the latter died, he was not sorry to think that she bore with her into the grave his chatter on the occasion of the Montmartre expedition. There lay his fortune, in those famous gaps which his hand had cut out in the heart of Paris, and he had made up his mind to communicate his idea to nobody, well knowing that on the day of the spoil there would be crows enough hovering over the disembowelled city. His first intention had been to get hold cheaply of some building which he would know beforehand to be condemned to speedy demolition, and to realize a big profit by obtaining substantial compensation. He might, perhaps, have gone so far as to make the attempt without a sou, buying the house on credit, and only receiving the difference, as on the Bourse, when his second marriage, bringing him in a premium of two hundred thousand francs, fixed and enlarged his design. Now, his calculations were made; he would buy the house in the Rue de la Pépinière from his wife through an intermediary, without allowing his own name to appear, and treble his outlay, thanks to the knowledge he had picked up in the corridors of the Hotel de Ville, and to his pleasant relations with certain eminent persons of influence. The reason he started when Aunt Elisabeth told him where the house was situated was because this was right in the centre of the design for a thoroughfare which had not yet been talked of outside the private office of the Préfet of the Seine. This thoroughfare would be swallowed up entirely by the Boulevard Malesherbes. It was an old scheme of Napoleon I, which they were now thinking of carrying out, “in order,” said the serious people, “to give a normal outlet to districts lost behind a labyrinth of narrow streets on the slope of the hills that mark the outskirts of Paris.” This official phrase did not, of course, admit the interest the Empire possessed in making the money dance, in organising those redoubtable excavations and building operations which gave the labouring classes no time to think. Saccard had ventured one day to consult, in the préfet’s room, that famous plan of Paris on which “an august hand” had traced in red ink the principal thoroughfares of the second network. Those blood-red pen-strokes cut even deeper gashes into Paris than did Saccard’s hand. The Boulevard Malesherbes, which pulled down some magnificent houses in the Rue d’Anjou and the Rue de la Ville-l’Évêque, and necessitated a large number of levelling works, was to be one of the first laid out. When Saccard went to look over the building in the Rue de la Pépinière, he thought of that autumn evening, of that dinner he had taken with Angèle on the Buttes Montmartre, during which, at sunset, so thick a shower of louis d’or had fallen on the Madeleine quarter. He smiled; he pictured to himself the radiant cloud as bursting over his own courtyard, and that he was on his way to pick up the twenty-franc pieces.

While Renée, luxuriously installed in the flat in the Rue de Rivoli, in the centre of that new Paris, one of whose queens she was destined to become, thought out her future dresses and took her first steps in the life of a woman of fashion, her husband was devoutly maturing his first great scheme. He began by purchasing from her the house in the Rue de la Pépinière, thanks to the intermediary of a certain Larsonneau, whom he had come across ferreting like himself in the offices of the Hotel de Ville. Larsonneau, however, had been stupid enough to allow himself to be caught one day when he was prying into the préfet’s private drawers. He had set up as an agent at the end of a dark, damp court at the foot of the Rue Saint-Jacques. His pride, his greed suffered torments there. He found himself in the same position as Saccard before his marriage; he too, he would say, had invented “a five-franc piece machine”; only he lacked the necessary funds to turn his invention to profit. A hint was sufficient to enable him to come to an understanding with his former colleague; and he did his part of the work so well that he obtained the house for one hundred and fifty thousand francs. Renée was already, before many months had elapsed, in great need of money. The husband did not appear in the matter except to authorize his wife to sell. When the sale was effected, she asked him to invest a hundred thousand francs for her, handing it to him with full confidence, so as no doubt to touch him and make him close his eyes to the fact that she was keeping fifty thousand francs back. He smiled knowingly; he had reckoned on her squandering her money; those fifty thousand francs, which were about to disappear in jewellery and lace, were calculated to bring him in cent. per cent. He carried his honesty so far, so well satisfied was he with his first transaction, as really to invest Renée’s hundred thousand francs and hand her the share certificates. His wife had no power to transfer them; he was certain of being able to lay his hand on them if ever he happened to want them.

“My dear, this will do for your dress,” he said gallantly.

