Текст книги "The Kill"

Автор книги: Émile Zola

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“You’ll be in on it,” he mumbled. “You’ve got to be in on it.”

Saccard was at his best throughout these maneuvers. He was prudent enough not to make Baron Gouraud and M. Toutin-Laroche each other’s accomplices. He visited them separately and whispered in each man’s ear a word in favor of one of his friends whose property on the rue de la Pépinière was about to be taken by eminent domain. He was careful to tell each of his two cronies that he would not breathe a word about this business to any other member of the commission, that it was all still up in the air, and that he was counting most especially on the help of whichever one he was speaking to.

The clerk was right to be wary and take precautions. When the dossier on his building came before the indemnity commission, it turned out that one of the members lived on the rue d’Astorg and knew the house. This man objected to the figure of 500,000 francs, which he said ought to be reduced by more than half. Aristide had been impudent enough to ask for 700,000. That day, M. Toutin-Laroche, who was normally extremely unpleasant to his colleagues, was in an even fouler mood than usual. He became incensed and took up the defense of property owners.

“We all own property, gentlemen. The emperor is out to do great things. Let’s not haggle over trifles. . . . This house ought to be worth 500,000 francs. The figure was set by one of our own people, an employee of city hall. . . . You’d think we were living in a den of thieves. Keep this up and we’ll end up being suspicious of one another.”

Baron Gouraud, sunk deep in his chair, glanced with surprise out of the corner of his eye at M. Toutin-Laroche fulminating on behalf of the owner of the rue de la Pépinière property. A suspicion crossed his mind. But since Toutin-Laroche’s vehement diatribe made it unnecessary for him to speak out, he simply nodded vigorously to signal his approval. Disgusted, the member from the rue d’Astorg dug in his heels and refused to give in to the two tyrants of the commission on a matter about which he was more competent than they. At that point, M. Toutin-Laroche, having noted the baron’s gesture of approval, grabbed the dossier and curtly said, “Very well, then. We’ll dispel your doubts. . . . If you’ll allow me, I’ll look into the matter, and Baron Gouraud will join me.”

“Yes, of course,” the baron added gravely. “Our decisions must be beyond reproach.”

The file had already vanished into M. Toutin-Laroche’s ample pockets. The commission was obliged to go along. On the way out, the two accomplices met on the quay and looked at each other without cracking a smile. They sensed that they were in this together, which only added to their poise. Men of commoner stamp would have insisted on explaining themselves, but these two continued to argue the case for property owners, as if the others could still hear them, and to deplore the distrustful attitude that was becoming so ubiquitous.

As they were about to part, the baron paused for a moment and smiled. “Oh, I almost forgot, but I’ll be leaving shortly for the country. Would you be kind enough, my dear colleague, to conduct this little inquiry without me? . . . And whatever you do, please don’t give away my secret: those fellows are always complaining that I take too many vacations.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” Toutin-Laroche replied. “I shall go at once to the rue de la Pépinière.”

He quietly returned home, feeling a twinge of admiration for the baron, who had such clever ways of extricating himself from ticklish situations. He kept the file in his pocket and at the next meeting of the commission announced peremptorily on behalf of the baron and himself that given the asking price of 700,000 francs and the proposed offer of 500,000, it would be necessary to compromise by granting an indemnity of 600,000. Not a murmur of opposition was heard. The member from the rue d’Astorg, having thought better of his objection, no doubt, allowed good-naturedly that he had been mistaken. He had thought that it was the building next door that was being discussed.

That was how Aristide Saccard won his first victory. He quadrupled his investment and gained two accomplices. Only one thing worried him. When he went to destroy Mme Sidonie’s fraudulent books, they were nowhere to be found. He rushed over to see Larsonneau, who told him bluntly that he had the books and planned to keep them. Saccard did not lose his temper. His only worry, he intimated, was for his dear friend, who was far more compromised than Saccard himself by these forgeries—almost all of which were in his friend’s hand—but he was reassured now that he knew the books to be in Larsonneau’s possession. Actually, he would gladly have strangled his “dear friend.” He remembered one highly compromising document, a bogus inventory that he had been stupid enough to draw up and that must still be in one of the ledgers. Larsonneau, richly rewarded for his services, opened a consulting office on the rue de Rivoli, which he furnished as luxuriously as any kept woman’s apartment. Saccard quit his job at city hall and, with a considerable quantity of capital now at his disposal, plunged into speculation with a vengeance, while Renée, excited and out of control, filled Paris with the clatter of her carriages, the sparkle of her diamonds, and the dizzying whirl of her swank and ostentatious existence.

