The Kill

  Paris in those days was a most interesting spectacle for a man like Aristide Saccard. The Empire had just been proclaimed following the famous trip during which the Prince-President5 had succeeded in kindling the enthusiasm of a few Bonapartist départements. Both the legislature and the press had been silenced. Saved yet again, society congratulated itself, relaxed, and slept in now that a strong government protected it and freed it from the cares of thinking and dealing with its own affairs. Its one abiding preoccupation was to decide which amusements it would choose to kill the time. In Eugène Rougon’s felicitous phrase, Paris sat down to dinner and dreamed bawdy dreams for dessert. Politics was terrifying, like a dangerous drug. Weary minds turned to business and pleasure. Those who had money dug it up, and those who had none searched high and low for forgotten treasures. The throngs quivered in rapt anticipation, straining to hear the first jingle of gold coins, the bright laughter of women, and the still-faint clatter of dishes and smack of kisses. In the deep ambient silence order reigned, and from the abject peace surrounding the new government arose a pleasant hum of gilded and voluptuous promises. It was as though one were passing by one of those little houses where carefully drawn curtains reveal only the silhouettes of women, and where the clink of gold coins can be heard as they drop onto marble mantelpieces. The Empire was soon to transform Paris into Europe’s den of iniquity. A handful of rogues had just stolen a throne, and what they needed now was a reign of adventures, of shady deals, of consciences sold and women bought, of mad and all-consuming revelry. In a city from which the blood of December had only just been washed away there grew—timidly at first—a rage for pleasure that would ultimately land the country in the padded cell reserved for debauched and dishonored nations.

  From the very first days Aristide Saccard sensed the approach of this rising tide of speculation, whose spume would one day cover all of Paris. He followed its progress closely. He found himself smack in the middle of the torrential downpour of gold raining down on the city’s roofs. In his incessant turns around city hall, he had caught wind of the vast project to transform Paris, of the plans for demolition, of the new streets and hastily planned neighborhoods, and of the massive wheeling and dealing in land and buildings that had ignited a clash of interests across the capital and set off an unbridled pursuit of luxury. From then on his efforts had a goal. It was at this time that he developed his pleasant manner. He even put on a little weight and stopped prowling the streets like a scrawny cat in search of prey. At the office he was more talkative and obliging than ever. His brother, whom he visited for more or less official purposes, congratulated him on having put his advice to such good use. Early in 1854, the clerk confided to the deputy that he had several business ventures in mind but would require fairly substantial advances.

  “You’ll need to look around,” Eugène said.

  “You’re right, I’ll look around,” answered Aristide, without a trace of rancor, seeming not to notice that his brother was refusing to start him off with an initial contribution.

  The thought of that initial investment now burned within him. His plan was set; with each passing day it grew more mature. But the first few thousand francs were still nowhere to be found. His tension increased. He looked at people now with a nervous and searching eye, as if scrutinizing every passerby for a potential lender. At home, Angèle continued to lead a happy if retiring life, but Aristide remained on the lookout for an opportunity, and his gregarious laughter grew increasingly shrill as time passed and no such opportunity presented itself.

