Ever since, Saccard had no doubt been nurturing a vague plan, and this, once he was installed as a tenant in the Orviedo mansion, took on the sharp clarity of a desire. Why shouldn’t he devote himself entirely to administering the charitable works of the Princess? In this period of doubt and uncertainty, defeated in the world of speculation and not knowing what kind of fortune he could rebuild, this seemed to him like a new incarnation, a sudden soaring apotheosis: becoming the dispenser of this royal charity, channelling this flow of gold pouring over Paris. There were still two hundred millions left; what great new works could yet be created, what miracle city could be brought forth from the ground? Besides, he would be able to make those millions bear fruit, he could double, even triple them, would use them so well that he would create a whole world out of them. Then, with his usual passion, it all grew bigger and bigger, and he now lived for the intoxicating idea of spreading those millions in endless charities, pouring them out over a joyful France; and he grew sentimental, for he was scrupulously honest and not a penny of it stuck to his fingers. In the head of this visionary, it was a gigantic idyll, the idyll of an unreflecting man free of any wish to redeem his former financial piracy. All the more so in that this, after all, was his life-long dream, the conquest of Paris. To be the king of charity, the god adored by the masses of the poor, to become unique and popular, to make the world take notice of him—this even went beyond his ambitions. What prodigies could he not achieve if he were to employ in being good all his businessman’s talents, his cunning, his determination, his total lack of prejudice! And he would have that irresistible power that wins battles—money, coffers full of money, money that often does so much harm, but would do so much good if all one’s pleasure and pride lay in the act of giving.
Then, in a further enlargement of his plan, Saccard even started to wonder whether he might marry the Princess d’Orviedo. That would stabilize their position and put an end to undesirable interpretations. For a whole month he manoeuvred skilfully, presented superb plans, and felt he had made himself indispensable; then one day, very calmly, quite ingenuous once more, he made his suggestion and outlined his great plan. It was a genuine partnership he was offering, he would become the liquidator of the money stolen by the Prince, and he promised to return it, tenfold, to the poor. The Princess meanwhile, in her everlasting black dress with her lace scarf on her head, listened attentively, with no trace of emotion on her yellowish face. She was very struck by the advantages that might derive from such a partnership, and quite indifferent to any other considerations it might involve. She put off her reply to the next day, and in the end refused; she had no doubt reflected that she would no longer be sole mistress of her charities, and she meant to have sovereign and absolute power to dispense them just as she wished, even foolishly. However, she explained that she would be happy to keep him as her adviser, and showed how precious his collaboration seemed to her by asking him to continue to look after the Work Foundation, of which he was in fact the real director.
For a whole week Saccard was extremely distressed, as at the loss of a cherished idea; not that he felt himself sinking back into the abyss of brigandage, but just as a sentimental song will bring tears to the eyes of even the most abject drunkard, the colossal idyll of the good to be done with millions and millions had really touched his old pirate’s soul. Here he was, falling down again, and from a great height, as if dethroned. Through money he had always wanted not just to satisfy his appetites but to have all the magnificence of a princely life; and never had he achieved it, never reached high enough. He grew more and more angry as each new fall carried away yet another hope. So when his plans collapsed in the face of the Princess’s calm and clear refusal, he found himself cast back into a furious longing for battle. To fight, to win in the hard battle of speculation, to devour others before they could devour you—this, after his thirst for splendour and enjoyment, this was the driving force, the sole cause of his passion for business. He was not a hoarder, his joy lay elsewhere, in the battle of the big numbers, fortunes deployed like battalions, the clash of opposing millions, the defeats and victories, this was what intoxicated him. And all at once his hatred for Gundermann rose again to the surface, along with his fevered need for revenge: to bring down Gundermann, that wild desire possessed him whenever he found himself brought low and defeated. Even if he recognized the childishness of such an enterprise, couldn’t he at least damage him a little, make a place for himself, facing the man and forcing him to a sharing of power, like those monarchs of neighbouring countries of equal might who treat each other as cousins? It was then that he was again attracted by the Bourse, his head full of new business ventures, pulled in every direction by contradictory plans, in such a fever that he didn’t know what to decide on until the day when one supreme, wildly extravagant idea detached itself from the rest and gradually took possession of him.
