The Kill - Emile Zola [105]
Larsonneau feigned astonishment, grasped the hands of “the chief,” and assured him of his devotion. Saccard regretted his momentary impatience. It was at this point that he gave serious thought to a closer relationship with his wife. He might need her against his confederate, and not for the first time he mused to himself that the bed was a wonderful place in which to do business. Little by little the kiss on the neck grew into a revelation, opening up a whole new realm of tactics.
In any case he was in no hurry, for he was husbanding his resources. He allowed his plan to ripen throughout the winter, distracted as he was by a hundred other schemes, each murkier than the last. For him it was a dreadful winter, which saw him buffeted by one blow after another as each day he moved heaven and earth to avoid bankruptcy. Rather than curtail his lavish lifestyle, he threw gala after gala. Yet while he coped with every difficulty, he inevitably neglected Renée, whom he was holding in reserve for his triumphal stroke, when the time was ripe for a move in Charonne. He contented himself with preparing the dénouement by ceasing to provide her with any money except through Larsonneau. Whenever he found himself with a few thousand francs to spare and she pleaded poverty, he supplied the cash she needed but told her that Larsonneau’s creditors insisted on a note for double the amount. This farce amused him no end. The whole business of the notes delighted him by introducing an element of intrigue into the affair. Even in the days when his profits had been most unequivocal, he had paid out his wife’s allowance in a highly irregular way, at times giving her princely gifts and handing over fistfuls of banknotes only to leave her begging for weeks for a paltry sum. Now that he was seriously hard up for cash, he alluded to the expenses of the household and treated her as a creditor to whom it was impossible to confess his bankruptcy and who had to be put off with excuses. She barely listened, signing whatever he asked her to; her only complaint was that she wasn’t allowed to sign more.
In any event, he already held 200,000 francs of paper she had signed, which had cost him barely 110,000 francs. After having these notes endorsed by Larsonneau, in whose name they were drawn, he prudently placed them in circulation with the intention of using them as decisive weapons later on. He would never have gotten through that terrible winter, lending to his wife at usurious rates of interest and maintaining his lavish way of life, had he not sold his property on the boulevard Malesherbes, for which Mignon and Charrier paid cash, but at a significant discount.
For Renée that winter was one of endless joy. She suffered only from a shortage of cash. Maxime cost her an arm and a leg. He still treated her as his stepmother and allowed her to pay for everything. Yet her hidden poverty was for her merely one more source of pleasure. She schemed and racked her brain so that “her darling boy” would want for nothing, and when she persuaded her husband to come up with a few thousand francs for her, she and her lover devoured them in costly extravagances like two schoolmates let loose on their first escapade. When they hadn’t a cent to their name, they stayed home and enjoyed the huge, ugly mansion with its brand-new and impudently absurd luxury. Saccard was never there. The lovers sat by the hearth more often now than in the past, because Renée had at last succeeded in filling the glacial void under the mansion’s gilded ceilings with the heat of her ecstasy. This suspect house of worldly pleasure had become a chapel in which she practiced a new religion apart