The Kill

  “Your poor wife,” the businesswoman sobbed. “I think the end is near. You heard the doctor?”

  Saccard made no reply other than to bow his head in a mournful manner.

  “She was a good woman,” his sister continued, speaking as though Angèle were already dead. “You can find women who are wealthier and more familiar with the ways of the world, but you’ll never find a heart like hers.”

  Then she stopped and, wiping her eyes, seemed to be casting about for a way to change the subject. “Do you have something to say to me?” Saccard asked bluntly.

  “Yes, I’ve been looking after your interests in regard to the matter we were discussing, and I think I’ve found . . . But at a time like this . . . My heart is breaking, you know.”

  She wiped her eyes once more. Saccard, maintaining his composure, let her run through her act without saying a word. Finally she made up her mind to come right out with it: “There’s a young woman whose family would like to find her a husband immediately. The dear child finds herself in trouble. There’s an aunt who would be willing to make a sacrifice. . . .”

  She cut herself short, still whimpering, her voice still tearful as though out of pity for poor Angèle. This was a way of making her brother impatient and compelling him to question her, so that she would not bear sole responsibility for the offer she had come to make. The clerk was indeed smoldering with irritation.

  “Come on, finish what you were saying! Why do they want to find a husband for this girl?”

  “She’s just out of boarding school,” the businesswoman rejoined in a plaintive voice. “She was visiting the country house of the parents of one of her friends when a man led her astray. The girl’s father learned of her crime only recently. He wanted her dead. To save the dear child, her aunt persuaded her to tell her father a tall tale. They’ve convinced him that the guilty party is an honorable young fellow who asks only to be allowed to atone for his momentary lapse.”

  “So?” asked Saccard in a tone of surprise and apparent annoyance. “This fellow from the country is going to marry the girl?”

  “No, he can’t. He’s already married.”

  For a while nothing was said. Angèle’s rattle made a more doleful sound in the shivering air. Little Clotilde had stopped playing with her doll. She looked at Mme Sidonie and her father with her big, dreamy child’s eyes, as if she had understood their conversation. Saccard put a series of short questions to his sister:

  “How old is the girl?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Pregnant for how long?”

  “Three months. There will no doubt be a miscarriage.”

  “And the family is rich and respectable?”

  “Old bourgeoisie. The father was a magistrate. A very nice fortune.”

  “How much is the aunt willing to sacrifice?”

  “A hundred thousand francs.”

  Another silence ensued. Mme Sidonie had stopped weeping. She was doing business now, and her voice took on the metallic sound of a secondhand dealer haggling over a sale. Her brother looked at her with a sidelong glance and, after a moment’s hesitation, added, “And you? What do you want out of it?”

  “We’ll see about that later,” she replied. “Someday you’ll do me a favor.”

  She waited a few seconds, and then, since he said nothing, put it to him directly. “So, what have you decided? These poor women are desperate. They’re trying to avoid a scene. They’ve promised to tell the girl’s father the guilty man’s name tomorrow. . . . If you agree, I’ll send a messenger to them with your card.”

  Saccard seemed to awaken from a dream. Thinking he heard a faint noise from the bedroom next door, he winced and turned in fright toward the source of the sound. “But I can’t,” he said in great distress, “you know very well that I can’t.”

  Mme Sidonie fixed him with a cold and disdainful stare. All the Rougon blood in his veins, all his ardent desires, rushed to his head. He took a card from his wallet and gave it to his sister, who thrust it into an envelope after carefully scratching out the address. Then she went out. It was just past nine o’clock.

  Saccard, left alone, went to the window and leaned his forehead against the frosted pane. Unconsciously he drummed the glass with his fingertips. But the night was so dark, the shadows outside hulked in such peculiar shapes, that he felt ill at ease and unthinkingly returned to the room in which Angèle lay dying. He had forgotten her, and it came as a horrible shock to find her sitting propped up against the pillows. Her eyes were wide open, and life seemed to have flooded back into her cheeks and lips. Little Clotilde, still clutching her doll, had sat down on the edge of the bed. The moment her father’s back was turned, she had hastily slipped into the bedroom from which she had been banished earlier, drawn there by the childish curiosity that was the source of all her joy. Saccard, his head still filled with his sister’s story, saw his dream dashed. A dreadful thought must have glared in his eyes. Angèle, seized by terror, tried to shrink back into the bed, pressing herself against the wall; but death had arrived, and this awakening in the throes of agony was only the final flaring up of the lamp before it went out for good. The dying woman could not move. She collapsed, still staring at her husband with wide-open eyes, as if to follow his movements. Saccard, who for a moment thought that fate had contrived some diabolical resurrection in order to keep him mired in misery, felt reassured on seeing that the wretched woman would be dead within the hour. Now all he felt was an intolerable malaise. Angèle’s eyes told him that she had overheard his conversation with Mme Sidonie and was afraid he would strangle her if she did not die quickly enough. Her eyes also expressed the horrified amazement of a sweet and inoffensive nature in its final hour recognizing the world’s infamy and shuddering at the thought of having spent long years at the side of a bandit. Little by little her eyes softened. She was no longer afraid, and she must have taken her wretched husband’s long and unremitting struggle against fate as the basis of an excuse. Saccard, pursued by the dying woman’s stare, which he read as a reproach, leaned against the furniture and groped for the shadows. Then, feeling faint, he sought to banish the nightmare that was driving him mad and advanced into the light. But Angèle motioned to him not to speak. She continued to stare at him with a look of terrified anguish, now mixed with a promise of forgiveness. At that point he bent down to take Clotilde in his arms and carry her into the other room. With a movement of her lips Angèle stopped him from doing this as well. She insisted that he remain with her. She went gently, without taking her eyes off him, and the paler he grew, the gentler her gaze became. Forgiveness came with her final sigh. She died as she had lived, softly, diffident in death as she had been in life. Saccard stood trembling before those lifeless eyes, which remained open and, inert though they now were, continued to pursue him. Little Clotilde rocked her doll gently on the edge of the sheet so as not to wake her mother.