While living at the Orviedo mansion Saccard from time to time saw the sister of Hamelin, the engineer who lived in the little apartment on the second floor, a splendid figure of a woman, Madame Caroline as she was familiarly known. What had struck him above all at their first encounter was her superb white hair, a royal crown of white hair which created such a curious effect on the brow of this still young woman, barely more than thirty-six at most. It had gone completely white when she was only twenty-five. Her eyebrows, which had remained black and quite thick, kept their youthfulness, and gave a lively oddity to her ermine-framed face. She had never been pretty, with too strong a chin and nose and a wide mouth with full lips that seemed to express an exquisite kindness. But certainly that white fleece, that fly-away whiteness of fine silky hair, softened her otherwise slightly hard features and gave her the smiling charm of a grandmother, along with the freshness and strength as of a beautiful woman in love. She was tall and solidly built, and she walked with naturalness and nobility.
Every time he saw her, Saccard, who was shorter than she was, followed her with his eyes with some interest, and secret envy of that tall, broad-shouldered figure. And gradually, through the servants, he got to know the whole history of the Hamelins. They were, Caroline and Georges, the children of a Montpellier doctor, a notable scholar and fervent Catholic who had died leaving nothing. When the father passed away, the daughter was eighteen and the son nineteen; and as the latter had just started at the École Polytechnique* his sister followed him to Paris, where she found a post as a teacher. It was she who slipped him the odd hundred-sou coin, and kept him in pocket-money over the two years of his course. Later, when he graduated with a rather poor degree, he had a hard time of it looking for work and it was his sister, once more, who kept him going until he found a job. These two children adored each other, and it was their dream to stay together always. However, when an unexpected marriage presented itself, the grace and lively intelligence of the young woman having conquered a millionaire brewer in the house where she was working, Georges urged her to accept, advice he cruelly regretted when, after a few years of marriage, Caroline had to demand a separation to avoid being killed by her husband, who drank, and chased her with a knife during fits of imbecile jealousy. She was then twenty-six and poor once more, since she had obstinately refused to ask for any allowance from the man she was leaving. By then her brother, after many attempts, had at last found a post that suited him; he was going to leave for Egypt, with the Commission set up to make the first studies for the Suez Canal, and he took his sister with him. She bravely settled in Alexandria and started giving lessons again, while he travelled around the country. In this way they remained in Egypt until 1859 and witnessed the first strokes of the pickaxe on the beach of Port Said:* a meagre crew of barely a hundred and fifty navvies, lost amid the sands, with a handful of engineers in command. Then Hamelin was sent to Syria to ensure the supply of provisions, and remained there after a quarrel with his bosses. He sent for Caroline to come to Beirut, where she found further pupils while he launched himself into a huge project, under the aegis of a French comp
any, laying out the route for a carriageable road from Beirut to Damascus, the first, indeed the only road through the gorges of the Lebanon range;* there they lived for three more years until the road was finished, while he made trips into the mountains and spent two months away in Constantinople, across the Taurus range,* while she would follow as soon as she could get away, embracing the plans of reawakening that her brother was making as he tramped around this ancient land slumbering beneath the ashes of dead civilizations. He had gathered together a whole portfolio overflowing with ideas and plans, and now felt an urgent need to return to France if he was going to put some flesh on his vast collection of undertakings, forming companies and finding capital. And after a stay of nine years in the East, they left, and curiosity led them to return through Egypt, where the work on the Suez Canal filled them with enthusiasm: in four years a town had sprung up in the sands of the beach of Port Said, an entire population was busily at work, the human ants had multiplied and were changing the face of the earth. But back in Paris some serious ill-fortune awaited Hamelin. For fifteen months he had been struggling with his projects, unable to communicate his confidence to anyone, being too modest and not much of a talker, and so ending up in this second floor of the Orviedo mansion, in a little five-room apartment rented for twelve hundred francs, even further from success than when he was roaming the mountains and plains of Asia. The savings of brother and sister were rapidly dwindling, and they were beginning to face real hardship.
