Complete Works of Emile Zola (225 page)

Then, when the great Worms at last received Renée, Maxime followed her into the consultation room. He had ventured to speak on two or three occasions while the master remained absorbed in the contemplation of his client, as the high-priests of the Beautiful hold that Leonardo da Vinci did in the presence of la Gioconda. The master had deigned to smile upon the correctness of his observations. He made Renée stand up before a glass which rose from the floor to the ceiling, and pondered with knit brows, while Renée, seized with emotion, held her breath, so as not to stir. And after a few minutes the master, as though seized and moved by inspiration, sketched in broad, jerky strokes the work of art which he had just conceived, ejaculating in short phrases:

“A Montespan dress in pale-gray faille… the skirt describing a rounded basque in front… large gray satin bows to catch it up on the hips… and a puffed apron of pearl-gray tulle, the puffs separated by strips of gray satin.”

He pondered once again, seemed to descend to the very depths of his genius, and, with the triumphant facial contortion of a pythoness on her tripod, concluded:

“We will have in the hair, on the top of this bonny head, Psyche’s dreamy butterfly, with wings of changeful blue.”

But at other times inspiration was stubborn. The illustrious Worms summoned it in vain, and concentrated his faculties to no purpose. He distorted his eyebrows, turned livid, took his poor head between his hands and shook it in his despair, and beaten, throwing himself into an arm-chair:

“No,” he would mutter, in a pitiful voice, “no, not to-day…. It is not possible…. You ladies expect too much. The source is exhausted.”

And he showed Renée out, repeating:

“Impossible, impossible, dear lady, you must come back another day…. I don’t grasp you this morning.”

The fine education that Maxime received had a first result. At seventeen the young scapegrace seduced his step-mother’s maid. The worst of the affair was that the lady’s-maid got a baby. They had to send her into the country with the brat, and to buy her a little annuity. Renée was horribly annoyed at this incident. Saccard did not interfere except to arrange the financial part of the question; but his young wife scolded her pupil roundly. That he, of whom she wanted to make a distinguished man, should compromise himself with a girl like that! What a ridiculous, disgraceful beginning, what a discreditable exploit! He might at least have led off with a lady!

“Quite true!” he replied quietly, “if your dear friend Suzanne had been willing, it was she who might have been sent to the country.”

“Oh! the scamp!” she murmured, disarmed, enlivened with the idea of seeing Suzanne retiring to the country with an annuity of twelve hundred francs.

Then a funnier thought occurred to her, and forgetting that she was playing the indignant mother, bursting into pearly laughter which she restrained with her fingers, she stammered, giving him a sidelong glance:

“I say, how you would have caught it from Adeline, and what a scene she would have made her….”

She did not finish. Maxime and she were screaming. Such was the fine catastrophe of Renée’s lecture on this incident.

Meanwhile Saccard troubled himself not at all about the two children, as he called his son and his second wife. He left them absolute liberty, glad to see them such good friends, whereby the flat was filled with noisy merriment. A singular apartment, this first floor in the Rue de Rivoli. The doors were slamming to and fro all day long. The servants talked loud; its new and dazzling luxury was continually traversed by a flood of vast, floating skirts, by processions of tradespeople, by the uproar of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s chums and Saccard’s callers. From nine to eleven the last received the strangest set imaginable: senators and bailiffs’ clerks, duchesses and old-clothes-women, all the scum that the tempests of Paris hurled at his door every morning, silk gowns, dirty skirts, blouses, dress-coats, all of whom he received with the same hurried manner, the same impatient, nervous gestures; he clinched bits of business with two words, got rid of twenty difficulties at a time, and gave solutions at a run. One would have thought that this restless little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, and with the furniture, tumbling head over heels, knocking his head against the ceiling to make his ideas flash out, and always falling triumphantly on his feet. Then at eleven o’clock he went out; he was not seen again during the day; he breakfasted out, he often even dined out. From that time the house belonged to Renée and Maxime; they took possession of the father’s study; they unpacked the tradesmen’s parcels there, and articles of finery lay about among the business-papers. Sometimes serious people had to wait for an hour at the study-door while the school-boy and the young married woman discussed a bow of ribbon, seated at either end of Saccard’s writing-table. Renée had the horses put to ten times a day. They rarely had a meal together; two of the three would be rushing about, forgetting themselves, staying out till midnight. An apartment of racket, of business, and of pleasure, through which modern life, with its noise of jingling gold, of rustling skirts, swept like a whirlwind.

