Aristide Saccard had at last found his element. He had shown himself to be a great speculator, a man who juggled millions. Following up his masterstroke on the rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the battle that was just beginning to leave shameful wrecks and brilliant triumphs scattered about Paris. At first he bet on sure things, repeating his initial success by buying buildings he knew to be slated for demolition and relying on his friends to obtain huge indemnities. At one point he owned five or six houses—the very houses he had once looked at so strangely, as if they were acquaintances, back when he was just a poor clerk in the road department. But his art was still in its infancy. It took no great cleverness to run out leases, conspire with tenants, and rob the state and private owners, and to him the game seemed not worth the candle. So he soon put his genius to work on more complicated tasks.
The first ploy he came up with was to buy buildings secretly on behalf of the city. A decision by the Conseil d’Etat had put the municipal government in a difficult position. It had purchased a large number of houses by private agreement with the owners in the hope of allowing the leases to expire and then evicting the tenants without any indemnity. But the council held that these purchases were in fact expropriations, and the city was obliged to pay. It was at that point that Saccard offered to act as a front. He bought the properties, ran out the leases, and in exchange for a bonus surrendered the buildings on a mutually agreed date. He even wound up playing a double game, buying for both the city and the prefect. When a deal proved too tempting, he slipped the deed for the property into his own pocket. The state paid. In compensation for his assistance he was granted building rights on sections of streets and planned intersections, which he sold to third parties even before work on the new street had begun. The game was fierce; people gambled on neighborhoods under construction as they might gamble on bonds. Certain ladies—pretty prostitutes, intimate friends of high officials—were in on the action. One of them, famous for the whiteness of her teeth, snapped up entire streets on several occasions. Saccard, famished, felt his desires grow as rivers of gold flowed through his hands. It seemed that a sea of twenty-franc coins was swelling before him, growing from a lake into an ocean whose waves stretched as far as the eye could see and made a strange sound, a metallic music that inflamed his heart. With each passing day he ventured more boldly out onto that sea, diving down and returning to the surface, now on his back, now on his belly, navigating the immensity in all weather, fair or foul, and counting on his strength and skill to avoid ever going to the bottom.
Paris was then disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The day that Saccard had predicted on the Buttes Montmartre had arrived. The city was being slashed with a saber, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He owned piles of ruins in all quarters of the city. On the rue de Rome he was mixed up in the amazing story of the company that dug a hole and carted away five or six thousand cubic meters of soil so as to create the impression that it was involved in a gigantic project, and which then went bankrupt, so that the hole had to be filled in again with fill from Saint-Ouen. 5 Saccard escaped with a clear conscience and full pockets thanks to his brother Eugène, who was kind enough to intervene. At Chaillot 6 he helped to pare away the heights and cart them off as fill in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont de l’Alma. Over toward Passy it was he who had the idea of covering the plateau with rubble from the Trocadéro,7 so that today the good soil lies two meters deep and nothing grows on the debris, not even weeds. He was in twenty places at once, wherever there was some insurmountable obstacle: dirt that nobody knew what to do with, an embankment that was impossible to build, a nice pile of soil and rubble that the engineers chafed to get out of the way—no matter what the mess, he would always dig his fingers into it and ultimately come away with a kickback or work out some kind of deal. In the course of a day he would race from construction sites around the Arc de Triomphe to others on the boulevard Saint-Michel, from the piles of rubble on the boulevard Malesherbes to the pits at Chaillot, dragging an army of workmen, law clerks, stockholders, dupes, and scoundrels in his wake.
