“Don’t trouble yourself about it,” Toutin-Laroche replied. “I shall go at once to the rue de la Pépinière.”
He quietly returned home, feeling a twinge of admiration for the baron, who had such clever ways of extricating himself from ticklish situations. He kept the file in his pocket and at the next meeting of the commission announced peremptorily on behalf of the baron and himself that given the asking price of 700,000 francs and the proposed offer of 500,000, it would be necessary to compromise by granting an indemnity of 600,000. Not a murmur of opposition was heard. The member from the rue d’Astorg, having thought better of his objection, no doubt, allowed good-naturedly that he had been mistaken. He had thought that it was the building next door that was being discussed.
That was how Aristide Saccard won his first victory. He quadrupled his investment and gained two accomplices. Only one thing worried him. When he went to destroy Mme Sidonie’s fraudulent books, they were nowhere to be found. He rushed over to see Larsonneau, who told him bluntly that he had the books and planned to keep them. Saccard did not lose his temper. His only worry, he intimated, was for his dear friend, who was far more compromised than Saccard himself by these forgeries—almost all of which were in his friend’s hand—but he was reassured now that he knew the books to be in Larsonneau’s possession. Actually, he would gladly have strangled his “dear friend.” He remembered one highly compromising document, a bogus inventory that he had been stupid enough to draw up and that must still be in one of the ledgers. Larsonneau, richly rewarded for his services, opened a consulting office on the rue de Rivoli, which he furnished as luxuriously as any kept woman’s apartment. Saccard quit his job at city hall and, with a considerable quantity of capital now at his disposal, plunged into speculation with a vengeance, while Renée, excited and out of control, filled Paris with the clatter of her carriages, the sparkle of her diamonds, and the dizzying whirl of her swank and ostentatious existence.
Occasionally husband and wife, both feverish in their pursuit of money and pleasure, returned to the icy mists of the Ile Saint-Louis. When they did, they felt as though they were entering a ghost town.
The Béraud mansion, built around the beginning of the seventeenth century, was one of those dark, square, solemn buildings with high, narrow windows that are so common in the Marais and are often rented out to boarding schools, manufacturers of seltzer water, and distributors of wine and spirits. It was admirably preserved, however. Situated on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, it had only three upper stories, each fifteen to twenty feet high. The ground floor had lower ceilings, with windows protected by depressingly heavy iron bars set right into the somber thickness of the walls and an arched doorway almost as wide as it was tall, which was shut by double doors bearing a cast-iron knocker, painted dark green, and studded with huge nails that formed star and diamond patterns on both panels. It was the classic carriage entrance, flanked by off-kilter hitching posts circled by iron hoops. One could see that a gutter had once run through the center of the gate and that the ballast beneath the porch had been gently sloped to channel water into it from either side. M. Béraud had decided, however, to pave the entrance and block this gutter. This was the only sacrifice to modern architecture to which he ever agreed. The windows on the upper floors were enclosed by thin iron handrails through which the colossal casements, with their heavy brown sashes and small greenish panes, could be seen. Above, the line of the roof was broken by dormers, leaving the gutters to continue by themselves to funnel rainwater into the downspouts. The austere nakedness of the façade was further aggravated by the total absence of shutters and blinds, the pale and melancholy stones of this front wall being untouched by sunlight throughout the year. This façade, with its venerable air, its bourgeois severity, slumbered solemnly in this neighborhood of dignified repose and silent streets seldom disturbed by the clatter of carriages.
Inside the gate was a square courtyard surrounded by arcades, a scaled-down version of the place Royale,22 paved with enormous slabs of stone, which added the finishing touch needed to make this lifeless house look exactly like a cloister. Facing the porch, a fountain— a lion’s head half worn away so that only its gaping jaws remained— spouted a heavy, monotonous stream of water from an iron pipe into a trough green with moss and worn smooth along the edges. The water was icy cold. Grass pushed its way up between the stone slabs. During the summer a thin sliver of sunlight penetrated the courtyard, and this rare visitation of the sun’s rays had whitened one corner of the façade, on the south side, leaving the remaining three-quarters of the front wall gloomy and black and streaked with mold. Standing in the middle of this courtyard, as cool and quiet as the bottom of a well, in the glaring light of a winter day, one could easily believe that the new Paris, ablaze with fiery passions and reverberating with the din of millions, was a thousand miles away.
The apartments within the mansion exuded the same mournful calm and frigid formality as the courtyard. The stairwell leading up to them was broad and guarded with an iron rail, and within it every footstep, every cough, resounded as beneath the vault of a church. Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery. M. Béraud Du Châtel had chosen for himself an apartment in the gloomiest part of the house, on the second floor between the street and the courtyard. There he found himself in surroundings remarkable for their shadowy silence and conducive to meditation. When he pushed open the doors and made his slow, lugubrious way through the solemn apartments, he resembled one of the members of the old parlements whose portraits were affixed to the walls, a man lost in thought on his way home after debating and refusing to sign a royal edict.
