The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
of State among the wedding-presents.
Meanwhile the fortune of the Saccards seemed to be at its zenith. It blazed in the midst of Paris like a colossal bonfire. This was the moment when the eager division of the hounds’ fee filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of the pack, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, in the shamelessness of triumph, amid the sound of crumbling districts and of fortunes built up in six months. The town was become a sheer orgy of gold and women. Vice, coming from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread out over the ornamental waters, shot up in the fountains of the public gardens to fall down again upon the roofs in a fine, penetrating rain. And at nighttime, when one crossed the bridges, it seemed as though the Seine drew along with it, through the sleeping city, the refuse of the town, crumbs fallen from the tables, bows of lace left on couches, false hair forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices, all that the brutality of desire and the immediate satisfaction of an instinct fling into the street bruised and sullied. Then, amid the feverish sleep of Paris, and even better than during its breathless quest in broad daylight, one felt the unsettling of the brain, the golden and voluptuous nightmare of a city madly enamoured of its gold and its flesh. The violins sounded till midnight; then the windows became dark, and shadows descended upon the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last remnant of shame extinguished. There was nothing left in the depths of the darkness save a great rattle of furious and wearied love; while the Tuileries, at the waterside, stretched out their arms into the night, as though for a huge embrace.
Saccard had just built his mansion in the Parc Monceau, on a plot of ground stolen from the Municipality. He had reserved for himself, on the first floor, a magnificent study, in violet ebony and gold, with tall glass doors to the bookcases, full of business-papers, but without a book to be seen; the safe, embedded in the wall, yawned like an iron alcove, large enough to accommodate the amorous exploits of a milliard of money. Here his fortune bloomed and insolently displayed itself. Everything seemed to succeed with him. When he left the Rue de Rivoli, enlarging his household, doubling his expenses, he talked to his friends of considerable winnings. According to his account, his partnership with the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier brought him in enormous profits; his speculations in house-property came off still better; while the Crédit Viticole was an inexhaustible milch-cow. He had a way of enumerating his riches that bewildered his listeners and prevented them from seeing the truth. His Provençal snuffle grew more pronounced: with his short phrases and nervous gestures he let off fireworks in which millions shot up like rockets and ended by dazzling the most incredulous. This turbulent mimicry of the man of wealth was mainly responsible for the reputation he had achieved as a lucky speculator. To tell the truth, no one knew him to be possessed of a clear, solid capital. His various partners, who were necessarily acquainted with his position as regarded themselves, explained his colossal fortune by believing in his absolute luck in other speculations, those in which they had no share. He spent money madly; the flow from his cashbox continued, although the sources of that stream of gold had not yet been discovered. It was pure folly, a frenzy of money, handfuls of louis flung out of window, the safe emptied each evening to its last sou, filling again during the night, no one knew how, and never supplying such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.
In this fortune, which clamoured and overflowed like a winter torrent, Renée’s dowry was shaken, carried off and drowned. The young wife, who had been distrustful in the earlier days and desirous of managing her property herself, soon grew weary of business; and then she felt herself poor beside her husband and, crushed by debt, she was obliged to apply to him, to borrow money from him and place herself in his hands. At each fresh bill that he paid, with the smile of a man indulgent towards human foibles, she surrendered herself a little more, confiding dividend-warrants to him, authorizing him to sell this or that. When they went to live in the house in the Parc Monceau, already she found herself almost entirely stripped. He had taken the place of the State, and paid her the interest on the hundred thousand francs coming from the Rue de la Pépinière; on the other hand, he had made her sell the Sologne property in order to sink the proceeds in a great piece of business, a splendid investment, he said. She therefore had nothing left except the Charonne building-plots, which she obstinately refused to part with, so as not to sadden that excellent Aunt Elisabeth. And in that quarter again he was preparing a stroke of genius, with the help of his old accomplice, Larsonneau. For the rest, she remained his debtor; though he had taken her fortune, he paid her the income five or six times over. The interest of the hundred thousand francs, added to the revenue of the Sologne money, amounted to barely nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to pay her hosier and bootmaker. He gave her, or spent on her, fifteen or twenty times that paltry sum. He would have worked for a week to rob her of a hundred francs, and he kept her like a queen. And thus, like all the world, she respected her husband’s monumental safe, without trying to penetrate into the nothingness of that stream of gold flowing under her eyes, into which every morning she flung herself.
At the Parc Monceau it was a delirium, a lightning triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses; they had an army of servants whom they dressed in a dark-blue livery with drab breeches and yellow-and-black striped waistcoats, a rather severe scheme of colour which the financier had chosen so as to appear quite serious, one of his most cherished dreams. They emblazoned their luxury on the walls, and drew back the curtains when they gave big dinners. The whirlwind of contemporary life, which had set slamming the doors of the first-floor in the Rue de Rivoli, had become, in the mansion, a genuine hurricane which threatened to carry away the partitions. In the midst of these princely rooms, along the gilded balustrades, over the fine velvet carpets, in this fairy parvenu palace, there trailed the aroma of Mabille, there danced the jauntiness of the popular quadrilles, the whole period passed with its mad, stupid laugh, its eternal hunger and its eternal thirst. It was the disorderly house of fashionable pleasure, of the unblushing pleasure that widens the windows so that the passersby may enjoy the confidence of the alcoves. Husband and wife lived there freely, under their servants’ eyes. They divided the house into two, encamped there, not appearing as though at home, but rather as if they had been dropped, at the end of a tumultuous and bewildering journey, into some palatial hotel where they had merely taken the time to undo their trunks in order to hasten more speedily towards the delights of a fresh city. They slept there at night, only staying at home on the days of the great dinner-parties, carried away by a ceaseless rush across Paris, returning sometimes for an hour as one returns to a room at an inn between two excursions. Renée felt more restless, more nervous there; her silken skirts glided with adder-like hisses over the thick carpets, along the satin of the couches; she was irritated by the idiotic gilding that surrounded her, by the high, empty ceilings, where after fête-nights there lingered nothing but the laughter of young fools and the sententious maxims of old ruffians; and to fill this luxury, to dwell amid this radiancy, she longed for a supreme amusement which her curiosity in vain sought in all the corners of the house, in the little sun-coloured drawingroom, in the conservatory with its fat vegetation. As to Saccard, he was approaching the realization of his dream; he received the high financiers, M. Toutin-Laroche, M. de Lauwerens; he received also great politicians, the Baron Gouraud, Haffner the deputy; his brother the minister had even consented to come two or three times and consolidate his position by his presence. And yet, like his wife, he experienced nervous anxieties, a restlessness that lent to his laugh a strange sound of broken windowpanes. He became so giddy, so bewildered, that his acquaintances said of him: “That devil of a Saccard! he makes too much money, it will drive him mad!” In 1860 he had been decorated, in consequence of a mysterious service he had done the préfet, by lending his name to a lady for the sale of some land.
It was about the time of their installation in the Parc Monceau that an apparition crossed Renée’s life, leaving an ineffaceable impression. Up to then the minister had resisted the entreaties of his sister-in-law, who was dying of a longing to be invited to the court balls. He gave way at last, thinking his brother’s fortune to be definitely established. Renée did not sleep for a month. The great evening came, and she sat all trembling in the carriage that drove her to the Tuileries.
She wore a costume of prodigious grace and originality, a real gem, which she had hit upon one sleepless night, and which three of Worms’s workmen had come to her house to carry out under her eyes. It was a simple dress of white gauze, but