‘Come on, my dear, what is making you choke like this? You know I want you to call a doctor. This is just not sensible… you must have been talking too much, for sure.’
And he cast a sidelong glance at Saccard, still standing in the middle of the room, decidedly disturbed by what he had just heard from the mouth of this tall fellow, so passionate and so ill, who from his window up here must be casting a spell over the Bourse with his notions of sweeping everything away and rebuilding.
‘Thanks, I’ll leave you now,’ said the visitor, eager to be outside. Send me my letter, with the ten lines of translation… I’m expecting some more, so we’ll settle the whole lot together.’
But, now the crisis was over, Busch kept him back a moment or two more.
‘By the way, the lady who was here just now had met you before, oh! a long time ago.’
‘Ah! Where was that?’
‘Rue de la Harpe, in ’52.’
Self-controlled as he was, Saccard nevertheless lost colour. A nervous tic twitched at his mouth. It wasn’t that he remembered at that instant the girl he’d tumbled on the staircase: he hadn’t known about her pregnancy, and did not know there was a child. But the memory of those first wretched years was always very disagreeable.
‘Rue de la Harpe. Oh, I only stayed there about a week when I first arrived in Paris, while I looked for somewhere to live… Au revoir!’
‘Au revoir!’ Busch pointedly repeated, mistakenly seeing Saccard’s embarrassment as an admission of guilt, and already thinking about how best to exploit this affair.
Down in the street again Saccard went back automatically towards the Place de la Bourse. He was quite shivery, he did not even look at little Madame Conin, whose pretty blonde face was smiling from the stationer’s door. In the square the commotion had increased, the clamour of trading was beating down on pavements teeming with people with the unfettered violence of a high tide. It was the quarter-to-three shouting-match, the battle of the last calls, the frenzy to find out who would emerge with full pockets. And standing at the corner of the Rue de la Bourse, opposite the peristyle, he thought he saw, in the confused jostling under the columns, the bear-trader Moser and the bull trader Pillerault, both doing battle, and fancied he could hear, emerging from the main hall, the shrill voice of the broker Mazaud, occasionally smothered by great bursts from Nathansohn, who was sitting under the clock in the kerb market. But a carriage going by, on the edge of the gutter, almost splattered him. Massias leaped from it even before the coachman had reined in, and ran up the steps in one bound, breathlessly carrying some client’s last order.
And Saccard, still standing motionless, gazing at the milling crowd up there, was mulling over his life, haunted by the memory of his beginnings reawakened by Busch’s question. He recalled the Rue de la Harpe, then the Rue Saint-Jacques, to which he had dragged his down-at-heel conquering-hero boots when newly arrived in Paris and determined to master it; and fury once more seized hold of him at the thought that he had not yet conquered, that he was once again out on the streets, seeking his fortune, unsatisfied, and tormented by a hunger for gratification such as he had never before experienced so painfully. That madman Sigismond spoke truly: work cannot make a life, the wretched and the stupid labour only to make others grow fat. There was only speculation, speculation which, from one day to the next, could at a stroke give well-being, luxury, an expansive life, life whole and entire. If this old social world had to crumble away one day, wouldn’t a man like him still manage to find the time and place to satisfy his desires before the collapse?
But a passer-by jostled him and didn’t even turn round to apologize. He saw it was Gundermann, taking his little daily constitutional; he watched him go into a sweetshop from which this king of gold frequently bought a one-franc box of sweets for his granddaughters. And that jostling, at that moment, in the fever that had been mounting in him since he started his circling of the Bourse, was like a whiplash, the final decisive thrust. He had finished his siege of the square, he would attack. It was a vow of merciless struggle: he would not leave France, he would defy his brother, he would risk everything in a battle of terrible audacity, which would either lay Paris at his feet or throw him broken into the gutter.