But within this lifeless house, this cloister, there was a warm and vibrant nest, a pocket of sunshine and gaiety, a lovely lair of childish high spirits, fresh air, and bright light. To reach it one had to climb a host of small staircases, proceed along a dozen or so corridors, climb back down and then up again to complete a veritable journey ending at last in a vast chamber, a sort of belvedere on the rooftop in the back of the house above the Quai de Béthune. It enjoyed full southern exposure. The window was so wide that the sky, with all its radiance, all its fresh air, all its blue color seemed to enter in. Perched aloft like a dovecote, it contained long flower boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single piece of furniture. A simple mat had been laid down over the tile floor. This was the “children’s room.” Throughout the house this was the name by which the room was known and referred to. The house was so cold and the courtyard so damp that Aunt Elisabeth had been afraid that Christine and Renée might catch a chill from the walls. She had often scolded the active little girls, who liked to race through the arcades and dip their tiny arms into the frigid water of the fountain. Then it occurred to her to have the forgotten loft fixed up for them, this being for centuries the only spot in the house where the sun was allowed in to disport itself in solitude among the spider-webs. She had given them a mat, some birds, and flowers. The girls were delighted. During vacations, Renée lived up there, bathing in the warm yellow rays of the sun, which seemed pleased with the way its hideout had been fixed up and with the two blondes it had been sent. The chamber became a paradise, resounding with the songs of the birds and the babble of the little girls. Ownership had been ceded entirely to them. They called it “our room.” They were at home in it. They went so far as to lock themselves in to prove to themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the premises. What a happy place! A hecatomb of playthings lay strewn about the mat in the bright sunshine.
The best thing about the children’s room was
the vast horizon. Looking out the other windows of the house one saw nothing but black walls a few feet away. But the children’s room offered a view of one end of the Seine, one whole side of Paris stretching from the Ile de la Cité 23 to the Pont de Bercy, flat and vast and looking like some quaint Dutch town. Below, on the Quai de Béthune, stood a series of ramshackle wooden sheds, and the children often amused themselves by watching enormous rats scamper about the heaps of fallen beams and roofing, feeling a vague sense of dread whenever they saw one scale the high walls. Beyond these ruins, however, the magic began. The pier, with its rows of floating timbers and buttresses like those of some Gothic cathedral, and the delicate Pont de Constantine, swaying like lace beneath the feet of pedestrians, intersected at right angles and seemed to dam the enormous mass of the river and hold it in check. Opposite stood the trees of the Halle aux Vins,24 and, farther on, the greenery of the Jardin des Plantes25 stretching off toward the horizon. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, the Quai Henri IV and Quai de la Rapée were lined with low, uneven structures, rows of houses that looked from above like the little wood and cardboard houses the girls kept in boxes. In the distance, to the right, loomed the slate roof of La Salpêtrière,26 a patch of blue above the trees. Then, in the middle, stretching all the way down to the Seine, the broad paved banks formed two long gray passageways smudged here and there by a row of barrels, a hitched-up wagon, or a boatload of wood or coal piled on the shore. But the soul of it all, the soul that filled the scene, was the Seine, the living river. It came from afar, from the vague and trembling edge of the horizon, from the land of dreams, and flowed in tranquil majesty straight to the children, swelling mightily on its way and finally spreading into a great sheet of water at their feet, at the extremity of the island. The two bridges that crossed it, the Pont de Bercy and the Pont d’Austerlitz, seemed like necessary barriers, responsible for holding the river back and preventing it from rising up to the children’s room. The girls loved the giant river. Their eyes could not get enough of its colossal flow, of the eternal rumbling flood that rolled forward as if pursuing them, and they could feel it divide below them and vanish to the right and to the left, into the unknown, with the docility of a tamed Titan. When the weather was fine, on mornings when the sky was blue, they took delight in the Seine’s beautiful finery. The river decked itself out in variegated gowns, taking on a thousand hues of infinite subtlety ranging from blue to green. It looked like silk patterned with tongues of white flame and trimmed with satin ruffles. And the boats that found shelter along its banks made a ribbon of black velvet along its edges. In the distance especially the fabric seemed lovely and precious, like the enchanted gauze of a fairy’s tunic. Beyond the hem of deep green satin formed by the shadows of the bridges were golden breastplates and rich folds that glowed like the sun. The immense sky looming over the water, the rows of low houses, and the greenery of the two parks seemed to grow deeper before one’s eyes.
At times, Renée, already nearly grown, weary of this limitless horizon, and bursting with curiosity acquired at school about matters of the flesh, would cast a glance in the direction of the swimming school at Petit’s floating bathhouse, moored to the tip of the island. Through the flapping linen hanging from lines that did duty for a roof, she hoped to catch a glimpse of men in bathing suits that revealed their naked torsos.
3
Maxime remained at school in Plassans until the holidays of 1854. He was then thirteen years and some months old and had just finished the seventh grade. It was at that point that his father decided to have him come to Paris. His idea was that a son of that age would set him up, would permanently establish him in the role he was playing of a wealthy widower now remarried, a man of serious disposition. When he announced his plan to Renée, whom he prided himself on treating in a most courtly manner, she replied casually: “Fine, send for the boy. . . . He’ll amuse us a little. Mornings are so deadly boring.”
