The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
addressed Saccard as “dear master.” At bottom he had a real admiration for this acrobat, and watched his performances on the tight-rope of speculation with the eye of a connoisseur. The idea of taking him in tickled him as a rare and pungent voluptuousness. He nursed a plan, as yet vague, not knowing how to make use of the weapon he possessed, lest he should do himself a damage with it. He felt beside that he was at his former colleague’s mercy. The ground and the buildings, which the cunningly-prepared inventories already estimated at closely two millions although not worth a quarter of that amount, must end by being swallowed up in a colossal smash, if the fairy of expropriation failed to touch them with her golden wand. According to the original plans which they had been able to consult, the new boulevard, opened to connect the artillery-park of Vincennes with the Prince-Eugène Barracks, and to bring the guns into the heart of Paris, while avoiding the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, cut off a part of the ground; but there still remained the danger that this would be only just grazed, and that the ingenious speculation might fall through by reason of its very shamelessness. In that case Larsonneau would be left stranded with a delicate adventure on his hands. Still, despite the inferior part he was compelled to play, this danger did not prevent him from feeling disgusted when he thought of the paltry ten per cent, which he was to pocket in this colossal robbery of millions. And at these moments he could not resist a furious longing to stretch out his hand and carve out a slice for himself.
Saccard had not even permitted him to lend money to his wife; he took pleasure himself in this crass piece of theatrical trickery, which delighted his weakness for complicated transactions.
“No, no, my dear fellow,” he said, with his Provençal accent, which he exaggerated whenever he wished to add zest to a joke, “don’t let us mix up our accounts…. You are the only man in Paris whom I have sworn never to owe any money to.”
Larsonneau contented himself with telling him that his wife was a sink. He advised him not to give her another sou, so that she might be compelled to make over the property to them at once. He would have preferred to have had business with Saccard alone. He tried him occasionally, and carried things so far as to say to him, with his languid and indifferent man-about-town manner:
“All the same, I shall have to put my papers in order a bit…. Your wife frightens me, old man. I don’t want to have certain documents at my office attached.”
Saccard was not the man to submit patiently to hints of this kind, especially as he was well acquainted with the cold and fastidious orderliness that prevailed in this individual’s office. All his active, cunning little being revolted against the terror with which this great coxcomb of a yellow-gloved usurer sought to inspire him. The worst was that he felt seized with shudders when he thought of the possibility of a scandal; and he saw himself remorselessly exiled by his brother and living in Belgium by some shabby little trade. One day he grew angry and went so far as to address Larsonneau in the second person singular.
“Look here, my boy,” he said, “you’re a decent chap, but it would be just as well if you gave up the document you know of. You’ll see that bit of paper will end by making us quarrel.”
The other feigned astonishment, pressed his “dear master’s” hands, and assured him of his devotion. Saccard regretted his momentary impatience. It was at this period that he began to think seriously of resuming relations with his wife; he might have need of her against his accomplice, and he, moreover, said to himself that business matters are wonderfully easy to talk over with one’s head on the pillow. That kiss on the neck tended little by little to reveal an entirely new policy.
However, he was in no hurry, he husbanded his resources. He devoted the whole winter to ripening his plan, bothered by a hundred affairs, one more involved than the other. It was a horrible winter for him, full of shocks, a prodigious campaign, during which he had daily to vanquish bankruptcy. Far from cutting down his domestic expenses, he gave entertainment upon entertainment. But if he successfully faced every obstacle, he was compelled to neglect Renée, whom he reserved for a triumphant stroke when the Charonne operation became ripe. He contented himself with preparing the catastrophe by continuing to give her no money except by the intermediary of Larsonneau. When he had a few thousand francs lying idle, and she complained of her poverty, he brought them to her, saying that Larsonneau’s people required a note of hand for twice the amount. This farce amused him enormously, the story of those promissory notes delighted him because of the air of romance they imparted to the affair. Even at the period of his clearest profits he had served out his wife’s income in a very irregular fashion, making her princely presents, throwing her handfuls of banknotes, and then for weeks leaving her in the lurch for a paltry amount. Now that he found himself seriously embarrassed, he spoke of the household expenses, he treated her as a creditor to whom one is unwilling to confess one’s ruin, gaining time by making excuses. She barely listened to him; she signed anything he asked; she only pitied herself for not being able to sign more.
Already, however, he held two hundred thousand francs’ worth of her promissory notes, which cost him barely one hundred and ten thousand francs. After having these notes endorsed by Larsonneau, in whose favour they were made out, he put them in circulation in a prudent manner, intending to employ them as decisive weapons later on. He would never have been able to hold out to the end of that terrible winter, lending money to his wife at usury and keeping up his household expenses, but for the sale of his building-plots on the Boulevard Malesherbes, which the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier bought of him for cash down, deducting, however, a formidable discount.
For Renée this same winter was a long joy. She suffered only from the want of ready money. Maxime proved a great expense; he still treated her as his stepmother, and allowed her to pay wherever they went. But this secret poverty was for her a delight the more. She taxed her ingenuity and racked her brains so that “her dear child” should want for nothing; and when she had persuaded her husband to find her a few thousand francs, she ran through them with her lover in costly frivolities like two schoolboys let out on their first escapade. When they had spent the last sou, they remained at home, they revelled in the great piece of masonry built with such new and such insolently meaningless luxury. The father was never there. The lovers sat by the fireside more often than formerly. The fact was that Renée had at last filled the icy emptiness of those gilded ceilings with a warm joy. The disorderly house of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she secretly practised a new religion. Maxime did not merely strike in her the shrill note that matched her extravagant costumes; he was the lover fashioned for this house, with its windows wide as shopwindows and its flow of sculpture from garret to base; he gave life to all this plaster, from the two chubby Cupids who in the courtyard let flow a sheet of water from their shell to the great naked women who supported the balconies and played with apples and ears of corn amid the pediments; he gave a meaning to the over-decorated hall, the circumscribed garden, the dazzling rooms in which one saw too many armchairs and no single work of art. Renée, who had bored herself to death in this house, began suddenly to take pleasure in it, using it as she might use a thing whose purpose she had not at first understood. And it was not only in her own rooms, in the buttercup drawingroom, and in the hothouse that she carried her love, but through the whole house. She even ended by finding pleasure in lying on the divan in the smoking-room; she lingered there, saying that the room had a vague and very agreeable smell of tobacco.
She had two days every week now instead of one. On Thursdays any called who pleased. But Mondays were reserved to bosom friends. Men were excluded. Maxime alone was admitted to these select gatherings, which took place in the small drawingroom. One evening she conceived the amazing idea of dressing him up as a woman and introducing him as her cousin. Adeline, Suzanne, Baronne Meinhold, and the other ladies present rose and bowed, astonished at this face, which they vaguely recognized. Then, when they understood, they laughed a great deal, they absolutely refused to let the young man go and undress. They kept him with them in his skirts, teasing him and permitting themselves equivocal pleasantries. When he had seen these ladies out by the front door, he went round the gardens and returned by the conservatory. Renée’s dear friends never had the slightest suspicion of the truth. The lovers could not be more familiar than they already were when they used to declare themselves boon companions. And if a servant happened to see them pressing rather close together, in the doorways, he felt no surprise, being accustomed to the frolicsomeness of madame