Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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When everything was settled, Saccard paid a ceremonial visit to his brother Eugène to announce his engagement to Mlle Renée Béraud Du Châtel. This masterstroke took the deputy by surprise. Since he made no effort to conceal his astonishment, the clerk said, “You told me to look around. I did as I was told and found what I was looking for.”

Eugène, who at first didn’t know what to think, slowly began to grasp the truth. He managed to strike the right tone to express his pleasure. “Well, now, aren’t you a clever fellow? . . . You’ve come to ask me to be your best man, haven’t you? You may count on me. . . . If necessary, I shall bring the whole right wing of the legislature to your wedding. That should get you off to a nice start.”

Then, as he opened the door, he lowered his voice and added, “Tell me, I wouldn’t want to stick my neck out too far just now, we’ve got a very tough bill to get through. . . . The girl isn’t showing too much, I trust?”

Saccard shot him a look so cutting that Eugène, as he closed the door behind him, mused to himself that “that little pleasantry would no doubt cost me dearly if I weren’t a Rougon.”

The marriage was celebrated in the church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile. Saccard and Renée did not meet until the eve of the great day. The scene unfolded at dusk in a downstairs parlor of the Béraud mansion. The two studied each other with curiosity. Once her marriage had been negotiated, Renée had gone back to her wild and heedless ways. She was a tall girl of exquisite and irrepressible beauty who had indulged her every whim at boarding school. She found Saccard short and ugly, but his ugliness was of a tormented and intelligent kind that did not displease her. In any case, his tone and manners were impeccable. He winced slightly at his first glimpse of her. She no doubt seemed too tall, taller at any rate than he. Without apparent embarrassment they exchanged a few words. Had the girl’s father been present, he might actually have come away thinking that they had known each other for some time and been partners in past sin. Aunt Elisabeth, who was present for the interview, blushed for both of them.

On the day after the wedding—which counted as a major event on the Ile Saint-Louis owing to the presence of Eugène Rougon, a deputy thrust into the limelight by a recent speech—the two newlyweds were at last granted an audience with M. Béraud Du Châtel. Renée cried at the sight of her father looking older, graver, and sadder than she remembered him. Saccard, who had thus far retained his composure through it all, was frozen by the chill and gloom of the apartment and the lugubrious severity of the old man, whose penetrating eye seemed to plumb the depths of his conscience. The former magistrate slowly kissed his daughter on the forehead, as if to say that he forgave her. Then he turned to his son-in-law and said simply, “Monsieur, we have suffered greatly. I am counting on you to make us forget your wrongs.”

He extended his hand, but Saccard stood on the spot trembling. He believed that if the judge had not buckled under the tragic burden of grief at Renée’s disgrace, he would have thwarted Mme Sidonie’s machinations with a glance or a gesture. After putting the clerk in touch with Aunt Elisabeth, his sister had prudently stepped aside. She had not even come to the wedding. He took a very straightforward line with the old man, having read in his eyes a look of surprise at discovering that his daughter had been seduced by a man who was short, ugly, and forty years old. The newlyweds were obliged to spend their first nights together in the Hôtel Béraud. Christine, a child of fourteen, had been sent away two months earlier in order to make sure that she would not get wind of the drama unfolding in the house, as calm and serene as a convent. When she returned, she was aghast at the sight of her sister’s husband, whom she also found old and ugly. Only Renée seemed to take relatively little notice of her husband’s age or the slyness of his countenance. She showed him neither contempt nor affection and dealt with him in absolute tranquillity, through which a hint of ironic disdain manifested itself from time to time. Saccard settled in, made himself at home, and with his verve and frankness gradually won the genuine friendship of everyone involved. By the time the couple left to take up residence in a superb apartment in a new house on the rue de Rivoli, there was no longer any amazement in M. Béraud Du Châtel’s gaze, and little Christine had made a playmate of her brother-in-law. Renée was then four months pregnant. Her husband was about to send her to the country in order to be able to lie about the child’s age later on when, as Mme Sidonie had predicted, she miscarried. She had laced herself up so tightly to hide her condition, which in any case was concealed by the fullness of her skirts, that she was obliged to take to her bed for several weeks. Saccard was delighted by the outcome. Fortune had kept faith with him. He had made a fabulous bargain: a superb dowry, a wife beautiful enough to earn him a decoration six months hence, and no obligations whatsoever. They had paid him 200,000 francs for his name on behalf of a fetus the mother did not even wish to see. Already the Charonne properties had become the object of his fondest dreams, but for the time being he devoted all his attention to a speculative venture that was to become the basis of his fortune.

