‘We’re fools to keep so many papers!’ he muttered, pulling out another drawer which was crammed full.
‘I can see a woman’s letter there,’ cried Delestang, with a wink.
Rougon laughed heartily. His broad chest shook. He picked up the letter and read a few lines.
‘Little d’Escorailles must have left it here!’ he said. ‘These sorts of notes can be very useful. Three lines by a woman can get you a long way!’
Then, setting light to this letter too, he added:
‘Take my advice, Delestang, beware of women!’
Delestang pretended not to hear. He was always involved in some risky love-affair. In 1851 he had nearly wrecked his political career by having an affair with the wife of a Socialist deputy, and more often than not, to placate the husband, he had voted with the opposition against the government. This made the decree of 2 December a huge blow to him. He did not show his face anywhere for two whole days, feeling utterly lost and confused—terrified that he would be arrested at any moment. Rougon had to rescue him. He persuaded him not to put up for re-election at all, but took him round instead to the Élysée,* where he managed to get him a position as Councillor of State. Delestang, the son of a Bercy wine merchant, and a former lawyer, was rich, a millionaire in fact… He owned a model farm near Sainte-Menehould, and in Paris he lived in a very fine mansion in the Rue du Colisée.
‘Yes, be very careful with women,’ Rougon repeated, pausing after every word as he peered into a file. ‘If they’re not putting a crown on your head, they’re slipping a noose round your neck… At our age, a man should look after his heart as much as his stomach.’
At this moment, the sound of voices came from the anteroom. Merle could be heard trying to keep somebody from the door. Then, all of a sudden, in burst a little man.
‘Damn it,’ he was saying, ‘he’s a friend of mine, I absolutely must say hello!’
‘Good heavens! Du Poizat!’ cried Rougon, without getting up.
He told Merle, who was waving his arms in an effort to apologize, to close the door, and then said calmly:
‘I thought you were in Bressuire… So, my dear Deputy Prefect, you’ve abandoned your post as if it were an old mistress!’
Du Poizat, a slight, sly-looking little man with very white, irregular teeth, shrugged.
‘I arrived this morning,’ he said, ‘on business. I wasn’t going to come round to see you, in the Rue Marbeuf, until this evening. I was thinking of asking you to give me a spot of dinner. But when I read the Moniteur…!’
He pulled an armchair up to the desk and settled down opposite Rougon.
‘Well, what on earth is happening? I’ve been buried away in the country, in the Deux-Sèvres… I got wind, though, of the fact that something was going on, but I never imagined… Why didn’t you write and tell me?’
It was Rougon’s turn to give a shrug. It was obvious that Du Poizat had learned all about his fall down there and had come racing up to town to see whether he would be able to save his own skin. He gave Du Poizat a piercing look, and said:
‘I was going to drop you a line this evening… Well, my dear fellow, you must resign too.’
‘That’s all I wanted to know,’ Du Poizat replied, simply. ‘Very well, I’ll resign.’
He stood up, whistling a little tune to himself. He walked across the room and, seeing Delestang kneeling on the carpet in the middle of an assortment of files, went up to him without a word and shook his hand. Then he took a cigar from his pocket and lit it with the candle on the desk.
‘Smoking is allowed now that you’re moving out,’ he said, settling down again in the armchair. ‘Moving out is such fun!’
But Rougon was now immersed in a bundle of documents he was reading carefully, identifying those he wanted to keep and burning the rest. Du Poizat lolled back in the chair, puffing thin jets of smoke from the corner of his mouth, and watched him. These two had first met some months before the February Revolution, when they both lodged at Madame Correur’s Hôtel Vaneau, in the Rue Vaneau. Like Madame Correur, Du Poizat was a native of Coulonges, a little town in the arrondissement of Niort. His father, a bailiff, in spite of making a small fortune as a moneylender, had sent him to Paris to read law, with an allowance of only one hundred francs a month. The old man had made so much money that local folk could not believe he had made it by honest means, and said that one day, while making a seizure, he must have found a lot of cash hidden away in an old cupboard. From the very beginning of the Bonapartist campaign, Rougon had made use of Du Poizat, then a lanky youth with a sinister smile, existing under sufferance on his hundred francs a month. Together, Rougon and he had engaged in some very shady political operations. Later on, when Rougon wanted to get into the Legislative Assembly, Du Poizat was his election agent in the department of Deux-Sèvres. Then, after the coup d’état, it was Rougon’s turn to help Du Poizat, by getting him appointed sub-prefect at Bressuire. Still barely thirty, the young man wanted a plum position back in his own part of the country, a few miles from his father, whose meanness had tormented him since he had left school.
