The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
abroad its plan of fortune and its dream of gratification.
In the early part of 1853, Aristide was appointed a surveying commissioner of roads. His salary was to be four thousand five hundred francs. This increase came in the nick of time: Angèle was in a decline, little Clotilde had lost all her colour. He kept on his scanty lodgings of two small rooms, the dining-room furnished in walnut and the bedroom in mahogany, and continued to lead a harsh existence, avoiding debt, not desiring to touch other people’s money until he was able to plunge his arms into it up to the elbows. He thus belied his instincts, scorning the few additional sous that came to him, remaining on the lookout. Angèle was perfectly happy. She bought herself some things and ate meat every day. She could no longer understand her husband’s suppressed anger, nor the reason why he wore the sombre expression of a man working out the solution of a formidable problem.
Aristide followed Eugène’s advice: he kept his ears and eyes open. When he went to thank his brother for his promotion, the latter observed the change that had taken place in him; he complimented him on what he called his sensible demeanour. The clerk, inwardly hardened by jealousy, had become supple and insinuating. A few months had sufficed to transform him into an admirable comedian. All his Southern ardour had been aroused; and he carried his cunning so far that his fellow-clerks at the Hotel de Ville looked upon him as an inoffensive fellow whom his near relationship to a deputy marked out beforehand for some fat appointment. This relationship secured for him the goodwill also of his superiors. He thus enjoyed a sort of authority above his position, which enabled him to open certain doors and to explore certain receptacles without any blame being attached to his indiscretions. For two years he was seen to roam about all the passages, linger in all the rooms, leave his seat twenty times a day to go and talk to a friend, or carry an instruction, or take a stroll through the offices, endless journeys that caused his colleagues to exclaim, “That devil of a Provençal! he can’t sit still: his legs are always on the move.” His personal friends took him for an idler, and our worthy laughed when they accused him of having but one thought, to despoil the services of a few minutes. He never made the mistake of listening at keyholes; but he had a way of boldly opening a door and walking across a room, with a document in his hand and a preoccupied air, with a step so slow and even that he did not lose a word of the conversation. This was a masterpiece of tactics; people ended by not interrupting themselves when this assiduous clerk passed by them, gliding through the shadows of the offices, and seemingly so wrapt up in his business. He had still one other method; he was extraordinarily obliging, he offered to help his fellow-clerks whenever they dropped into arrears with their work, and he would then study the registers and documents that passed through his hands with meditative fondness. But one of his favourite tricks was to strike up a friendship with the messengers. He went so far as to shake them by the hand. For hours together he would keep them talking between the doors, with little stifled bursts of laughter, telling them stories, drawing them out. The worthy men worshipped him, and said of him, “There’s a man who isn’t haughty.” He was the first to be told of any scandal that might occur. And thus it came about that at the end of two years the Hotel de Ville was an open book to him. He knew every member of the staff down to the least of the lamp-lighters, and every paper down to the laundress’s bills.
The Paris of that period offered a most fascinating study to a man like Aristide Saccard. The Empire had just been proclaimed, after the famous journey in the course of which the Prince-President had succeeded in stirring up the enthusiasm of a few Bonapartist departments. The platform and the press were silent. Society, saved once again, shook hands with itself, took its ease, lay abed of a morning, now that it had a strong government to protect it and relieve it from the trouble of thinking and looking after its interests. The great preoccupation of society was to know with what amusement to kill time. In Eugène Rougon’s happy phrase, Paris had sat down to dinner, and was contemplating bawdiness at dessert. Politics terrified it, like a dangerous drug. Men’s enervated minds turned towards pleasure and speculation. Those who had money brought it forth from its hiding-place, and those who had none sought for forgotten treasures in every nook and cranny. And underneath the turmoil there ran a subdued quiver, a nascent sound of five-franc pieces, of women’s rippling laughter, and the yet faint clatter of plate and murmur of kisses. In the midst of the great silence, the absolute peace of the new reign of order, arose every kind of attractive rumour, of golden and voluptuous promise. It was as if one were passing in front of one of those little houses whose closely-drawn curtains reveal nothing beyond the shadows of women, whence no sound issues but that of the gold on the marble chimney-pieces. The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy-house of Europe. The handful of adventurers who had succeeded in purloining a throne required a reign of adventures, of shady transactions, of sold consciences, of bought women, of rampant and universal drunkenness. And in the city where the blood of December was yet hardly washed away, there sprang up, timidly as yet, that mad desire for dissipation that was destined to drag down the country to the limbo of decayed and dishonoured nations.
From the very beginning Aristide Saccard felt the advent of this rising tide of speculation, whose spume was in the end to cover the whole of Paris. He watched its progress with profound attention. He found himself in the very midst of the hot rain of crown-pieces that fell thickly on to the city’s roofs. In his incessant wanderings across the Hotel de Ville, he had got wind of the vast project for the transformation of Paris, of the plan of those clearances, those new roads and improvised districts, that formidable piece of jobbery in the sale of real property, which gave rise in the four quarters of the town to the conflict of interests and the blaze of luxury unrestrained. From that time forward his activity had a purpose. It was at this period that he developed his geniality. He even fattened out a little, he ceased hurrying through the streets like an attenuated cat in search of its prey. At his office he was more chatty, more obliging than ever. His brother, whom he visited in a more or less official manner, complimented him on putting his advice so happily into practice. About the beginning of 1854 Saccard confided to him that he had several pieces of business in view, but that he would require a rather large advance.
“Look for it,” said Eugène.
“You are quite right, I will look for it,” he replied, with entire good humour, appearing not to perceive that his brother declined to supply him with the preliminary capital.
It was the thought of this capital that now worried him. His plan was formed, it matured day by day.
But the first few thousand francs were not to be found. His will became more and more tense; he looked at the people in the streets in a nervous and penetrating manner, as though he were seeking a lender in every wayfarer. At home Angèle continued to lead her subdued and contented existence. He awaited his opportunity; and his genial laughter became more bitter as this opportunity delayed in presenting itself.
Aristide had a sister in Paris. Sidonie Rougon had married at Plassans an attorney’s clerk, and together they had set up business in the Rue Saint-Honoré as dealers in fruit from the South of France. When her brother came across her, the husband had vanished, and the business had long ago disappeared. She was living in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, in a little entresol consisting of three rooms. She also leased the shop on the ground-floor beneath her flat, a narrow and mysterious establishment in which she pretended to carry on a business in lace; and there were, as a matter of fact, in the window some odds and ends of guipure and Valenciennes, hung over gilt rods; but the inside looked like a waiting-room, with a polished wainscotting and not the least sign of goods for sale. The door and window were veiled with light curtains, which sheltered the shop from the gaze of the passersby and completed its discreet and secluded appearance, as of the atrium to some unknown temple. It was a rare thing for a customer to be seen calling on Madame Sidonie; most frequently even the handle was removed from the door. She made it known in the neighbourhood that she waited personally upon wealthy women and offered them her lace. The convenience of the place, she used to say, was her sole reason for hiring the shop and the entresol, which communicated by means of a staircase hidden in the wall. As a matter of fact the lace-woman was always out of doors; she was seen hurrying in and out ten times in a single day. Moreover, she did not confine herself to the lace-trade; she made use of her entresol, filling it up with a stock of things picked up nobody knew where. She had there dealt in gutta-percha goods, waterproofs, goloshes, braces, and the rest; and then followed one after