Occasionally husband and wife, both feverish in their pursuit of money and pleasure, returned to the icy mists of the Ile Saint-Louis. When they did, they felt as though they were entering a ghost town.

The Béraud mansion, built around the beginning of the seventeenth century, was one of those dark, square, solemn buildings with high, narrow windows that are so common in the Marais and are often rented out to boarding schools, manufacturers of seltzer water, and distributors of wine and spirits. It was admirably preserved, however. Situated on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, it had only three upper stories, each fifteen to twenty feet high. The ground floor had lower ceilings, with windows protected by depressingly heavy iron bars set right into the somber thickness of the walls and an arched doorway almost as wide as it was tall, which was shut by double doors bearing a cast-iron knocker, painted dark green, and studded with huge nails that formed star and diamond patterns on both panels. It was the classic carriage entrance, flanked by off-kilter hitching posts circled by iron hoops. One could see that a gutter had once run through the center of the gate and that the ballast beneath the porch had been gently sloped to channel water into it from either side. M. Béraud had decided, however, to pave the entrance and block this gutter. This was the only sacrifice to modern architecture to which he ever agreed. The windows on the upper floors were enclosed by thin iron handrails through which the colossal casements, with their heavy brown sashes and small greenish panes, could be seen. Above, the line of the roof was broken by dormers, leaving the gutters to continue by themselves to funnel rainwater into the downspouts. The austere nakedness of the façade was further aggravated by the total absence of shutters and blinds, the pale and melancholy stones of this front wall being untouched by sunlight throughout the year. This façade, with its venerable air, its bourgeois severity, slumbered solemnly in this neighborhood of dignified repose and silent streets seldom disturbed by the clatter of carriages.

Inside the gate was a square courtyard surrounded by arcades, a scaled-down version of the place Royale,²² paved with enormous slabs of stone, which added the finishing touch needed to make this lifeless house look exactly like a cloister. Facing the porch, a fountain– a lion’s head half worn away so that only its gaping jaws remained– spouted a heavy, monotonous stream of water from an iron pipe into a trough green with moss and worn smooth along the edges. The water was icy cold. Grass pushed its way up between the stone slabs. During the summer a thin sliver of sunlight penetrated the courtyard, and this rare visitation of the sun’s rays had whitened one corner of the façade, on the south side, leaving the remaining three-quarters of the front wall gloomy and black and streaked with mold. Standing in the middle of this courtyard, as cool and quiet as the bottom of a well, in the glaring light of a winter day, one could easily believe that the new Paris, ablaze with fiery passions and reverberating with the din of millions, was a thousand miles away.

The apartments within the mansion exuded the same mournful calm and frigid formality as the courtyard. The stairwell leading up to them was broad and guarded with an iron rail, and within it every footstep, every cough, resounded as beneath the vault of a church. Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery. M. Béraud Du Châtel had chosen for himself an apartment in the gloomiest part of the house, on the second floor between the street and the courtyard. There he found himself in surroundings remarkable for their shadowy silence and conducive to meditation. When he pushed open the doors and made his slow, lugubrious way through the solemn apartments, he resembled one of the members of the old parlements whose portraits were affixed to the walls, a man lost in thought on his way home after debating and refusing to sign a royal edict.

