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 himself; stretching out his arm to show Paris to Angèle, who was leaning by his side, he went on:
“Yes, yes, I said so, more than one district will be melted down, and gold will stick to the fingers of those who heat and stir the mortar. That great noodle of a Paris! see how big it is, and how quietly it goes to sleep! What fools, these large towns! It has no suspicion of the army of picks that will fall upon it one of these fine mornings, and certain houses in the Rue d’Anjou would not shine so brightly in the sunset, if they knew that they have only three or four years to live.”
Angèle thought her husband was joking. He sometimes showed a predilection for colossal and disquieting pleasantries. She laughed, but with a vague terror, at the sight of this little man standing erect over the recumbent giant at his feet, and shaking his fist at it while ironically pursing his lips.
“They have begun already,” he continued. “But it is nothing much yet. Look down there, over by the Halles, they have cut Paris into four ….”
And with his hand spread out, open and sharp-edged as a cutlass, he made the movement of separating the city into four parts.
“You mean the Rue de Rivoli and the new boulevard they are building?” asked his wife.
“Yes, the great transept of Paris, as they call it. They’re clearing away the buildings round the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville. That’s mere child’s play! It serves to awaken the public’s appetite…. When the first network is finished the fun will begin. The second network will pierce the city in every direction so as to connect the suburbs with the first. The remains will disappear in clouds of plaster…. Look, just follow my hand. From the Boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, that’s one cutting; then on this side another, from the Madeleine to the Plaine Monceau; and a third cutting this way, another that way, a cutting there, one further on, cuttings on every side, Paris slashed with sabre cuts, its veins opened, giving sustenance to a hundred thousand navvies and bricklayers, traversed by splendid military roads which will bring the forts into the very heart of the old quarters of the town.”
Night was falling. His dry, nervous hand kept cutting through space. Angèle shivered slightly before this living knife, those iron fingers mercilessly slicing up the boundless mass of dusky roofs. During the last moment the haze of the horizon had been descending slowly from the heights, and she fancied she could hear, beneath the gloom that was gathering in the hollows, a distant cracking, as though her husband’s hand had really made the cuttings he spoke of, splitting up Paris from one end to the other, severing beams, crushing masonry, leaving behind it long and hideous wounds of crumbling walls. The smallness of this hand, hovering pitilessly over a gigantic prey, ended by becoming disquieting; and as, without effort, it tore asunder the entrails of the enormous city, it seemed to assume a strange reflex of steel in the blue of the twilight.
“There is to be a third network,” continued Saccard after a pause, as though talking to himself; “that one is too far off yet, I do not see it so distinctly. I have heard only a little about it…. But there will be a sheer orgy, a bacchanal of millions, Paris drunk and overwhelmed!”
He lapsed into silence, his eyes ardently fixed upon the town, over which the shadows were falling more and more deeply. He was apparently interrogating that too-distant future which escaped him. Then night fell, the city became confused, one heard it breathing heavily, like the sea when the eye no longer distinguishes anything but the pale crest of the billows. Here and there a wall still stood out white; and the yellow flames of the gasjets pierced the darkness one by one, like stars lighting up in the blackness of a stormy sky.
Angèle shook off her feeling of uneasiness, and took up the jest that her husband had made at dessert.
“Well,” she said, with a smile, “there has been a fine shower of those twenty-franc pieces! The people of Paris are counting them now. Look at the great heaps they are laying out at our feet!”
She pointed to the streets that run down opposite the Buttes Montmartre, whose gaslights seemed to be heaping up their specks of gold in two rows.
“And over there,” she cried, pointing with her finger to a swarm of stars, “that must be the treasury.”
The jest made Saccard laugh. They stayed a few moments longer at the window, enchanted with this torrent of “twenty-franc pieces,” which had ended by setting light to the whole of Paris. On the road home from Montmartre the surveyor of roads no doubt repented of having spoken so freely. He put it down to the Burgundy, and begged his wife not to repeat the “nonsense” he had been talking; he wanted, he said, to be a serious person. For a long time past Saccard had been studying these three arteries of streets and boulevards, of which he had so far forgotten himself as to lay bare the plan to Angèle with tolerable correctness. When the latter died, he was not sorry to think that she bore with her into the grave his chatter on the occasion of the Montmartre expedition. There lay his fortune, in those famous gaps which his hand had cut out in the heart of Paris, and he had made up his mind to communicate his idea to nobody, well knowing that on the day of the spoil there would be crows enough hovering over the disembowelled city. His first intention had been to get hold cheaply of some building which he would know beforehand to be condemned to speedy demolition, and to realize a big profit by obtaining substantial compensation. He might, perhaps, have gone so far as to make the attempt without a sou, buying the house on credit, and only receiving the difference, as on the Bourse, when his second marriage, bringing him in a premium of two hundred thousand francs, fixed and enlarged his design. Now, his calculations were made; he