The Kill - Emile Zola [47]
enough to describe in reasonably accurate terms to Angèle. When she died, he was by no means upset to know that she took with her to the grave all memory of his loose talk from that day on the Buttes Montmartre. There, in the slashes he had made with his hand in the heart of Paris, lay the seeds of his fortune, and he had no intention of sharing his idea with anyone, knowing full well that when the day came to divide the spoils, there would be plenty of crows circling the gutted city. His initial plan had been to acquire, at a good price, a building he knew to be slated for imminent demolition and then to make a killing on the indemnity. He might have gone ahead and taken his chances without a cent to his name, buying the building on credit and pocketing the difference when the price went up as in buying shares of stock on margin, but then the 200,000-franc bonus from his marriage encouraged him to think big. His calculations were now complete: he would use a front to purchase his wife’s house on the rue de la Pépinière, leaving his name out of the transaction entirely, and triple his investment thanks to the knowledge he had acquired in the corridors of the Hôtel de Ville and through his connections with certain influential individuals. The reason he had been startled when Aunt Elisabeth mentioned the location of the house was that it happened to be situated right in the middle of a proposed new thoroughfare, knowledge of which was still confined to the offices of the Prefect of the Seine.20 The boulevard Malesherbes was to sweep away everything in its path. This was an old project of Napoleon I, which there was now talk of reviving in order “to allow a normal traffic flow to and from neighborhoods cut off by the maze of narrow streets on the slopes of the Paris perimeter,” to use the earnest official phraseology. That phraseology of course avowed nothing of the interest the Empire had in opening the spigots of cash or in the vast projects of excavation and filling that would capture the imagination of the working class. Saccard had once taken the liberty of examining the famous map of Paris in the prefect’s office on which “an august hand” had traced in red ink the main roads of the second network. Those bloody strokes of the pen had cut into Paris even more deeply than the hand of our surveyor of roads. The boulevard Malesherbes, which would require the demolition of any number of superb mansions on the rue d’Anjou and the rue de la Ville-l’Evêque as well as the construction of substantial embankments, was one of the first slated to be put through. When Saccard went to inspect the building on the rue de la Pépinière, he thought back on that autumn night, on that dinner he had eaten with Angèle on the Buttes Montmartre, during which showers of gold louis had rained on the neighborhood around the Madeleine at sunset. He smiled. The shining cloud had just burst over his head, above his courtyard, and he was soon to start scooping up those golden coins.
While Renée, luxuriously installed in the apartment on the rue de Rivoli, right in the middle of the new Paris of which she was soon to become one of the queens, pondered her future wardrobe and tried her hand at the life of the socialite, her husband devoted himself to his first important business transaction. His first move was to buy from his wife the house on the rue de la Pépinière, using a certain Larsonneau as an intermediary. Larsonneau was someone he had come to know while prying into the secrets of city hall but who had been foolish enough to get caught going through the prefect’s files. He had then set himself up as a real estate agent in an office off a dank and dismal courtyard at the lower end of the rue Saint-Jacques. This was a cruel blow to Larsonneau’s pride, as well as to his greed. He found himself in the same position Saccard had been in prior to his marriage. He, too, claimed to have invented a “money machine,” only he lacked the initial funds needed to capitalize on his invention. Saccard quickly came to a tacit understanding with his former colleague,