Complete Works of Emile Zola (218 page)

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 passers-by 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 coffee-pot, 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 two-fold 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, note-books, pocket-books, 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 coffee-pot, 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.