But within this lifeless house, this cloister, there was a warm and vibrant nest, a pocket of sunshine and gaiety, a lovely lair of childish high spirits, fresh air, and bright light. To reach it one had to climb a host of small staircases, proceed along a dozen or so corridors, climb back down and then up again to complete a veritable journey ending at last in a vast chamber, a sort of belvedere on the rooftop in the back of the house above the Quai de Béthune. It enjoyed full southern exposure. The window was so wide that the sky, with all its radiance, all its fresh air, all its blue color seemed to enter in. Perched aloft like a dovecote, it contained long flower boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single piece of furniture. A simple mat had been laid down over the tile floor. This was the “children’s room.” Throughout the house this was the name by which the room was known and referred to. The house was so cold and the courtyard so damp that Aunt Elisabeth had been afraid that Christine and Renée might catch a chill from the walls. She had often scolded the active little girls, who liked to race through the arcades and dip their tiny arms into the frigid water of the fountain. Then it occurred to her to have the forgotten loft fixed up for them, this being for centuries the only spot in the house where the sun was allowed in to disport itself in solitude among the spider-webs. She had given them a mat, some birds, and flowers. The girls were delighted. During vacations, Renée lived up there, bathing in the warm yellow rays of the sun, which seemed pleased with the way its hideout had been fixed up and with the two blondes it had been sent. The chamber became a paradise, resounding with the songs of the birds and the babble of the little girls. Ownership had been ceded entirely to them. They called it “our room.” They were at home in it. They went so far as to lock themselves in to prove to themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the premises. What a happy place! A hecatomb of playthings lay strewn about the mat in the bright sunshine.

The best thing about the children’s room was the vast horizon. Looking out the other windows of the house one saw nothing but black walls a few feet away. But the children’s room offered a view of one end of the Seine, one whole side of Paris stretching from the Ile de la Cité ²³ to the Pont de Bercy, flat and vast and looking like some quaint Dutch town. Below, on the Quai de Béthune, stood a series of ramshackle wooden sheds, and the children often amused themselves by watching enormous rats scamper about the heaps of fallen beams and roofing, feeling a vague sense of dread whenever they saw one scale the high walls. Beyond these ruins, however, the magic began. The pier, with its rows of floating timbers and buttresses like those of some Gothic cathedral, and the delicate Pont de Constantine, swaying like lace beneath the feet of pedestrians, intersected at right angles and seemed to dam the enormous mass of the river and hold it in check. Opposite stood the trees of the Halle aux Vins,²⁴ and, farther on, the greenery of the Jardin des Plantes²⁵ stretching off toward the horizon. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, the Quai Henri IV and Quai de la Rapée were lined with low, uneven structures, rows of houses that looked from above like the little wood and cardboard houses the girls kept in boxes. In the distance, to the right, loomed the slate roof of La Salpêtrière,²⁶ a patch of blue above the trees. Then, in the middle, stretching all the way down to the Seine, the broad paved banks formed two long gray passageways smudged here and there by a row of barrels, a hitched-up wagon, or a boatload of wood or coal piled on the shore. But the soul of it all, the soul that filled the scene, was the Seine, the living river. It came from afar, from the vague and trembling edge of the horizon, from the land of dreams, and flowed in tranquil majesty straight to the children, swelling mightily on its way and finally spreading into a great sheet of water at their feet, at the extremity of the island. The two bridges that crossed it, the Pont de Bercy and the Pont d’Austerlitz, seemed like necessary barriers, responsible for holding the river back and preventing it from rising up to the children’s room. The girls loved the giant river. Their eyes could not get enough of its colossal flow, of the eternal rumbling flood that rolled forward as if pursuing them, and they could feel it divide below them and vanish to the right and to the left, into the unknown, with the docility of a tamed Titan. When the weather was fine, on mornings when the sky was blue, they took delight in the Seine’s beautiful finery. The river decked itself out in variegated gowns, taking on a thousand hues of infinite subtlety ranging from blue to green. It looked like silk patterned with tongues of white flame and trimmed with satin ruffles. And the boats that found shelter along its banks made a ribbon of black velvet along its edges. In the distance especially the fabric seemed lovely and precious, like the enchanted gauze of a fairy’s tunic. Beyond the hem of deep green satin formed by the shadows of the bridges were golden breastplates and rich folds that glowed like the sun. The immense sky looming over the water, the rows of low houses, and the greenery of the two parks seemed to grow deeper before one’s eyes.

At times, Renée, already nearly grown, weary of this limitless horizon, and bursting with curiosity acquired at school about matters of the flesh, would cast a glance in the direction of the swimming school at Petit’s floating bathhouse, moored to the tip of the island. Through the flapping linen hanging from lines that did duty for a roof, she hoped to catch a glimpse of men in bathing suits that revealed their naked torsos.