His greatest claim to fame, however, was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was officially in charge; Saccard figured only as a member of the board of directors. In this instance Eugène had once again done his brother an important favor. Thanks to him, the government had granted the company authorization to do business and watched over its operations most indulgently. At a particularly ticklish moment, when a hostile newspaper took the liberty of criticizing something the company had done, the official government bulletin went so far as to publish a note banning all discussion of a firm so honorable that the state itself deigned to sponsor it. The Crédit Viticole relied on an excellent system of financing: it lent farmers up to half the estimated value of their property, guaranteed the loan with a mortgage, and collected interest plus amortization from the borrowers. No system was ever more prudent or proper. With a knowing smile Eugène had told his brother that the Tuileries wanted everything aboveboard. Interpreting this wish to suit himself, M. Toutin-Laroche allowed the lending machinery to operate without interference while he set up alongside it a bank that attracted capital, which he then used to gamble with abandon, plunging headlong into any number of ventures. Thanks to the energetic leadership of its managing director, the Crédit Viticole soon enjoyed an unshakable reputation as a solid and prosperous firm. At first, when Saccard wanted to put a large number of new shares on the market all at once, he was shrewd enough to make it look as though they had been in circulation for a long time by having bank tellers spend the night tromping on them and beating them with birch brooms. The bank’s premises were designed to make it look like a branch office of the Bank of France. The headquarters, with its many offices, courtyard full of carriages, austere iron railings, broad stoop and monumental staircase, suites of sumptuous private rooms, and uniformed personnel and factotums, stood forth as a grave and dignified temple of money, and nothing inspired a more religious emotion in the public than the sanctuary, the counting room, to which one gained access by way of a corridor notable for its sacred nudity, there to glimpse the safe, the god, crouched down, secured to the wall, squat and somnolent, with its triple locks, thick flanks, and air of brute divinity.
Saccard worked a huge swindle on city hall. Oppressed and overburdened by debt, the city, having been dragged into the dance of millions that it had set in motion to please the Emperor and line certain pockets, was reduced to borrowing money in secret so as not to be obliged to confess its own raging fever, its obsession with pickaxe and quarry stone. It had just invented something called delegation bonds, long-term letters of exchange, with which it could pay contractors on the day that papers were signed so that they could then sell the notes at a discount in exchange for needed funds. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper from the contractors. The day the city ran short of money, Saccard tried putting temptation in its way. A considerable sum of money was advanced on the security of delegation bonds that M. Toutin-Laroche swore he had obtained from companies doing business with the city, and which he dragged through all the gutters of speculation. The Crédit Viticole was thereafter safe from attack; it held Paris by the throat. From then on the managing director never spoke about the famous Société Générale des Ports du Maroc without a smile. It still existed, however, and the newspapers continued to celebrate the great commercial stations at regular intervals. One day, when M. Toutin-Laroche urged Saccard to take some shares of the company, the latter laughed in his face and asked if he, Toutin-Laroche, thought him fool enough to invest his money in the “The Arabian Nights, Inc.”
Saccard had thus far speculated successfully on sure things, cheating, selling himself, making money on his deals, and extracting some sort of profit from each of his ventures. Before long, however, this wheeling and dealing ceased to satisfy him. He was too proud to scoop up the remains, t
o pick up the gold that men like Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud let fall in their wake. He plunged his arms into the sack up to his shoulders. He formed a partnership with Mignon, Charrier & Co., the well-known contractors, who were then just starting out on their way to amassing colossal fortunes. The city had already decided not to build the new boulevards itself but to hire contractors to do the work instead. These contractors agreed to deliver a finished street complete with trees, benches, and gaslights in exchange for a fixed fee. Sometimes they laid the roadway for nothing, feeling amply compensated by the adjacent land, from which they derived substantial profits. The speculative fever over land and the dizzying rise in the price of housing date from the same period. With his connections Saccard obtained the rights to develop three stretches of boulevard. What he brought to the partnership was his ardent if somewhat unmethodical spirit. Initially his underlings, MM Mignon and Charrier, proved to be well-heeled, cunning coconspirators, master masons who knew