She held out her hand with a gesture of suppressed mortification.
“Very well,” she said, curtly, “give me back the bill. I will think it over.”
“I see you don’t believe me,” murmured Saccard, taking pleasure in his wife’s incredulity on the subject of his embarrassment as though in a personal triumph. “I don’t say that my position is threatened, but business is very shaky at present…. Allow me, although I may seem insistent, to explain to you how we stand; you have confided your dowry to me, and I owe you complete frankness.”
He laid the bill on the mantel, took up the tongs, and began to stir the fire. This passion for raking the cinders while talking business was with him a system that had ended by becoming a habit. Whenever he came to an irksome figure or phrase, he brought about a subsidence which subsequently he laboriously built up, bringing the logs together, collecting and heaping up the little splinters. At another time he almost disappeared into the fireplace in search of a stray piece of charcoal. His voice grew indistinct, you grew impatient, you became interested in his cunning constructions of glowing firewood, you omitted to listen to him, and as a rule you left his presence beaten and satisfied. Even at other people’s houses he despotically took possession of the tongs. In summer-time he played with a pen, a paper-knife, a penknife.
“My dear,” he said, giving a great blow that sent the fire flying, “I once more beg your pardon for entering into these details…. I have punctually made over to you the interest on the money you placed in my hands. I can even say, without hurting your feelings, that I have only looked upon that interest as your pocket-money for your private disbursements, and that I have never asked you to contribute your share to the common household expenses.”
He paused. Renée suffered, as she watched him making a large hole in the cinders to bury the end of a log. He was approaching a delicate confession.
“I have had, you understand, to make your money pay a high interest. You can be easy, the principal is in good hands…. As to the amounts coming from your property in the Sologne, they have partly gone to pay for the house we live in; the remainder is invested in an excellent company, the Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco…. We have not got to settle accounts yet, have we? But I want to show you that we poor husbands are sometimes not half appreciated.”
A powerful motive must have impelled him to lie less than usual. The truth was that Renée’s dowry had long ceased to exist; it had become a fictitious asset in Saccard’s safe. Although he paid out interest on it at the rate of two or three hundred per cent, or more, he could not have produced the least security or found the smallest solid particle of the original capital. As he half confessed, moreover, the five hundred thousand francs of the Sologne property had been used to pay a first installment on the house and the furniture, which together cost close upon two millions. He still owed a million to the upholsterer and the builders.
“I make no claim on you,” Renée said at last; “I know I am very much in your debt.”
“Oh, my dear,” he cried, taking his wife’s hand, without relinquishing the tongs, “what a horrid thing to say!… Listen, in two words, I have been unlucky on the Bourse, Toutin-Laroche has made a fool of himself, and Mignon and Charrier are a pair of crooks who have taken me in. And that is why I can’t pay your bill. You forgive me, don’t you?”
He seemed genuinely moved. He dug the tongs in among the logs, and made the sparks burst out like fireworks. Renée remembered how restless he had been for some time past. But she was unable to realize the astonishing truth. Saccard had reached the point of having to perform a daily miracle. He resided in a house that cost two millions, he lived on a princely footing, and there were mornings when he had not a thousand francs in his safe. His expenditure did not seem to diminish. He lived upon debt among a race of creditors who swallowed up from day to day the scandalous profits that he realized from certain transactions. In the meantime and at the same moment companies crumbled beneath his feet, new and deeper pits yawned before him, over which he had to leap, unable to fill them up. He thus trod over sapped ground, amid a chronic crisis, settling bills of fifty thousand francs and leaving his coachman’s wages unpaid, marching on with a more and more regal assurance, emptying over Paris with increasing frenzy his empty cashbox, from which continued to flow the golden stream with the fabulous source.
Speculation was passing through a bad period at that moment. Saccard was a worthy offspring of the Hotel de Ville. He had undergone the rapidity of transformation, the frenzy for enjoyment, the blindness to expense that was shaking Paris. He now again resembled the Municipality in finding himself face to face with a formidable deficit which it was necessary secretly to make good; for he would not hear speak of prudence, of economy, of a calm and respectable existence. He preferred to keep up the useless luxury and real penury of those new thoroughfares whence he had derived his colossal fortune, which came into being each morning to be swallowed up at night. Passing from adventure to adventure, he now only possessed the gilded façade of a missing capital. In this period of eager madness, Paris itself did not risk its future with greater rashness or march straighter towards every folly and every trick of finance. The winding-up threatened to be disastrous.
The most promising speculations turned out badly in Saccard’s hands. As he said, he had just written off considerable losses on the Bourse. M. Toutin-Laroche had almost caused the Crédit Viticole to founder through a gamble for a rise that had suddenly turned against him; fortunately the Government, intervening under the rose, had set the famous wine-growers’ mortgage loan-machine on its legs again. Saccard, badly shaken by this sudden blow, seriously upbraided by his brother for the danger that had threatened the delegation bonds of the Municipality, which was involved with the Crédit Viticole, was even still more unfortunate in his speculations in house-property. The Mignon and Charrier pair had broken with him entirely. If he accused them it was because he was secretly enraged at his mistake of having built on his share of the ground while they prudently sold theirs. While they were making their fortune, he was left behind with houses on his hands that he was often unable to dispose of save at a loss. Among others he sold a house in the Rue de Marignan, on which he still owed three hundred and eighty thousand francs, for three hundred thousand francs. He had certainly invented a trick of his own which consisted in asking ten thousand francs a year for an apartment worth eight thousand at most. The terrified tenant only signed a lease when the landlord had consented to forego the first two years’ rent. In this way the apartment was brought down to its real value, but the lease bore the figure of ten thousand francs a year, and when Saccard found a purchaser and capitalized the income from the house, the calculation became an absolute phantasmagoria. He was not able to practise this swindle on a large scale: his houses would not let; he had built them too early; the clearings in which they stood, lost in the mud of winter, isolated them, and considerably reduced their value. The affair that affected him the most was the coarse piece of trickery of the Sieurs Mignon and Charrier, who bought back from him the house on the Boulevard Malesherbes, the building of which he had had to abandon. The contractors were at last smitten with the desire to inhabit “their boulevard.” As they had sold their share of the ground above its value, and suspected the embarrassment of their former partner, they offered to relieve him of the enclosure in the centre of which the house stood completed up to the flooring of the first story, whose iron girders were partly laid. Only they treated the solid freestone foundations as useless rubbish, saying that they would have preferred the ground bare, so as to build on it according to their taste. Saccard was obliged to sell, without taking into account the hundred and odd thousand francs he had already expended, and what exasperated him still further was that the contractors persistently refused to take back the ground at two hundred and fifty francs the metre, the figure fixed at the time of the division. They beat him down twenty-five francs a metre, like those secondhand clothes-women who give only four francs for a thing they have sold for five the day before. Two days later Saccard had the mortification of seeing an army of bricklayers invade the boarded enclosure and go on building upon the “useless rubbish.”
He was thus all the better able to play before his wife at being pressed