The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
said:
“Come, you’re a clever fellow…. I suppose you have come to ask me to be your witness. You may rely on me…. If necessary, I will bring the whole of the Right of the Corps Législatif to your wedding; that would launch you nicely….”
Then, as he had opened the door, he lowered his voice to add:
“I say…. I don’t want to compromise myself too much just now, we have a very tough bill to pass…. The lady is not very far gone, I hope?”
Saccard gave him such a savage look that Eugène said to himself, as he shut the door:
“That’s a joke that would cost me dear if I were not a Rougon.”
The marriage was solemnised in the Church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. Saccard and Renée did not meet till the eve of that great day. The introduction took place early in the evening, in a low reception-room at the Hotel Béraud. They examined each other curiously. Renée, since her marriage had been arranged, had regained her light-headedness, her madcap ways. She was a tall girl of exquisite and tempestuous beauty, that had grown up at random through her schoolgirl caprices. She thought Saccard small and ugly, but ugly in a restless and intelligent way that she did not dislike; and moreover, he was perfect in manner and deportment. As for him, he made a little grimace at the first sight of her; she doubtless struck him as too tall, taller than he was. They exchanged a few words, free from embarrassment. Had the father been present, he might readily have believed that they had long known each other, and that they had a common fault in their past lives. Aunt Elisabeth, who was present at the interview, blushed in their stead.
On the day after the wedding, which the presence of Eugène Rougon, whom a recent speech had brought to the forefront, magnified into an event in the Île Saint-Louis, the newly-married couple were at length admitted to the presence of Monsieur Béraud du Châtel. Renée shed tears on finding her father aged, graver, and sadder. Saccard, whom up to that point nothing had put out of countenance, was frozen by the chill and gloom of the room, by the sombre austerity of the tall old man, whose piercing eye seemed to penetrate to the depths of his conscience. The ex-magistrate kissed his daughter slowly on the forehead, as though to tell her that he forgave her, and turning to his son-in-law: “Monsieur,” he said, simply, “we have suffered greatly, I trust you will give us reason to forget the wrong you have done us.”
He held out his hand. But Saccard remained timorous. He thought how, if M. Béraud du Châtel had not given way under the tragic sorrow of Renée’s shame, he might with a glance, with a gesture, have annulled Madame Sidonie’s manuœvres. The latter, after bringing her brother and Aunt Elisabeth together, had prudently effaced herself. She had not even come to the wedding. Saccard adopted an attitude of great frankness towards the old man, having read in his face a look of surprise at finding his daughter’s seducer ugly, little, and forty years of age. The newly-married couple were compelled to spend the first nights at the Hotel Béraud. Christine had been sent away two months since, so that this child of fourteen might have no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in this house, peaceful and serene as a convent. When she returned home, she stood aghast before her sister’s husband, whom she too thought old and ugly. Renée alone seemed to take but little notice of her husband’s age or his mean aspect. She treated him without contempt as without affection, with absolute tranquillity, through which was visible an occasional glimmer of ironical disdain. Saccard strutted about, made himself at home, and really succeeded, by his frankness and vivacity, in gradually winning everybody’s good will. When they took their departure, in order to install themselves in an imposing flat in a new house in the Rue de Rivoli, M. Béraud du Châtel had lost his look of astonishment, and Christine had taken to playing with her brother-in-law as with a schoolfellow. Renée’s pregnancy was at that time four months advanced; her husband was on the point of sending her to the country, proposing afterwards to lie as to the child’s age, when, as Madame Sidonie had foretold, she had a miscarriage. She had so tightly laced herself to dissimulate her condition, which was moreover concealed under the fulness of her skirts, that she was compelled to keep her bed for some weeks. He was enchanted with the adventure; Fortune was at last on his side; he had made a golden bargain: a splendid dowry, a wife of a beauty that should be worth a decoration to him within six months, and not the least encumbrance. He had received two hundred thousand francs to give his name to a fœtus which its mother would not even look at. From that moment his thoughts began to turn affectionately towards the Charonne property. But for the time being he devoted all his attention to a speculation which was to be the basis of his fortune.
Notwithstanding the high standing of his wife’s family, he did not immediately resign his post as a surveyor of roads. He talked of work that had to be finished, of an occupation that had to be sought for. As a matter of fact he wished to remain till the end on the battlefield upon which he was venturing his first stake. He felt at home, he was able to cheat more at his ease.
His plan of fortune was simple and practical. Now that he had more money than he had ever hoped for in hand to begin his operations, he reckoned on putting his designs into execution on a large scale. He had all Paris at his fingers’ ends; he knew that the shower of gold which was beating down upon the walls would fall more heavily every day. Clever people had but to open their pockets. He had enlisted himself among the clever ones by reading the future in the offices of the Hôtel de Ville. His duties had taught him what may be stolen in the buying and selling of houses and ground. He was well up in every classical swindle: he knew how you sell for a million what has cost you five hundred thousand francs; how you acquire the right of rifling the treasury of the State, which smiles and closes its eyes; how, when throwing a boulevard across the belly of an old quarter, you juggle with six-storied houses amidst the unanimous applause of your dupes. And in these still clouded days, when the canker of speculation was but at its period of incubation, what made a formidable gambler of him was that he saw further than his chiefs themselves into the stone-and-plaster future reserved for Paris. He had ferreted to such an extent, collected so many clues, that he could have prophesied the appearance the new neighbourhoods would offer in 1870. Sometimes, in the street, he would look at certain houses in a curious way, as though they were acquaintances whose destiny, known to him alone, deeply affected him.
Two months before Angèle’s death, he had taken her, on a Sunday, to the Buttes Montmartre. The poor woman loved dining at a restaurant; she was delighted whenever, after a long walk, he sat her down at a table in some hostelry on the outskirts of the town. On this particular day they dined at the top of the hill, in a restaurant whose windows looked out over Paris, over that sea of houses with blue roofs, like surging billows that filled the vast horizon. Their table was placed at one of the windows. The sight of the roofs of Paris enlivened Saccard. At dessert he called for a bottle of Burgundy. He smiled into space, he was unusually gallant. And his looks always returned amorously to that living, seething ocean, from which issued the deep voice of the crowd. It was autumn; beneath the great pale sky the city lay listless in a soft and tender gray, pierced here and there with dark patches of foliage that resembled the broad leaves of water-lilies floating on a lake; the sun was setting behind a red cloud, and, while the background was filled with a light haze, a shower of gold dust, of golden dew, fell on the right bank of the river, in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine and the Tuileries. It was like an enchanted corner in a city of the “Arabian Nights,” with emerald trees, sapphire roofs, ruby weathercocks. There came a moment when a ray of sunlight, gliding from between two clouds, was so resplendent that the houses seemed to flare up and melt like an ingot of gold in a crucible.
“Oh! look,” said Saccard, with a laugh like a child’s, “it is raining twenty-franc pieces in Paris!”
Angèle joined in the laughter, saying that that sort of pieces was not easy to pick up. But her husband had stood up, and leaning on the handrail of the window:
“That is the Vendôme Column, is it not, glittering over there?…. There, more to the right, you can see the Madeleine…. A fine district, where there is much to be done…. Ah! now it is all going to blaze up! Do you see?…. You would think the whole neighbourhood was boiling in a chemist’s retort.”
His voice became eager and agitated. The comparison he had hit upon seemed to strike him greatly. He had been drinking Burgundy, he forgot