THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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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 lampposts 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 tenfold, 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 hothouse for forcing pineapples and sugar-canes.
Before long, turning over money by the shovelful, he had eight houses on the new boulevards. He had four that were completely finished, two in the Rue de Marignan and two on the Boulevard Haussmann; the four others, situated on the Boulevard Malesherbes, remained in progress, and one of them, in fact, a vast enclosure of planks from which a magnificent house was to arise, had not got further than the flooring of the first story. At this period his affairs became so complicated, he had so many strings attached to his fingers’ ends, so many interests to watch over and puppets to work, that he slept barely three hours a night, and read his correspondence in his carriage. The marvellous part was that his coffers seemed inexhaustible. He held shares in every company, built houses with a sort of mania, turned to every trade and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, and yet he was never seen to realize a genuine clear profit, to pocket a big sum of gold shining in the sun. This flood of gold with no known source, which seemed to flow from his office in rapidly-recurring waves, astonished the cockneys and made of him, at one moment, the prominent figure to whom the newspapers ascribed all the witticisms that came from the Bourse.
With such a husband Renée was as little married as she could be. She remained entire weeks almost without seeing him. For the rest he was perfect: he opened his cashbox quite wide for her. At bottom she liked him as she would have liked an obliging banker. When she visited the Hotel Béraud, she praised him highly before her father, whose cold austerity was in no way changed by his son-in-law’s good-fortune. Her contempt had disappeared; this man seemed so convinced that life is a mere business, he was so obviously born to coin money with whatever fell into his hands: women, children, paving-stones, sacks of plaster, consciences, that she was no longer able to reproach him for their marriage-bargain. Since that bargain he looked upon her in a measure as upon one of those fine houses which did him credit and which would, he hoped, yield him a large profit. He liked to see her well-dressed, noisy, attracting the attention of all Paris. That consolidated his position, doubled the probable figure of his fortune. He seemed handsome, young, amorous and giddy because of his wife. She was his partner, his unconscious accomplice. A new pair of horses, a two-thousand-crown dress, a surrender to some lover facilitated and often ensured the success of his most remunerative transactions. Also he often pretended to be tired out and sent her to a minister, to some functionary or other, to solicit an authorization or receive a reply. He said to her: “And be good!” in a tone all his own, bantering and coaxing in one. And when she returned, successful, he rubbed his hands, repeating his famous, “I hope you were good!” Renée laughed. He was too active to desire a Madame Michelin. Only he loved coarse pleasantries and improper hypotheses. For the rest, had Renée not “been good,” he would have experienced only the mortification of having really paid for the minister’s or functionary’s complaisance. To dupe people, to give them less than their money’s worth, was his delight. He often said: “If I were a woman, I might sell myself, but I would never deliver the goods: that is too foolish.”
This madcap of a Renée, who had shot one night into the Parisian firmament as the eccentric fairy of fashionable voluptuousness, was the most complex of women. Had she been brought up at home, she would doubtless by the aid of religion or some other nervous satisfaction have blunted the edge of the desire whose pricks at times maddened her. Her mind was of the middle-class: she was absolutely straightforward, loved logical views, feared Heaven and Hell, and was crammed with prejudice; she was the daughter of her father, of that placid, prudent race among which flourish the virtues of the fireside. And in this nature there sprouted and grew her prodigious fantasies, her ever reviving curiosity, her unspeakable longings. Among the ladies of the Visitation, free, her mind roaming amid the mystic voluptuousness of the chapel and the carnal attachments of her little friends, she had framed for herself a fantastic education, learning vice, throwing the frankness of her nature into it, and disordering her brain to the extent of singularly embarrassing her confessor by telling him that one day at mass she had experienced an irrational desire to get up and kiss him. Then she struck her breast, and turned pale at the thought of the Devil and his caldrons. The fault which later brought on her marriage with Saccard, the brutal rape which she underwent with a sort of frightened expectation, made her despise herself, and accounted in a great measure for the subsequent abandonment of her whole life. She thought that she need no longer struggle against evil, that it was in her, that logic authorized her to pursue the study of wickedness to the end. She had still more curiosity than appetite. Thrown into the world of the Second Empire, abandoned to her imagination, kept in money, encouraged in her loudest eccentricities, she gave herself,