The Kill - Emile Zola [45]
Two months before Angèle’s death, he had taken her one Sunday to the Buttes Montmartre.16 The poor woman loved to eat out in restaurants. She was happy when, at the end of a long walk, he led her to a table in some suburban cabaret. On that day they dined at the top of the hill, in a restaurant with a view of Paris, with windows that looked out over an ocean of blue-tinted roofs that filled the vast horizon with its surging swell. Their table stood in front of one of those windows. The sight of the roofs of Paris put Saccard in a good mood. He ordered a bottle of Burgundy to go with dessert. He smiled absentmindedly and was more attentive to his wife than usual. But his eyes, like a lover’s, kept being drawn back to the living, seething sea of rooftops and the deep rumble of the crowd beneath. It was autumn. The city, languishing under pale skies, was a soft and tender gray, pierced here and there by somber patches of green reminiscent of the broad leaves of water lilies floating on the surface of a lake. The sun was setting in a cloud of red, and as a light haze filled the background, a golden dust or dew fell on the city’s right bank over toward the Madeleine 17 and the Tuileries. It was like an enchanted spot in one of the cities of A Thousand and One Nights,18 with emerald trees, sapphire roofs, and ruby weathervanes. At one point a ray of sunlight slipped its way between two clouds and cast such a glorious light on the houses below that they seemed to flare up and melt like a bar of gold in a crucible.
“Oh, look!” Saccard exclaimed with a child’s laugh. “Twenty-franc gold pieces are raining down on Paris!”
Angèle, too, began to laugh, remarking that those particular gold pieces were not easy to pick up. But her husband had stood up and gone over to the window, where he leaned against the sill. “That’s the Vendôme column, isn’t it, gleaming down there? . . . And over there, farther to the right, that’s the Madeleine. . . . A beautiful neighborhood, where there’s plenty of work to be done. . . . Yes, this time, it’s all going to burn! Do you see? . . . It’s as if the neighborhood were being boiled down in some chemist’s retort.”
His voice turned grave and tremulous. The comparison he had hit upon seemed to make a great impression on him. He had drunk the Burgundy, and he forgot himself. Stretching out his arms to show Paris to Angèle, who was now also leaning against the windowsill by his side, he went on. “Yes, yes, as I was saying, more than one neighborhood is about to be melted down, and gold will stick to the fingers of everybody who stokes the furnace and stirs the boiling pot. Paris is so big and simpleminded! Look how huge the city is and how calmly it lies sleeping! These big cities are so stupid! This one has no idea that one fine day it will be set upon by an army of pickaxes. Some of those mansions on the rue d’Anjou wouldn’t gleam quite so brightly in the sunset if they knew that they had only three or four more years to live.”
Angèle thought her husband was joking. He had a taste at times for elaborate, nettlesome tomfoolery. She laughed, but with a vague disquiet, at the sight of this little man standing over the giant asleep at his feet and shaking his fist at it while pressing his lips together with an ironic twist.
“They’ve already begun,” he went on. “But it’s nothing to speak of yet. Look over