He listened distractedly as his sister pointed out that opinion in the newspapers seemed to be growing a little more favourable towards him. Then, with no transition, and looking at her with the gaze of one newly awakened, he said:
‘Why do you refuse to see him?’
She shuddered, understanding at once that he was speaking of Saccard. With a shake of her head she said no, and again, no. Then he made a decision and said, with embarrassment, in a very low voice:
‘After what he has been to you, you cannot refuse. Go and see him!’
O God! he knew, and, she was suffused with a burning red blush; throwing herself into his arms to hide her face, she stammered at him, asking who could have told him, and how had he learned about this matter that she had thought was quite unknown, and especially, unknown to him.
‘My poor Caroline, a long time ago… Anonymous letters, horrible people who envied us… I never mentioned it to you, you are free, we no longer think the same way… I know you are the best woman on earth. Go and see him.’
And gaily, smiling once more, he took down the little bouquet of roses that he had already slipped behind the crucifix and put it back into her hands, adding:
‘Look, take that to him, and tell him I don’t hold a grudge, either.’
Madame Caroline, overwhelmed by her brother’s pitiful tenderness, and filled with simultaneous feelings of awful shame and delightful relief, resisted no more. Besides, since that morning, she had felt it had become necessary to see Saccard. How could she not inform him of Victor’s flight, and the atrocious events that made her tremble even now? From the very first day, he had listed her among the persons he wished to see; and she had only to speak her name for a warder to lead her at once to the prisoner’s cell.
When she entered, Saccard had his back to the door, sitting at a little table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. He stood up quickly and gave a cry of joy.
‘You!… Oh, how kind of you, and how happy I am!’
He had clasped her hand between his two hands, and she smiled, looking embarrassed, very moved, and unable to find the right thing to say. Then, with her free hand, she placed her little two-sous bouquet on the table, among the papers covered with figures that littered its surface.
‘You are an angel,’ he murmured in delight, kissing her fingers. At last she spoke:
‘It’s true, it was all over, and I had condemned you in my heart. But my brother wanted me to come.’
‘No, no, don’t say that! Say that you are too intelligent, too kind, that you’ve understood, and forgiven me…’
She interrupted him with a gesture.
‘I beseech you, don’t ask that much of me. I don’t know myself… Isn’t it enough that I’ve come?… And besides, I have to let you know about something very bad.’
Then at once, in a low voice, she told him of the reawakening of Victor’s savagery, his attack on Mademoiselle de Beauvilliers, his extraordinary, inexplicable flight, the uselessness, so far, of all the searches, and the little hope there was now of ever finding him again. He listened, astonished, without a question, without a gesture, and when she fell silent, his eyes overflowed with two big tears, that streamed down his cheeks while he stammered out:
‘The wretched boy… the wretched boy…’
She had never before seen him cry. She was deeply moved and amazed, so strange were these tears of Saccard’s, grey and heavy, as if they had come a long way, from a heart hardened and clogged by years of knavery. And then suddenly, he burst out in noisy despair.
‘But it’s terrible, I’ve never even embraced him, this lad… For you know I haven’t seen him. My God! Yes, I had sworn to go and see him, and I never had the time, not a single free hour, with those accursed business affairs consuming me… Ah, it’s always like that, when you don’t do something straight away, you can be certain you’ll never do it. And now, are you sure I can’t see him? Someone could bring him here.’
She shook her head.
‘Who knows where he is now, in the unknown depths of this terrible Paris!’
For a moment Saccard again walked about furiously, throwing out scraps of phrases.
‘That child is found for me, and what do I do, but lose him… I shall never see him. You see! I just have no luck, no, no luck at all! Oh, great Heavens! It’s the same story as for the Universal.’