When he had obtained possession of the house, he had the ingenuity to have it sold over again, twice in one month, to men of straw, increasing the purchase price each time. The last purchaser paid no less than three hundred thousand francs for it. Meanwhile Larsonneau alone appeared as the representative of the successive landlords, and worked the tenants. He pitilessly refused to renew the leases unless they consented to a formidable increase of rent. The tenants, who had an inkling of the approaching expropriation, were in despair; they ended by agreeing to the increase, especially when Larsonneau added, with a conciliatory air, that this increase should remain a fictitious one during the first five years. As for the tenants who were unaccommodating, they were replaced by creatures who received the apartment for nothing and signed anything they were asked to; in their case there was a double profit: the rent was raised, and the compensation due to the tenant for his lease went to Saccard. Madame Sidonie was so good as to assist her brother by setting up a pianoforte-agency in one of the shops on the ground-floor. It was then that Saccard and Larsonneau, seized with the fever of gain, went rather too far: they concocted business-books, they forged letters, so as to establish a trade in pianos on an immense footing. They scribbled away together for many nights. Worked in this fashion, the house trebled in value. Thanks to the last sale, thanks to the increase in the rents, to the fictitious tenants, and to Madame Sidonie’s business, it was in a condition to be valued at five hundred thousand francs before the compensations commission.

The machinery of expropriation, of that powerful piece of mechanism that for fifteen years turned Paris topsy-turvy, breathing fortune and ruin, is of the simplest. So soon as a new thoroughfare is decided upon, the surveyors of roads draw up the plan in separate sections and appraise the buildings. As a rule, in the case of houses let in apartments, they add up the total amount of the rents, after making enquiries, and are thus enabled to fix upon the approximate value. The compensations commission, consisting of members of the Municipal Council, always make an offer lower than this sum, knowing that the interested parties will claim more, and that there will be a concession on both sides. When they are unable to come to terms, the case is taken before a jury, which decides authoritatively upon the offer of the town and the claim of the evicted landlord or tenant.

Saccard, who had remained at the Hotel de Ville for the decisive moment, had for one instant the impudence to wish to have himself appointed when the works of the Boulevard Malesherbes were begun, and himself to appraise his house. But he was afraid by so doing to paralyze his influence with the members of the compensations commission. He caused one of his colleagues to be chosen, a young man with a sweet smile, called Michelin, whose wife, an adorably pretty woman, occasionally called to apologize to her husband’s chiefs for his absence, when he stayed away through ill-health. He was often ill. Saccard had noticed that the pretty Madame Michelin, who glided so humbly through the half-closed doorways, was omnipotent; Michelin obtained promotion at each illness, he made his career by taking to his bed. During one of his absences, when he was sending his wife almost every morning to the office to say how he was getting on, Saccard twice met him on the outer boulevards, smoking a cigar with the expression of rapt affection that never left him. This filled him with sympathy for this good young man, for that happy couple, so practical and so ingenious. He admired all “five-franc-piece machines” that were properly worked. When he had got Michelin appointed, he went and called on his charming wife, expressed a wish to introduce her to Renée, talked before her of his brother the deputy, the brilliant orator. Madame Michelin understood.

From that day forward her husband kept his choicest smiles for his colleague. The latter, who had no desire to take the worthy fellow into his confidence, contented himself with being present, as though casually, on the day when the other proceeded to value the house in the Rue de la Pépinière. He assisted him. Michelin, who had the most insignificant and the emptiest head imaginable, followed the instructions of his wife, who had urged him to satisfy M. Saccard in all things. He suspected nothing, moreover; he thought the surveyor was in a hurry to see him finish his work so as to take him off to a café. The leases, the receipts for rent, Madame Sidonie’s famous books, passed from his colleague’s hands under his eyes without his even having time to verify the figures which the latter read aloud. Larsonneau was present, and treated his accomplice as a stranger.

“Come, put down five hundred thousand francs,” Saccard ended by saying. “The house is worth more…. Hurry up; I believe there is going to be a change in the staff of the Hotel de Ville, and I want to talk to you about it, so that you may let your wife know beforehand.”