Despite the high position of his wife’s family, he did not immediately resign his position as surveyor of roads. He spoke of work to be finished and jobs to be done. In reality, he wanted to remain until the end on the battlefield where he was about to strike his first blow. As in a game of cards, it would be easier to cheat if he played at home with his own deck.

The clerk’s plan was simple and pragmatic. Now that he had more money than he had ever dreamed of with which to launch his operations, he was ready to think big. He knew Paris like the back of his hand. He knew that the shower of gold already beating down on the city’s walls would only intensify with each passing day. Clever people had only to open their pockets. He had joined the ranks of the clever by reading the future in the offices of city hall. In the course of his duties he had learned how much could be stolen in the purchase and sale of buildings and land. He was well versed in the usual ways of fraud: he knew how to sell for a million francs what had been bought for 500,000; he knew how to pay for the right to pick the locks of the state treasury, while the state shut its eyes and smiled; he knew how to juggle six-story buildings when a boulevard was cut through the heart of an old neighborhood while the dupes looked on and applauded. And in a time still beset by turmoil, before the canker of speculation had progressed beyond the incubation stage, what made him a gambler to be feared was that he saw more deeply than his own superiors into the future of granite and plaster that lay in store for the capital. He had dug up so much, collected such quantities of intelligence, that he could have told you what the city’s new quarters would look like in 1870. In the street sometimes, he looked at certain houses in a peculiar way, as if they were acquaintances whose fate, known to him alone, touched him deeply.

Two months before Angèle’s death, he had taken her one Sunday to the Buttes Montmartre.¹⁶ The poor woman loved to eat out in restaurants. She was happy when, at the end of a long walk, he led her to a table in some suburban cabaret. On that day they dined at the top of the hill, in a restaurant with a view of Paris, with windows that looked out over an ocean of blue-tinted roofs that filled the vast horizon with its surging swell. Their table stood in front of one of those windows. The sight of the roofs of Paris put Saccard in a good mood. He ordered a bottle of Burgundy to go with dessert. He smiled absentmindedly and was more attentive to his wife than usual. But his eyes, like a lover’s, kept being drawn back to the living, seething sea of rooftops and the deep rumble of the crowd beneath. It was autumn. The city, languishing under pale skies, was a soft and tender gray, pierced here and there by somber patches of green reminiscent of the broad leaves of water lilies floating on the surface of a lake. The sun was setting in a cloud of red, and as a light haze filled the background, a golden dust or dew fell on the city’s right bank over toward the Madeleine ¹⁷ and the Tuileries. It was like an enchanted spot in one of the cities of A Thousand and One Nights,¹⁸ with emerald trees, sapphire roofs, and ruby weathervanes. At one point a ray of sunlight slipped its way between two clouds and cast such a glorious light on the houses below that they seemed to flare up and melt like a bar of gold in a crucible.

“Oh, look!” Saccard exclaimed with a child’s laugh. “Twenty-franc gold pieces are raining down on Paris!”

Angèle, too, began to laugh, remarking that those particular gold pieces were not easy to pick up. But her husband had stood up and gone over to the window, where he leaned against the sill. “That’s the Vendôme column, isn’t it, gleaming down there? . . . And over there, farther to the right, that’s the Madeleine. . . . A beautiful neighborhood, where there’s plenty of work to be done. . . . Yes, this time, it’s all going to burn! Do you see? . . . It’s as if the neighborhood were being boiled down in some chemist’s retort.”

His voice turned grave and tremulous. The comparison he had hit upon seemed to make a great impression on him. He had drunk the Burgundy, and he forgot himself. Stretching out his arms to show Paris to Angèle, who was now also leaning against the windowsill by his side, he went on. “Yes, yes, as I was saying, more than one neighborhood is about to be melted down, and gold will stick to the fingers of everybody who stokes the furnace and stirs the boiling pot. Paris is so big and simpleminded! Look how huge the city is and how calmly it lies sleeping! These big cities are so stupid! This one has no idea that one fine day it will be set upon by an army of pickaxes. Some of those mansions on the rue d’Anjou wouldn’t gleam quite so brightly in the sunset if they knew that they had only three or four more years to live.”