3

Maxime remained at school in Plassans until the holidays of 1854. He was then thirteen years and some months old and had just finished the seventh grade. It was at that point that his father decided to have him come to Paris. His idea was that a son of that age would set him up, would permanently establish him in the role he was playing of a wealthy widower now remarried, a man of serious disposition. When he announced his plan to Renée, whom he prided himself on treating in a most courtly manner, she replied casually: “Fine, send for the boy. . . . He’ll amuse us a little. Mornings are so deadly boring.”

The boy arrived a week later. He was already a tall, thin, mischievous youth with a girlish face, a delicate, insolent look, and soft blond hair. But good God, how oddly he was turned out! His hair cropped to the ears, so short that the whiteness of his scalp seemed barely covered by a faint shadow, he wore his pants too short and sported a teamster’s boots and a horribly threadbare tunic so big for his size that it made him look almost hunchbacked. In this getup, surprised by the new things that greeted his eyes, he looked around, not at all timidly but with the savage cunning of a precocious child, wary of revealing too much of himself right away.

A servant had fetched him from the station, and he was waiting in the main drawing room, delighted by the gold on the furniture and ceiling and deeply pleased with the luxurious surroundings in which he was now to live, when Renée, returning home from her tailor’s, swept in like a gust of wind. She tossed aside her hat and the white burnoose she had wrapped around her shoulders to protect her from the already-biting cold. To Maxime, struck dumb with admiration, she seemed splendid in her marvelous costume.

The child thought it must be a disguise. She had on a ravishing skirt of blue faille with big flounces, over which she had thrown a sort of French Guard’s jacket of soft gray silk. The flaps of the jacket, lined with blue satin darker than the blue of the skirt, were lifted up in a provocative manner and held in place by bows of ribbon. The cuffs of the flat sleeves and wide lapels stood out, lined with the same satin. And to add an ultimate zest to the ensemble, a daring dash of originality, two rows of large imitation sapphire buttons set in blue rosettes adorned the jacket front. It was ugly and adorable.

When Renée noticed Maxime, she was surprised to find him as tall as she. “That’s the little boy, I presume?” she inquired of the servant.

The child devoured her with his eyes. This lady, whose skin was so white, whose bosom could be glimpsed through the gap in her pleated blouse, this sudden and charming apparition with her high coiffure, her elegant gloved hands, and her small men’s boots with pointed heels that dug into the carpet, delighted him—she seemed the good fairy of this warm, gilded apartment. A smile began to form on his lips, and he was just gauche enough to retain a mischievous youthful grace.

“My, how funny he is!” Renée exclaimed. “But what a fright! Look at the way they’ve cut his hair! . . . Listen, my young friend, your father probably won’t be back before dinner, and I shall be obliged to move you in. . . . I’m your step-mama, monsieur. Would you like to kiss me?”

“I would,” came Maxime’s forthright answer. And with that he kissed the young woman on both cheeks, holding her by the shoulders in a way that rumpled her French Guard’s jacket a bit.

Laughing, she freed herself and said, “My God! That shaved head—what a riot!”

Then she turned back to him with a more serious expression. “We’ll be friends, won’t we? . . . I want to be a mother to you. I thought it all over while waiting for my tailor, who was otherwise occupied, and I said to myself that I ought to be very kind and bring you up quite properly. . . . It will be nice!”

Maxime went on staring at her as brazenly as a tart with his big blue eyes. Then, suddenly, he came out with a question: “How old are you?”

“Never ask such a thing!” she cried, putting her hands together. “The poor thing doesn’t know what he can and cannot say! I’ll have to teach him everything. . . . Fortunately, I’m still young enough to say how old I am. I’m twenty-one.”

“I’ll soon be fourteen. . . . You could be my sister.”

He did not finish his thought, but his eyes made it clear that he had expected his father’s second wife to be much older. He was standing quite close to her and staring at her neck so attentively that after a while she almost blushed. Yet she was too flighty to stick to one subject for long, and as she walked off she began talking about her tailor, forgetting that she was speaking to a child.

