THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
Читать онлайн книгу.
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 goodnature