  By the time Mme Sidonie returned, it was all over. With the deft touch of a woman accustomed to performing this final act, she closed Angèle’s eyes, much to Saccard’s relief. Then, after putting the child to bed, she rapidly tidied up the death chamber. After lighting two candles on the dresser and carefully drawing the coverlet up to the dead woman’s chin, she looked around with a satisfied glance and stretched out in an armchair, where she slept until daybreak. Saccard spent the night in the next room writing letters announcing his wife’s death. From time to time he stopped what he was doing, mused about something else, and jotted down columns of figures on scraps of paper.

  On the night of the burial, Mme Sidonie brought Saccard to her apartment, where important decisions were taken. The clerk made up his mind to send little Clotilde to live with one of his brothers, Pascal Rougon, an unmarried doctor in love with science who made his home in Plassans and who had several times offered to take in his niece in the hope of bringing a little joy to the silence of his scholarly abode. Mme Sidonie impressed on him that he could no longer go on living on the rue Saint-Jacqu
es. She would rent an elegantly furnished apartment for him somewhere near the Hôtel de Ville for a period of one month. She would try to find an apartment in a decent building, so that the furniture would appear to be his. Meanwhile, the furniture from the rue Saint-Jacques apartment would be sold, so as to eliminate the last vestiges of the past. He would use the money to buy a suitable trousseau and clothing. Three days later, Clotilde was entrusted to an elderly lady who happened to be traveling south. And a triumphant Aristide Saccard—with his cheeks now a healthy crimson color and, though fortune had been smiling on him for just three days, with more flesh already on his bones—moved into a charming five-room apartment in an austere and respectable house on rue Payenne in the Marais,10 where he padded about in embroidered slippers. The apartment belonged to a young abbé, who had departed suddenly for Italy with orders to his serving woman to find a tenant. This servant was a friend of Mme Sidonie’s, who had something of a weakness for men of the cloth. She loved priests in the same way she loved women, by instinct, perhaps drawing certain uneasy parallels between cassocks and silk skirts. By this point Saccard was prepared. He composed his role with exquisite art and unflinchingly anticipated the difficulties and delicacies of the situation to which he had committed himself.

  On the terrible night of Angèle’s death, Mme Sidonie faithfully if briefly recounted the calamity that had befallen the Béraud family. Its patriarch, M. Béraud Du Châtel, a tall, elderly man of sixty, was the last in a long and respectable bourgeois line whose pedigree could be traced back farther than that of many a noble clan. One of his ancestors had been a companion of Etienne Marcel.11 In 1793, his father had died on the scaffold 12 after welcoming the Revolution with all the enthusiasm of a bourgeois de Paris in whose veins flowed the city’s revolutionary blood. He himself was one of those Spartan republicans who dreamed of a government of thoroughgoing justice and sage liberty. After a lifetime in the magistracy, where he acquired the rigidity and severity associated with his profession, he resigned as chief judge after the coup d’état of 1851 because he had been unwilling to take part in the kangaroo courts that had discredited French justice by punishing those who had resisted the takeover. Since that time he had lived a withdrawn and solitary existence in his home on the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, almost opposite the Hôtel Lambert. His wife had died young. Some private tragedy, the wound from which was still raw, made his already-grave judicial countenance even gloomier. He had a daughter, Renée, who had been eight when his wife passed away while giving birth to a second girl. The younger child, baptized Christine, had been taken in by one of his sisters, the wife of the notary Aubertot. Renée had been sent off to a convent school. Mme Aubertot, who had no children of her own, loved Christine like a daughter and raised her under her own roof. When her husband died, she returned the girl to her father’s home and lived there as companion to the silent old man and his smiling blonde daughter. Renée was left at boarding school. During school vacations she raised such a ruckus in the house that her aunt heaved a great sigh of relief on returning her to the Dames de la Visitation, in whose custody she had been from the age of eight. She did not leave the convent until she was nineteen, at which time she went to spend the summer with the parents of her good friend Adeline, who owned a fine estate in the Nivernais.13 When she returned home in October, her aunt Elisabeth was surprised to find her in a very pensive mood and profoundly sad. One night she found the girl sobbing into her pillow and writhing on her bed in anguish. In the throes of despair, the child told a heartrending tale: a man of forty, wealthy and married, whose young and charming wife was also staying at the house, had raped her in a field, and she had not dared to defend herself, nor would she have known how. This confession filled Aunt Elisabeth with terror. She blamed herself, as if she felt somehow an accomplice. Her preference for Christine weighed on her mind, and she believed that if she had kept Renée at home, the poor child would not have succumbed. To cope with her remorse, which her tender nature only compounded, she supported the wayward child. She bore the brunt of the father’s anger when the very zealousness of their efforts to conceal the terrible truth from him gave it away. In her alarmed state of anxiety she came up with the strange plan of arranging a marriage, which she hoped would fix everything, calming the wrath of Renée’s father and restoring the child to the ranks of respectable womanhood. She refused to see what was shameful about the plan or to acknowledge its inevitable consequences.