Angèle thought her husband was joking. He had a taste at times for elaborate, nettlesome tomfoolery. She laughed, but with a vague disquiet, at the sight of this little man standing over the giant asleep at his feet and shaking his fist at it while pressing his lips together with an ironic twist.

“They’ve already begun,” he went on. “But it’s nothing to speak of yet. Look over there, toward Les Halles.¹⁹ They’ve cut Paris into four.”

With that, extending his open hand and wielding it like the sharp edge of a cutlass, he made as if to slice the city into four parts.

“You mean the rue de Rivoli and the new boulevard they’re putting through?” his wife asked.

“Yes, the ‘Great Crossing’ of Paris, as they’re calling it. They’re clearing out the area around the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville. But that’s mere child’s play! Just enough to whet the public’s appetite. . . . When the first network of new streets is finished, the big dance will begin. The second network will cut through the city in all directions to link the suburbs to the first network. The buildings that need to be cleared away will collapse in clouds of plaster. . . . Look, follow my hand. From the boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, one cut; then, over this way, from the Madeleine to the Monceau plain, another cut; and a third cut in this direction, a fourth in that direction, a cut here, another farther out. Cuts everywhere. Paris slashed to pieces with a saber, its veins laid open to provide nourishment for a hundred thousand excavators and masons, and in the end you’ll have a city crisscrossed by fine strategic highways that will put fortresses right in the heart of the old neighborhoods.”

Night was coming on. Saccard’s wizened, muscular hand continued slashing away at the void. Angèle trembled slightly at the sight of this living blade, these iron fingers pitilessly hacking at the endless expanse of dark rooftops. The haze on the horizon had just begun to roll in from the heights, and in her imagination she heard distant cracking sounds from the darkening vales below, as if her husband’s hand really were making the cuts he was describing, slicing Paris up from one end to the other, smashing beams, crushing masonry, and leaving behind long and hideous wounds where walls had collapsed. The smallness of the hand so implacably attacking its giant prey was ultimately frightening to behold, and as it effortlessly ripped the entrails of the enormous city to shreds, it seemed to take on a peculiar glint of steel in the twilight tinged with blue.

“There will be a third network,” Saccard continued after an interval of silence, as if talking to himself. “That one is still too far in the future. I can’t envision it very clearly. I’ve picked up few clues to where it will go. But it will be sheer madness, millions changing hands at a breakneck pace, Paris drunk and reeling!”

He lapsed again into silence, his eyes fixed ardently on the city, which darkness gathered in its folds. He must have been pondering that future so remote that even he could not yet grasp it. Then night fell, and the city dissolved into a blur and seemed to breathe heavily, like the sea when nothing can be seen but the pale crests of the waves. Here and there, the whiteness of a wall still stood out, and one by one the yellow flames of the gaslights pierced the shadows, like stars making their appearance in the blackness of a stormy night.

Angèle put aside her discomfort and returned to the joke her husband had made at dessert. “Well, then,” she said with a smile, “there’s been quite a shower of those twenty-franc pieces! The people of Paris are counting them now. Look at those nice piles they’re lining up down there!”

She pointed to the streets descending the Buttes Montmartre, whose gaslights seemed to form two golden rows. “And over there,” she shouted, pointing at a cluster of stars, “that has to be the Caisse Générale.”

This allusion to the state treasury made Saccard laugh. He and Angèle remained at the window a few moments longer, delighted by the shower of gold that eventually engulfed the entire city. On the way down from the heights of Montmartre the clerk had second thoughts about having talked so much. He blamed the wine and begged his wife not to repeat the “foolish things” he had said. He wanted, he said, to be taken for a sober head.