‘And how is the old man?’ Rougon asked, without looking up.
‘Too well,’ Du Poizat replied, crudely. ‘He has just sacked his last domestic, just because she got through three pounds of bread. Now he keeps two loaded guns by the door, and whenever I see him, I have to parley with him over the courtyard wall.’
As he spoke, Du Poizat leaned forward and began to fish about in the bronze bowl, with its fragments of half-burnt paper. But Rougon soon realized what he was doing and looked up sharply. He had never really trusted his former lieutenant, whose irregular white teeth suggested the jowl of a wolf cub. When they had worked together in the past, Rougon’s great concern had always been never to let Du Poizat get hold of the least scrap of compromising material. So, now that he saw him trying to read what was left of the documents, he hastened to toss another handful of blazing sheets of paper into the bowl. Du Poizat took the hint, and with a grin tried to make a joke of it.
‘A real clean-up, eh?’ he remarked.
He picked up a large pair of scissors and, using them as tongs, proceeded to reignite any sheets that were going out, and dealt with any scrap that was too tightly screwed up to burn. He stirred the smouldering paper as if he had a bowl of punch in front of him. Sparks jumped around in the bowl and bluish smoke began to drift towards the open window. Every now and again the flame of the candle would sputter, then burned again straight and high.
‘It’s just like a church candle,’ said Du Poizat with a snigger. ‘And what a funeral service, my dear fellow. There are corpses to bury in all this ash!’
Rougon was about to make a rejoinder when raised voices were again heard in the antechamber. For the second time, Merle was trying to bar the door. When the voices became even louder, Rougon turned to Delestang.
‘Can you have a look to see what’s going on?’ he said. ‘If I show myself, there’ll be an invasion.’
Cautiously, Delestang slipped out through the door, closing it behind him. But the very next moment, he poked his head in again and whispered:
‘Kahn’s here.’
‘Very well,’ said Rougon. ‘Show him in. But only him!’
He also called in Merle, to repeat his instructions.
‘My dear friend, you must forgive me,’ he said, turning to Monsieur Kahn as soon as the commissioner had disappeared. ‘I’m extremely busy… Sit down next to Du Poizat, and don’t move, or I’ll throw you both out.’
Monsieur Kahn did not seem in the least put out by this ungracious welcome. He was used to Rougon’s moods. He took an armchair and sat down next to Du Poizat, who was now lighting his second cigar.
‘It’s hot already!’ he exclaimed, still breathing heavily. ‘I went round to your place in the Rue Marbeuf. I thought you might still be at home.’
Rougon did not reply, and there was a silence as he crumpled up some more sheets and tossed them into a was
te-paper basket he had placed next to him.
‘I wanted to have a chat,’ resumed Monsieur Kahn.
‘Fire away, fire away,’ said Rougon. ‘I’m listening.’
But now the deputy seemed suddenly to notice that the room was in complete disarray.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Changing offices?’
His show of surprise was played to perfection. His tone was so nicely judged that Delestang was thoughtful enough to stop what he was doing to find a copy of the Moniteur and hand it to him.
‘My God!’ cried Monsieur Kahn, as soon as he glanced at the gazette. ‘But I thought yesterday evening everything had been settled. This is unbelievable!… My dear friend!’
He stood up and took both of Rougon’s hands in his. Rougon stared at him without a word, a deep, sarcastic crease on each side of his mouth. Since Du Poizat seemed unmoved, the suspicion flashed into Rougon’s mind that these two had already met that morning. His suspicion was increased by Kahn’s failure to show any surprise at finding the sub-prefect there. One had come straight there, while the other had hurried round to the Rue Marbeuf, so that between them they would be sure not to miss him.