The boy arrived a week later. He was already a tall, thin, mischievous youth with a girlish face, a delicate, insolent look, and soft blond hair. But good God, how oddly he was turned out! His hair cropped to the ears, so short that the whiteness of his scalp seemed barely covered by a faint shadow, he wore his pants too short and sported a teamster’s boots and a horribly threadbare tunic so big for his size that it made him look almost hunchbacked. In this getup, surprised by the new things that greeted his eyes, he looked around, not at all timidly but with the savage cunning of a precocious child, wary of revealing too much of himself right away.
A servant had fetched him from the station, and he was waiting in the main drawing room, delighted by the gold on the furniture and ceiling and deeply pleased with the luxurious surroundings in which he was now to live, when Renée, returning home from her tailor’s, swept in like a gust of wind. She tossed aside her hat and the white burnoose she had wrapped around her shoulders to protect her from the already-biting cold. To Maxime, struck dumb with admiration, she seemed splendid in her marvelous costume.
The child thought it must be a disguise. She had on a ravishing skirt of blue faille with big flounces, over which she had thrown a sort of French Guard’s jacket of soft gray silk. The flaps of the jacket, lined with blue satin darker than the blue of the skirt, were lifted up in a provocative manner and held in place by bows of ribbon. The cuffs of the flat sleeves and wide lapels stood out, lined with the same satin. And to add an ultimate zest to the ensemble, a daring dash of originality, two rows of large imitation sapphire buttons set in blue rosettes adorned the jacket front. It was ugly and adorable.
When Renée noticed Maxime, she was surprised to find him as tall as she. “That’s the little boy, I presume?” she inquired of the servant.
The child devoured her with his eyes. This lady, whose skin was so white, whose bosom could be glimpsed through the gap in her pleated blouse, this sudden and charming apparition with her high coiffure, her elegant gloved hands, and her small men’s boots with pointed heels that dug into the carpet, delighted him—she seemed the good fairy of this warm, gilded apartment. A smile began to form on his lips, and he was just gauche enough to retain a mischievous youthful grace.
“My, how funny he is!” Renée exclaimed. “But what a fright! Look at the way they’ve cut his hair! . . . Listen, my young friend, your father probably won’t be back before dinner, and I shall be obliged to move you in. . . . I’m your step-mama, monsieur. Would you like to kiss me?”
“I would,” came Maxime’s forthright answer. And with that he kissed the young woman on both cheeks, holding her by the shoulders in a way that rumpled her French Guard’s jacket a bit.
Laughing, she freed herself and said, “My God! That shaved head—what a riot!”
Then she turned back to him with a more serious expression. “We’ll be friends, won’t we? . . . I want to be a mother to you. I thought it all over while waiting for my tailor, who was otherwise occupied, and I said to myself that I ought to be very kind and bring you up quite properly. . . . It will be nice!”
Maxime went on staring at her as brazenly as a tart with his big blue eyes. Then, suddenly, he came out with a question: “How old are you?”
“Never ask such a thing!” she cried, putting her hands together. “The poor thing doesn’t know what he can and cannot say! I’ll have to teach him everything. . . . Fortunately, I’m still young enough to say how old I am. I’m twenty-one.”
“I’ll soon be fourteen. . . . You could be my sister.”
He did not finish his thought, but his eyes made it clear that he had expected his father’s second wife to be much older. He was standing quite close to her and staring at her neck so attentively that after a while she almost blushed. Yet she was too flighty to stick to one subject for long, and as she walked off she began talking about her tailor, forgetting that she was speaking to a child.
“I would have liked to be here to welcome you. But can you believe that Worms brought me this outfit this morning? . . . I tried it on an
d think it looks rather good. It’s quite chic, don’t you think?”
She had gone over to a mirror. Maxime walked around behind her so as to examine her from various angles.
“But when I put on the jacket, I noticed that there was a big crease right here on the left shoulder. Do you see it? . . . It’s very ugly. It makes me look as though one shoulder is higher than the other.”
He moved close to her, passed his finger over the crease as if to smooth it out, and then, naughty schoolboy that he was, allowed his hand to linger on the spot with a certain apparent comfort.
“Well,” she continued, “I simply couldn’t stand it. I ordered the carriage brought round and went to tell Worms what I thought of his inconceivable carelessness. . . . He promised me he’d fix it.”
She remained in front of the mirror, still contemplating her image and all of a sudden lost in reverie. After a while she placed a finger on her lips with an air of meditative impatience. Then, in a very low voice, as if talking to herself, she said, “Something is missing. . . . Something is definitely missing.”
Turning abruptly, she faced Maxime and asked, “Is it really all right? . . . Don’t you think something is missing, a trifle, a bow somewhere?”
The schoolboy, reassured by the young woman’s friendly manner, had regained all the poise of his impudent nature. He moved away, drew near, squinted, muttering all the while: “No, no, nothing is missing. It’s very pretty, very pretty. . . . If anything, there is a bit too much.”
He blushed a bit for all his audacity, drew still closer to Renée, and tracing an acute angle on her bosom with his fingertip said, “If it were up to me, I’d scoop out the lace like this and add a necklace with a big cross.”