“I would have liked to be here to welcome you. But can you believe that Worms brought me this outfit this morning? . . . I tried it on and think it looks rather good. It’s quite chic, don’t you think?”

She had gone over to a mirror. Maxime walked around behind her so as to examine her from various angles.

“But when I put on the jacket, I noticed that there was a big crease right here on the left shoulder. Do you see it? . . . It’s very ugly. It makes me look as though one shoulder is higher than the other.”

He moved close to her, passed his finger over the crease as if to smooth it out, and then, naughty schoolboy that he was, allowed his hand to linger on the spot with a certain apparent comfort.

“Well,” she continued, “I simply couldn’t stand it. I ordered the carriage brought round and went to tell Worms what I thought of his inconceivable carelessness. . . . He promised me he’d fix it.”

She remained in front of the mirror, still contemplating her image and all of a sudden lost in reverie. After a while she placed a finger on her lips with an air of meditative impatience. Then, in a very low voice, as if talking to herself, she said, “Something is missing. . . . Something is definitely missing.”

Turning abruptly, she faced Maxime and asked, “Is it really all right? . . . Don’t you think something is missing, a trifle, a bow somewhere?”

The schoolboy, reassured by the young woman’s friendly manner, had regained all the poise of his impudent nature. He moved away, drew near, squinted, muttering all the while: “No, no, nothing is missing. It’s very pretty, very pretty. . . . If anything, there is a bit too much.”

He blushed a bit for all his audacity, drew still closer to Renée, and tracing an acute angle on her bosom with his fingertip said, “If it were up to me, I’d scoop out the lace like this and add a necklace with a big cross.”

She clapped her hands, beaming.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “That’s it! . . . A big cross was just what I had on the tip of my tongue.”

She opened up her blouse, vanished for two minutes, and returned with the necklace and cross. Then she stationed herself once more in front of the mirror, murmuring, “Oh, now it’s perfect, quite perfect! . . . So, my little boy with the shaved head is not stupid at all! Did you dress the women in your province? . . . Clearly we shall be good friends. But you must mind what I say. First of all, you must let your hair grow, and you must never wear that dreadful tunic again. And you will faithfully heed all my lessons in good manners. I want you to be a smart young man.”

“Of course,” the boy said naïvely, “since papa is rich now, and you’re his wife.”

She smiled, and with her usual audacity said, “Then let’s begin by addressing each other familiarly. I’ve been switching between tu and vous. It’s silly. . . . Do you promise to love me?”

“I shall love you with all my heart,” he answered with the effusive-ness of a lad addressing his sweetheart.

Such was the first conversation between Maxime and Renée. The boy did not return to school for a month. In their first days together, his stepmother played with him as she would have played with a doll. She knocked the rough edges of his provincial upbringing off him, and it must be said that he lent himself to her efforts with the utmost alacrity. When he appeared dressed from head to toe in spanking new clothes supplied by his father’s tailor, she gave a cry of joyful surprise. He was as “pretty as a picture,” as she put it. It took a desperately long time for his hair to grow out, however. Renée always said that the hair made the face. She took devoted care of her own. For quite some time the color of her hair drove her to despair—that soft yellow color reminiscent of the finest butter. But when blonde hair became fashionable, she was delighted, and in order to make people believe that she wasn’t just unconsciously following fashion, she swore that she dyed her hair every month.

For a boy of thirteen, Maxime was already terribly knowing. His was one of those frail and precocious natures in which the senses assert themselves early. He had vices before he had desires. On two occasions he nearly got himself expelled from school. Had Renée been attuned to provincial graces, she might have noticed that, as odd as his appearance was, the “little shaved skull,” as she called him, smiled, turned his head, and held out his arm in the dainty, effeminate manner of those schoolboys who beguile their classmates with their charms. He took great care with his hands, which were slender and long. Although his hair was cut short by order of the headmaster, a former colonel in the Engineers, he possessed a small mirror, which he used to take from his pocket during class and place between the pages of his book so that he could stare at himself for hours on end, examining his eyes and gums, making faces, and teaching himself to flirt. His classmates clutched at his school uniform as if it were a skirt, and he pulled his belt so tight that he had the thin waist and swaying hips of a grown woman. The truth was that he took beatings from his classmates as often as he received their caresses. The school in Plassans, like most provincial boarding schools a den of young bandits, thus proved a hotbed of corruption that developed Maxime’s neutered temperament in unusual ways, fostering the evil that had come down to him from some mysterious hereditary source. Fortunately, age was about to straighten him out. But the mark of his youthful surrenders, of the effeminization of his entire being during this period in which he had thought of himself as a girl, would remain with him and cripple his virility for good.