‘You said you wanted to chat,’ Rougon quietly reminded him.
‘Forget it, my dear friend!’ cried the deputy. ‘You’ve got enough to think about. I won’t add to your troubles by telling you about mine.’
‘But, my dear Kahn, please feel free, say whatever you want.’
‘Very well, then. It’s about my project. You know, that wretched railway concession of mine… In fact I’m glad Du Poizat is here. He might be able to enlighten us about a few things.’
He proceeded to outline at length how far his project had got. It concerned a railway between Niort and Angers, a project he had been working on for the past three years. The essence of it was that the line would run through Bressuire, where he owned some blast furnaces, the value of which would be doubled; hitherto transport had been a problem and business was sluggish. Moreover, the scheme offered excellent prospects for some very profitable fishing in difficult waters. So, Monsieur Kahn had been prodigiously active trying to get the concession, and Rougon had been working hard on his behalf. The concession had been on the point of being granted when the Minister of the Interior, Count de Marsy,* annoyed at not being involved in the scheme, and whose instincts told him there were some fine pickings to be had—and who in any case was very keen to put Rougon’s nose out of joint—used his influence in high places to block the project. With the temerity that made him so dangerous a foe, he had even gone so far as to offer the concession to the head of the Compagnie de l’Ouest,* through the Minister of Public Works; and he had promoted the view that they were the only people who could make anything of such a branch line, the construction of which required considerable financial guarantees. Now Monsieur Kahn saw himself facing ruin. Rougon’s fall would make sure of it.
‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘I heard that one of the Compagnie de l’Ouest’s engineers has been instructed to work out a new route… Have you heard anything about that, Du Poizat?’
‘Indeed I have,’ replied the sub-prefect. ‘In fact, they’ve already begun working on it… They’re trying to avoid the bend you introduced to take the line through Bressuire. They would make it run through Parthenay and Thouars.’
Monsieur Kahn made a despondent gesture.
‘It’s pure spite,’ he muttered. ‘What harm would it do them to run the line close to my factory? I’ll lodge a complaint right away; I’m going to write a memo arguing against their route… I’ll come down to Bressuire with you, Du Poizat.’
Du Poizat grinned. ‘There’s not much point,’ he said. ‘Apparently I’m going to resign my sub-prefecture.’
Monsieur Kahn slumped into a chair, as if this was the final blow. With both hands he scratched his ruff of beard and looked beseechingly at Rougon. Rougon had abandoned his files. Elbows on the desk, he was now all ears.
‘So you want my advice?’ he said at last, rather brusquely. ‘Well, it’s this: lie low, my friends; try to keep things as they are until we’re back on top… Du Poizat is going to resign his prefecture now because, if he didn’t, he’d be thrown out within two weeks. As for you, Kahn, write to the Emperor and do all you can to prevent the Compagnie de l’Ouest from getting the concession. You certainly won’t get it now, but if, for the moment, nobody does, you might get it later on.’
The two visitors shook their heads, and he added, even more bluntly:
‘That’s all I can do for you. They’ve pulled me down, you’ve got to give me time to get up again… Do I look depressed? No, of course not. So, please stop behaving as if you were at my funeral… In fact, I’m pleased I can be a private citizen for a while and have some rest.’
He took a deep breath, folded his arms, and let his vast frame relax. Monsieur Kahn made no further mention of his concession, but assumed the nonchalant air of Du Poizat, trying to appear perfectly calm. Meanwhile, Delestang had started on a fresh set of files. Ensconced behind the armchairs, he was making such tiny sounds that one might have imagined a family of mice was at work there. The sun, spreading slowly across the red carpet, now cut off an angle of the desk with a bright glare which made the flame of the candle seem very pale.
