Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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Despite this banal socialite’s existence, Renée had had one romance in her life. She had gone out one day at dusk to visit her father, walking to his house because he did not like the sound of carriages at his door, and on her way back via the Quai Saint-Paul she noticed that she was being followed by a young man. It was hot; the day was dying with amorous softness. Used to being followed only by men on horseback on the bridle paths of the Bois, she found the adventure stimulating and was flattered by this new and somewhat brutal form of homage, whose very crudeness she found appealing. Rather than return directly home, she took the rue du Temple, leading her admirer along the boulevards. Emboldened, the man became so importunate, however, that Renée, rather taken aback, lost her head, turned down the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, and took refuge in her husband’s sister’s shop. The man followed her in. Mme Sidonie smiled, signaled her comprehension of the situation, and left the couple alone. When Renée made as if to follow her out of the room, the stranger called her back, spoke to her in a respectfully admiring way, and won her pardon. He was a clerk by the name of Georges, whose last name she never asked. She came to meet him twice, entering through the shop, while he used the entrance on rue Papillon. This chance love affair, which began with an encounter on the street, was one of her keenest pleasures. She always thought of it with a certain shame but also a singular smile of regret. Mme Sidonie’s profit from the adventure was to have become the accomplice of her brother’s second wife, a role she had aspired to play from the day of the wedding.

Poor Mme Sidonie had suffered a setback. In brokering the marriage, she had hoped in a sense to marry Renée herself, to turn her into a client and reap from her a variety of rewards. She judged women at a glance, as connoisseurs judge horses. So her consternation was great when, after allowing the couple a month to get settled, she found Mme de Lauwerens already ensconced in their salon and realized that she had waited too long. Mme de Lauwerens, a beautiful woman of twenty-six, made it her business to launch newcomers to high society. She belonged to a very old family and was married to a man from the world of high finance, who had made the mistake of refusing to pay the bills submitted by his wife’s milliner and tailor. Highly intelligent, the lady minted whatever cash she needed and became her own keeper. Men horrified her, she said, yet she supplied all her lady friends with them. The apartment she occupied on the rue de Provence, above her husband’s offices, was always crowded with clients. It was an ideal setting for intimate little meals. Men and women could meet there in charming impromptu encounters. Where was the harm if a young woman went to visit her dear friend Mme de Lauwerens, and so what if some very respectable men from the best society chanced to arrive at her apartment at the same time? The mistress of the house looked lovely in her long lacy peignoirs. Many a visitor would have chosen her over any of the women in her collection of blondes and brunettes, but word had it that she was beyond reproach. That was the secret of her success. She maintained her position in society, enjoyed friendships with all the men, preserved her proud reputation as a respectable lady, and secretly enjoyed ruining the reputations of other women and profiting from their downfall. When Mme Sidonie had worked out the mechanism of this new system, she was mortified. It was the old school—a woman in a black dress carrying love notes in the bottom of her basket—versus the modern school—a great lady who sips tea while selling her friends in her own boudoir. The modern school won out. Mme de Lauwerens cast a cold eye on the threadbare clothing of Mme Sidonie, in whom she suspected a rival. And it was Mme de Lauwerens who saddled Renée with her first problem, the young duc de Rozan, for whom the financier’s beautiful wife had had a very hard time finding a match. The old school did not score a victory until later, when Mme Sidonie lent her sister-in-law her apartment so that she might indulge her whim with the strange man from the Quai Saint-Paul. She remained Renée’s confidante.

Among Mme Sidonie’s faithful allies, moreover, was Maxime. By the age of fifteen he was prowling around his aunt’s house, sniffing at gloves he found lying forgotten on the furniture. Although she detested any situation that was unambiguous and never admitted doing favors, eventually she agreed to lend him the keys to her apartment on certain days, saying that she would be off to the country overnight. Maxime had mentioned to her that there were friends he wished to entertain but did not dare bring to his father’s house. It was in his aunt’s apartment above the shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière that he had spent several nights with the poor girl who had had to be sent away to the country. Mme Sidonie borrowed money from her nephew and swooned at the sight of him, whispering sweetly in his ear that he was “as smooth and pink as a cherub.”