The business was thus carried through. But he still had fears. He dreaded lest the sum of five hundred thousand francs should seem rather excessive to the compensations commission for a house which was well known to be worth at most two hundred thousand. The formidable rise in house-property had not yet taken place. An enquiry would have caused him to run the risk of serious unpleasantness. He remembered his brother’s words: “No flagrant scandal, or I’ll exterminate you;” and he knew Eugène was the man to carry out his threat. It was a question of blindfolding those gentlemen of the commission, and ensuring their good will. He cast his eyes on two influential men, of whom he had made friends through his habit of saluting them in the corridors when he met them. The thirty-six members of the Municipal Council were carefully selected by the Emperor himself, on the recommendation of the préfet, from among the senators, deputies, advocates, doctors, and great manufacturers, who prostrated themselves the most devoutly before the reigning power; but among them all, the fervour of the Baron Gouraud and of M. Toutin-Laroche more especially attracted the good will of the Tuileries.

The whole of the Baron Gouraud is comprised in this short biography: he was made a baron by Napoleon I as a reward for supplying damaged biscuits to the Grand Army, he was a peer successively under Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe, and he was a senator under Napoleon III. He worshipped the throne, the four gilded boards covered with velvet; It mattered little to him what man sat upon it. With his enormous belly, his bovine face, his elephantine movements, he boasted a delightful rascality; he sold himself majestically, and committed the greatest infamies in the name of duty and conscience. But the man was yet more astonishing in his vices. Stories were current about him which could not be told above a whisper. In spite of his seventy-eight years, he flourished in the midst of the most monstrous debauchery. It was necessary on two occasions to hush up some dirty adventure, so that his embroidered senator’s coat should not be dragged through the dock of the assize-court.

M. Toutin-Laroche, tall and thin, had invented a mixture of tallow and stearine for the manufacture of candles, and longed to enter the Senate. He clung to the Baron Gouraud like a leech; he rubbed up against him with the vague idea that it would bring him luck. At bottom he was exceedingly practical; and had he come across a senator’s seat for sale, he would have haggled fiercely over the price. The Empire was to bring into prominence this greedy nonentity, this narrow brain with its genius for industrial swindling. He was the first to sell his name to a shady company, one of those associations which sprouted like poisonous toadstools on the dunghill of imperial speculation. At that time one could see stuck on the walls a placard bearing these words in big black letters: “Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco,” on which the name of M. Toutin-Laroche, with his title of municipal councillor, was displayed at the head of the list of members of the board of directors, each more unknown than the other. This method, which has since been abused, succeeded admirably; the shares were snapped up, although the question of the Ports of Morocco was not a very definite one, and the worthy people who brought their money were not themselves able to explain to what use it was to be put. The placard spoke magniloquently of commercial stations to be established along the Mediterranean. For two years past certain of the newspapers had been hallowing this imposing undertaking, which they declared to be more prosperous every quarter. In the Municipal Council M. Toutin-Laroche was considered an administrator of the first water; he was one of the clever heads of the place, and his bitter tyranny over his colleagues was equalled only by his devout self-effacement in the presence of the préfet. He was now engaged upon the construction of a great financial company, the Crédit Viticole, a wine-growers’ loan office, of which he spoke with a reticence and an air of solemnity that kindled the covetousness of the idiots around him.

Saccard secured the protection of these two personages by rendering them services whose importance he cleverly pretended to ignore. He introduced his sister to the baron at a time when the latter was mixed up in a very dirty scandal. He took her to see him under the pretence of soliciting his support in the favour of the dear woman, who had long been petitioning for an order for the supply of window-curtains to the Tuileries. But it so happened that when the surveyor of roads left them together, it was Madame Sidonie who promised the baron to negotiate with certain people who were clumsy enough not to have felt honoured by the friendship that a senator had condescended to shew to their child, a little girl of ten. Saccard took M. Toutin-Laroche in hand himself; he manœuvred so as to obtain an interview with him in the corridor, and led the conversation to the famous Crédit Viticole. After five minutes the great administrator, dazed and astounded at the astonishing things he heard, took the clerk familiarly by the arm and detained him for a full hour in the corridor. Saccard whispered in his ear some financial schemes of prodigious ingenuity. When M. Toutin-Laroche left him, he pressed his hand in a meaning way with a masonic wink of the eye.

“You shall be there,” he murmured, “you must be there.”

