Complete Works of Emile Zola (221 page)

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 gas-jets 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 gas-lights 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 court-yard, 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.