the value of a franc. The two contractors laughed up their sleeves at the sight of Saccard’s horses. They usually wore overalls, did not refuse to shake hands with their workmen, and went home at night covered with plaster. Both were from Langres. To ardent, insatiable Paris they brought their Champenois8 prudence and unflappable wits, which, though not very open to new ideas and not very intelligent, were nevertheless quite apt at profiting from opportunities to line their pockets right now while deferring enjoyment of their gains till later on. If Saccard set a deal in motion and invested his passion in it, his avid craving, Mignon and Charrier with their down-to-earth ways and strict, methodical management had what it took to prevent their partner’s extravagant imagination from derailing it at twenty different junctures. They never agreed to build the superb offices, the impressive headquarters with which he hoped to astonish Paris. Nor did they want any part of the lesser speculations that spewed from his brain every morning: plans to build concert halls and huge bathhouses adjacent to newly laid streets; railways to parallel new boulevards; and glass-roofed malls that would have raised commercial rents tenfold and allowed customers to shop without getting wet. Terrified of such proposals, the contractors nipped them in the bud by deciding that the land adjacent to the new streets would be divided among the three partners and each would be free to do as he pleased with his share. Mignon and Charrier wisely continued to sell their lots. Saccard built on his. His brain seethed with ideas. He was capable of proposing in all seriousness that Paris should be placed under an enormous bell jar, so as to turn the city into a hothouse where pineapples and sugarcane could be grown.
Moving capital by the shovelful, he soon owned eight houses on the new boulevards. Four were completely finished, two on the rue de Marignan and two on the boulevard Haussmann. The other four, located on the boulevard Malesherbes, were still under construction, and one of them, on a vast lot enclosed by a wooden fence within which a splendid mansion was to rise, had got no further than the installation of the second-story flooring. At this stage, his affairs had become so complicated, he had so many strings attached to each of his fingers, so many interests to oversee and so many marionettes to keep in motion, that he barely slept three hours a night and read his correspondence in his carriage. The wonder was that his cash box seemed bottomless. He owned stock in all sorts of companies, built with a kind of frenzy, was involved in traffic of many kinds, and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, yet he never seemed to realize a clear profit or pocket a substantial sum of gleaming gold coins. This river of gold, flowing from unknown sources, which seemed to gush from his office in wave after wave, astonished observers and made him at one point the man of the hour to whom the Paris papers attributed every clever remark about the stock exchange.
With a husband like this, Renée was about as little married as she could be. She went for weeks on end almost without seeing him. In any event, he was perfect: he opened his coffers wide whenever she needed money. Deep down, she loved him as she would have loved any obliging banker. Whenever she visited the Béraud household, she praised him to her father, who remained severe and cold toward his son-in-law despite his good fortune. Her contempt for him had evaporated. This man seemed so convinced that life is nothing but business and was so clearly born to mint money out of whatever came his way—women, children, paving stones, sacks of plaster, consciences— that she could not blame him for the bargain he had struck in marrying her. Since striking that bargain, he looked at her in much the same way as he looked at those beautiful houses that earned him esteem and would hopefully bring him huge profits. He liked to see her well dressed, making a splash, turning heads all over Paris. This enhanced his stature and made people double their estimate of his probable net worth. Because of his wife, people thought him handsome, young, amorous, and giddy. She was a partner, an unwitting accomplice. A new team of horses, an outfit that cost 2,000 écus, an indulgence for one of her lovers facilitated some of his best deals and frequently turned out to be the decisive factor. Often, too, he pretended to be busy and sent her in his stead to seek a necessary authorization from some minister or official or to receive his reply. On such occasions he would tell her, “And be good, now!” in a tone of voice that was all his own, at once mocking and cajoling. And when she returned, having been successful in her mission, he would rub his hands together and say, “And I hope you were good!” Renée laughed. He was too busy to want someone like Mme Michelin. He merely liked to make crude jokes and nasty insinuations. In any case, had Renée not “been good,” his only irritation would have been at having had to pay in earnest for the minister’s or official’s favor. He delighted in duping people, in giving them less than their money’s worth. He often said, “If I were a woman, I might sell myself, but I would never deliver the goods. That would be idiotic.”
