Complete Works of Emile Zola (228 page)

He had recovered himself, and threatened his son with his finger, murmuring:

“That rascal has always some forbidden fruit in his pockets…. One of these days he will bring us the lady’s arm with the bracelet on.”

“Ah! but it’s not I,” replied Maxime with mischievous cowardice. “It’s Renée who wanted to see it.”

“Ah!” was all the husband said.

And he examined the gaud in his turn, repeating like his wife:

“It is very pretty, very pretty.”

Then he went quietly away, and Renée scolded Maxime for giving her away like that. But he declared that his father didn’t care a pin! Then she returned him the bracelet, adding:

“You must go to the jeweller and order one exactly like it for me; only you must have sapphires put in instead of emeralds.”

Saccard was unable to keep a thing or a person near him for long without wanting to sell it or derive some sort of profit from it. His son was not twenty when he thought of turning him to account. A good-looking boy, nephew to a minister and son of a big financier, ought to be a good investment. He was a trifle young still, but one could always look out for a wife and a dowry for him, and then decide to postpone the wedding for a long time, or to hurry it on, according to the exigencies of domestic economy. Saccard was fortunate. He discovered on a board of directors of which he was a member a fine, tall man, M. de Mareuil, who in two days belonged to him. M. de Mareuil was a retired sugar-refiner of Havre, and his real name was Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young girl of noble birth, also very rich, who was looking out for a fool of imposing appearance. Bonnet obtained permission to assume his wife’s name, which was a first satisfaction for his bride; but his marriage had made him madly ambitious, and his dream was to repay Hélène for the noble name she had given him by achieving a high political position. From that time forward he had put money into new papers, bought large estates in the heart of the Nièvre, and by all the well-known means prepared for himself a candidature for the Corps Législatif. So far he had failed without losing an iota of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could come across. He was of splendid stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman; and as he had a marvellous way of listening, he gave the impression of a prodigious inner labour of comprehension and deduction. In reality he was thinking of nothing. But he succeeded in perplexing people, who no longer knew whether they had to do with a man of distinction or a fool. M. de Mareuil attached himself to Saccard as to a raft. He knew that an official candidature was about to fall vacant in the Nièvre, and he ardently hoped that the minister would nominate him: it was his last card. And so he handed himself over, bound hand and foot, to the minister’s brother. Saccard, who scented a good piece of business, put into his head a match between his daughter Louise and Maxime. The other became most effusive, thought he was the first to have had the idea of this marriage, and considered himself very fortunate to enter into a minister’s family and to give Louise to a young man who seemed to have such fine prospects.

Louise, her father said, would have a million francs to her dowry. Deformed, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young; consumption was stealthily undermining her, giving her a nervous gaiety and a tender grace. Sick little girls quickly grow old, and become women before their time. She was naïvely sensual, she seemed to have been born when she was fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, that healthy, stupid colossus, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother during her lifetime had also been a tall, strong woman; but stories were told about her which explained the child’s stuntedness, her manners like a millionaire gipsy’s, her vicious and charming ugliness. It was said that Hélène de Mareuil had died amid the most shameful debauchery. Pleasure had eaten into her like an ulcer, without her husband’s perceiving the lucid madness of his wife, whom he ought to have had locked up in a lunatic asylum. Borne in these diseased flanks, Louise had issued from them with impoverished blood, deformed limbs, her brain threatened, and her memory already filled with a dirty life. She occasionally fancied she had a confused recollection of a former existence; she saw unfolded before her, in a vague gloaming, bizarre scenes, men and women kissing, a whole fleshly drama in which her childish curiosity found amusement. It was her mother that spoke within her. This vice continued through her childhood. As she gradually grew up, nothing astonished her, she recollected everything, or rather she knew everything, and she reached for forbidden things with a sureness of hand that made her, in life, resemble a man returning home after a long absence, and having only to stretch out his arm to make himself comfortable and enjoy the pleasures of his homestead. This odd little girl, who by her evil instincts flattered Maxime, but had, moreover, in this second life which she lived as a virgin with all the knowledge and shame of a grown woman, an ingenuous effrontery, a piquant mixture of childishness and audacity, was bound in the end to attract him, and to seem to him even more diverting than Sylvia, the daughter of a worthy stationer, who had the heart of a money-lender, and was terribly homely by nature.