He surpassed himself throughout this business. He carried his foresight as far as not to make the Baron Gouraud and M. Toutin-Laroche accomplices of one another. He called upon them separately, dropped a word in their ear in favour of one of his friends who was about to be bought out in the Rue de la Pépinière; he was very careful to tell each of the two confederates that he would not mention this business to any other member of the commission, that it was very uncertain, but that he reckoned on all his good will.

The surveyor of roads was right in being apprehensive and in taking his precautions. When the report relating to his house came before the compensations commission, it just happened that one of the members lived in the Rue d’Astorg and knew the house. This member raised a protest against the figure of five hundred thousand francs which, according to him, should be reduced by one-half. Aristide had had the impudence to have seven hundred thousand francs put down in the claim. But that day M. Toutin-Laroche, who was generally very disagreeable to his colleagues, was in a still more truculent mood than usual. He grew angry, he took up the defence of the landlords.

“We are all of us landlords, messieurs,” he cried…. “The Emperor wishes to do things on a large scale, let us not haggle over trifles…. This house must be worth five hundred thousand francs; the amount was set down by one of our people, a clerk of the town…. Upon my word, one would think we were living in a den of thieves; you will see that we shall end by suspecting one another.”

The Baron Gouraud, sitting squat in his chair, looked from the corner of his eye, with an air of surprise, at M. Toutin-Laroche raising fire and flames on behalf of the landlord of the Rue de la Pépinière. He had a suspicion. But after all, as this violent outburst saved him the trouble of speaking, he began to nod his head slowly, as a sign of complete approval. The member from the Rue d’Astorg indignantly resisted, refusing to bow before the two tyrants of the commission in a matter in which he was more competent than those gentlemen. At that moment M. Toutin-Laroche, noticing the baron’s marks of approval, hastily seized the report and said, curtly:

“Very well. We’ll dispel your doubts…. If you will allow me, I will take the matter in hand, and the Baron Gouraud shall join me in the enquiry.”

“Yes, yes,” said the Baron gravely, “nothing underhand must be allowed to taint our decisions.”

The report had already vanished within M. Toutin-Laroche’s capacious pockets. The commission had to give way. As they went out on to the quay, the two confederates looked at each other without a smile. They felt themselves to be accomplices, and this added to their assurance. Two vulgar minds would have sought an explanation; these two continued to plead the cause of the landlords, as though they could still be overheard, and to deprecate the spirit of distrust that was filtering through everything. Just as they were about to separate:

“Ah, I was forgetting, my dear colleague,” said the Baron, with a smile. “I am going into the country almost at once. It would be very kind of you to go and make this little enquiry without me…. And above all don’t give me away, our friends complain that I take too many holidays.”

“Be easy,” replied M. Toutin-Laroche, “I shall go straight to the Rue de la Pépinière.”

He went quietly to his own house, not without a touch of admiration for the baron, who had such a pretty way of unravelling a delicate position. He kept the report in his pocket, and at the next sitting he declared peremptorily, in the baron’s name and his own, that they should split the difference between the offer of five hundred thousand and the claim of seven hundred thousand francs, and allow six hundred thousand. There was not the slightest opposition. The member from the Rue d’Astorg, who had no doubt thought it over, said with great goodnature that he had been mistaken: he thought it was the next house that was in question.

In this way did Aristide Saccard win his first victory. He quadrupled his outlay and secured two accomplices. One thing alone perturbed him; when he wanted to destroy Madame Sidonie’s famous account-books, he was unable to find them. He hastened to Larsonneau, who boldly avowed that he had them and that he meant to keep them. The other showed no vexation; he suggested that he had only been anxious on account of his dear friend, who was much more compromised than himself by these entries, which were almost entirely in his handwriting, but that he was reassured so soon as he knew they were in his keeping. At heart he would have been delighted to strangle his “dear friend;” he remembered a particularly compromising document, a false inventory which he had been fool enough to draw up, and which he knew had been left in one of the ledgers. Larsonneau, handsomely remunerated, set up a business-agency in the Rue de Rivoli, where he had a suite of offices furnished as luxuriously as a courtesan’s rooms. Saccard left the Hotel de Ville and, being in command of considerable funds to work with, launched furiously into speculation, while Renée, in mad intoxication, filled Paris with the clatter of her equipages, the sparkle of her diamonds, the vertigo of her adorably riotous existence.

