“Look for it,” said Eugène.
“You are quite right, I will look for it,” he replied, with entire good humour, appearing not to perceive that his brother declined to supply him with the preliminary capital.
It was the thought of this capital that now worried him. His plan was formed, it matured day by day.
But the first few thousand francs were not to be found. His will became more and more tense; he looked at the people in the streets in a nervous and penetrating manner, as though he were seeking a lender in every wayfarer. At home Angèle continued to lead her subdued and contented existence. He awaited his opportunity; and his genial laughter became more bitter as this opportunity delayed in presenting itself.
Aristide had a sister in Paris. Sidonie Rougon had married at Plassans an attorney’s clerk, and together they had set up business in the Rue Saint-Honoré as dealers in fruit from the South of France. When her brother came across her, the husband had vanished, and the business had long ago disappeared. She was living in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, in a little entresol consisting of three rooms. She also leased the shop on the ground-floor beneath her flat, a narrow and mysterious establishment in which she pretended to carry on a business in lace; and there were, as a matter of fact, in the window some odds and ends of guipure and Valenciennes, hung over gilt rods; but the inside looked like a waiting-room, with a polished wainscotting and not the least sign of goods for sale. The door and window were veiled with light curtains, which sheltered the shop from the gaze of the passersby and completed its discreet and secluded appearance, as of the atrium to some unknown temple. It was a rare thing for a customer to be seen calling on Madame Sidonie; most frequently even the handle was removed from the door. She made it known in the neighbourhood that she waited personally upon wealthy women and offered them her lace. The convenience of the place, she used to say, was her sole reason for hiring the shop and the entresol, which communicated by means of a staircase hidden in the wall. As a matter of fact the lace-woman was always out of doors; she was seen hurrying in and out ten times in a single day. Moreover, she did not confine herself to the lace-trade; she made use of her entresol, filling it up with a stock of things picked up nobody knew where. She had there dealt in gutta-percha goods, waterproofs, goloshes, braces, and the rest; and then followed one after the other a new oil for promoting the growth of the hair, appliances for curing deformities, a patent automatic coffeepot, the working of which had cost her a deal of trouble. When her brother called to see her she was selling pianos; her entresol was crammed with these instruments; there were pianos even in her bedroom, a very coquettishly-furnished room that clashed with the sale-room disorder of the two others. She carried on these two businesses with perfect method; the customers who came for the goods on the entresol came in and went out through a carriage-entrance that led into the house from the Rue Papillon; you had to know the secret of the little staircase in order to be aware of the twofold nature of the lace-woman’s dealings. On the entresol she called herself Madame Touche, her husband’s name, while on the door of the shop she had put only her Christian name, which caused her to be generally known as Madame Sidonie.
Madame Sidonie was thirty-five; but she dressed herself with so little care, and had so little of the woman in her manner, that one would have thought her much older. As a matter of fact she had no age. She wore an everlasting black dress, frayed at the edges, rumpled and discoloured by use, recalling an advocate’s gown worn out by the wear and tear of the bar. Clad further in a black bonnet that came down to her forehead and hid her hair, and a pair of thick shoes, she trotted along the streets, carrying on her arm a little basket whose handles were mended with string. This basket, which never left her, was a world in itself. When she raised the lid there came from it samples of every sort, notebooks, pocketbooks, above all handfuls of stamped documents, the illegible writing on which she was peculiarly adroit at deciphering. She combined the attributes of the bailiff and the commission-agent. She lived among protests, judgment summonses, and orders of court; when she had sold ten francs’ worth of lace or pomade, she would insinuate herself into her customer’s good graces and become her man of business, attending attorneys, advocates, and judges on her behalf. She would thus for weeks hawk about the particulars of a case at the bottom of her basket, taking the devil’s own trouble, going from one end of Paris to the other, with a little even trot, never taking a conveyance. It would have been difficult to say what profit she made from this sort of business; she did it to begin with from an innate taste for shady traffic and a fondness for sharp practice; and then she secured a host of little advantages: dinners on every hand, franc pieces picked up here and there. But after all her most distinct gain lay in the confidences she everywhere received, putting her on the track of good strokes of business and useful windfalls. Living in the homes of others, in the business of others, she was a real walking catalogue of wants and offers. She knew where there was a daughter that had to get married at once, a family that stood in need of three thousand francs, an old gentleman willing to lend the three thousand francs, but on substantial security and at a fat rate of interest. She knew of matters more delicate than these: the sad feelings of a fair-haired lady who was not understood by her husband, and who yearned to be understood; the secret aspirations of a good mother who wished to see her little girl comfortably married; the tastes of a baron keen on little supper-parties and very young girls. And with a pale smile she hawked these wants and offers about; she would do miles on foot to interview people; she sent the baron to the good mother, induced the old gentleman to lend the three thousand francs to the distressed family, found consolation for the fair-haired lady and a not too inquiring husband for the girl that had to get married. She had big affairs on hand too, affairs that she could speak of aloud, pestering everybody who came near her: an interminable lawsuit that a noble but ruined family had employed her to look after, and a debt contracted by England to France in the days of the Stuarts, whose figures, with the compound interest added, ran up to close upon three milliards of francs. This debt of three milliards was her hobby; she explained the case with great wealth of detail, launching out into quite an historical lecture, and a flush of enthusiasm would rise to her cheeks, usually flaccid and yellow as wax. Occasionally, between a visit to bailiff and a call on a friend, she would get rid of a coffeepot, a waterproof, or sell a bit of lace, or place a piano on the hire system. These things gave her the least trouble. Then she would hurry back to her shop, where a customer had made an appointment to inspect a piece of Chantilly. The customer arrived and glided like a shadow into the discreetly-veiled shop. And not infrequently a gentleman would at the same time come in by the carriage-entrance in the Rue Papillon to see Madame Touche’s pianos on the entresol.
If Madame Sidonie failed to make her fortune, it was because she often worked for art’s sake. Loving litigation, neglecting her own business for that of others, she allowed herself to be fleeced by the bailiffs, though this gave her, for the rest, a rapture unknown save to the litigious. All the woman in her vanished; she became a mere man of business, a commission-agent bustling about Paris at all hours, carrying in her fabulous basket the most equivocal articles, selling everything, dreaming of milliards, and appearing in court, on behalf of a favourite client, over a contested matter of ten francs. Short, lean, and sallow, clad in the thin black dress that looked as though it had been cut out of an advocate’s gown, she had shrivelled out of recognition, and to see her creeping along the houses, one would have taken her for an errand-boy dressed up as a girl. Her complexion had the piteous pallor of stamped paper. Her lips smiled an extinct smile, while her eyes seemed to swim in the whirlpool of jobs and preoccupations of every kind with which she stuffed her brains. Her ways, for the rest, were timid and discreet, with a vague reminiscence of the priest’s confessional and the midwife’s closet, and she had the maternal gentleness of a nun who, having renounced all worldly affections, feels pity for the sufferings of the heart. She never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, her personal concerns. There was only one thing that she never sold, and that was her person; not that she had any scruples, but because the