The marriage was arranged with a laugh, and it was decided that “the youngsters” should be allowed to grow up. The two families lived in close intimacy. M. de Mareuil worked his candidature. Saccard watched his prey. It was understood that Maxime should place his nomination as an auditor to the Council of State among the wedding-presents.

Meanwhile the fortune of the Saccards seemed to be at its zenith. It blazed in the midst of Paris like a colossal bonfire. This was the moment when the eager division of the hounds’ fee filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of the pack, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, in the shamelessness of triumph, amid the sound of crumbling districts and of fortunes built up in six months. The town was become a sheer orgy of gold and women. Vice, coming from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread out over the ornamental waters, shot up in the fountains of the public gardens to fall down again upon the roofs in a fine, penetrating rain. And at night-time, when one crossed the bridges, it seemed as though the Seine drew along with it, through the sleeping city, the refuse of the town, crumbs fallen from the tables, bows of lace left on couches, false hair forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices, all that the brutality of desire and the immediate satisfaction of an instinct fling into the street bruised and sullied. Then, amid the feverish sleep of Paris, and even better than during its breathless quest in broad daylight, one felt the unsettling of the brain, the golden and voluptuous nightmare of a city madly enamoured of its gold and its flesh. The violins sounded till midnight; then the windows became dark, and shadows descended upon the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last remnant of shame extinguished. There was nothing left in the depths of the darkness save a great rattle of furious and wearied love; while the Tuileries, at the waterside, stretched out their arms into the night, as though for a huge embrace.

Saccard had just built his mansion in the Parc Monceau, on a plot of ground stolen from the Municipality. He had reserved for himself, on the first floor, a magnificent study, in violet ebony and gold, with tall glass doors to the book-cases, full of business-papers, but without a book to be seen; the safe, embedded in the wall, yawned like an iron alcove, large enough to accommodate the amorous exploits of a milliard of money. Here his fortune bloomed and insolently displayed itself. Everything seemed to succeed with him. When he left the Rue de Rivoli, enlarging his household, doubling his expenses, he talked to his friends of considerable winnings. According to his account, his partnership with the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier brought him in enormous profits; his speculations in house-property came off still better; while the Crédit Viticole was an inexhaustible milch-cow. He had a way of enumerating his riches that bewildered his listeners and prevented them from seeing the truth. His Provençal snuffle grew more pronounced: with his short phrases and nervous gestures he let off fireworks in which millions shot up like rockets and ended by dazzling the most incredulous. This turbulent mimicry of the man of wealth was mainly responsible for the reputation he had achieved as a lucky speculator. To tell the truth, no one knew him to be possessed of a clear, solid capital. His various partners, who were necessarily acquainted with his position as regarded themselves, explained his colossal fortune by believing in his absolute luck in other speculations, those in which they had no share. He spent money madly; the flow from his cash-box continued, although the sources of that stream of gold had not yet been discovered. It was pure folly, a frenzy of money, handfuls of louis flung out of window, the safe emptied each evening to its last sou, filling again during the night, no one knew how, and never supplying such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.