Until the market closed Saccard stayed resolutely at his post of observation and menacing intent. He watched the peristyle emptying and the steps filling with the slow disbanding of all these excited, weary people. Around him the roadway and the pavements were still crowded with an uninterrupted flow of people, the eternal crowd, ready to be exploited, the shareholders of tomorrow, who could not go past this great lottery of speculation without turning their heads, impelled by desire and fear of what went on in there, the mystery of financial transactions, a mystery all the more attractive to French brains since so few of them ever penetrate it.
CHAPTER II
AFTER Saccard’s last disastrous land-deal, when he had to leave his palace in the Parc Monceau, abandoning it to his creditors to avoid an even greater catastrophe, his first idea had been to take refuge with his son Maxime. Maxime, since the death of his wife, who now lay in a little cemetery in Lombardy,* had been living on his own in a mansion on the Avenue de l’Impératrice,* where he had organized his life with a careful and ferocious egoism; as a young man prematurely aged by vice, he was impeccably eating up the fortune of his dead wife, and firmly refused to take his father in, explaining, with an air of sweet reasonableness, that this was so that they could go on living in harmony.
After that Saccard thought of another refuge. He would rent a little house in Passy, a bourgeois retreat for retired businessmen, then he remembered that the ground floor and first floor of the Orviedo mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare were still lying empty, their doors and windows shuttered. The Princess d’Orviedo had been living in three rooms on the second floor since the death of her husband, and she had not even had a sign put up at the carriage entrance, now overgrown with weeds. A low door at the other end of the front of the building led to the second floor by a servants’ staircase. Saccard had frequently been in touch with the Princess over business matters, and had been astonished, on his visits to her, at her failure to try and make some profit out of her building. But she would just shake her head; she had her own ideas on money matters. However, when he suggested himself as a tenant she agreed at once, granting him, for a derisory rent of ten thousand francs, the use of the sumptuous ground floor and first floor, a princely accommodation worth at least double.
People had not forgotten the lavish splendour of the Prince. It was in the feverish excitement of his immense financial fortune, when he first came to Paris from Spain, arriving in a shower of millions, that he had bought this mansion and had it restored, pending the day when he could astonish people with the palace of marble and gold he had in mind. The building dated from the previous century, one of those maisons de plaisance* built in the middle of vast gardens by philandering lords, but it had been partly demolished, then rebuilt in more severe proportions. Of its former park it had kept only a large courtyard surrounded by stables and outbuildings, all of which would surely be carried away by the planned Rue du Cardinal Fesch.* The prince had acquired it as part of the estate of a spinster lady of the Saint-Germain family: her property had once extended right up to the Rue des Trois Frères, the former continuation of the Rue Taitbout. Indeed, the mansion still had its entrance on the Rue Saint-Lazare, right beside a large building of the same era, the Folie-Beauvilliers as it was known, where the Beauvilliers still lived after a period of gradual ruin; and they still owned what was left of an admirable garden, with magnificent trees which were also doomed to disappear in the impending upheaval of the neighbourhood.
In the midst of his disaster Saccard had still dragged along with him a trail of servants, the debris of his over-numerous staff, a valet, a chef, and his wife who looked after the clothes, another woman who was still there for no obvious reason, a coachman and two grooms; and he filled up the stables and the outbu
ildings, putting in two horses and three carriages, and setting up a refectory for his staff on the ground floor. This man, with less than five hundred solid francs in his coffers, was living at the rate of two or three hundred thousand francs a year. He even managed, on his own, to occupy the vast apartments of the first floor, the three drawing-rooms and five bedrooms, not to mention the enormous dining-room with a table seating fifty. Here, at one time, there had been a door opening on to an internal staircase leading to the second floor, and another, smaller dining-room; and as the Princess had recently let that part of the second floor to an engineer, a Monsieur Hamelin, a bachelor who lived with his sister, she had simply had the door sealed off, fastened with two strong screws. She thus shared the old servants’ stairs with this tenant, while Saccard had sole use of the grand staircase. He partly furnished a few rooms with what was left from the Parc Monceau, and left the others empty, but somehow managed to give some life to this long succession of dull bare walls, from which some determined hand seemed, after the death of the Prince, to have torn away even the slightest scraps of covering. And here Saccard was able to start once more his dream of a great fortune.