Rougon began to talk more freely. He assured them, as he resumed tying up his papers with string, that politics did not really suit him. He smiled good-naturedly, and, as if tired, his eyelids sank down to conceal the gleam in his eyes. What he wanted, he said, was a big piece of land to cultivate, fields he could plough as he pleased, herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, horses, dogs. He would be their absolute monarch. He told them how, years ago, in Plassans, while he was still just a little country lawyer, his great delight had been to put on a rough shooting-jacket and spend whole days wandering about in the Seille gorge with a gun, shooting eagles and other game. He was a peasant at heart, he said. His grandfather had been a tiller of the soil.* He went on to say how weary he had become of his life as a politician. Power had begun to bore him. He would spend the summer in the country. Never had he felt more relaxed than he was now. And he gave a great heave of his powerful shoulders, as if he had shed some tremendous burden.
‘How much did you get as president? Eighty thousand francs?’ Monsieur Kahn asked.
Rougon nodded.
‘And all you’ll have now is your thirty thousand as a senator.’*
What did that matter, Rougon replied. He spent very little, and he had no vices. This was quite true. He did not gamble, he was not a womanizer, and food meant nothing to him. Inevitably, he came back to his notion of being master of a farm and all the animals on it. That was his ideal, to have a whip and to be in command, to be superior, cleverer and stronger than all of them. Gradually, he worked himself up, speaking of animals as he might of humans, claiming that crowds like the stick, that shepherds never manage their flocks without throwing a few stones. As he spoke, he became transfigured, his thick lips swollen with scorn, his every feature exuding strength. In his clenched fist he brandished a file of papers, and it seemed that he was about to hurl it at Kahn and Du Poizat. This sudden burst of fury quite frightened them.
‘Hmm,’ murmured Du Poizat, ‘the Emperor has definitely been very unwise.’
Just as suddenly, Rougon calmed down. His face turned grey and his body became flaccid, sluggish like one who is merely obese. He now launched into extravagant praise of the Emperor. He had such a powerful intellect, he said—a mind of incredible profundity. Du Poizat and Monsieur Kahn looked at each other. But Rougon piled it on even more, saying how devoted he was to the Emperor and, with great humility, that he had always been proud to be a tool in his hands. He ended up by making Du Poizat, who was quick-tempered, quite angry. The two began to argue. Du Poizat talked bitterly about everything he and Rougon had done for the Empire between 1848 and 1851, in the days when they lodged, almost starving, at Madame Mélanie Correur’s. He went on to speak of those
terrible days, particularly during the first year, days spent trudging through the muddy streets of Paris, canvassing support. Later, he said, they had risked their lives a score of times. Was Rougon not the man who on 2 December had led the regiment that took control of the Palais Bourbon?* In all that, they had risked their lives. Yet here they were today, sacrificed, victims of a Court intrigue! Rougon, however, would not accept this. He was no sacrificial victim, he said; he was withdrawing for personal reasons. Finally, when Du Poizat, quite worked up, referred to the Court crowd as ‘swine’, Rougon shut him up by bringing his fist down with such force on the rosewood desk that it made a cracking noise.
‘That sort of talk is not wise,’ he said calmly.
‘You’re going too far,’ murmured Monsieur Kahn.
Delestang, very pale, stood up behind the armchairs. He went over and peered out of the door to make sure nobody was eavesdropping. But all he saw in the anteroom was the tall silhouette of Merle, who had turned his back discreetly to the door. Rougon’s blunt pronouncement had brought a flush to Du Poizat’s cheeks, but it also restored him to his senses and, chewing on his cigar with a disgruntled look on his face, he held his tongue.
‘No doubt the Emperor does not have good advisers,’ Rougon resumed, after a brief silence. ‘I once took it upon myself to tell him so, but he just smiled. Indeed, he found it rather funny and said that his entourage was no worse than mine.’
At this Du Poizat and Monsieur Kahn laughed, though rather grudgingly. They declared the Emperor’s witticism very good.
‘However,’ Rougon continued, emphasizing his words, ‘I repeat, I am resigning of my own accord. If anybody asks you questions, as my friends, you should insist that yesterday evening I was still in a position to withdraw my resignation. You might also deny all the gossip about that Rodriguez business. It seems that the whole story is being blown up out of all proportion. Perhaps I did disagree with the majority of the Council of State about it, and I certainly did tread on a few toes, and all that did contribute to my resignation. But I had more serious reasons, which go back a long way. I decided a long time ago to give up the high office I owed to the Emperor’s kindness.’