Complete Works of Emile Zola (222 page)

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 good-nature 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.