The Kill - Emile Zola [50]
M. Toutin-Laroche, a tall, thin man known for having invented a mixture of suet and stearin used in the manufacture of candles, dreamed of becoming a senator. He stuck to Baron Gouraud like a leech, rubbing up against him with the idea that this would somehow bring him luck. At bottom he was a very pragmatic man, and had he found a senate seat for sale he would have haggled ferociously over the price. The Empire was about to make a celebrity of this greedy nonentity, this narrow-minded entrepreneur with a genius for shady industrial deals. He was the first to sell his name to a dubious company, one of those corporations that sprang up like poisonous mushrooms on the dung heap of imperial speculation. Some time ago a poster could be seen glued to the walls of Paris and bearing the following words in big black letters: SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE DES PORTS DU MAROC. It featured the name of M. Toutin-Laroche together with his title as municipal councilor at the head of a list of members of the board of directors, each more obscure than the next so far as the general public was concerned. This technique, much abused since, worked wonders. People rushed to buy stock in the company, even though a great deal remained unclear about what was to be done with the “ports of Morocco,” and the good people who invested their money could not themselves explain what project it was to be used for. The poster offered a superb description of commercial stations to be established along the Mediterranean coast. For two years previously, certain newspapers had been singing the praises of this ambitious venture, which every three months they reported to be prospering as never before. At the municipal council, M. Toutin-Laroche enjoyed a reputation as a top-flight administrator. He was one of the big thinkers of the group, and the harsh tyranny he exercised over his colleagues was rivaled only by the abject devotion he showed to the prefect. He was already at work setting up a major financial venture to be called the Crédit Viticole, which proposed to lend money to wine growers, and he spoke of this in such a halting, grave manner that all the imbeciles around him burned to invest in it.
Saccard won the protection of these two personages by doing them favors, the importance of which he shrewdly pretended not to notice. He introduced his sister to the baron, who was mixed up at the time in a most unsavory affair. He took her to the baron’s house on the pretext of soliciting his support for Mme Sidonie’s long-standing effort to obtain a contract to supply the Tuileries with draperies. After they spent some time alone together, however, it turned out that it was she who promised the baron to negotiate with certain individuals ill-mannered enough not to be honored by the friendship that a senator had deigned to show their daughter, a little girl of ten. Saccard himself took the initiative with M. Toutin-Laroche. He contrived a meeting in a corridor and turned the conversation to the much-discussed Crédit Viticole. Before five minutes had passed, the great administrator, alarmed and dumbfounded by the astonishing things he was hearing, took the clerk familiarly by the arm and kept him standing in the hallway for the next hour. Saccard whispered in his ears details of the most wonderfully ingenious financial schemes. On taking his leave, M. Toutin-Laroche squeezed the clerk’s hand in a most meaningful way and gave him a conspiratorial wink.
“You’ll be in on it,” he mumbled. “You’ve got to be in on it.”
Saccard was at his best throughout these maneuvers. He was prudent enough not to make Baron Gouraud and M. Toutin-Laroche each other’s accomplices. He visited them separately and