  Aristide had a sister in Paris. Sidonie Rougon had married a law clerk from Plassans, whom she had accompanied to the capital to set up a shop on the rue Saint-Honoré selling fruits from the south of France. By the time her brother caught up with her, the husband had vanished, and the shop had long since gone under. She was living in a small three-room apartment above another shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière. She leased the shop as well, a cramped and mysterious boutique in which she pretended to sell lace. And the window did contain pieces of guipure and Valenciennes 6 suspended from gold-plated rods. The interior, however, resembled a waiting room, with gleaming woodwork and no sign of merchandise for sale. Light curtains on the door and window hid the inside of the shop from prying eyes, contributing to the impression that the boutique was actually the discreet and veiled antechamber to a strange temple of some sort. It was rare to see a customer enter Mme Sidonie’s shop. Usually, in fact, the knob was removed from the door. She always told people in the neighborhood that she went personally to the homes of wealthy clients to display her wares. Her only reason for renting the shop, she said, was the layout of the apartment, which communicated with the boutique below via a stairway hidden in the wall. Indeed, the lace merchant was seldom in. She came and went ten times a day, always with a hurried air. In any case, she did not limit herself to selling lace. She used her apartment to store goods picked up Lord knows where. There she sold rubber overshoes, raincoats, suspenders, and countless other items. Later she added to her inventory a new oil said to promote the growth of hair, various orthopedic devices, and an automatic coffeemaker, a patented invention, the commercialization of which gave her a great deal of trouble. When her brother came to see her, she was dealing in pianos, and her apartment was crammed with these instruments. There were pianos even in her bedroom, which was very smartly decorated in a manner that clashed with the commercial jumble of the other two rooms. She ran her two businesses in a perfectly methodical way. Customers who came for the merchandise upstairs entered and exited through the carriage entrance on the rue Papillon. You had to be in on the mystery of the hidden staircase to be aware of the lace merchant’s double life. Upstairs she went by the name of Mme Touche, using her husband’s surname, whereas the door that led to the shop directly from the street bore only her first name, so that most people knew her as Mme Sidonie.

  Mme Sidonie was thirty-five years old, but she dressed so carelessly and had so little feminine appeal that one would have thought her much older. In truth she had no age. She always wore the same black dress, frayed at the pleats and rumpled and discolored from use, so that it resembled a lawyer’s robe threadbare from frequent rubbing against the courtroom rail. With a black hat pulled down to her forehead to hide her hair and a pair of heavy shoes, she walked the streets carrying a small basket whose handles were mended with string. This basket, which never left her side, was a whole world unto itself. If she opened it even slightly, all sorts of things spilled out: date books, folders, and above all bundles of paper bearing official stamps whose illegible writing she deciphered with remarkable dexterity. She had in her the makings of a business broker and a clerk of court. She lived among defaulted bills, writs, and court orders. Each time she sold ten francs’ worth of pomade or lace, she wormed her way into the good graces of her clients and became the business agent of her customers, running errands to lawyers and judges on their behalf. Week after week she hauled the dossiers in her basket around the city, putting herself to no end of trouble as she walked at a slow and steady pace from one end of Paris to the other, never taking a carriage. It would have been difficult to say what profit she derived from this work. She did it mainly because she had an instinctive taste for shady deals and a love of chicanery, but she also picked up a host of little benefits along the way: a dinner now and then or a franc added to her purse here and there. Her clearest gain, however, came in the form of the confidences she gleaned everywhere, which put her on the trail of likely scores and probable windfalls. Spending her life as she did, in other people’s homes and deeply involved in their affairs, she was a living catalog of supply and demand. She knew where there was a young girl in immediate need of a husband, a family in need of 3,000 francs, or an elderly gentleman willing to lend such a sum but only against solid collateral and at a high rate of interest. She was also informed of still more delicate matters: the sadness of a certain blonde woman whose husband failed to understand her, and who aspired to be under
stood; the secret desire of a conscientious mother who dreamed of an advantageous situation for her daughter; the tastes of a baron given to intimate late-night suppers and very young girls. With her wan smile she hawked these offers to buy and sell. She thought nothing of walking two leagues to make contact with the right people. She sent the baron to see the conscientious mother, persuaded the elderly gentleman to lend the 3,000 francs to the family strapped for cash, found consolation for the blonde and a less-than-scrupulous husband for the girl in need. She also had a hand in bigger deals, deals she could talk about out loud, with which she assailed the ears of anyone who came near: an interminable lawsuit that a ruined noble family had asked her to follow and a debt that England had incurred with France in the time of the Stuarts, and that now, with compound interest, amounted to nearly three billion francs. This three-billion-franc debt was her hobbyhorse. She explained the ins and outs of the case with a wealth of detail, a veritable course in history, and as she did so, her cheeks, ordinarily as soft and yellow as wax, turned red with enthusiasm. Occasionally, between an errand to the clerk of courts and a visit to a friend, she would unload a coffeemaker or a rain slicker or sell a remnant of lace or lease a piano. Business of this sort was quickly dispatched. Then she would hasten to her store, where she had an appointment with a client to view a piece of Chantilly. The client would arrive and slip as quietly as a shadow into the discreetly curtained shop. It was not rare on such occasions for a gentleman to enter by way of the carriage entrance on rue Papillon to visit Mme Touche’s pianos on the floor above.