Irrepressible Renée, who had appeared one night in the Parisian firmament as a strangely enchanted creature from the world of fashionable sensuality, was the least analyzable of women. Had she been raised at home, she would no doubt have turned to religion or some other means of calming the nerves and drawing the sting of desires that now and again drove her wild. Her temperament was solidly bourgeois. She was absolutely honest, much given to logic, afraid of heaven and hell, and full of prejudices. She was her father’s daughter, one of that calm and prudent breed in whom the homely virtues flourish. And yet it was in this nature that prodigious fantasies, persistent curiosities, and unavowable desires germinated and grew. With the Sisters of the Visitation, among whom she was free to explore the mystical sensuality of the chapel and close attachments to her little friends, she had acquired a bizarre education, learning vice, investing it with all the sincerity of her nature, and unsettling her young mind to the point where she embarrassed her confessor no end by telling him that one day during mass she had experienced an impulsive desire to get up from her seat and kiss him. Then she beat her breast and turned pale at the thought of the devil and his cauldrons. The crime that led to her later marriage to Saccard, the brutal rape that she had endured with a sort of terrified anticipation, had made her despise herself and played a large part in the unrestrained way in which she lived her entire life. She believed she no longer had to struggle against evil, that it was inside her, that logic authorized her to pursue wicked knowledge to the end. For her that knowledge was still more a matter of curiosity than of appetite. Thrown into Second Empire society, abandoned to her fantasies, supplied with money, encouraged in her most ostentatious eccentricities, she surrendered, regretted it, and ultimately succeeded in killing off what remained of decency in her, lashed and driven as she was by her insatiable need to know and to feel.
In any case, she had as yet gone no further than anyone else. She liked to whisper laughingly about such extraordinary cases as the tender friendship between Suzanne Haffner and Adeline d’Espanet, Mme de Lauwerens’s questionable livelihood, and Countess Wanska’s prix-fixe kisses. But she still contemplated these things from afar, with the vague idea of tasting them perhaps, and this nebu
lous desire, which swelled in her when her mood turned foul, compounded her seething anxiety and spurred her on in her nervous quest for some unique, exquisite pleasure, some apple into which she alone would bite. Her first lovers had not spoiled her. Three times she had believed herself to be in the grip of a grand passion. Love burst in her head like a Roman candle, the sparks from which did not reach as far as her heart. One month she was madly in love and showed herself with her lord and master all over Paris. Then, one morning, in the midst of her ostentatious show of affection, she felt an oppressive silence, an immense void. Her first lover, the young duc de Rozan, was little more than a quick snack in the sun. Renée, who had picked him out for his gentle manner and excellent attire, found him, once they were alone together, absolutely empty, colorless, and tiresome. Next came Mr. Simpson, an attaché at the American embassy, who practically beat her and for that reason remained with her for more than a year. She then took on an aide-de-camp to the emperor, the comte de Chibray, a vain and handsome man whom she had begun to find oppressive when Duchess von Sternich took it into her head to fall for him and snatch him away. Renée of course then shed tears over him and led her friends to believe that her heart had been broken and that she was through with love. That was how she got to M. de Mussy, a person of no significance whatsoever, a young man who was making his way in the diplomatic corps by dint of his remarkable grace on the dance floor. Although she never knew exactly how she had given herself to him, she kept him for quite some time, gripped as she was by sloth, disgusted with this stranger about whom she had learned everything there was to know within an hour of their meeting, and unwilling to deal with the bother of making a change until some extraordinary adventure should present itself. At twenty-eight she was already horribly weary. Boredom seemed all the more unbearable because her bourgeois virtues availed themselves of the hours of tedium to vex and annoy her. She shut her door and suffered from dreadful migraines. Yet when that door reopened, waves of silk and lace poured out of it in a rush, and no sign of worry or embarrassment disfigured the brow of this creature of luxury and pleasure.