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By Root 1384 0

to see Larsonneau, who told him bluntly that he had the books and planned to keep them. Saccard did not lose his temper. His only worry, he intimated, was for his dear friend, who was far more compromised than Saccard himself by these forgeries—almost all of which were in his friend’s hand—but he was reassured now that he knew the books to be in Larsonneau’s possession. Actually, he would gladly have strangled his “dear friend.” He remembered one highly compromising document, a bogus inventory that he had been stupid enough to draw up and that must still be in one of the ledgers. Larsonneau, richly rewarded for his services, opened a consulting office on the rue de Rivoli, which he furnished as luxuriously as any kept woman’s apartment. Saccard quit his job at city hall and, with a considerable quantity of capital now at his disposal, plunged into speculation with a vengeance, while Renée, excited and out of control, filled Paris with the clatter of her carriages, the sparkle of her diamonds, and the dizzying whirl of her swank and ostentatious existence.

Occasionally husband and wife, both feverish in their pursuit of money and pleasure, returned to the icy mists of the Ile Saint-Louis. When they did, they felt as though they were entering a ghost town.

The Béraud mansion, built around the beginning of the seventeenth century, was one of those dark, square, solemn buildings with high, narrow windows that are so common in the Marais and are often rented out to boarding schools, manufacturers of seltzer water, and distributors of wine and spirits. It was admirably preserved, however. Situated on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, it had only three upper stories, each fifteen to twenty feet high. The ground floor had lower ceilings, with windows protected by depressingly heavy iron bars set right into the somber thickness of the walls and an arched doorway almost as wide as it was tall, which was shut by double doors bearing a cast-iron knocker, painted dark green, and studded with huge nails that formed star and diamond patterns on both panels. It was the classic carriage entrance, flanked by off-kilter hitching posts circled by iron hoops. One could see that a gutter had once run through the center of the gate and that the ballast beneath the porch had been gently sloped to channel water into it from either side. M. Béraud had decided, however, to pave the entrance and block this gutter. This was the only sacrifice to modern architecture to which he ever agreed. The windows on the upper floors were enclosed by thin iron handrails through which the colossal casements, with their heavy brown sashes and small greenish panes, could be seen. Above, the line of the roof was broken by dormers, leaving the gutters to continue by themselves to funnel rainwater into the downspouts. The austere nakedness of the façade was further aggravated by the total absence of shutters and blinds, the pale and melancholy stones of this front wall being untouched by sunlight throughout the year. This façade, with its venerable air, its bourgeois severity, slumbered solemnly in this neighborhood of dignified repose and silent streets seldom disturbed by the clatter of carriages.

Inside the gate was a square courtyard surrounded by arcades, a scaled-down version of the place Royale,22 paved with enormous slabs of stone, which added the finishing touch needed to make this lifeless house look exactly like a cloister. Facing the porch, a fountain— a lion’s head half worn away so that only its gaping jaws remained— spouted a heavy, monotonous stream of water from an iron pipe into a trough green with moss and worn smooth along the edges. The water was icy cold. Grass pushed its way up between the stone slabs. During the summer a thin sliver of sunlight penetrated the courtyard, and this rare visitation of the sun’s rays had whitened one corner of the façade, on the south side, leaving the remaining three-quarters of the front wall gloomy and black and streaked with mold. Standing in the middle of this courtyard, as cool and quiet as the bottom of a well,