In this fortune, which clamoured and overflowed like a winter torrent, Renée’s dowry was shaken, carried off and drowned. The young wife, who had been distrustful in the earlier days and desirous of managing her property herself, soon grew weary of business; and then she felt herself poor beside her husband and, crushed by debt, she was obliged to apply to him, to borrow money from him and place herself in his hands. At each fresh bill that he paid, with the smile of a man indulgent towards human foibles, she surrendered herself a little more, confiding dividend-warrants to him, authorizing him to sell this or that. When they went to live in the house in the Parc Monceau, already she found herself almost entirely stripped. He had taken the place of the State, and paid her the interest on the hundred thousand francs coming from the Rue de la Pépinière; on the other hand, he had made her sell the Sologne property in order to sink the proceeds in a great piece of business, a splendid investment, he said. She therefore had nothing left except the Charonne building-plots, which she obstinately refused to part with, so as not to sadden that excellent Aunt Elisabeth. And in that quarter again he was preparing a stroke of genius, with the help of his old accomplice, Larsonneau. For the rest, she remained his debtor; though he had taken her fortune, he paid her the income five or six times over. The interest of the hundred thousand francs, added to the revenue of the Sologne money, amounted to barely nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to pay her hosier and boot-maker. He gave her, or spent on her, fifteen or twenty times that paltry sum. He would have worked for a week to rob her of a hundred francs, and he kept her like a queen. And thus, like all the world, she respected her husband’s monumental safe, without trying to penetrate into the nothingness of that stream of gold flowing under her eyes, into which every morning she flung herself.

At the Parc Monceau it was a delirium, a lightning triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses; they had an army of servants whom they dressed in a dark-blue livery with drab breeches and yellow-and-black striped waistcoats, a rather severe scheme of colour which the financier had chosen so as to appear quite serious, one of his most cherished dreams. They emblazoned their luxury on the walls, and drew back the curtains when they gave big dinners. The whirlwind of contemporary life, which had set slamming the doors of the first-floor in the Rue de Rivoli, had become, in the mansion, a genuine hurricane which threatened to carry away the partitions. In the midst of these princely rooms, along the gilded balustrades, over the fine velvet carpets, in this fairy parvenu palace, there trailed the aroma of Mabille, there danced the jauntiness of the popular quadrilles, the whole period passed with its mad, stupid laugh, its eternal hunger and its eternal thirst. It was the disorderly house of fashionable pleasure, of the unblushing pleasure that widens the windows so that the passers-by may enjoy the confidence of the alcoves. Husband and wife lived there freely, under their servants’ eyes. They divided the house into two, encamped there, not appearing as though at home, but rather as if they had been dropped, at the end of a tumultuous and bewildering journey, into some palatial hotel where they had merely taken the time to undo their trunks in order to hasten more speedily towards the delights of a fresh city. They slept there at night, only staying at home on the days of the great dinner-parties, carried away by a ceaseless rush across Paris, returning sometimes for an hour as one returns to a room at an inn between two excursions. Renée felt more restless, more nervous there; her silken skirts glided with adder-like hisses over the thick carpets, along the satin of the couches; she was irritated by the idiotic gilding that surrounded her, by the high, empty ceilings, where after fête-nights there lingered nothing but the laughter of young fools and the sententious maxims of old ruffians; and to fill this luxury, to dwell amid this radiancy, she longed for a supreme amusement which her curiosity in vain sought in all the corners of the house, in the little sun-coloured drawing-room, in the conservatory with its fat vegetation. As to Saccard, he was approaching the realization of his dream; he received the high financiers, M. Toutin-Laroche, M. de Lauwerens; he received also great politicians, the Baron Gouraud, Haffner the deputy; his brother the minister had even consented to come two or three times and consolidate his position by his presence. And yet, like his wife, he experienced nervous anxieties, a restlessness that lent to his laugh a strange sound of broken window-panes. He became so giddy, so bewildered, that his acquaintances said of him: “That devil of a Saccard! he makes too much money, it will drive him mad!” In 1860 he had been decorated, in consequence of a mysterious service he had done the préfet, by lending his name to a lady for the sale of some land.

It was about the time of their installation in the Parc Monceau that an apparition crossed Renée’s life, leaving an ineffaceable impression. Up to then the minister had resisted the entreaties of his sister-in-law, who was dying of a longing to be invited to the court balls. He gave way at last, thinking his brother’s fortune to be definitely established. Renée did not sleep for a month. The great evening came, and she sat all trembling in the carriage that drove her to the Tuileries.