Sometimes the husband and wife, those two feverish devotees of money and of pleasure, would penetrate the icy mists of the Île Saint-Louis. They felt as though they were entering a city of the dead.

The Hotel Béraud, built about the beginning of the sixteenth century, was one of those square black, solemn edifices, with tall, narrow windows, which are numerous in the Marais, and are let to proprietors of schools, to manufacturers of aerated waters, and to bonders of wines and spirits. Only it was in admirable preservation. On the Rue Saint-Louis side it had only three stories, each fifteen to twenty feet in height. The ground-floor was not so lofty, and was pierced with windows protected by enormous iron bars and sunk dismally into the gloomy thickness of the walls, and with an arched gateway almost as tall as it was broad, and bearing a cast-iron knocker on its doors, which were painted dark-green and studded with enormous nails that formed stars and lozenges on the two folds. This characteristic entrance was flanked on either side with spur-posts sloping backwards, and strapped with broad iron bands. One could see that formerly a gutter had run under the middle of the gateway, between the weatherings of the pebble-work of the porch; but M. Béraud had decided to stop up this gutter and have the entrance asphalted: this, however, was the only concession he could ever be persuaded to make to modern architecture. The windows of the upper floors were ornamented with thin handrails of wrought iron, through which could be seen their colossal casements of strong brown woodwork with little green panes. At the top the roof was interrupted by the dormers, and the gutter alone continued its course so as to discharge the rainwater into the down-pipes. And what still further increased the severe nakedness of the façade was the entire absence of awnings or shutters, for at no season of the year did the sun shine on those pale, melancholy stones. This facade with its venerable air, its burgher severity, slumbered solemnly amid the self-absorption of the district, in the silence of the street that no carriage ever disturbed.

In the interior of the mansion was a square courtyard, surrounded by a colonnade, a reduced copy of the Place Royale, paved with enormous flags, and completing the cloistral appearance of this lifeless house. Opposite the porch a fountain, a lion’s head half worn away, its gaping jaws alone distinguishable, discharged a heavy, monotonous stream of water through an iron tube into a basin green with moss, its edges polished by wear. This water was cold as ice. Weeds sprouted between the flagstones. In the summer a meagre ray of sunlight entered the courtyard, and this infrequent visit had whitened a corner of the south façade, while the three other walls, morose and black, were streaked with moisture. There, in the depth of that courtyard, cold and silent as a well, lighted with a white, wintry light, one would have thought one’s self a thousand leagues away from that new Paris in which every passionate enjoyment flamed amid the racket of gold.

The rooms of the house had the sad calm, the cold solemnity of the courtyard. Approached by a broad iron-railed staircase, on which the footsteps and coughs of visitors resounded as in the aisle of a church, they stretched in long strings of wide, lofty rooms, in which the old-fashioned, heavy furniture of dark wood was lost; and the pale light was peopled only by the figures on the tapestries, whose great, pallid bodies could be vaguely discerned. There was all the luxury of the old-fashioned Parisian middle-class, a luxury that is Spartan and all-enduring. Chairs whose oak seats are barely covered with a little tow, beds with stiff sheets, linen-chests the roughness of whose boards would strangely endanger the frail existence of modern garments. M. Béraud du Châtel had selected his rooms in the darkest part of the mansion, between the street and the courtyard, on the first floor. He there found himself in a wonderful surrounding of peacefulness, silence, and gloom. When he opened the doors, traversing the solemnity of the rooms with his slow, serious step, he might have been taken for one of those members of the old parliaments, whose portraits were hung on the walls, returning home wrapt in thought after discussing and refusing to sign an edict of the king.

