The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
cent, or more, he could not have produced the least security or found the smallest solid particle of the original capital. As he half confessed, moreover, the five hundred thousand francs of the Sologne property had been used to pay a first installment on the house and the furniture, which together cost close upon two millions. He still owed a million to the upholsterer and the builders.
“I make no claim on you,” Renée said at last; “I know I am very much in your debt.”
“Oh, my dear,” he cried, taking his wife’s hand, without relinquishing the tongs, “what a horrid thing to say!… Listen, in two words, I have been unlucky on the Bourse, Toutin-Laroche has made a fool of himself, and Mignon and Charrier are a pair of crooks who have taken me in. And that is why I can’t pay your bill. You forgive me, don’t you?”
He seemed genuinely moved. He dug the tongs in among the logs, and made the sparks burst out like fireworks. Renée remembered how restless he had been for some time past. But she was unable to realize the astonishing truth. Saccard had reached the point of having to perform a daily miracle. He resided in a house that cost two millions, he lived on a princely footing, and there were mornings when he had not a thousand francs in his safe. His expenditure did not seem to diminish. He lived upon debt among a race of creditors who swallowed up from day to day the scandalous profits that he realized from certain transactions. In the meantime and at the same moment companies crumbled beneath his feet, new and deeper pits yawned before him, over which he had to leap, unable to fill them up. He thus trod over sapped ground, amid a chronic crisis, settling bills of fifty thousand francs and leaving his coachman’s wages unpaid, marching on with a more and more regal assurance, emptying over Paris with increasing frenzy his empty cashbox, from which continued to flow the golden stream with the fabulous source.
Speculation was passing through a bad period at that moment. Saccard was a worthy offspring of the Hotel de Ville. He had undergone the rapidity of transformation, the frenzy for enjoyment, the blindness to expense that was shaking Paris. He now again resembled the Municipality in finding himself face to face with a formidable deficit which it was necessary secretly to make good; for he would not hear speak of prudence, of economy, of a calm and respectable existence. He preferred to keep up the useless luxury and real penury of those new thoroughfares whence he had derived his colossal fortune, which came into being each morning to be swallowed up at night. Passing from adventure to adventure, he now only possessed the gilded façade of a missing capital. In this period of eager madness, Paris itself did not risk its future with greater rashness or march straighter towards every folly and every trick of finance. The winding-up threatened to be disastrous.
The most promising speculations turned out badly in Saccard’s hands. As he said, he had just written off considerable losses on the Bourse. M. Toutin-Laroche had almost caused the Crédit Viticole to founder through a gamble for a rise that had suddenly turned against him; fortunately the Government, intervening under the rose, had set the famous wine-growers’ mortgage loan-machine on its legs again. Saccard, badly shaken by this sudden blow, seriously upbraided by his brother for the danger that had threatened the delegation bonds of the Municipality, which was involved with the Crédit Viticole, was even still more unfortunate in his speculations in house-property. The Mignon and Charrier pair had broken with him entirely. If he accused them it was because he was secretly enraged at his mistake of having built on his share of the ground while they prudently sold theirs. While they were making their fortune, he was left behind with houses on his hands that he was often unable to dispose of save at a loss. Among others he sold a house in the Rue de Marignan, on which he still owed three hundred and eighty thousand francs, for three hundred thousand francs. He had certainly invented a trick of his own which consisted in asking ten thousand francs a year for an apartment worth eight thousand at most. The terrified tenant only signed a lease when the landlord had consented to forego the first two years’ rent. In this way the apartment was brought down to its real value, but the lease bore the figure of ten thousand francs a year, and when Saccard found a purchaser and capitalized the income from the house, the calculation became an absolute phantasmagoria. He was not able to practise this swindle on a large scale: his houses would not let; he had built them too early; the clearings in which they stood, lost in the mud of winter, isolated them, and considerably reduced their value. The affair that affected him the most was the coarse piece of trickery of the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, who bought back from him the house on the Boulevard Malesherbes, the building of which he had had to abandon. The contractors were at last smitten with the desire to inhabit “their boulevard.” As they had sold their share of the ground above its value, and suspected the embarrassment of their former partner, they offered to relieve him of the enclosure in the centre of which the house stood completed up to the flooring of the first story, whose iron girders were partly laid. Only they treated the solid freestone foundations as useless rubbish, saying that they would have preferred the ground bare, so as to build on it according to their taste. Saccard was obliged to sell, without taking into account the hundred and odd thousand francs he had already expended, and what exasperated him still further was that the contractors persistently refused to take back the ground at two hundred and fifty francs the metre, the figure fixed at the time of the division. They beat him down twenty-five francs a metre, like those secondhand clothes-women who give only four francs for a thing they have sold for five the day before. Two days later Saccard had the mortification of seeing an army of bricklayers invade the boarded enclosure and go on building upon the “useless rubbish.”
He was thus all the better able to play before his wife at being pressed for money, as his affairs were becoming more and more involved. He was not the man to confess from sheer love of truth.
“But, monsieur,” said Renée, with an air of doubtfulness, “if you are in difficulties for money, why have you bought me that aigrette and necklace which cost you, I believe, sixty-five thousand francs?… I have no use for those jewels, and I shall have to ask your permission to dispose of them so as to pay Worms something on account.”
“Take care not to do that!” he cried anxiously. “If you were not seen wearing those diamonds at the ministry ball tomorrow, people would invent stories about my position….”
He was in a genial mood that morning. He ended by smiling and murmuring with a wink:
“We speculators, my dear, are like pretty women, we have our little artifices…. Keep your aigrette and necklace, I beg, for love of me.”
He could not tell the story, a very pretty one but a little risky. It was after supper one night that Saccard and Laure d’Aurigny had entered into an alliance. Laure was over head and ears in debt, and her one thought was to find a good young man who would elope with her and take her to London. Saccard on his side felt the ground crumbling beneath his feet; his imagination, driven to bay, sought an expedient which would display him to the public sprawling on a bed of gold and banknotes. The courtesan and the speculator had come to an understanding amid the semi-intoxication of dessert. He hit upon the idea of that sale of diamonds which set all Paris agog; and there, with a deal of fuss, he bought jewels for his wife. Then with the product of the sale, about four hundred thousand francs, he managed to satisfy Laure’s creditors, to whom she owed nearly twice as much. It is even to be presumed that he recouped part of his sixty-five thousand francs. When he was seen settling the d’Aurigny affairs, he was looked upon as her lover, and believed to be paying her debts in full and committing extravagances for her. Every hand was stretched out to him, his credit revived formidably. And on the Bourse he was chaffed about his passion, with smiles and insinuations that entranced him. Meanwhile Laure d’Aurigny, brought into prominence by this hubbub, although he had never spent a single night with her, pretended to deceive him with nine or ten idiots enticed by the notion of stealing her from a man of such colossal wealth. In one month she had two sets of furniture and more diamonds than she had sold. Saccard had got into the way of going to smoke a cigar with her in the afternoon on leaving the Bourse; he often caught sight of coat-tails flying through the doorways in terror. When they were alone, they could not look at one another without laughing. He kissed her on the forehead as though she were a wayward wench whose roguery delighted him. He did not give her a sou, and on one occasion she even lent him money to pay a gambling debt.
Renée tried to insist, and spoke of at least pawning the diamonds; but her husband