Saccard had long studied these three networks of streets and boulevards, the plan for which he had been careless enough to describe in reasonably accurate terms to Angèle. When she died, he was by no means upset to know that she took with her to the grave all memory of his loose talk from that day on the Buttes Montmartre. There, in the slashes he had made with his hand in the heart of Paris, lay the seeds of his fortune, and he had no intention of sharing his idea with anyone, knowing full well that when the day came to divide the spoils, there would be plenty of crows circling the gutted city. His initial plan had been to acquire, at a good price, a building he knew to be slated for imminent demolition and then to make a killing on the indemnity. He might have gone ahead and taken his chances without a cent to his name, buying the building on credit and pocketing the difference when the price went up as in buying shares of stock on margin, but then the 200,000-franc bonus from his marriage encouraged him to think big. His calculations were now complete: he would use a front to purchase his wife’s house on the rue de la Pépinière, leaving his name out of the transaction entirely, and triple his investment thanks to the knowledge he had acquired in the corridors of the Hôtel de Ville and through his connections with certain influential individuals. The reason he had been startled when Aunt Elisabeth mentioned the location of the house was that it happened to be situated right in the middle of a proposed new thoroughfare, knowledge of which was still confined to the offices of the Prefect of the Seine.²⁰ The boulevard Malesherbes was to sweep away everything in its path. This was an old project of Napoleon I, which there was now talk of reviving in order “to allow a normal traffic flow to and from neighborhoods cut off by the maze of narrow streets on the slopes of the Paris perimeter,” to use the earnest official phraseology. That phraseology of course avowed nothing of the interest the Empire had in opening the spigots of cash or in the vast projects of excavation and filling that would capture the imagination of the working class. Saccard had once taken the liberty of examining the famous map of Paris in the prefect’s office on which “an august hand” had traced in red ink the main roads of the second network. Those bloody strokes of the pen had cut into Paris even more deeply than the hand of our surveyor of roads. The boulevard Malesherbes, which would require the demolition of any number of superb mansions on the rue d’Anjou and the rue de la Ville-l’Evêque as well as the construction of substantial embankments, was one of the first slated to be put through. When Saccard went to inspect the building on the rue de la Pépinière, he thought back on that autumn night, on that dinner he had eaten with Angèle on the Buttes Montmartre, during which showers of gold louis had rained on the neighborhood around the Madeleine at sunset. He smiled. The shining cloud had just burst over his head, above his courtyard, and he was soon to start scooping up those golden coins.

While Renée, luxuriously installed in the apartment on the rue de Rivoli, right in the middle of the new Paris of which she was soon to become one of the queens, pondered her future wardrobe and tried her hand at the life of the socialite, her husband devoted himself to his first important business transaction. His first move was to buy from his wife the house on the rue de la Pépinière, using a certain Larsonneau as an intermediary. Larsonneau was someone he had come to know while prying into the secrets of city hall but who had been foolish enough to get caught going through the prefect’s files. He had then set himself up as a real estate agent in an office off a dank and dismal courtyard at the lower end of the rue Saint-Jacques. This was a cruel blow to Larsonneau’s pride, as well as to his greed. He found himself in the same position Saccard had been in prior to his marriage. He, too, claimed to have invented a “money machine,” only he lacked the initial funds needed to capitalize on his invention. Saccard quickly came to a tacit understanding with his former colleague, who did his job so well that he managed to purchase the house for 150,000 francs. After only a few months, Renée was already badly in need of cash. Her husband intervened solely to authorize his wife to sell. When the deal was done, she asked him to invest the proceeds on her behalf and entrusted 100,000 francs of the money to him, no doubt hoping to win him over with this show of confidence and encourage him to overlook the 50,000 francs she kept for pocket money. He smiled knowingly. In his calculations he had already taken into account the fact that she would be shoveling money out the window. The 50,000 francs that would soon vanish in lace and jewels would come back to him with a hundred percent profit. He was so pleased with this first transaction that he carried honesty to the point of actually investing the 100,000 francs that Renée had given him in bonds, which he then turned over to his wife. Since she could not sell them, he was certain of being able to recover his nest egg should the need arise.

“My dear,” he said gallantly, “these will do for your rags.”