Renée called him “mademoiselle,” unaware that six months earlier her description would have been right on the mark. He struck her as very obedient and very loving, indeed so loving that she often felt embarrassed by his caresses. He had a way of kissing that made her skin feel warm. What delighted her, though, was his mischievous manner. He was as funny as could be, and bold, already grinning when he spoke of women and holding his own with Renée’s friends: dear Adeline, who had just married M. d’Espanet, and plump Suzanne, who had only recently married the big industrialist Haffner. At fourteen he formed a passionate attachment to the latter. He made a confidant of his stepmother, who was most amused.

“In your place I would have preferred Adeline,” she said. “She’s prettier.”

“Maybe,” the naughty boy replied, “but Suzanne is so much meatier. I love beautiful women. If you were nice, you’d speak to her for me.”

Renée laughed. Her doll—this tall boy with his girlish ways– seemed priceless now that he was in love. There came a point when Mme Haffner had to defend herself seriously. In any case, these three women encouraged the precocious child with their stifled laughs, their insinuations, and their flirtatious behavior. A very aristocratic touch of debauchery was part of it. All three led tumultuous lives and, having been burned by passion, they found the naughty child’s charming depravity diverting—a novel, unthreatening spice that reawakened their taste. They allowed him to touch their gowns and graze their shoulders with his fingers when he followed them into the vestibule to throw their evening wraps over them. They passed him from one to the other, laughing madly when he kissed their wrists on the veined side, where the skin is so soft. Then they turned maternal and instructed him at length in the art of being a fine gentleman and pleasing the ladies. He was their plaything, a little man of ingenious construction, who kissed, made love, and exhibited all the most charming vices of high society yet remained a toy, a little cardboard man of whom one did not have to be too afraid, just enough to tremble most pleasantly beneath his childish caresses.

When classes resumed, Maxime went to the Lycée Bonaparte. This was the school to which all the best families sent their children, the one that Saccard was bound to choose for his son. The boy, listless and frivolous though he was at that point, had a very lively intelligence, but the classics were the last thing to which he applied himself. He was nevertheless a decent student, who never joined the dunces in their low bohemian ways but remained among the proper, well-dressed young gentlemen who never drew adverse comment. All that remained of his younger years was a veritable fetish about good grooming. Paris opened his eyes and made a handsome young man of him; following the latest fashions, he wore his clothes tight. He was the Beau Brummel¹ of his class. He came to school turned out as if for a drawing room, elegantly shod, properly gloved, wearing fabulous ties and indescribable hats. There were twenty or so similar boys in his class, and they constituted an aristocracy, passing out Havana cigars after school from cases with gold clasps and having their books carried by liveried servants. Maxime had persuaded his father to buy him a tilbury² and a small black horse that made him the envy of his classmates. He drove this rig himself, while a footman sat in the rear with arms crossed and Maxime’s books on his lap in a briefcase of textured brown leather worthy of a government minister. You had to see him to appreciate how effortlessly, cleverly, and skillfully he managed the ten-minute drive from the rue de Rivoli to the rue du Havre, stopping his horse in front of the lycée and tossing the reins to the footman with the reminder, “Jacques, until four-thirty, all right?” The neighborhood shopkeepers took delight in the grace of this fair-haired boy whose comings and goings they witnessed daily. After school, he would sometimes drive a friend home and drop him at his door. The two youths would smoke, look at women, and spatter pedestrians with mud as if returning from the races. It was an astonishing little world, a breeding ground for the snobs and imbeciles who could be seen every day on the rue du Havre, nattily dressed in their dandyish jackets, playing at being blasé men of means, while the school’s bohemians, the real schoolboys, arrived shouting and pushing and pounding the pavement with their heavy boots while carrying their books slung over their backs at the end of a strap.