He had sat down again at the table, and Madame Caroline took a chair facing him. And now, with his hands riffling through the papers in the whole voluminous dossier he had been preparing for months, he began to unfold the history of the trial, and to expound his mode of defence, as if he felt the need to persuade her of his innocence. The case against him rested on: the perpetual increasing of the capital to create a fever in the share-prices, and make people believe that the bank was in possession of the whole of its funds; the simulation of subscriptions and payments that had not in fact been made, thanks to the accounts opened for Sabatani and other frontmen, whose payments were no more than accountancy-juggling; the distribution of fictitious dividends, in the form of releases of old shares; and finally, the bank’s buying of its own shares, a whole frenzy of speculation, which had produced an extraordinary and artificial rise, by which the Universal had been drained of money, and killed. To all this he responded with abundant and passionate explanations: he had done what any general manager of a bank does, only he had done it on the grand scale, with the vigour of a forceful man. There was not one of the heads of the most prosperous banks of Paris who did not deserve to share his cell, if anyone had thought to use a little logic. He was being made the scapegoat for the illegalities of all. Besides, what a strange way of assessing the responsibilities! Why were the directors not being prosecuted? The Daigremonts, the Hurets, the Bohains, who, in addition to their fifty thousand francs of attendance fees, received ten per cent on the profits, and had a hand in all the jiggerypokery? And why was there total impunity for the auditors, Lavignière among others, who got away with just alleging incompetence, and claiming their good faith? Of course, this trial was going to be the most monstrous iniquity, for Busch’s charge of embezzlement had had to be set aside for making unsubstantiated allegations, and the expert’s report, after a preliminary examination of the bank’s books, was discovered to be full of errors. So why should bankruptcy have been officially declared as a result of these two documents, when not a sou of the deposits had been embezzled, and all the clients were going to recover their funds? Was it then that they just wanted to ruin the shareholders? If so, they had succeeded, the disaster was growing steadily worse, spreading ever more widely. And it was not he who was to blame for all this; it was the magistrates, the government, all those who had plotted to suppress him and kill the Universal.
‘Ah, the scoundrels! If they had left me free, you’d have seen, you’d have seen!’
Madame Caroline gazed at him, marvelling at his insouciance which was really beginning to acquire a certain grandeur. She recalled his old theories: the need for speculation in all great enterprises, in which fair remuneration is impossible; speculation seen as human excess, the necessary fertilizer, the compost on which progress grows. Wasn’t it he who, with his unscrupulous hands, had madly heated the enormous engine until it burst into fragments and wounded all those it was carrying along with it? And wasn’t he the one who had wanted that idiotic, crazily exaggerated share-price of three thousand francs? A company with a capital of one hundred and fifty millions, whose three hundred thousand shares, quoted at three thousand francs each, represented nine hundred millions, how could that be justified? Wasn’t there a fearful danger in the distribution of the colossal dividend required by such a sum, even at the rate of five per cent?
But Saccard had stood up and was striding restlessly back and forth, like a great conqueror shut in a cage.
‘Ah, the scoundrels, they knew what they were doing when they chained me up like this… I was about to triumph, about to crush them all…’
‘What do you m
ean, triumph? You didn’t have a sou left, you were defeated!’
‘Of course,’ he went on, bitterly, ‘I was defeated, so I’m a villain… Honesty and glory belong only to success. You mustn’t let yourself be beaten, otherwise you find that overnight you’ve become an idiot and a crook… Oh, I can guess what people are saying, you don’t need to tell me! Isn’t it this? They call me a robber, accuse me of having pocketed all those millions, they’d cut my throat if they could get hold of me; and what is worse, they shrug their shoulders in pity, as if I were just a madman, of little intelligence… But if I had succeeded, can you imagine? Yes, if I had brought down Gundermann, and conquered the market, if I were now the undisputed king of gold, eh? What a triumph! I’d be a hero, I’d have Paris at my feet!’
She flatly disagreed.
‘You could not succeed, you had neither justice nor logic on your side.’
He had stopped brusquely, facing her angrily.
‘Couldn’t succeed! Come now! I didn’t have enough money, that’s all. If Napoleon at Waterloo had had another hundred thousand men to send out to get killed, he would have won, and the face of the world would have been changed. And I, if I had had the few hundreds of millions I needed, to throw into the abyss, I would be the master of the world.’
‘But that’s awful!’ she cried, in revulsion. ‘What? You think there’s not been enough ruin, tears, and blood? You’d have yet more disasters, more families robbed, more wretched people reduced to begging in the streets!’
He took up once more his violent marching about, and with a gesture of superiority and indifference, he cried:
‘As if life bothered about such matters! With every step we take, we destroy thousands of existences.’
At this, a silence fell, and she walked behind him, her heart quite chilled. Was he a villain? Was he a hero? She shuddered, wondering what thoughts, as of a great captain defeated and reduced to impotence, he might have been harbouring during the six months he had been shut up in this cell; and only then did she cast a glance around her, and see the four bare walls, the little iron bed, the white wood table, the two chairs with straw seats. And he had lived a life of such extravagant and dazzling luxury!
But suddenly he went and sat down again, as if his legs had given way in weariness. And he spoke quietly, at some length, making a sort of involuntary confession.
