The Kill - Emile Zola [159]
It was the expropriation agent who received the gentlemen of the committee. He showed them around the garden and the music hall and gave them a huge file to examine. But the two businessmen had gone back downstairs with the doctor, whom they continued to question about the petite maison of the comte de Savigny, which had fired their imaginations. With jaws hanging, both men listened to the doctor’s stories, as all three stood alongside a “barrel ride” in the amusement park. And the doctor regaled them with tales of Mme de Pompadour and recounted the loves of Louis XV 1 while M. de Mareuil and Saccard carried on with the investigation by themselves.
“This job is done,” said the latter upon returning to the garden. “If you’ll allow me, gentlemen, I’ll accept responsibility for writing up the report.”
The man who manufactured surgical instruments didn’t even hear what Saccard had said. He was lost in the Régence.2
“What a strange time, for sure!” he murmured.
Then they found a cab on the rue de Charonne and drove off, spattered with filth up to the knees and as pleased with their outing as if they’d been to a picnic in the country. In the cab the conversation turned to politics; they agreed that the Emperor was doing great things. No one had ever seen anything like what they had just seen. This big straight boulevard would be superb once houses were built along it.
Saccard drew up the report, and the jury awarded an indemnity of three million francs. The speculator had his back to the wall; he couldn’t have held out another month. This money saved him from ruin and perhaps even from the criminal courts. He paid 500,000 francs of the million he owed his upholsterer and contractor on the Parc Monceau house. He attended to other trouble spots, plunged into new ventures, and deafened Paris with the sound of the very real gold coins that he loaded into his safe by the shovelful. The river of gold at last had a source. But it was not yet a solid, entrenched fortune flowing at an even and steady rate. Saved from bankruptcy, Saccard considered himself a beggar reduced to living on the crumbs from his three million francs; naïvely he told himself that he was still too poor, that he could not stop. And soon the ground had opened up yet again beneath his feet.
Larsonneau had behaved so admirably in the Charonne business that Saccard, after only a moment’s hesitation, had pushed honesty to the point of paying him his ten percent plus a bonus of 30,000 francs. With that the expropriation agent opened a bank. When his accomplice grumpily accused him of having outstripped him in wealth, the yellow-gloved dandy replied with a laugh: “You see, my beloved teacher, you’re very clever at making money rain down, but you’ve no idea how to pick it up.”
Mme Sidonie took advantage of her brother’s stroke of fortune to borrow 10,000 francs from him, with which she spent two months in London. She returned without a penny. No one ever found out what had become of the 10,000 francs.
“Oh, my, you know everything costs money,” she replied when questioned. “I scoured all the libraries. I had three secretaries to help with my research.”
And when people asked if she had at last found out anything certain about her three billion, she smiled mysteriously at first and then murmured, “You’re all skeptics. . . . I didn’t find anything, but it makes no difference. You’ll see, one of these days you’ll see.”
She had not wasted all her time in England, however. Her brother the minister had availed himself of the opportunity to charge her with a delicate commission. When she returned, she received a number of large orders from the ministry. This was a new incarnation for her. She signed contracts with the government and undertook to supply goods of every conceivable kind. She sold rations and weapons to the army for its troops, furniture to prefectures and government bureaus, and firewood to public offices and museums. The money she earned was not enough to persuade her to put aside the black dresses she invariably wore, and her waxy, doleful