Aristide Saccard was in his element at last. He had revealed himself a great speculator, a brewer of millions. After the master-stroke in the Rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the struggle which was beginning to fill Paris with shameful wreckages and lightning triumphs. He began by gambling on certainties, repeating his first successful stroke, buying up houses which he knew to be threatened with the pickaxe, and utilizing his friends in order to obtain fat compensation. The moment came when he had five or six houses, those houses that he had looked at so curiously, as though they were acquaintances of his, in the days when he was only a poor surveyor of roads. But these were the mere first steps of art. There was no great cleverness wanted to run out leases, conspire with the tenants, and rob the State and individuals; nor did he think the game worth the candle. For which reason he soon made use of his genius for transactions of a more complicated character.

Saccard first invented the trick of making secret purchases of house-property on the city’s account. A decision of the Council of State had placed the Municipality in a difficult position. It had acquired by private contract a large number of houses, in the hope of running out the leases and turning the tenants out without compensation. But these purchases were pronounced to be genuine acts of expropriations, and the city had to pay. It was then that Saccard offered to lend his name to the city: he bought houses, ran out the leases, and for a consideration handed over the property at a fixed date. And he even ended by playing a double game: he acted as buyer both for the Municipality and for the préfet. Whenever the thing was irresistibly tempting, he stuck to the house himself. The State paid. In reward for his assistance he received building concessions for bits of streets, for open spaces, which he disposed of in his turn even before the new thoroughfare was commenced. It was a fierce gamble, the new streets were speculated in as one speculates in stocks and shares. Certain ladies were in the swim, handsome girls, intimately connected with some of the higher functionaries; one of them, whose white teeth are world-renowned, has nibbled up whole streets on more than one occasion. Saccard was insatiable, he felt his greed grow at the sight of the flood of gold that glided through his fingers. It seemed to him as though a sea of twenty-franc pieces extended about him, swelling from a lake to an ocean, filling the vast horizon with a sound of strange waves, a metallic music that tickled his heart; and he grew adventurous, plunging more boldly every day, diving and coming up again, now on his back, then on his belly, swimming through this immensity in fair weather and foul, and relying on his strength and skill to prevent him from ever sinking to the bottom.

Paris was at that time disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The days predicted by Saccard on the Buttes Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed with sabre-cuts, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He had belonging to him demolished houses in every quarter of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astounding story of the pit which was dug by a company in order to carry away five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in gigantic works, and which had afterwards to be filled up, on the failure of the company, by bringing the soil back from Saint-Ouen. Saccard came out of this with an easy conscience and full pockets, thanks to the friendly intervention of his brother Eugène. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont d’Alma. In the direction of Passy it was he who conceived the idea of scattering the refuse of the Trocadero over the high level, so that to this day the good soil is buried two metres below the surface, and the very weeds refuse to grow through the rubbish. He was to be found in twenty places at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a heap of rubbish that no one knew what to do with, a hollow that could not be filled up, a great mass of soil and plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but in which he rummaged with his nails, and invariably ended by finding some bonus or some speculation to his taste. On the same day he ran from the works at the Arc de Triomphe to those at the Boulevard Saint-Michel, from the clearings in the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments at Chaillot, dragging after him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and swindlers.

But his purest glory was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was the official director; he himself only figured as a member of the board. In this connection Eugène had done his brother another good turn. Thanks to him the Government authorized the company and watched over its career with great good nature. On one delicate occasion, when a malignant journal ventured to criticise one of the company’s operations, the
Moniteur
went so far as to publish a note forbidding any discussion of so honourable an undertaking, one which the State deigned to protect. The Crédit Viticole was based upon an excellent financial system: it lent the wine-growers half of the estimated value of their property, ensured the repayment of the loan by a mortgage, and received interest from the borrowers in addition to installments of the principal. Never was there mechanism more prudent or more worthy. Eugène had declared to his brother, with a knowing smile, that the Tuileries expected people to be honest. M. Toutin-Laroche interpreted this wish by allowing the wine-growers’ loan-office to work quietly, and founding by its side a banking-house which attracted capital and gambled feverishly, launching out into every sort of adventure. Thanks to the formidable impulse it received from its director, the Crédit Viticole soon achieved a well-established reputation for solidity and prosperity. At the outset, in order to offer at the Bourse in one job a mass of shares on which no dividend had yet been paid, and to give them the appearance of having been long in circulation, Saccard had the ingenuity to have them trodden on and beaten, a whole night long, by the bank-messengers, armed with birch-brooms. The place resembled a branch of the Bank of France. The house occupied by the offices, with its court-yard full of private carriages, its austere iron railings, its broad flight of steps and its monumental staircase, its suites of luxurious reception-rooms, its world of clerks and of liveried lackeys, seemed to be the grave, dignified temple of Mammon; and nothing filled the public with a more religious emotion than the sanctuary, the cashier’s office, which was approached by a corridor of hallowed bareness and contained the safe, the god, crouching, embedded in the wall, squat and somnolent, with its triple lock, its massive flanks, its air of a brute divinity.