It was this, in fact, that captured Saccard’s attention, the increasing sadness of Madame Caroline, her lovely gaiety darkened by the discouragement she saw settling over her brother. It was she who seemed to be the man of the house. Physically Georges was very like her, but in a frailer version and with exceptional faculties for study; but he was absorbed in his books, and there was no getting him out of them. He had never wished to marry, feeling no need for that—just adoring his sister was enough for him. He probably had occasional mistresses, though nobody knew them. This former researcher of the École Polytechnique, with such vast ideas, such ardent zeal in everything he undertook, sometimes displayed such naivety that he might have been thought stupid. Brought up in the strictest Catholic faith, he had retained the religious beliefs of a child and practised his faith with great conviction, while his sister had revised her views through her immense reading and all the vast learning she had acquired while her brother was deep in his technical works. She spoke four languages and had read the economists and philosophers, quite carried away for a while by socialist and evolutionist theories; but she had steadied herself; and thanks especially to her travels and her long sojourns among distant civilizations, she had acquired great tolerance and a fine and balanced common sense. Although no longer a believer herself, she retained respect for her brother’s faith. They had had the matter out between them, and after that never mentioned it again. In her simplicity and kindliness she was a woman of real intelligence; with an extraordinary zest for living, a joyfully brave spirit that withstood the cruelties of fate, she would sometimes say that the one grief she still felt keenly was that of never having had a child.
Saccard was able to do Hamelin a service, procuring a small job for him for some business partners who needed an engineer for a report on the profitability of a new machine. This carried him into the intimate world of the brother and sister; he often went up to spend an hour with them in their living-room, their one large room, which they had converted into a workroom. It was still utterly bare, furnished only with a long designer’s table, another smaller table loaded with papers, and half-a-dozen chairs. Books were piled up on the mantelpiece. But on the walls an improvised decoration-scheme cheered up the emptiness with a series of maps and a set of bright watercolours, each piece of paper tacked up with four nails. It was his portfolio of projects that Hamelin had displayed there, the notes he had taken in Syria, the whole of his future fortune; and the watercolours were by Madame Caroline, views from back there, and typical figures and costumes, things she had observed and sketched while accompanying her brother, with her own very individual approach as a colourist and quite without pretentiousness. Two wide windows overlooking the garden of the Beauvilliers mansion threw a brilliant light over this proliferation of drawings, evoking a quite other life, the dream of an ancient society crumbling into dust, that the firm mathematical lines of the technical drawings seemed to be trying to set upright again, supported by the solid scaffolding of modern science. When he had made himself useful, with that eager energy that was part of his charm, Saccard would linger, especially captivated by the maps and watercolours, forever asking for more information about them. In his head the launching of a vast enterprise was already germinating.
One morning he found Madame Caroline alone, sitting at the little table she used as her desk. She was dreadfully sad, her hands lying idle among the papers.
‘What can one do? Things are going really badly… not that I’m faint-hearted, but we are going to find ourselves lacking everything all at once; and what distresses me is the helplessness to which misfortune is reducing my brother, for he has courage and strength only for his work… I had thought of finding myself a position as a teacher again, just to be able at least to be some help. But I’ve looked around and found nothing… And I can’t start working as a cleaner.’
Never had Saccard seen her so disconcerted, so cast down.
‘Good heavens, no! It hasn’t come to that!’ he cried.
