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By Root 1295 0

through the dazzling luxury of the brand-new rooms, along with processions of purveyors and gaggles of Renée’s friends, Maxime’s classmates, and Saccard’s visitors. From nine until eleven in the morning Saccard received the strangest assemblage of characters imaginable: senators and court clerks, duchesses and rag dealers— whatever flotsam the Parisian tempest dumped on his doorstep each morning, whether clad in silk gowns, filthy skirts, workmen’s smocks, or dark frock coats—and he received each one with the same clipped tones and impatient, nervous gestures. He dispatched business deals with a couple of words, dealt with twenty difficulties at once, and proposed solutions on the fly. It sometimes sounded as though this energetic little man with the very loud voice was fighting with people in his study, or with the furniture, turning somersaults and knocking his head against the ceiling to jar ideas loose before landing on his feet, ever victorious. Then, at eleven o’clock, he went out and was not seen again for the rest of the day. He took his lunch out and often his dinner as well. Then the house belonged to Renée and Maxime. They took over the old man’s study and unpacked the boxes from the stores, and articles of clothing were left lying on top of business files. There were times when grave men were obliged to wait for an hour outside the door of the study while the schoolboy and the young wife, seated at either end of Saccard’s desk, argued about a bow of ribbon. Renée ordered the horses hitched up ten times a day. The family seldom took meals together. Two of the three were always on the run somewhere, too absorbed in whatever they were doing to return before midnight. It was an apartment noisy with business and pleasure, where modern life rushed in like a gust of wind, accompanied by the clink of gold and the rustle of gowns.

Aristide Saccard had at last found his element. He had shown himself to be a great speculator, a man who juggled millions. Following up his masterstroke on the rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the battle that was just beginning to leave shameful wrecks and brilliant triumphs scattered about Paris. At first he bet on sure things, repeating his initial success by buying buildings he knew to be slated for demolition and relying on his friends to obtain huge indemnities. At one point he owned five or six houses—the very houses he had once looked at so strangely, as if they were acquaintances, back when he was just a poor clerk in the road department. But his art was still in its infancy. It took no great cleverness to run out leases, conspire with tenants, and rob the state and private owners, and to him the game seemed not worth the candle. So he soon put his genius to work on more complicated tasks.

The first ploy he came up with was to buy buildings secretly on behalf of the city. A decision by the Conseil d’Etat had put the municipal government in a difficult position. It had purchased a large number of houses by private agreement with the owners in the hope of allowing the leases to expire and then evicting the tenants without any indemnity. But the council held that these purchases were in fact expropriations, and the city was obliged to pay. It was at that point that Saccard offered to act as a front. He bought the properties, ran out the leases, and in exchange for a bonus surrendered the buildings on a mutually agreed date. He even wound up playing a double game, buying for both the city and the prefect. When a deal proved too tempting, he slipped the deed for the property into his own pocket. The state paid. In compensation for his assistance he was granted building rights on sections of streets and planned intersections, which he sold to third parties even before work on the new street had begun. The game was fierce; people gambled on neighborhoods under construction as they might gamble on bonds. Certain ladies—pretty prostitutes, intimate friends of high officials—were in on the action. One of them, famous for the whiteness of her teeth, snapped up entire streets