Meanwhile, Maxime had grown. He was now a slender, good-looking young man who still had the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a child. His curly locks completed the “girlish look” that the ladies found so enchanting. He took after poor Angèle, with her gentle gaze and blond pallor. Yet he was even more worthless than that lazy, empty-headed woman. The Rougon blood ran thin in his veins and became tenuous and susceptible to vice. Born to a woman too young to be a mother, he was a confused and somehow incoherent mixture of his father’s frenetic appetites and his mother’s capitulations and weaknesses, a defective product in whom the faults of the parents complemented and exacerbated one another. This family was all too quickly using up what life it had in it; in this frail creature, whose sex must have remained in doubt at birth and who was no longer, like Saccard, a will grasping profit and pleasure but a feebleness devouring fortunes already made, a strange hermaphrodite opportunely born into a society gone rotten, it was already dying out. When Maxime went riding in the Bois, pinched in at the waist like a woman and swaying slightly in the saddle to the rhythm of his horse’s canter, he was the god of the age, with his well-developed hips, his long, slender hands, his sickly, leering appearance, his punctilious elegance, and his music-hall slang. At twenty he considered himself beyond all possibility of surprise or disgust. He had certainly dreamt some unusually filthy dreams. Vice for him was not an abyss, as it is for some old men, but a natural and outward flowering. It lived in his wavy blond hair, smiled on his lips, cloaked him in its robes. What was most typical of him, however, were his eyes, two blue apertures, radiant and smiling, mirrors of vanity that could not hide the emptiness of the brain behind. Those harlot eyes were never lowered. They never tired in their search for pleasure, which they summoned forth and drank in.

The wind that constantly rattled the doors of the apartment on the rue de Rivoli grew stronger as Maxime grew older, Saccard expanded the scope of his operations, and Renée searched ever more feverishly for unfamiliar pleasures. The lives these three people led were in the end astonishingly wild and free. Such was the fruit that the epoch ultimately produced in abundance. The street invaded the apartment with its rumble of carriages, its jostling of strangers, its unbridled speech. The father, the stepmother, and the stepson acted and spoke and made themselves at home as if each were alone, living the bachelor life. Three friends, three classmates sharing the same furnished room, could not have been less inhibited about their vices, their loves, and their boisterous adolescent pleasures. They greeted one another with handshakes, gave no hint of any doubts about why they were living under the same roof, and treated one another in a cavalier, carefree manner, thereby asserting their absolute independence. They banished the idea of family in favor of a kind of partnership, with each claiming an equal share of the profits. To each partner went a quota of pleasure to be consumed, it was tacitly understood, as he or she saw fit. Ultimately they gratified themselves in one another’s presence, making a parade of their pleasures, recounting them to one another without provoking anything but a bit of envy or curiosity, nothing more.

Maxime now became Renée’s teacher. When he went to the Bois with her, he amused her greatly with his stories about the whores. Whenever a new one turned up at lakeside, he set out at once to find out who her lover was, how much he paid her per month, and how she lived. He knew the interiors of these ladies’ apartments as well as intimate details of their lives and was nothing less than a walking catalog listing all the prostitutes of Paris, with complete descriptions of each and every one. This scandal sheet delighted Renée. On race days at Longchamp, she would listen avidly to all his stories as they drove past the racetrack in her calèche, yet she always maintained the hauteur of the true socialite. She liked to hear, for instance, how Blanche Muller was deceiving her embassy attaché with her hairdresser; or how the little baron had found the count in his undershorts in the alcove of a skinny, redheaded celebrity who went by the name “Crayfish.” Each day yielded its quota of gossip. When the story was too coarse for a lady’s ears, Maxime lowered his voice but told all. Renée opened her eyes wide like a child listening to a good joke and restrained her laughter until she was obliged to stifle it with an embroidered handkerchief pressed delicately to her lips.

Maxime also brought her photographs of these ladies. His pockets and even his cigar case were always filled with portraits of actresses. Sometimes he emptied them out and put the ladies’ pictures in the album left lying about the drawing room, which already contained portraits of Renée’s friends. It also contained pictures of men such as MM. de Rozan, Simpson, de Chibray, and de Mussy, along with actors, writers, and deputies who had somehow or other found their way into Maxime’s collection. It was a singularly mixed society, a faithful reflection of the motley assortment of ideas and people that came Renée and Maxime’s way. Whenever it rained, or they felt bored, this album served as a great conversation piece. Somehow it always seemed close at hand. Stifling a yawn, Renée would open it for perhaps the hundredth time. Then her curiosity would reawaken, Maxime would come and lean behind her, and they would fall into lengthy discussions about Crayfish’s hair, Frau von Meinhold’s double chin, Mme de Lauwerens’s eyes, Blanche Muller’s bosom, the marquise’s slightly crooked nose, or little Sylvia’s mouth with its notoriously thick lips. They compared one woman with another.