Princess d’Orviedo was at that time one of the oddities of Paris. Fifteen years ago she had resigned herself to marrying the Prince, whom she did not love, in obedience to the formal command of her mother, the Duchess de Combeville. At the time, this young woman of twenty was renowned for both beauty and good conduct, being deeply religious and a shade too serious, though she adored the social world. She knew nothing of the strange stories circulating about the Prince and the origins of his kingly fortune, estimated at three hundred millions, derived from a lifetime of fearsome robbery, carried out not as an armed man in some remote spot, like the noble adventurers of old, but as a well-dressed modern bandit in the bright sunshine of the Bourse, stealing from the pockets of poor credulous folk, bringing them ruin and death. For twenty years, back in Spain and here in France, the Prince had played the major role in all the great swindles that had become the stuff of legend. Although knowing nothing of the mire and blood in which he had amassed such millions, she had, from their very first meeting, felt a repugnance for him that even her religion had failed to overcome; and soon to that antipathy had been added a dull and growing resentment at having no child from this marriage, to which she had submitted out of obedience. Motherhood would have been enough for her, for she adored children, but she began to hate this man who, after destroying all hope of love, could not even satisfy her maternal longings. It was then that the Princess was seen to throw herself into unheard-of luxury, dazzling Paris with the brilliance of her parties, living in a style of such splendour that it was said to be the envy of the Tuileries.* Then suddenly, the day after the Prince died, struck down by apoplexy, the mansion in the Rue Saint-Lazare had fallen into absolute silence and total darkness. Not a light, not a sound; doors and windows remained closed; and it was rumoured that the Princess, after violently clearing the ground floor and the first floor, had withdrawn like a recluse to three small rooms on the second floor with old Sophie, a former maid of her mother’s, who had brought her up. When she reappeared she was dressed in a simple black wool dress, with a lace scarf over her hair, still small and plump, with her narrow brow, her pretty, round face and pearly teeth between her pursed lips, but already with the yellowish complexion and the impassive, single-minded face of a long-cloistered nun. She had then just turned thirty, and ever since she had lived solely for huge charitable works.
Great was the surprise in Paris, and all sorts of extraordinary stories went around. The Princess had inherited the whole fortune, the famous three hundred million to which entire columns were devoted in the press. And the tale that finally got established was quite romantic. A man, a stranger dressed in black, so the story went, had suddenly appeared in the Princess’s bedroom just as she was preparing for bed, without her ever fathoming by what secret door he had been able to get in; and what this man had told her no one in the world knew; but he must have revealed to her the abominable origins of the three hundred million, perhaps demanding that she swear to make reparation for so much iniquity if she wanted to avoid terrible catastrophes. Then the man had disappeared. Was it then, for the five years since her widowhood, a response to an order from the hereafter, or was it rather the straightforward revolt of her honesty once she had seen the records of her fortune? The truth was that she now lived only in an ardent fever of renunciation and reparation. In this woman who had never been a lover and had been unable to be a mother, all her repressed tenderness, and especially her thwarted love of children, blossomed into a real passion for the poor, the weak, the disinherited, the suffering, all those from whom she felt her millions had been stolen and whom she swore to repay royally, showering them with alms. Ever since, she had been possessed by one idea; obsession had hammered its way into her brain: she thought of herself now only as a banker with whom the poor had deposited the three hundred millions so that they could be put to the best use; she was just an accountant, a business agent living among lists of figures, surrounded by a population of solicitors, workmen and architects. Outside, she had set up a vast office with twenty or so employees. In her own quarters, in her three small rooms, she received only four or five intermediaries, her lieutenants; and she spent her days there at her desk, like the director of a great company, cloistered far from intruders, in an over-flowing heap of papers. Her dream was to relieve every misery, from the child who suffers in being born, to the old man who cannot die without suffering. During these five years, scattering