‘Gundermann was right, absolutely: it’s no good at all being excitable at the Bourse… Ah, the scoundrel, how lucky he is, to have neither blood nor nerves any more, unable to sleep with a woman or drink a bottle of burgundy! Besides, I think he’s always been like that, his veins are full of ice… But I am too passionate, that’s for sure. That’s the reason for my defeat, and that’s why I have so often been brought down… But it must be added that if my passion kills me, it’s also my passion that keeps me alive. Yes, it carries me away, lifts me up, carries me very high, then brings me down and suddenly destroys all it has accomplished. Enjoyment is perhaps only a devouring of oneself… Certainly, when I think of those four years of struggle, I can see what has betrayed me; it’s all the things I have desired, all that I have possessed… it must be incurable, all that. I’m done for.’
Then he was seized with rage against his conqueror.
‘Ah! that Gundermann, that dirty Jew, he triumphs because he has no desires… He is like all of Jewry, that cold and obstinate conqueror, marching towards royal sovereignty over the whole world, among nations bought, one after the other, by the omnipotence of gold. For centuries now that race has been invading us and triumphing over us, in spite of being kicked on the backside and spat upon. Gundermann already has one billion, he’ll have two, he’ll have ten, he’ll have a hundred, one day he will be master of the earth… I have gone on shouting this from the rooftops for years, but nobody seems to listen, people think it’s just a speculator’s rancour, when it’s the cry of my very blood. Yes, hatred of the Jew is a part of me, from way back, in the very roots of my being!’
‘What an extraordinary thing!’ Madame Caroline murmured quietly, with her vast knowledge and universal tolerance. ‘For me, the Jews are just men like any others. If they are apart, it’s because that’s where they’ve been put.’
Saccard, who had not even heard, went on with increasing violence:
‘And what exasperates me is that I see governments in complicity with them, governments at the very feet of these beggars. Even the Empire has been sold to Gundermann! As if it wasn’t possible to rule without Gundermann’s money! And certainly Rougon, that great man, my brother, has behaved in a truly disgusting way towards me; for I haven’t told you, I was cowardly enough to seek a reconciliation with him before disaster struck, and if I am here, it’s because that’s what he wanted. Never mind! Since I’m an embarrassment to him, let him get rid of me! The only thing I’ll really blame him for is his alliance with those dirty Jews… Have you thought of that? The Universal strangled, so that Gundermann can carry on with his trade! Every Catholic bank, if it’s too powerful, is crushed, as if it were a danger to society, to ensure the definitive triumph of Jewry, which will devour us all, and soon!… Ah! Rougon should be careful! He will be the first to be eaten, swept away from that power to which he clings, and for which he is betraying everything. It’s very cunning, that balancing-act of his, giving pledges one day to the liberals, and next day to the authoritarians; but in that game you inevitably end up breaking your neck… And since everything is cracking up, let Gundermann’s desire be fulfilled, he who predicted that France would be beaten if we had a war with Germany! We’re ready, the Prussians have only to walk in and take over our provinces.’*
With a terrified and supplicating gesture, she made him stop, as if he risked bringing a thunderbolt down on his head.
‘No, no, do not say such things. You have no right to say these things… Besides, your arrest is nothing to do with your brother. I know from a sure source that it was Delcambre, the Keeper of the Seals, who did it all.’
Saccard’s anger suddenly subsided, and he smiled.
‘Oh, he’s just taking his revenge.’
She looked at him with a questioning air, and he added:
‘Yes, it’s an old story between us… I know in advance that I shall be condemned.’
She no doubt suspected what the story was, for she did not insist. There was a brief silence, during which he again took up the papers on the table, entirely absorbed once more in his obsessive idea.
‘It was very nice of you to come, dear friend, and you must promise me you’ll come back, because you give good advice, and I want you to look at some plans for me. Ah, if only I had money!’
She quickly interrupted him, seizing the opportunity to clarify a point that had been haunting and tormenting her for months. What had he done with the millions he must possess for his own shares? Had he sent them abroad, or buried them at the foot of some tree known only to him?
‘But you have money! The two millions from the Sadowa affair, and the nine millions from your three thousand shares, if you sold them at the three-thousand share-price.’
‘Oh, my dear, but I don’t have a sou!’
And that was said in a voice so clear and despairing, and he looked at her with such an air of surprise, that she was convinced it was true.
‘I have never made a sou in business affairs that have turned out badly… I ruin myself, you see, along with the rest… Certainly, yes, I sold, but I bought back too; and where they went, the nine million, along with two other million, I’d find it very difficult to explain clearly… I rather think my account with poor Mazaud ended with me owing him thirty to forty thousand francs… Not a sou left, a clean sweep, as ever!’
She was so relieved to hear this, so cheered, that she joked about their own ruin, the ruin of her brother and herself.