“If I were a man,” Renée would say, “I’d choose Adeline.”

“That’s because you don’t know Sylvia,” Maxime would answer. “She’s so funny! . . . I prefer Sylvia.”

As the pages turned, an image of the duc de Rozan might pop up, or Mr. Simpson, or the comte de Chibray, and Maxime would add in a mocking tone, “In any case, your taste is perverted, as everyone knows. . . . Can you imagine anything stupider than the faces of these gentlemen? Rozan and Chibray look like Gustave, my barber.”

Renée shrugged as if to say that sarcasm like Maxime’s left her cold. She remained absorbed in the spectacle of faces, whether pallid, cheerful, or cross. She lingered longest over the portraits of the prostitutes, carefully scrutinizing the photographs for precise, microscopic details, for tiny wrinkles and hairs. One day she even called for a servant to bring her a magnifying glass after she thought she spotted a hair on Crayfish’s nose. And in fact the lens did reveal a thin golden filament, which had fallen from an eyebrow onto the middle of the nose. This hair amused the two of them for quite some time. For the next week, all the ladies who came to visit were obliged to verify its presence in the photograph for themselves. From then on the magnifying glass was put to regular use in scrutinizing the women’s faces. Renée made some astonishing discoveries. She found unsuspected wrinkles, rough skin, and pockmarks imperfectly concealed by rice powder. In the end Maxime hid the magnifying glass, on the grounds that it was not right to use such an instrument to make the human face look disgusting. The truth was that Renée had subjected Sylvia’s thick lips to excessively close scrutiny, Sylvia being a person for whom Maxime felt a special affection. He and Renée invented a new game. They asked the question, “With whom would I like to spend a night?” and then turned to the album for answers. This yielded some quite delightful couples. Renée spent any number of evenings playing this game with her friends and found herself married off in succession to the archbishop of Paris, Baron Gouraud, M. de Chibray, which made her laugh, and even her own husband, which depressed her. As for Maxime, whether by chance or as a result of Renée’s mischievous intervention, he always ended up with the marquise. But the laughs were never louder than when fate coupled two men or two women.

So close was the camaraderie between Renée and Maxime that she even told him about her heartaches. He consoled her and offered his advice. His father seemed not to exist. Eventually they even exchanged confidences about their younger years. During their drives in the Bois especially they felt a vague languor, a need to tell each other things that are difficult to say and usually left unspoken. The relish that children feel when speaking in low voices about forbidden subjects, the attraction that draws a young man and a young woman together into sin, albeit in word only, kept bringing them back to salacious subjects. This gave them deep pleasure, for which they did not reproach each other—a pleasure that each savored while reclining listlessly in a corner of their carriage, like old schoolfellows recalling their first escapades. Eventually they boasted to each other of their debaucheries, like braggarts. Renée confessed that the little girls in her school were very naughty. Maxime outdid her and dared to recount some of the shameful things that went on at his school in Plassans.

“Ah!” Renée whispered. “I can’t tell . . .”

Then she leaned close to his ear, as if the only thing that would have made her blush was the sound of her own voice, and confided to him one of those convent stories that are often heard in lewd songs. He himself had too rich a collection of anecdotes of this sort to hold anything back. He warbled any number of very coarse verses in her ear. Little by little they entered their own peculiar state of beatitude, gently stimulated by the many carnal thoughts they stirred up and titillated by unavowed desires. The carriage drove quietly on, and they returned home pleasantly fatigued, more tired than on the morning after a night of love. They had sinned, like two boys who, while strolling together in the country without their mistresses, make do with mutual recollections.

