The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
the three hundred francs that remained last him a month. Angèle was a great eater; moreover she thought it necessary to trim her Sunday dress with a fresh set of mauve ribbons. That month of waiting seemed endless to Aristide. He was consumed with impatience. When he sat at his window and watched the gigantic labour of Paris seething beneath him, he was struck with an insane desire to hurl himself straightway into the furnace, in order with his fevered hands to mould the gold like soft wax. He inhaled the breath, vague as yet, that rose from the great city, that breath of the budding Empire, laden already with the odours of alcoves and financial hells, with the warm effluvia of sensuality. The faint fumes that reached him told him that he was on the right scent, that the game was scudding before him, that the great imperial hunt, the hunt after adventures, women, and millions, was at last about to commence. His nostrils quivered, his instinct, the instinct of a famished beast, dexterously seized upon the slightest indications of the division of spoil of which the city was to be the arena.
Twice he called on his brother, to urge him to greater activity. Eugène received him gruffly, told him again that he was not forgetting him, but that he must have patience. He at last received a letter asking him to call at the Rue Penthièvre. He went, his heart beating violently, as though he was on his way to an assignation. He found Eugène sitting before his everlasting little black table in the great bleak room which he used as a study. So soon as he saw him, the lawyer handed him a document, and said:
“There, I got your business settled yesterday. This is your appointment as an assistant surveying-clerk at the Hotel de Ville. Your salary will be two thousand four hundred francs.”
Aristide remained where he stood. He turned pale, and did not take the document, thinking that his brother was making fun of him. He had expected an appointment of at least six thousand francs. Eugène, suspecting what was passing in his mind, turned his chair round, and, folding his arms, exclaimed, with a show of anger:
“So you are a fool, then, are you?…. You indulge in dreams like a girl. You want to live in a handsome flat, to keep servants, to eat well, to sleep in silken sheets, to take your pleasure in the arms of the first woman that comes, in a boudoir furnished in a couple of hours…. You and your sort, if you had your way, would empty the coffers even before they were full. But, good God, why can’t you be patient? See how I live, and in order to pick up your fortune at least take the trouble to stoop.”
He spoke with a profound contempt for his brother’s schoolboy impatience. One could feel, through his rude speech, a higher ambition, a desire for unmitigated power; this candid craving for money must have seemed common to him, and puerile. He continued in a gentler voice, with a subtle smile:
“No doubt you have excellent propensities, and I have no wish to thwart them. Men like you are worth much to us. We fully intend to choose our best friends from among the hungriest. Set your mind at rest, we shall keep open table, and the most unbounded appetites shall be satisfied. It is, after all, the easiest way of governing…. But for Heaven’s sake wait till the cloth is laid; and, if you take my advice, you will go to the kitchen yourself and fetch your own knife and fork.”
Aristide still remained sullen. His brother’s metaphorical humour in no way raised his spirits. And Eugène once more gave vent to his anger.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “I was right in my first opinion: you are a fool…. Why, what did you expect, what did you imagine I was going to do with your illustrious person? You have not even had the spirit to finish your law studies; you bury yourself for ten years in a miserable clerkship in a sous-préfecture; and you come down upon me with the odious reputation of a Republican whom the Coup d’État alone was able to convert …. Do you think there is the making of a minister in you, with a record like that?…. Oh, I know you have in your favour your savage desire to succeed by any possible means. It is a great point, I admit, and it is that which I had in my mind when I got you this appointment in the Hotel de Ville.”
And rising, he thrust the nomination into Aristide’s hands, and continued:
“Take it, and some day you’ll thank me! I chose the place for you myself, and I know what you’ll be able to get out of it…. You have only to look about you and to keep your ears open. If you know your way about, you will understand, and act accordingly…. Now remember carefully what I am about to add. We are entering upon a period when fortune will be within the reach of anyone. Make as much money as you like: I give you leave; only no folly, no flagrant scandal, or I’ll exterminate you.”
This threat produced the effect which his promises had not been able to bring about. All Aristide’s ardour was rekindled at the thought of the fortune of which his brother spoke. It seemed to him that he was at last let loose in the fray, authorized to cut throats, provided he did so legally, and without causing too much commotion. Eugène gave him two hundred francs to keep him till the end of the month. Then he paused, reflecting.
“I am thinking of changing my name,” he said at last; “you should do the same…. We should be less in each other’s way.”
“As you like,” answered Aristide quietly.
“You need take no trouble in the matter, I will attend to the formalities…. Would you like to call yourself Sicardot, your wife’s name?”
Aristide raised his eyes to the ceiling, repeating the name and listening to the sound of the syllables:
“Sicardot…. Aristide Sicardot…. No, I wouldn’t; it’s clumsy and stinks of failure.”
“Think of something else then,” said Eugène.
“I would prefer Sicard simply,” resumed the other after a pause: “Aristide Sicard…. That’s not so bad, is it?…. a little frivolous, perhaps ….”
He thought a moment longer, and then, triumphantly:
“I have it, I’ve found it,” he cried …. “Saccard, Aristide Saccard!…. with two c’s …. Eh! there’s money in that name; it sounds as if you were counting five-franc pieces.”
Eugène’s was a savage type of humour. He dismissed his brother, and said to him with a smile:
“Yes, a name that ought to make either a felon or a millionaire of you.”
A few days later Aristide Saccard was installed at the Hotel de Ville. He learnt that his brother must have had great influence to get him admitted without the usual examinations.
And then the household entered upon the monotonous life of a small clerk. Aristide and his wife resumed their Plassans habits. Only they had fallen from a dream of sudden fortune, and their poverty-stricken existence seemed the heavier to them since they had come to look upon it as a time of probation whose length they were unable to determine. To be poor in Paris is to be doubly poor. Angèle accepted penury with the listlessness of a chlorotic woman; she spent her days in the kitchen, or else lolling on the floor playing with her daughter, never bewailing her lot till the last franc was reached. But Aristide quivered with rage in this poverty, in this narrow existence, in which he turned about like a caged beast. For him it was a period of unspeakable suffering; his pride was wounded to the quick, his unsatisfied cravings goaded him to madness. His brother succeeded in getting elected to the Corps Législatif by the arrondissement of Plassans, and he suffered all the more. He was too conscious of Eugène’s superiority to be foolishly jealous: he accused him of not doing as much as he might have done for him. Time after time he was driven by want to go to him and borrow money of him. Eugène lent him the money, but reproached him roughly for his lack of spirit and willingness. After that Aristide set his back up. He swore he would never ask anybody for a sou, and he kept his word. The last week of each month Aristide ate dry bread and sighed. This apprenticeship completed Saccard’s gruesome training. His lips became still more thin; he was no longer fool enough to dream of millions aloud; his emaciated person became dumb, and expressed but one desire, one fixed idea, that never left his mind. When he trotted from the Rue Saint-Jacques to the Hotel de Ville, his worn heels sounded sharply on the pavement, and he buttoned himself up in his threadbare frockcoat as in an asylum of hatred, while his weasel’s nose sniffed the air of the streets: a jagged symbol of the envious wretchedness that one sees