  If Mme Sidonie did not amass a fortune, it was because she often labored for sheer love of her art. With her fondness for legal formalities and willingness to neglect her own affairs for the sake of others, court clerks picked her pockets clean, but she allowed them to get away with this because she derived from her legal entanglements pleasures known only to the litigious. The woman in her died; she became nothing but a business agent, a deal-maker forever bustling about Paris with her legendary basket full of the most dubious merchandise, ready to sell anything and everything, dreaming of billions, yet willing to go to the justice of peace to plead for ten francs on behalf of a favorite client. Tiny, slight, pale, clad in the thin black dress that seemed to have been cut from a lawyer’s toga, she had shriveled, and to see her scuttle past a row of houses one might have thought she was an errand boy disguised as a girl. Her complexion had the awful pallor of an official document. The smile on her lips seemed to have been snuffed out, while her eyes seemed to swim in the swirl of business deals and other matters that preoccupied her mind. Timid and discreet in her manner, moreover, and with a vague odor of the confessional and the midwife’s consulting room, she had a gentle and maternal way about her, like a nun who has renounced the affections of this world and therefore takes pity on those whose hearts ache. She never spoke of her husband, any more than she spoke of her childhood, family, or interests. There was only one thing she did not sell: herself. Not because she had any scruples, but because the idea of such a bargain could never have occurred to her. She was as dry as an invoice, as cold as an unpaid bill, as indifferent and brutal inside as a sheriff ’s deputy.

  Saccard, newly arrived from his province, could not at first fathom the intricate depths of Mme Sidonie’s numerous occupations. Since he had done a year of law, she spoke to him one day about the three billion francs with an air of seriousness that left him with a poor opinion of her intelligence. She gave the apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques the once over, took Angèle’s measure at a glance, and did not reappear until her errands brought her back to the neighborhood and she felt a need to allude once more to the matter of the three billion francs. Angèle had been hooked by the story of the English debt. The saleswoman mounted her hobbyhorse and for an hour made the heavens rain with gold. This was the crack in her nimble mind, the tempting folly with which she compensated for a life squandered in squalid deals, the magical bait with which she bewitched not only herself but the most credulous of her clients. She was so convinced of her case, moreover, that she ended up speaking of the three billion as her own personal fortune, which sooner or later the judges must restore to its rightful owner. Her miserable black hat, garnished with faded violets swaying on stems of bare brass wire, was thus wreathed in a miraculous aureole. Angèle’s enormous eyes opened wide. On several occasions she spoke of her sister-in-law to her husband with respect, saying that Mme Sidonie might one day make them rich. Saccard shrugged. He had visited the boutique and the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière and had sniffed nothing but impending bankruptcy. He asked his brother’s opinion of their sister, but Eugène turned grave and replied only that he never saw her and knew her to be highly intelligent but perhaps a little disreputable. Some time later, however, as Saccard was returning to the rue de Penthièvre, he thought he saw Mme Sidonie’s black dress slip out of his brother’s apartment and scurry down the street. He ran after the woman in black but lost sight of her. The businesswoman’s appearance was of the unremarkable sort that is easily lost in a crowd. But the incident made an impression on him, and from that moment on he began to study his sister more carefully. It did not take him long to grasp the immensity of the labor performed by this pale, shapeless little woman, whose whole face seemed to melt into a covetous gaze. He respected her. She had the Rougon blood in her veins. He recognized the family’s characteristic appetite for money and craving for intrigue. But thanks to the milieu in which she had grown old—Paris, the city she had been obliged to scour in the morning in order to have black bread to eat at night—the common temperament had been warped to produce this strange hermaphrodite, this neutered female, this woman of affairs and procuress rolled into one.