A still greater familiarity and lack of restraint existed between father and son. Saccard had grasped the fact that a great financier is bound to make love to women and on occasion lose his head over them. He was brusque in love and preferred money. It was a part of his plan, however, to frequent women’s bedrooms, to strew banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to use a celebrated prostitute as a gold-plated advertisement for one of his speculations. When Maxime left school, he and his father would occasionally run into each other at the home of the same lady, and they would laugh about it. To some extent they were even rivals. Sometimes, when the young man dined at the Maison d’Or with a noisy group of friends, he could hear Saccard’s voice in a private room nearby.

“Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t Daddy next door!” he would shout, with an expression on his face borrowed from one of the popular actors of the day.

“Oh, it’s you!” his father would rejoin in a jocular tone of voice. “Come in, why don’t you? You’re making so much noise I can’t hear myself eat. So who are you with tonight?”

“Laure d’Aurigny, Sylvia, Crayfish, and two others I think. They’re astonishing: they poke at the plates with their fingers and throw handfuls of salad at our heads. My clothes are covered with oil.”

His father laughed at this story, which he thought quite funny.

“Ah, young people, young people,” he murmured. “Not like us, are they, my kitten? We’ve had a very quiet meal and will soon hit the hay.”

And with that he grabbed the chin of the woman next to him and cooed at her in his nasal Provençal, which produced a strange amorous music.

“Oh, you old fool!” the woman shouted. “Hello, Maxime. If I’m willing to have supper with your nasty father, I must be in love with you, don’t you think? . . . Where have you been keeping yourself? Come see me the day after tomorrow, early in the morning. . . . No, I mean it, I have something to tell you.”

With a blissful look on his face, Saccard polished off a dish of ice cream or fruit, taking small mouthfuls. He kissed the woman’s shoulders and said teasingly, “You know, my loves, if I’m in your way, I’ll be off. . . . You can ring when it’s safe to return.”

Then he would take the lady off, or sometimes he would take her to join the boisterous crowd next door. He and Maxime shared the same shoulders; their hands encircled the same waists. They called out to each other from the divans and repeated out loud confidences that women had whispered in their ears. Indeed, they carried intimacy to the point of conspiring, when one or the other had chosen a blonde or brunette from the company, to lure her away from the group and make off with her.

They were well-known at Mabille.⁹ They used to go there arm in arm after an elegant dinner party and stroll about the garden, nodding at the women and shouting comments after them as they passed. They laughed loudly without letting go of each other’s arms and when conversations became heated helped each other out. The father, who knew how to drive a hard bargain, negotiated a very good price when it came to his son’s amours. Occasionally they would sit down and have a drink with a group of whores. Then they might move to another table or continue their stroll. Until midnight they could always be seen, arms linked like a couple of schoolfellows, chasing skirts down the yellow walkways under the harsh flame of the gaslights.

When they returned home, they brought with them, on their clothing, traces of the tarts they had been with outdoors. Their provocative poses, hints of risqué language, and vulgar gestures filled the apartment on the rue de Rivoli with the reek of dubious alcoves. The lackadaisical and wanton way in which the father offered his hand to his son was in itself enough to indicate where they had been. This was the air that Renée breathed, the source of her sensual caprices and longings. She used to tease the two men nervously.

“So where are you coming from?” she would say. “You reek of tobacco and perfume. . . . I’m sure I’m going to have a migraine.”

And something about the peculiar odor did indeed trouble her deeply. Such was the persistent fragrance of this unusual household.

Meanwhile, Maxime was smitten with a grand passion for little Sylvia. For months on end he bored his stepmother with talk of this prostitute. Renée soon knew all there was to know about her, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. She had a slight bruise on her hip; nothing was lovelier than her knees; her shoulders were peculiar in that only the left one was dimpled. Maxime took malicious pleasure in recounting the perfections of his mistress to Renée during their drives together. One evening, on the way home from the Bois, Renée’s carriage was caught with Sylvia’s in a traffic jam, and the two were obliged to sit for a time side by side on the Champs-Elysées.¹⁰ The two women stared at each other with keen curiosity, while Maxime, delighted by this critical encounter, snickered to himself. When the calèche resumed its forward motion, Renée’s somber silence made Maxime think she was sulking, and he expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those odd scoldings with which she still occasionally diverted herself in her lassitude.

“Do you know that woman’s jeweler?” she asked him abruptly, just as they reached the place de la Concorde.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he answered with a smile. “I owe him 10,000 francs. . . . Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

Then, after another interval of silence: “She was wearing a very pretty bracelet, the one on her left wrist. . . . I would have liked to have seen it close up.”