her gold in great handfuls, she had founded the Sainte-Marie Children’s Hospital at La Villette, with white cradles for the littlest and blue beds for the older ones, a vast establishment full of light, already holding three hundred children; then the Saint-Joseph Orphanage at Saint-Mandé, where a hundred boys and a hundred girls were receiving the sort of education and instruction that bourgeois families would provide for their children; and in addition, a home for old people at Châtillon,* housing fifty men and fifty women, and a hospital of two hundred beds in one of the suburbs, the Saint-Marceau Hospital, which had only just been opened. But her favourite project, the one that just now engaged her whole heart, was the Work Foundation,* her own creation, an institution that was to replace the House of Correction. In the Work Foundation three hundred children, one hundred and fifty boys and one hundred and fifty girls, gathered up from the streets of Paris, from lives of debauchery and crime, were being given a new life through proper care and apprenticeship to a trade. These diverse foundations, her substantial donations, and her wild prodigality in giving to charity had consumed almost a hundred million in five years. A few more years of this and she would be ruined, without even having kept in reserve the small income needed for the bread and milk on which she now lived. When Sophie, her old servant, broke her usual silence to scold her sternly, warning her she would die destitute, she would just give a faint smile, the only smile that ever appeared now upon her colourless lips, a divine smile of hope.
It was in fact on the occasion of the setting up of the Work Foundation that Saccard first became acquainted with the Princess. He was one of the owners of the land she bought for this foundation, an ancient garden planted with fine trees, which lay at the edge of the Parc de Neuilly and ran alongside the Boulevard Bineau. He had charmed her by his brisk way of doing business, and she decided to see him again when faced by some difficulties with her contractors. For his part he had become interested in these works, which had captured his imagination, and he was delighted by the grandeur of the plan she had imposed on the architect: two monumental wings, one for the boys and the other for the girls, the two linked by a central building containing the chapel, communal area, administrative offices, and all the service departments; each wing had its own huge courtyard, its workshops and outbuildings of all sorts. But what most roused Saccard’s passion, given his own taste for the grand and sumptuous, was the opulence of it all, this huge construction built wit
h materials that would last for centuries, a lavish use of marble, a tiled kitchen large enough to roast an ox, immense dining-halls with rich oak panelling, dormitories flooded with light and brightly painted in light colours, a laundry, a bathroom, an infirmary, all done up with excessive refinements; and everywhere vast open areas, stairs and corridors, airy in summer and heated in winter; and the entire house bathed in sunshine, with a youthful gaiety, all the comforts of a huge fortune. When the architect, concerned about all this useless magnificence, tried to speak of the expense, the Princess would stop him with one word: she had enjoyed luxury and she wanted to give it to the poor so that they, they who create the luxury of the rich, could in their turn enjoy it. This dream was her obsession: to give joy to the wretched, to let them sleep in beds and sit at the table of the fortunate of this world; no longer receiving the charity of a crust of bread or a makeshift pallet, but an expansive life in palaces that would be their home, where they would have their revenge, and taste the pleasures of those who always triumph. But in all this wasteful spending, with enormous estimates on all sides, she was being abominably robbed; a swarm of contractors were living off her, not to mention losses due to poor supervision; the wealth of the poor was being squandered. It was Saccard who opened her eyes, begging her to let him put her accounts in order, and this was completely disinterested, for it was the sole pleasure of regulating this crazy dance of millions that so excited him. Never had Saccard shown such scrupulous honesty. In this colossal and complicated affair he was the most active, the most trustworthy of collaborators, giving his time and even his money, finding his reward simply in the joy of having such considerable sums passing through his hands. He was the one who was known at the Work Foundation, for the Princess never went there, any more than she ever visited any of her other foundations, staying hidden away in her three little rooms like some benevolent, invisible goddess; while he was adored and blessed, loaded with all the gratitude that she seemed not to want.