“I say, how you would have caught it from Adeline, and what a scene she would have made her….”
She did not finish. Maxime and she were screaming. Such was the fine catastrophe of Renée’s lecture on this incident.
Meanwhile Saccard troubled himself not at all about the two children, as he called his son and his second wife. He left them absolute liberty, glad to see them such good friends, whereby the flat was filled with noisy merriment. A singular apartment, this first floor in the Rue de Rivoli. The doors were slamming to and fro all day long. The servants talked loud; its new and dazzling luxury was continually traversed by a flood of vast, floating skirts, by processions of tradespeople, by the uproar of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s chums and Saccard’s callers. From nine to eleven the last received the strangest set imaginable: senators and bailiffs’ clerks, duchesses and old-clothes-women, all the scum that the tempests of Paris hurled at his door every morning, silk gowns, dirty skirts, blouses, dress-coats, all of whom he received with the same hurried manner, the same impatient, nervous gestures; he clinched bits of business with two words, got rid of twenty difficulties at a time, and gave solutions at a run. One would have thought that this restless little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, and with the furniture, tumbling head over heels, knocking his head against the ceiling to make his ideas flash out, and always falling triumphantly on his feet. Then at eleven o’clock he went out; he was not seen again during the day; he breakfasted out, he often even dined out. From that time the house belonged to Renée and Maxime; they took possession of the father’s study; they unpacked the tradesmen’s parcels there, and articles of finery lay about among the business-papers. Sometimes serious people had to wait for an hour at the study-door while the schoolboy and the young married woman discussed a bow of ribbon, seated at either end of Saccard’s writing-table. Renée had the horses put to ten times a day. They rarely had a meal together; two of the three would be rushing about, forgetting themselves, staying out till midnight. An apartment of racket, of business, and of pleasure, through which modern life, with its noise of jingling gold, of rustling skirts, swept like a whirlwind.
Aristide Saccard was in his element at last. He had revealed himself a great speculator, a brewer of millions. After the masterstroke in the Rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the struggle which was beginning to fill Paris with shameful wreckages and lightning triumphs. He began by gambling on certainties, repeating his first successful stroke, buying up houses which he knew to be threatened with the pickaxe, and utilizing his friends in order to obtain fat compensation. The moment came when he had five or six houses, those houses that he had looked at so curiously, as though they were acquaintances of his, in the days when he was only a poor surveyor of roads. But these were the mere first steps of art. There was no great cleverness wanted to run out leases, conspire with the tenants, and rob the State and individuals; nor did he think the game worth the candle. For which reason he soon made use of his genius for transactions of a more complicated character.
Saccard first invented the trick of making secret purchases of house-property on the city’s account. A decision of the Council of State had placed the Municipality in a difficult position. It had acquired by private contract a large number of houses, in the hope of running out the leases and turning the tenants out without compensation. But these purchases were pronounced to be genuine acts of expropriations, and the city had to pay. It was then that Saccard offered to lend his name to the city: he bought houses, ran out the leases, and for a consideration handed over the property at a fixed date. And he even ended by playing a double game: he acted as buyer both for the Municipality and for the préfet. Whenever the thing was irresistibly tempting, he stuck to the house himself. The State paid. In reward for his assistance he received building concessions for bits of streets, for open spaces, which he disposed of in his turn even before the new thoroughfare was commenced. It was a fierce gamble, the new streets were speculated in as one speculates in stocks and shares. Certain ladies were in the swim, handsome girls, intimately connected with some of the higher functionaries; one of them, whose white teeth are world-renowned, has nibbled up whole streets on more than one occasion. Saccard was insatiable, he felt his greed grow at the sight of the flood of gold that glided through his fingers. It seemed to him as though a sea of twenty-franc pieces extended about him, swelling from a lake to an ocean, filling the vast horizon with a sound of strange waves, a metallic music that tickled his heart; and he grew adventurous, plunging more boldly every day, diving and coming up again, now on his back, then on his belly, swimming through this immensity in fair weather and foul, and relying on his strength and skill to prevent him from ever sinking to the bottom.
Paris was at that time disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The days predicted by Saccard on the Buttes Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed with sabre-cuts, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He had belonging to him demolished houses in every quarter of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astounding story of the pit which was dug by a company in order to carry away five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in gigantic works, and which had afterwards to be filled up, on the failure of the company, by bringing the soil back from Saint-Ouen. Saccard came out of this with an easy conscience and full pockets, thanks to the friendly intervention of his brother Eugène. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont d’Alma. In the direction of Passy it was he who conceived the idea of scattering the refuse of the Trocadero over the high level, so that to this day the good soil is buried two metres below the surface, and the very weeds refuse to grow through the rubbish. He was to be found in twenty places at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a heap of rubbish that no one knew what to do with, a hollow that could not be filled up, a great mass of soil and plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but in which he rummaged with his nails, and invariably ended by finding some bonus or some speculation to his taste. On the same day he ran from the works at the Arc de Triomphe to those at the Boulevard Saint-Michel, from the clearings in the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments at Chaillot, dragging after him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and swindlers.
But his purest glory was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was the official director; he himself only figured as a member of the board. In this connection Eugène had done his brother another good turn. Thanks to him the Government authorized the company and watched over its career with great good nature. On one delicate occasion, when a malignant journal ventured to criticise one of the company’s operations, the Moniteur went so far as to publish a note forbidding any discussion of so honourable an undertaking, one which the State deigned to protect. The Crédit Viticole was based upon an excellent financial system: it lent the wine-growers half of the estimated value of their property, ensured the repayment of the loan by a mortgage, and received interest from the borrowers in addition to installments of the principal. Never was there mechanism more prudent or more worthy. Eugène had declared to his brother, with a knowing smile, that the Tuileries expected people to be honest. M. Toutin-Laroche interpreted this wish by allowing the wine-growers’ loan-office to work quietly, and founding by its side a banking-house which attracted capital and gambled feverishly, launching out into every sort of adventure. Thanks to the formidable impulse it received from its director, the Crédit Viticole soon achieved a well-established reputation for solidity and prosperity. At the outset, in order to offer at the Bourse in one job a mass of shares on which no dividend had yet been paid, and to give them the appearance of having been long in circulation, Saccard had the ingenuity to have them trodden on and beaten, a whole night long, by the bank-messengers, armed with birch-brooms. The place resembled a branch of the Bank of France. The house occupied by the offices, with its courtyard full of private carriages, its austere iron railings, its broad flight of steps and its monumental staircase, its suites of luxurious reception-rooms, its world of clerks and of liveried lackeys, seemed to be the grave, dignified temple of Mammon; and nothing filled the public with a more religious emotion than the sanctuary, the cashier’s office, which was approached by a corridor of hallowed bareness and contained the safe, the god, crouching, embedded in the wall, squat and somnolent, with its triple lock, its massive flanks, its air of a brute divinity.
Saccard