Once he was in possession of the house, he was shrewd enough to resell it twice to fronts, raising the price each time. The final buyer paid no less than 300,000 francs for the property. Meanwhile, Larsonneau, who acted as sole representative of the successive owners, harassed the tenants. He was merciless, refusing to renew their leases unless they agreed to substantial rent increases. The tenants, having gotten wind of the impending confiscation of the property, were desperate. In the end they agreed to accept the rent hike, especially after Larsonneau made the conciliatory gesture of announcing that the increase would exist only on paper for the first five years and no additional sums would actually be collected. The few tenants who refused to back down were replaced by shills to whom free housing was offered in exchange for signing any document placed in front of them. This yielded two benefits: the nominal rents went up, and the indemnity to be paid to the tenant for his lease would go to Saccard. Mme Sidonie wanted to help her brother out by setting up a piano shop in one of the ground-floor boutiques. At this point Saccard and Larsonneau got a bit carried away: they concocted fake books for the business and forged signatures to make it appear as though the shop was doing a huge volume of sales. They spent several nights together scribbling away. As a result of all these efforts, the building tripled in value. Thanks to the final contract of sale, the rent increases, the sham tenants, and Mme Sidonie’s shop, it was possible to propose an estimated value of 500,000 francs to the commission on indemnities.

Confiscation by eminent domain—the powerful machine that bulldozed its way through Paris for fifteen years, leaving wealth and ruin in its wake—could not be simpler in its operation. As soon as the decision to build a new street is made, surveyors map out the affected parcels of land and estimate the value of the properties. In the case of rental properties, they make inquiries to determine the income stream from rentals in order to calculate an approximate value of the building as a capital investment. The indemnity commission, made up of members of the municipal council, then makes an offer that is always less than this calculated figure, knowing that the owners will ask for more and that the eventual price will be reached through compromise. If agreement cannot be reached, the case goes to a jury, which has the final say in arbitrating between the city’s offer and the price asked by the landlord or lessee facing expropriation.

Saccard, who had decided to remain in his job at city hall until after the crucial decisions were taken, had briefly entertained the impudent idea of having himself named as estimator on the boulevard Malesherbes project, which would have allowed him to set the value of his own house. But he was afraid that in doing so he would inhibit his ability to exert influence on the members of the indemnity commission. So he had one of his colleagues appointed instead, a pleasant, amiable young man named Michelin, whose strikingly beautiful wife often appeared in person to present her husband’s excuses to his superiors when he stayed away from work. He stayed away frequently. Saccard had observed that the lovely Mme Michelin, who had such a discreet way of slipping into offices when doors were left ajar, could work wonders. Michelin came away from each of his illnesses with a promotion; he made his way in life by taking to his bed. During one of his absences, when he was sending his wife to the office nearly every morning with news of his condition, Saccard twice ran into him on the outer boulevards smoking his cigar with his usual expression of bemused delight. These encounters left Saccard with sympathy for both this fine young man and this happy couple, which had demonstrated such ingenuity and pragmatism in its dealings with the bureaucracy. Indeed, he admired any skillfully operated money machine. After securing the appointment for Michelin, he went to see the young man’s charming wife, insisted on introducing her to Renée, and spoke in her presence of his brother the deputy and illustrious speechmaker. Mme Michelin got the point. From that day on, her husband reserved his most significant smiles for his colleague. Saccard, who did not want to take the worthy youth into his confidence, simply turned up as if by chance on the day the building on the rue de la Pépinière was to be inspected. He offered his assistance. Michelin, who was stupider and more empty-headed than one might imagine, followed the instructions given him by his wife, who had recommended that he do everything possible to please M. Saccard. In any case, he suspected nothing. He thought that the clerk wanted him to hurry through his work so that they could go off together to a café. The leases, the rental receipts, and Mme Sidonie’s amazing books passed through his colleague’s hands while Saccard looked on, and there was not even time to verify the figures, which Saccard himself read out loud. Larsonneau, who was also present, treated his accomplice as a stranger.

“Go ahead, put it down as 500,000 francs,” Saccard said in the end. “The house is worth more. . . . Hurry up, I think there’s going to be a change in personnel at city hall, and I want to discuss it with you so that you can pass it on to your wife.”