They returned home. She said no more about it. But the next day, as Maxime and his father were about to go out together, she took the young man aside and spoke to him in a low voice, with an embarrassed look and a pretty smile as if seeking a favor. He seemed surprised and went off laughing in his wicked way. That evening he brought Sylvia’s bracelet home with him, for his stepmother had begged him to show it to her.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Who wouldn’t steal for you, step-mama?”

“She didn’t see you take it?” Renée asked, as she eagerly examined the bracelet.

“I don’t think so. . . . She wore it yesterday, so she certainly won’t want to wear it today.”

In the meantime the young woman had gone over to the window and put the bracelet on. She held her wrist slightly raised and turned it slowly, ecstatically repeating, “Oh! Very pretty, very pretty. . . . I quite like everything about it, except the emeralds.”

At that moment, with her wrist still held high in the white light of the window, Saccard walked in.

“What have we here?” he cried out in astonishment. “Sylvia’s bracelet!”

“You’re familiar with this item?” she said, more embarrassed than he and not knowing what to do with her arm.

He recovered. He pointed a menacing finger at his son and muttered, “This young scoundrel always has some kind of forbidden fruit in his pocket! . . . One of these days he’ll be bringing us the lady’s arm with the bracelet still on it.”

“Hold on a minute!” Maxime replied with cowardly cunning. “It wasn’t me. It was Renée who wanted to see it.”

“Oh!” was all the husband said.

And he in turn examined the jewelry, repeating the same words as his wife: “It’s very pretty, very pretty indeed.”

Then he quietly left the room, and Renée scolded Maxime for giving her away. He replied that his father couldn’t care less about such things. She returned the bracelet to him.

“You will go see the jeweler,” she said, “and order me one just like this, only you’ll ask him to use sapphires instead of emeralds.”

Saccard could not keep anything or anyone close to him for long without wanting to sell or derive a profit from it. Before his son was twenty it occurred to him that the boy could be useful. A good-looking young man who was the nephew of a minister and the son of an important financier was bound to be a good investment. He was of course a bit young, but one could always search out a wife and dowry for him, and then the wedding could be postponed or hurried along according to the financial needs of the firm. Saccard chose well. At a meeting of a board of directors of which he was a member, he chanced to meet a tall, handsome man by the name of Mareuil, and within two days Mareuil was his. M. de Mareuil had once been a sugar refiner in Le Havre, at which time his name had been Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young noblewoman, also quite wealthy, who had been looking for an imbecile with an impressive face. His first proud trophy was the right to use his wife’s name, but the marriage had made him insanely ambitious: he dreamed of paying Hélène back for her nobility by acquiring a high political position. He immediately invested money in the new newspapers, bought extensive properties in the remote Nièvre, and did all he could to prepare himself to run for a seat in the legislature. Thus far he had failed, though without shedding any of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could possibly encounter. He was a man of superb stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman, and since he was a marvelously good listener, with a deep gaze and a majestic calm in his expression, it was possible to believe that he was engaged in a prodigious inner labor of comprehension and deduction. Of course his mind was completely empty. Yet he had a disturbing effect on people, who had no idea whether they were dealing with a superior man or an imbecile. M. de Mareuil clung to Saccard as to a life raft. He knew that an official candidacy was about to open up in the Nièvre and ardently hoped that the minister would designate him. This was the last card he had to play. Hence he put himself completely in the hands of the minister’s brother. Saccard, who sensed a mutually advantageous alliance, encouraged him to think of marrying his daughter Louise off to Maxime. Mareuil was effusive in gratitude, believed that the idea of a wedding had been his own, and considered himself most fortunate to forge an alliance with the family of a minister and to give Louise to a young man whose prospects seemed bright indeed.

