The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
these were the mere first steps of art. There was no great cleverness wanted to run out leases, conspire with the tenants, and rob the State and individuals; nor did he think the game worth the candle. For which reason he soon made use of his genius for transactions of a more complicated character.
Saccard first invented the trick of making secret purchases of house-property on the city’s account. A decision of the Council of State had placed the Municipality in a difficult position. It had acquired by private contract a large number of houses, in the hope of running out the leases and turning the tenants out without compensation. But these purchases were pronounced to be genuine acts of expropriations, and the city had to pay. It was then that Saccard offered to lend his name to the city: he bought houses, ran out the leases, and for a consideration handed over the property at a fixed date. And he even ended by playing a double game: he acted as buyer both for the Municipality and for the préfet. Whenever the thing was irresistibly tempting, he stuck to the house himself. The State paid. In reward for his assistance he received building concessions for bits of streets, for open spaces, which he disposed of in his turn even before the new thoroughfare was commenced. It was a fierce gamble, the new streets were speculated in as one speculates in stocks and shares. Certain ladies were in the swim, handsome girls, intimately connected with some of the higher functionaries; one of them, whose white teeth are world-renowned, has nibbled up whole streets on more than one occasion. Saccard was insatiable, he felt his greed grow at the sight of the flood of gold that glided through his fingers. It seemed to him as though a sea of twenty-franc pieces extended about him, swelling from a lake to an ocean, filling the vast horizon with a sound of strange waves, a metallic music that tickled his heart; and he grew adventurous, plunging more boldly every day, diving and coming up again, now on his back, then on his belly, swimming through this immensity in fair weather and foul, and relying on his strength and skill to prevent him from ever sinking to the bottom.
Paris was at that time disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The days predicted by Saccard on the Buttes Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed with sabre-cuts, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He had belonging to him demolished houses in every quarter of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astounding story of the pit which was dug by a company in order to carry away five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in gigantic works, and which had afterwards to be filled up, on the failure of the company, by bringing the soil back from Saint-Ouen. Saccard came out of this with an easy conscience and full pockets, thanks to the friendly intervention of his brother Eugène. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont d’Alma. In the direction of Passy it was he who conceived the idea of scattering the refuse of the Trocadero over the high level, so that to this day the good soil is buried two metres below the surface, and the very weeds refuse to grow through the rubbish. He was to be found in twenty places at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a heap of rubbish that no one knew what to do with, a hollow that could not be filled up, a great mass of soil and plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but in which he rummaged with his nails, and invariably ended by finding some bonus or some speculation to his taste. On the same day he ran from the works at the Arc de Triomphe to those at the Boulevard Saint-Michel, from the clearings in the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments at Chaillot, dragging after him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and swindlers.
But his purest glory was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was the official director; he himself only figured as a member of the board. In this connection Eugène had done his brother another good turn. Thanks to him the Government authorized the company and watched over its career with great good nature. On one delicate occasion, when a malignant journal ventured to criticise one of the company’s operations, the Moniteur went so far as to publish a note forbidding any discussion of so honourable an undertaking, one which the State deigned to protect. The Crédit Viticole was based upon an excellent financial system: it lent the wine-growers half of the estimated value of their property, ensured the repayment of the loan by a mortgage, and received interest from the borrowers in addition to installments of the principal. Never was there mechanism more prudent or more worthy. Eugène had declared to his brother, with a knowing smile, that the Tuileries expected people to be honest. M. Toutin-Laroche interpreted this wish by allowing the wine-growers’ loan-office to work quietly, and founding by its side a banking-house which attracted capital and gambled feverishly, launching out into every sort of adventure. Thanks to the formidable impulse it received from its director, the Crédit Viticole soon achieved a well-established reputation for solidity and prosperity. At the outset, in order to offer at the Bourse in one job a mass of shares on which no dividend had yet been paid, and to give them the appearance of having been long in circulation, Saccard had the ingenuity to have them trodden on and beaten, a whole night long, by the bank-messengers, armed with birch-brooms. The place resembled a branch of the Bank of France. The house occupied by the offices, with its courtyard full of private carriages, its austere iron railings, its broad flight of steps and its monumental staircase, its suites of luxurious reception-rooms, its world of clerks and of liveried lackeys, seemed to be the grave, dignified temple of Mammon; and nothing filled the public with a more religious emotion than the sanctuary, the cashier’s office, which was approached by a corridor of hallowed bareness and contained the safe, the god, crouching, embedded in the wall, squat and somnolent, with its triple lock, its massive flanks, its air of a brute divinity.
Saccard carried through a big job with the Municipality. The latter was greatly in debt, was crushed by its debts, dragged into this dance of gold which it had led off to please the Emperor and to fill certain people’s pockets, and was now reduced to borrowing covertly, not caring to confess its violent fever, its stone-and-pickaxe madness. It had begun to issue what were called delegation bonds, really bills of exchange payable at a distant date, so that the contractors might be paid on the day the agreements were signed, and thus enabled to obtain money by discounting the bonds. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper at the contractors’ hands. One day when the Municipality was in want of money, Saccard went and tempted it. It received a considerable advance on an issue of delegation bonds, which M. Toutin-Laroche swore he held from contracting companies, and which he dragged through every gutter of speculation. From thenceforward the Crédit Viticole was safe from attack; it held Paris by the throat. The director now talked only with a smile of the famous Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco; and yet it still continued to exist, and the newspapers continued regularly to extol its great commercial stations. One day when M. Toutin-Laroche endeavoured to induce Saccard to take shares in this society, the latter laughed in his face, and asked him if he thought he was such a fool as to invest his money in the Société Générale of the Arabian Nights.
Up to that time Saccard had speculated successfully, with safe profits, cheating, selling himself, making money on deals, deriving some sort of gain from each of his operations. Soon, however, this gambling in differences ceased to suffice him; he disdained to glean and pick up the gold which men like Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud let drop behind them. He plunged his arms into the sack to the elbows. He went into partnership with Mignon, Charrier and Co., those famous contractors, who were then just starting and who were destined to make colossal fortunes. The Municipality had already decided no longer to carry out the works itself, but to have the boulevards laid out by contract. The tendering companies agreed to deliver a complete thoroughfare, with its trees planted, it benches and lampposts fixed, in return for a specified indemnity; sometimes even they delivered the thoroughfare for nothing, finding themselves amply remunerated by retaining the bordering building-ground, for which they asked a considerably enhanced price. Saccard through his connections obtained a concession to lay out three lots of boulevards. He was the ardent and somewhat blundering soul of the partnership. The Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, his creatures at the outset, were a pair of fat, cunning cronies, master-masons who knew the value of money. They laughed in their sleeves at Saccard’s horses and carriages; oftenest they kept on their blouses, always ready to shake hands with their workmen, and returning home covered with plaster. They came from Langres both of them. They brought into this burning and insatiable Paris their Champenois caution, their calm brains, not very open to impressions, not very intelligent, but exceedingly quick at profiting by opportunities