The Kill - Emile Zola [32]
Early in 1853, Aristide Saccard was promoted to surveyor of roads. He now earned 4,500 francs a month. This raise came just in time. Angèle was wasting away; little Clotilde was deathly pale. He kept his cramped two-room apartment, with its dining room furnished in walnut and its bedroom in mahogany, and continued to lead a life of rigid discipline, avoiding debt and refusing to dip into other people’s money until he was able to plunge his arms in up to the elbows. In so doing he went against his instincts, turning up his nose at the few extra sous that came his way and maintaining his vigilance. Angèle was perfectly content. She bought herself some old clothes and put a roast on the spit daily. Her husband’s silent rages surpassed her understanding, as did the somber look he sometimes wore of a man searching for the solution to some intractable problem.
Aristide followed Eugène’s advice: he kept his eyes and ears open. When he went to thank his brother for the promotion, Eugène immediately grasped the change that had come over him and complimented him on what he called his “correct attire.” Though envy had stiffened his backbone, outwardly the clerk had become more pliable and ingratiating. Within the space of a few months he had become a prodigious actor. All his southern verve was now aroused, and he had developed his art to such a high pitch that his comrades at city hall looked upon him as a fine fellow destined for an important position on account of his close relationship to a deputy. That same relationship also put him in the good graces of his superiors. Hence he enjoyed greater authority than his position indicated, and this allowed him to open certain doors and poke his nose into certain boxes of files without his indiscretions seeming culpable. For two years he prowled all the corridors, lingered in all the chambers, and rose twenty times a day to chat with a coworker or deliver an order or make the rounds of the offices. Because he was perpetually in motion, his colleagues said, “That devil of a Provençal! He can’t sit still. He has quicksilver in his legs.” Those closest to him mistook him for lazy, and the worthy fellow laughed when they accused him of wanting nothing more than to steal a few minutes from his administrative chores. Never once did he commit the blunder of listening at keyholes, but he had a forthright way of opening doors and walking across rooms with a piece of paper in his hand and an abstracted look, yet at a pace so slow and deliberate that he never missed a word of what was being said. The tactic proved ingenious, because eventually people stopped interrupting themselves when this very busy clerk, apparently so preoccupied with his work, glided through the shadowy recesses of their offices. He had another method as well: he was extremely helpful, always offering to assist his fellow workers whenever they fell behind in their work and then studying with rapt attention whatever ledgers and documents were set before him. But one of his foibles was his penchant for befriending office boys. He went so far as to shake their hands and spent hour after hour with them in private conversation, stifling laughs, telling them stories, and encouraging them to open up to him. These fine lads adored him: “That fellow there isn’t stuck-up like the rest of them,” they said when he passed by. Whenever a scandal erupted, he was the first to learn about it. So after two years, the Hôtel de Ville no longer held any mysteries for him. He knew the personnel down to the lowliest factotum and the paperwork down to the laundry bills.
Paris in those days was a most interesting spectacle for a man like Aristide Saccard. The Empire had just been proclaimed following the famous trip during which the Prince-President5 had succeeded in kindling the enthusiasm of a few Bonapartist départements. Both the legislature and the press had been silenced. Saved yet again, society congratulated itself, relaxed, and slept in now that a strong government