  When Saccard, having settled on a plan, set out in search of seed money, he naturally thought of his sister. She shook her head and sighed with an allusion to the three billion francs. But the clerk had no patience with her folly and cut her short whenever she brought up the matter of the Stuart debt. Daydreams of that sort in so practical a mind struck him as disgraceful. Mme Sidonie, whose convictions were impervious to the harshest sarcasms, went on to explain in the clearest of terms that since he had no collateral to offer, he would find it impossible to borrow a cent. This conversation took place in front of the Bourse,7 where she no doubt gambled with her savings. At around three o’clock you could be sure of finding her leaning against the railing on the left, on the side facing the post office, where she held court for characters as suspect and dubious as herself. Her brother was about to take his leave when she murmured wistfully, “Ah, if only you weren’t married.” This reticence, the full and precise meaning of which he did not wish to inquire into, put Saccard in an unusually reflective frame of mind.

  Months passed. War had just been declared in Crimea.8 Paris, unmoved by hostilities in a faraway land, displayed far more enthusiasm for speculation and prostitution. Saccard, who had foreseen the rampant mania, looked on and gnawed his knuckles. The city was a giant forge, and each time a hammer struck gold on one of its anvils he quivered with rage and impatience. His mind and will were so fraught with tension that he lived as in a dream, teetering along the edges of rooftops like a sleepwalker in the grip of an idea he could not shake. He was therefore surprised and irritated one evening to find Angèle sick in her bed. His home life, as regular as clockwork, had gone awry, and this exasperated him as if fate had deliberately played him a dirty trick. Poor Angèle complained mildly; she had caught a chill. When the doctor arrived, he seemed quite worried. On the landing he told the husband that his wife had pneumonia and he could not answer for her life. From that moment on the clerk nursed the patient without a trace of anger. He stopped going to the office, remained at her side, and stared at her with an inscrutable expression as she slept, flushed with fever and short of breath. Mme Sidonie, despite her crushing workload, found time every evening to stop in and prepare a tisane,9 which she claimed would cure anything. To all her other professions she added
that of a born nurse, pleased to be in close proximity to suffering, medications, and the kinds of anguished conversations that take place around the beds of the dying. She seemed taken, moreover, by a tender friendship for Angèle. She truly loved women and lavished them with a thousand kindnesses, no doubt for the pleasure they gave men. She treated them with the same delicate attention that merchants reserve for the most precious items on their shelves, called them “my darling, my beauty,” cooed over them and swooned before them like a lover before his mistress. Although Angèle was not the sort from whom she hoped to gain anything, she flattered her as she did the others, obedient to a general rule of conduct. When the young woman took to her bed, Mme Sidonie’s effusions turned maudlin, and she filled the silent bedroom with signs of her devotion. Her brother watched her move about the room with her lips pressed together as though devastated by unspoken grief.

  The illness worsened. One evening the doctor let it be known that the patient would not last the night. Mme Sidonie had come early, looking preoccupied, and stared at Aristide and Angèle with watery eyes illuminated by brief flashes of fire. After the doctor left, she turned down the lamp, and deep silence ensued. Death slowly made its way into the hot, humid room, which the dying woman’s irregular breathing filled with a syncopated ticking like that of a clock about to run down. Mme Sidonie had given up on her potions, allowing the disease to do its work. She sat down in front of the fireplace next to her brother, who poked feverishly at the fire while casting involuntary glances at the bed. Then, as if overwhelmed by the heavy atmosphere and the distressing spectacle, he withdrew into the adjacent room. Little Clotilde, who had been left there, was sitting on a rug and playing very quietly with her doll. Saccard’s daughter smiled at him, but just then Mme Sidonie slipped into the room behind him and drew him off to a corner, where she spoke to him in a low voice. The door remained open, and a faint rattle could be heard in Angèle’s throat.