“Think of something else then,” said Eugène.
“I would prefer Sicard simply,” resumed the other after a pause: “Aristide Sicard…. That’s not so bad, is it?…. a little frivolous, perhaps ….”
He thought a moment longer, and then, triumphantly:
“I have it, I’ve found it,” he cried …. “Saccard, Aristide Saccard!…. with two c’s …. Eh! there’s money in that name; it sounds as if you were counting five-franc pieces.”
Eugène’s was a savage type of humour. He dismissed his brother, and said to him with a smile:
“Yes, a name that ought to make either a felon or a millionaire of you.”
A few days later Aristide Saccard was installed at the Hotel de Ville. He learnt that his brother must have had great influence to get him admitted without the usual examinations.
And then the household entered upon the monotonous life of a small clerk. Aristide and his wife resumed their Plassans habits. Only they had fallen from a dream of sudden fortune, and their poverty-stricken existence seemed the heavier to them since they had come to look upon it as a time of probation whose length they were unable to determine. To be poor in Paris is to be doubly poor. Angèle accepted penury with the listlessness of a chlorotic woman; she spent her days in the kitchen, or else lolling on the floor playing with her daughter, never bewailing her lot till the last franc was reached. But Aristide quivered with rage in this poverty, in this narrow existence, in which he turned about like a caged beast. For him it was a period of unspeakable suffering; his pride was wounded to the quick, his unsatisfied cravings goaded him to madness. His brother succeeded in getting elected to the Corps Législatif by the arrondissement of Plassans, and he suffered all the more. He was too conscious of Eugène’s superiority to be foolishly jealous: he accused him of not doing as much as he might have done for him. Time after time he was driven by want to go to him and borrow money of him. Eugène lent him the money, but reproached him roughly for his lack of spirit and willingness. After that Aristide set his back up. He swore he would never ask anybody for a sou, and he kept his word. The last week of each month Aristide ate dry bread and sighed. This apprenticeship completed Saccard’s gruesome training. His lips became still more thin; he was no longer fool enough to dream of millions aloud; his emaciated person became dumb, and expressed but one desire, one fixed idea, that never left his mind. When he trotted from the Rue Saint-Jacques to the Hotel de Ville, his worn heels sounded sharply on the pavement, and he buttoned himself up in his threadbare frockcoat as in an asylum of hatred, while his weasel’s nose sniffed the air of the streets: a jagged symbol of the envious wretchedness that one sees prowling over the pavements of Paris, carrying abroad its plan of fortune and its dream of gratification.
In the early part of 1853, Aristide was appointed a surveying commissioner of roads. His salary was to be four thousand five hundred francs. This increase came in the nick of time: Angèle was in a decline, little Clotilde had lost all her colour. He kept on his scanty lodgings of two small rooms, the dining-room furnished in walnut and the bedroom in mahogany, and continued to lead a harsh existence, avoiding debt, not desiring to touch other people’s money until he was able to plunge his arms into it up to the elbows. He thus belied his instincts, scorning the few additional sous that came to him, remaining on the lookout. Angèle was perfectly happy. She bought herself some things and ate meat every day. She could no longer understand her husband’s suppressed anger, nor the reason why he wore the sombre expression of a man working out the solution of a formidable problem.
Aristide followed Eugène’s advice: he kept his ears and eyes open. When he went to thank his brother for his promotion, the latter observed the change that had taken place in him; he complimented him on what he called his sensible demeanour. The clerk, inwardly hardened by jealousy, had become supple and insinuating. A few months had sufficed to transform him into an admirable comedian. All his Southern ardour had been aroused; and he carried his cunning so far that his fellow-clerks at the Hotel de Ville looked upon him as an inoffensive fellow whom his near relationship to a deputy marked out beforehand for some fat appointment. This relationship secured for him the goodwill also of his superiors. He thus enjoyed a sort of authority above his position, which enabled him to open certain doors and to explore certain receptacles without any blame being attached to his indiscretions. For two years he was seen to roam about all the passages, linger in all the rooms, leave his seat twenty times a day to go and talk to a friend, or carry an instruction, or take a stroll through the offices, endless journeys that caused his colleagues to exclaim, “That devil of a Provençal! he can’t sit still: his legs are always on the move.” His personal friends took him for an idler, and our worthy laughed when they accused him of having but one thought, to despoil the services of a few minutes. He never made the mistake of listening at keyholes; but he had a way of boldly opening a door and walking across a room, with a document in his hand and a preoccupied air, with a step so slow and even that he did not lose a word of the conversation. This was a masterpiece of tactics; people ended by not interrupting themselves when this assiduous clerk passed by them, gliding through the shadows of the offices, and seemingly so wrapt up in his business. He had still one other method; he was extraordinarily obliging, he offered to help his fellow-clerks whenever they dropped into arrears with their work, and he would then study the registers and documents that passed through his hands with meditative fondness. But one of his favourite tricks was to strike up a friendship with the messengers. He went so far as to shake them by the hand. For hours together he would keep them talking between the doors, with little stifled bursts of laughter, telling them stories, drawing them out. The worthy men worshipped him, and said of him, “There’s a man who isn’t haughty.” He was the first to be told of any scandal that might occur. And thus it came about that at the end of two years the Hotel de Ville was an open book to him. He knew every member of the staff down to the least of the lamp-lighters, and every paper down to the laundress’s bills.
The Paris of that period offered a most fascinating study to a man like Aristide Saccard. The Empire had just been proclaimed, after the famous journey in the course of which the Prince-President had succeeded in stirring up the enthusiasm of a few Bonapartist departments. The platform and the press were silent. Society, saved once again, shook hands with itself, took its ease, lay abed of a morning, now that it had a strong government to protect it and relieve it from the trouble of thinking and looking after its interests. The great preoccupation of society was to know with what amusement to kill time. In Eugène Rougon’s happy phrase, Paris had sat down to dinner, and was contemplating bawdiness at dessert. Politics terrified it, like a dangerous drug. Men’s enervated minds turned towards pleasure and speculation. Those who had money brought it forth from its hiding-place, and those who had none sought for forgotten treasures in every nook and cranny. And underneath the turmoil there ran a subdued quiver, a nascent sound of five-franc pieces, of women’s rippling laughter, and the yet faint clatter of plate and murmur of kisses. In the midst of the great silence, the absolute peace of the new reign of order, arose every kind of attractive rumour, of golden and voluptuous promise. It was as if one were passing in front of one of those little houses whose closely-drawn curtains reveal nothing beyond the shadows of women, whence no sound issues but that of the gold on the marble chimney-pieces. The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy-house of Europe. The handful of adventurers who had succeeded in purloining a throne required a reign of adventures, of shady transactions, of sold consciences, of bought women, of rampant and universal drunkenness. And in the city where the blood of December was yet hardly washed away, there sprang up, timidly as yet, that mad desire for dissipation that was destined to drag down the country to the limbo of decayed and dishonoured nations.
From the very beginning Aristide Saccard felt the advent of this rising tide of speculation, whose spume was in the end to cover the whole of Paris. He watched its progress with profound attention. He found himself in the very midst of the hot rain of crown-pieces that fell thickly on to the city’s roofs. In his incessant wanderings across the Hotel de Ville, he had got wind of the vast project for the transformation of Paris, of the plan of those clearances, those new roads and improvised districts, that formidable piece of jobbery in the sale of real property, which gave rise in the four quarters of the town to the conflict of interests and the blaze of luxury