Saccard carried through a big job with the Municipality. The latter was greatly in debt, was crushed by its debts, dragged into this dance of gold which it had led off to please the Emperor and to fill certain people’s pockets, and was now reduced to borrowing covertly, not caring to confess its violent fever, its stone-and-pickaxe madness. It had begun to issue what were called delegation bonds, really bills of exchange payable at a distant date, so that the contractors might be paid on the day the agreements were signed, and thus enabled to obtain money by discounting the bonds. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper at the contractors’ hands. One day when the Municipality was in want of money, Saccard went and tempted it. It received a considerable advance on an issue of delegation bonds, which M. Toutin-Laroche swore he held from contracting companies, and which he dragged through every gutter of speculation. From thenceforward the Crédit Viticole was safe from attack; it held Paris by the throat. The director now talked only with a smile of the famous Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco; and yet it still continued to exist, and the newspapers continued regularly to extol its great commercial stations. One day when M. Toutin-Laroche endeavoured to induce Saccard to take shares in this society, the latter laughed in his face, and asked him if he thought he was such a fool as to invest his money in the Société Générale of the Arabian Nights.

Up to that time Saccard had speculated successfully, with safe profits, cheating, selling himself, making money on deals, deriving some sort of gain from each of his operations. Soon, however, this gambling in differences ceased to suffice him; he disdained to glean and pick up the gold which men like Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud let drop behind them. He plunged his arms into the sack to the elbows. He went into partnership with Mignon, Charrier and Co., those famous contractors, who were then just starting and who were destined to make colossal fortunes. The Municipality had already decided no longer to carry out the works itself, but to have the boulevards laid out by contract. The tendering companies agreed to deliver a complete thoroughfare, with its trees planted, it benches and lamp-posts fixed, in return for a specified indemnity; sometimes even they delivered the thoroughfare for nothing, finding themselves amply remunerated by retaining the bordering building-ground, for which they asked a considerably enhanced price. Saccard through his connections obtained a concession to lay out three lots of boulevards. He was the ardent and somewhat blundering soul of the partnership. The Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, his creatures at the outset, were a pair of fat, cunning cronies, master-masons who knew the value of money. They laughed in their sleeves at Saccard’s horses and carriages; oftenest they kept on their blouses, always ready to shake hands with their workmen, and returning home covered with plaster. They came from Langres both of them. They brought into this burning and insatiable Paris their Champenois caution, their calm brains, not very open to impressions, not very intelligent, but exceedingly quick at profiting by opportunities for filling their pockets, contented to enjoy themselves later on. If Saccard pushed the business, infused his vigour into it, and his rage for greed, the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, by their matter-of-fact ways, their methodical, narrow management, saved it a score of times from being capsized by the extraordinary imagination of their partner. They would never agree to having superb offices in a house which he wanted to build to astonish Paris. They refused moreover to entertain the subordinate speculations that sprouted each morning in his head the erection of concert-halls and immense baths on the building-ground bordering their thoroughfares; of railways along the line of the new boulevards; of glass-roofed galleries which would increase the rent of the shops ten-fold, and allow Paris to walk about without getting wet. The contractors, in order to put a stop to these alarming projects, decided that these pieces of ground should be apportioned among the three partners, and that each of them should do as he please with his share. They wisely continued to sell theirs. Saccard built upon his. His brain seethed. He would have proposed in all seriousness to place Paris under an immense bell-glass, so as to transform it into a hot-house for forcing pine-apples and sugar-canes.