Yet in this lifeless house, in this cloister, there was one warm nest full of life, a corner of sunshine and gaiety, a nook of adorable childhood, of fresh air, of bright light. One had to climb a host of little stairways, pass along ten or twelve corridors, go down and up again, make a positive journey, and then at last one reached a huge room, a sort of belvedere built on the roof, at the back of the house, over above the Quai de Bethune. It looked due South. The window opened so wide that the heavens, with all their sunbeams, all their ether, all their blue, seemed to enter there. It was perched aloft like a dovecot, and contained long flower-boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single article of furniture. There was only just some matting spread over the floor. This was “the children’s room.” All over the house it was known and spoken of by that name. The house was so cold, the courtyard so damp, that Aunt Elisabeth had dreaded lest Christine and Renée should suffer harm from the chill breath that hung about the walls; many a time had she scolded the children for running about the arcades and amusing themselves by dipping their little arms into the icy water of the fountain. Thereupon she conceived the idea of making use of this forgotten attic for them, the only corner into which the sun had, for nearly two centuries, entered and rejoiced, in the midst of the cobwebs. She gave them some matting, birds, and flowers. The bairns were wild with delight. Renée lived there during the holidays, bathing in the yellow rays of that good sun, who seemed pleased with the decorations lavished upon his retreat and with the two fair-haired heads sent to keep him company. The room became a paradise, ever resounding with the song of the birds and the children’s babbling. It had been yielded to them for their exclusive use. They spoke of “our room;” it was their home; they went so far as to lock themselves in so as to put it beyond doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the room. What a happy nook! On the matting lay a massacre of playthings, expiring in the bright sunshine.

But the great delight of the children’s room was the vastness of the horizon. From the other windows of the house there was nothing to look at but black walls, a few feet away. But from this window one could see all that part of the Seine, all that piece of Paris which extends from the Cité to the Pont de Bercy, boundlessly flat, resembling some quaint Dutch city. Down below, on the Quai de Béthune, were tumbledown wooden sheds, accumulations of beams and crumbling roofs, amid which the children often amused themselves by watching enormous rats run about, with a vague fear of seeing them clamber up the high walls. But beyond all this the real rapture began. The boom, with its tiers of timbers, its buttresses resembling those of a Gothic cathedral, and the slender Pont de Constantine, hanging like a strip of lace beneath the wayfarers’ footsteps: crossed each other at right angles, and seemed to dam up and keep within bounds the huge mass of the river. The trees of the Halle aux Vins opposite and the shrubberies of the Jardin des Plantes, further away, spread out their greenness to the distant horizon: while on the other bank of the river the Quai Henri IV and the Quai de la Rapée extended their low and irregular edifices, their row of houses which, from above, resembled the tiny wood and cardboard houses which the little girls kept in boxes. In the background on the right the slated roof of the Saltpêtrière rose blue above the trees. Then, in the centre, sloping down to the Seine, the wide-paved banks formed two long gray tracks, streaked here and there by a row of casks, a cart and its team, an empty wood or coal-barge lying high and dry. But the soul of all this, the soul that filled the whole landscape, was the Seine, the living river; it came from afar, from the vaguely-shimmering edge of the horizon, it emerged from the distance, as from a dream, to flow straight down to the children with its tranquil majesty, its puissant swell, which spread and widened itself into a great sheet of water at their feet, at the extremity of the island. The two bridges that crossed it, the Pont de Bercy and the Pont d’Austerlitz, looked like necessary boundaries placed there to contain it, to prevent it from surging up to the room. The little ones loved this giant, they filled their eyes with its colossal flux, with that eternal murmuring flood which rolled towards them as though to reach them, and which branched out to left and right, and disappeared into the unknown with the docility of a conquered Titan. On fine days, on mornings when the sky hung blue overhead, they would be enraptured with the pretty dresses of the Seine; it wore dresses of a changeable hue that altered from blue to green with a thousand tints of infinite tenderness; dresses of silk shot with white flames and trimmed with frills of satin; and the barges drawn up on either bank bordered it with a black velvet ribbon. In the distance, especially, the material became beautiful and precious as the enchanted gauze of a fairy’s robe; and, beyond the belt of dark-green satin with which the shadow of the bridges girdled the Seine, were breastplates of gold and lappets of a plaited sun-coloured stuff. The immense sky formed a vault over the water, over the low rows of houses, over the green of the two parks.

Sometimes Renée, wearied of this unbounded horizon, a big girl already, and full of a fleshly curiosity brought back from her boarding-school, would throw a glance into the swimming school attached to Petit’s floating baths, which were moored to the end of the island. She sought to catch a glimpse, through the flapping linen cloths hung up on lines to serve as a roof, of the men in bathing-drawers showing their naked bellies.