  No one ever found out how Mme Sidonie had got wind of this stroke of fortune. The honor of the Bérauds had moldered in the bottom of her basket along with the overdue bills of the capital’s prostitutes. When she learned of the story, she all but forced her brother on the unfortunate family even as his wife lay dying. Aunt Elisabeth ended up believing that she owed a debt of gratitude to this woman, so gentle, so humble, and so devoted to Renée as to find the unfortunate girl a husband from her own family. The aunt’s first interview with Saccard took place in the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. The city-hall employee, who had come in through the carriage entrance on the rue Papillon, saw Mme Aubertot enter by way of the shop and the hidden staircase and immediately grasped the ingenious contrivance of the two entrances. He was as tactful and polite as could be. He treated the marriage as a business deal, but with the attitude of a man of the world settling a gambling debt. Aunt Elisabeth trembled a good deal more than he. She stammered and did not dare mention the hundred thousand francs she had promised him. It was he who brought up the matter of money, and he did so with the detachment of an attorney discussing the case of a client. In his view, a hundred thousand francs was a ridiculously small sum for Mademoiselle Renée’s prospective husband to bring to the marriage. He laid slight stress on the word “mademoiselle.” M. Béraud Du Châtel, already ill disposed toward his future son-in-law, would be all the more contemptuous if the prospective bridegroom appeared to be impoverished. The judge would accuse him of seducing his daughter for her fortune, and it might even occur to him to make private inquiries. Mme Aubertot, unsettled, not to say alarmed, by Saccard’s calm and polite presentation, lost her head and agreed to double the sum when he let it be known that with anything less than 200,000 francs in his pocket he would never dare to ask for Renée’s hand lest he be mistaken for a contemptible fortune-hunter. The worthy lady departed in a state of considerable confusion, not knowing what to think of a young man capable of such indignation yet willing to enter into such a bargain.

  This first interview was followed by an official visit: Aunt Elisabeth called on Aristide Saccard in his apartment on the rue Payenne, this time on behalf of M. Béraud. The former magistrate had refused to see “that man,” as he referred to his daughter’s seducer, so long as he was not married to Renée, whom he had also banished from his home. Mme Aubertot had full powers to make all the arrangements. She seemed pleased to find the clerk ensconced in such luxurious surroundings, having been afraid that the brother of the rather bedraggled-looking Mme Sidonie might turn out to be a man of no refinement. He greeted her in a sumptuous dressing gown. These were the days when the adventurers who had swept to power in the wake of the December coup, having paid off their debts, flung their worn boots and frayed waistcoats into the sewers, shaved the week’s growth from their faces, and became proper gentlemen. Saccard had at last joined the gang. He now cleaned his nails and daubed himself with priceless powders and perfumes after his bath. He was stylish, and he changed tactics, affecting a prodigious lack of interest in the entire affair. When the old woman brought up the contract, he made a gesture as if to say that the whole thing was of no importance to him. For the past week he had been studying the Code14 and pondering a grave question on which his future freedom to wheel and deal would depend.

  “If you please, let’s dispose of this disagreeable matter of money. . . . My view is that Mademoiselle Renée ought to retain control of her fortune and I of mine. The notary will take care of all that.”

  Aunt Elisabeth approved of this
way of looking at the matter. She had a vague sense that this young man had a grip of iron and felt some trepidation that he might want to lay hands on her niece’s dowry, which was her next order of business.

  “My brother,” she said, “has a fortune consisting mainly of land and houses. He is not inclined to punish his daughter by reducing her share of his estate. He is giving her a property in the Sologne 15 estimated to be worth 300,000 francs, as well as a house in Paris valued at 200,000 francs.”

  Saccard was dazzled. He had not anticipated figures like these. He turned away slightly in order to conceal the rush of blood to his face.

  “That comes to 500,000 francs,” the aunt continued, “but I would be remiss if I hid the fact that the Sologne property yields only two percent.”

  He smiled and again made a gesture indicating lack of interest, signifying that such a consideration could not possibly matter to him since he was declining to dip into his wife’s fortune in any way. Sitting in his armchair, he affected an attitude of charming indifference, absentmindedly balancing his slipper on his toe and seeming to listen purely out of politeness. Mme Aubertot, good soul that she was, spoke with difficulty, choosing her words carefully so as not to give offense.