She shook her head, showing some bitterness towards life, life that she normally accepted so cheerfully, even when it was unkind. And as Hamelin came in just then, bringing news of his most recent setback, large, slow tears began to fall and she said no more, sitting with clenched fists at her table, her eyes staring into space.
‘And to think’, Hamelin muttered, ‘that back there millions are waiting for us, if only someone would help me to make them.’
Saccard had planted himself in front of a drawing showing the plan of a house in the middle of vast warehouses.
‘What is this?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I was just amusing myself,’ the engineer explained. ‘It’s the plan for a house back there in Beirut for the director of the company I dreamed of, you know, the General United Steamboat Company.’
Warming to the subject, he gave some new details. During his stay in the East he had observed how poor the transport services were. The few companies involved, based in Marseilles, were ruining each other with competition, unable to provide adequate and comfortable vessels; one of his first ideas, which was the very basis of the whole of his ventures, was to syndicate these companies, form them into one huge company with a capital of millions, which would exploit the whole Mediterranean area, over which it would have sovereign control, setting up shipping lines to all the ports of Africa, Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Asia right up to the edge of the Black Sea. The whole scheme showed him to be a very shrewd organizer and a great patriot: this was the East conquered and given to France, not to mention that he was also drawing closer to Syria, where his vast field of operations would unfold.
‘Syndicates,’ murmured Saccard, ‘that’s where the future seems to lie today… It is such a powerful form of association! Three or four small enterprises which on their own just vegetate gain an irresistible vitality and prosperity if they join forces… Yes, tomorrow belongs to huge amounts of capital and the centralized efforts of great masses. All industry and commerce will end up as one single, immense market, supplying everything.’
He had come to a stop once more, this time before a watercolour representing a wild area, an arid gorge, blocked by a gigantic pile of rocks covered with bushes.
‘Oh, oh!’ he went on. ‘Now this is the uttermost end of the world. No risk of being jostled by passers-by in that place.’
‘One of the Carmel gorges,’ Hamelin said in reply, ‘my sister painted that, while I was studying the area.’
Then he simply added:
‘Between the cretace
ous limestone and the porphyries that have pushed up the limestone, over the whole side of the mountain there is a considerable deposit of silver sulphite—oh yes, a silver mine, whose exploitation, according to my calculations, would guarantee enormous profits.’
‘A silver mine,’ Saccard repeated eagerly.
Madame Caroline, her eyes still focused far away in her sadness, had heard this, and it was as if a vision had been called up:
‘Carmel, ah! What a desert, what days of solitude! It’s full of myrtle and broom, and smells so good, the warm air is perfumed with their sweet scent. And eagles forever glide high overhead… But all that silver, sleeping in that tomb, alongside such poverty! One would like to see happy crowds of people, building-work going on, towns being born, and an entire people regenerated by work.’
‘A road could easily be opened from Carmel to Saint-Jean-d’Acre,’ Hamelin went on, ‘and I believe iron would also be discovered, for there’s a lot of it in the mountains of that area… I’ve also been studying a new method of extraction which would allow considerable savings to be made. Everything is ready, it’s just a matter of finding the capital.’
‘The Carmel Silver Mines Company,’ murmured Saccard.
But it was the engineer now who was looking up, going from one map to another, once more in the grip of this, his life’s work, and feverishly thinking of the dazzling future slumbering there, paralysed by lack of money.
‘And these are just the small things to start off with,’ he continued. ‘Look at this series of maps, this is the big project, an entire railway system* running across Asia Minor from one end to the other… The lack of convenient and rapid communications is the primary cause for the stagnation in which this country, with all its riches, is sunk. You wouldn’t find a single carriageable highway there; every journey and all the transport has to be made by mule or camel… So just imagine what a revolution it would be if railway lines ran right up to the edges of the desert! Industry and commerce would be increased tenfold, civilization would triumph, Europe would at last open up the gates to the Orient… Oh, if it’s of interest to you we can talk about it in detail. And you’ll see! You’ll see!’