That sealed the deal. Saccard was still anxious, though. He was afraid that the 500,000-franc figure might strike the indemnity commission as somewhat inflated for a house well-known to be worth 200,000 at best. The remarkable rise in real estate values had yet to take place. An investigation would have subjected him to a risk of serious unpleasantness. He remembered what his brother had said to him: “No unseemly scandals, or I’ll get rid of you.” And he knew Eugène to be the kind of man to carry out such a threat. The honorable members of the commission would need to have the wool pulled over their eyes, and their goodwill would have to be secured. He looked to two influential men whose friendship he had won by the way he greeted them in hallways when they met. The thirty-six members of the municipal council were handpicked by the Emperor himself, on the prefect’s recommendation, from among the senators, deputies, lawyers, doctors, and leading industrialists who knelt most devoutly before the majesty of the government. Of all of them, however, two had earned the favor of the Tuileries by their zealousness: Baron Gouraud and M. Toutin-Laroche.

All of Baron Gouraud is summed up in this brief biography: made a baron by Napoleon I for supplying the Grand Army with spoiled rations, he was a peer under Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe²¹ in succession and became a senator under Napoleon III. He was a worshiper of the throne, of four gilt boards covered with velvet; the man who happened to sit on it mattered little to him. With his enormous belly, bovine face, and elephantine gait, he proved to be a charming rogue. He sold himself in the most majestic manner and committed the most dishonorable acts in the name of duty and conscience. His vices were even more astonishing. There were rumors about him that could only be whispered. Despite his seventy-eight years, monstrous debauchery was his element. On two occasions his filthy escapades had had to be hushed up in order to keep his sumptuous senatorial robes from being dragged through the criminal courts.

M. Toutin-Laroche, a tall, thin man known for having invented a mixture of suet and stearin used in the manufacture of candles, dreamed of becoming a senator. He stuck to Baron Gouraud like a leech, rubbing up against him with the idea that this would somehow bring him luck. At bottom he was a very pragmatic man, and had he found a senate seat for sale he would have haggled ferociously over the price. The Empire was about to make a celebrity of this greedy nonentity, this narrow-minded entrepreneur with a genius for shady industrial deals. He was the first to sell his name to a dubious company, one of those corporations that sprang up like poisonous mushrooms on the dung heap of imperial speculation. Some time ago a poster could be seen glued to the walls of Paris and bearing the following words in big black letters: SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE DES PORTS DU MAROC. It featured the name of M. Toutin-Laroche together with his title as municipal councilor at the head of a list of members of the board of directors, each more obscure than the next so far as the general public was concerned. This technique, much abused since, worked wonders. People rushed to buy stock in the company, even though a great deal remained unclear about what was to be done with the “ports of Morocco,” and the good people who invested their money could not themselves explain what project it was to be used for. The poster offered a superb description of commercial stations to be established along the Mediterranean coast. For two years previously, certain newspapers had been singing the praises of this ambitious venture, which every three months they reported to be prospering as never before. At the municipal council, M. Toutin-Laroche enjoyed a reputation as a top-flight administrator. He was one of the big thinkers of the group, and the harsh tyranny he exercised over his colleagues was rivaled only by the abject devotion he showed to the prefect. He was already at work setting up a major financial venture to be called the Crédit Viticole, which proposed to lend money to wine growers, and he spoke of this in such a halting, grave manner that all the imbeciles around him burned to invest in it.

Saccard won the protection of these two personages by doing them favors, the importance of which he shrewdly pretended not to notice. He introduced his sister to the baron, who was mixed up at the time in a most unsavory affair. He took her to the baron’s house on the pretext of soliciting his support for Mme Sidonie’s long-standing effort to obtain a contract to supply the Tuileries with draperies. After they spent some time alone together, however, it turned out that it was she who promised the baron to negotiate with certain individuals ill-mannered enough not to be honored by the friendship that a senator had deigned to show their daughter, a little girl of ten. Saccard himself took the initiative with M. Toutin-Laroche. He contrived a meeting in a corridor and turned the conversation to the much-discussed Crédit Viticole. Before five minutes had passed, the great administrator, alarmed and dumbfounded by the astonishing things he was hearing, took the clerk familiarly by the arm and kept him standing in the hallway for the next hour. Saccard whispered in his ears details of the most wonderfully ingenious financial schemes. On taking his leave, M. Toutin-Laroche squeezed the clerk’s hand in a most meaningful way and gave him a conspiratorial wink.