Louise, according to her father, was to have a dowry worth a million francs. Misshapen, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young. A lung disease was secretly sapping her health, lending her a nervous gaiety, a soothing grace. Sick little girls age quickly, becoming women before their time. She was naïvely sensual and seemed to have been born at age fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, a healthy, stupid colossus of a man, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, too, had been a big, strong woman in life, but after her death stories were told about her that explained why the child was stunted and had the manners of a bohemian millionaire and the charming ugliness of a debauchee. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died in the most shockingly dissolute excess. Pleasures had eaten away at her like an ulcer, yet her husband, who ought to have had her locked up in an asylum, never noticed her lucid madness. Carried in this diseased womb, Louise emerged with anemic blood, misshapen limbs, and a diseased brain, her memory already steeped in filth. At times she was persuaded that she possessed vague memories of another existence and imagined bizarre, shadowy scenes of men and women embracing, a whole carnal drama that titillated her childish curiosity. It was her mother speaking in her. This vice continued throughout her childhood. As she grew older, nothing shocked her; she remembered everything, or, rather, knew everything already, and she sought out forbidden things with such a sure instinct that she was like a person returning home after a long absence and needing only to reach out in order to feel comfortable and take delight from the surroundings. This strikingly unusual girl, whose instinct for debauchery complemented Maxime’s, also had an innocence in her impudence, a piquant mixture of childishness and boldness, as she went about this second life as a virgin with the knowledge and shame of a grown woman, and in the end Maxime grew to like her and to find her far more amusing even than Sylvia, who, though the daughter of a respectable stationer, had the heart of a moneylender and was at bottom dreadfully middle-class.

The marriage was arranged with smiles all around, and it was decided that the “kids” would be allowed to grow up. The two families enjoyed a close friendship. M. de Mareuil pursued his candidacy. Saccard kept an eye on his prey. It was understood that Maxime’s basket of wedding gifts would include his nomination as an auditor to the Conseil d’Etat.

Meanwhile, the Saccards’ fortune seemed to have reached its apogee. It blazed like a gigantic bonfire in the middle of Paris. It was the hour when the hounds were ardently devouring their share of the spoils, and a corner of the forest was filled with the sounds of dogs barking and whips cracking and the flare of countless torches. The appetites that had been unleashed at last found contentment in the impudence of triumph, in the din of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes built in six months. The city had become an orgy of millions and of women. Vice, come from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread across ornamental basins, and spurted skyward in public fountains only to fall again upon the roofs in a fine driving rain. And at night, when one crossed the bridges, the Seine seemed to carry off all the refuse of the sleeping city: crumbs fallen from tables, lace bows left lying on divans, hairpieces forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices—everything that brutal desire and immediate gratification of instinct shattered and soiled and then tossed into the street. Then, in the capital’s feverish sleep, better even than in its breathless daylight quest, one sensed the mental derangement, the gilded, voluptuous nightmare of a city driven mad by its gold and its flesh. Violins sang until midnight. Then windows went dark, and shadows fell upon the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last vestige of modesty extinguished. In the depths of the darkness there was now only a great gurgle of frenetic and weary love, while the Tuileries, at the water’s edge, reached out its arms as if to embrace the vast blackness.

Saccard had built his Parc Monceau mansion on land stolen from the city. On the second floor he had reserved for himself a superb study in rosewood and gold, its tall glassed bookcases filled with files and not a single book in sight. The safe, built into the wall, created an iron alcove big enough to hide the amours of a billion francs. There his fortune flourished and insolently displayed itself. Everything he tried seemed to succeed. When he left the rue de Rivoli and adopted a grander style of entertaining, doubling his expenditure, he alluded, in conversations with people he knew well, to substantial profits. To hear him tell it, his partnership with Mignon and Charrier had yielded enormous rewards; his speculations on real estate were doing even better; and the Crédit Viticole was an inexhaustible fountain of cash. He had a way of enumerating his riches that dazzled his listeners and prevented them from getting a clear view of his situation. His Provençal twang became thicker than ever. With his short sentences and nervous gestures he fired off rockets that exploded into millions, leaving even the most incredulous listeners dazzled in the end. His frantic mimicry of a man of means played a large part in the reputation he had acquired of being a lucky gambler. In truth, he was not known to possess any clear, solid capital. His various associates, who were of necessity well-informed as to his situation with respect to themselves, explained his colossal fortune by telling themselves that he must have enjoyed perfect luck in his other speculations—the ones they knew nothing about. He spent prodigiously. Cash flowed continually from his coffers, yet the sources of this river of gold had yet to be discovered. It was pure madness: the rage for money, the handfuls of louis thrown out the windows, the strongbox emptied of its last coin night after night only to be refilled before morning, no one knew how; and never did it disgorge such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.