The Kill - Emile Zola [46]
With that, extending his open hand and wielding it like the sharp edge of a cutlass, he made as if to slice the city into four parts.
“You mean the rue de Rivoli and the new boulevard they’re putting through?” his wife asked.
“Yes, the ‘Great Crossing’ of Paris, as they’re calling it. They’re clearing out the area around the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville. But that’s mere child’s play! Just enough to whet the public’s appetite. . . . When the first network of new streets is finished, the big dance will begin. The second network will cut through the city in all directions to link the suburbs to the first network. The buildings that need to be cleared away will collapse in clouds of plaster. . . . Look, follow my hand. From the boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, one cut; then, over this way, from the Madeleine to the Monceau plain, another cut; and a third cut in this direction, a fourth in that direction, a cut here, another farther out. Cuts everywhere. Paris slashed to pieces with a saber, its veins laid open to provide nourishment for a hundred thousand excavators and masons, and in the end you’ll have a city crisscrossed by fine strategic highways that will put fortresses right in the heart of the old neighborhoods.”
Night was coming on. Saccard’s wizened, muscular hand continued slashing away at the void. Angèle trembled slightly at the sight of this living blade, these iron fingers pitilessly hacking at the endless expanse of dark rooftops. The haze on the horizon had just begun to roll in from the heights, and in her imagination she heard distant cracking sounds from the darkening vales below, as if her husband’s hand really were making the cuts he was describing, slicing Paris up from one end to the other, smashing beams, crushing masonry, and leaving behind long and hideous wounds where walls had collapsed. The smallness of the hand so implacably attacking its giant prey was ultimately frightening to behold, and as it effortlessly ripped the entrails of the enormous city to shreds, it seemed to take on a peculiar glint of steel in the twilight tinged with blue.
“There will be a third network,” Saccard continued after an interval of silence, as if talking to himself. “That one is still too far in the future. I can’t envision it very clearly. I’ve picked up few clues to where it will go. But it will be sheer madness, millions changing hands at a breakneck pace, Paris drunk and reeling!”
He lapsed again into silence, his eyes fixed ardently on the city, which darkness gathered in its folds. He must have been pondering that future so remote that even he could not yet grasp it. Then night fell, and the city dissolved into a blur and seemed to breathe heavily, like the sea when nothing can be seen but the pale crests of the waves. Here and there, the whiteness of a wall still stood out, and one by one the yellow flames of the gaslights pierced the shadows, like stars making their appearance in the blackness of a stormy night.
Angèle put aside her discomfort and returned to the joke her husband had made at dessert. “Well, then,” she said with a smile, “there’s been quite a shower of those twenty-franc pieces! The people of Paris are counting them now. Look at those nice piles they’re lining up down there!”
She pointed to the streets descending the Buttes Montmartre, whose gaslights seemed to form two golden rows. “And over there,” she shouted, pointing at a cluster of stars, “that has to be the Caisse Générale.”
This allusion to the state treasury made Saccard laugh. He and Angèle remained at the window a few moments longer, delighted by the shower of gold that eventually engulfed the entire city. On the way down from the heights of Montmartre the clerk had second thoughts about having talked so much. He blamed the wine and begged his wife not to repeat the “foolish things” he had said. He wanted, he said, to be taken for a sober head.
Saccard had long studied these three networks of streets and boulevards, the plan for which he had been careless