The Kill - Emile Zola [62]
Paris was then disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The day that Saccard had predicted on the Buttes Montmartre had arrived. The city was being slashed with a saber, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He owned piles of ruins in all quarters of the city. On the rue de Rome he was mixed up in the amazing story of the company that dug a hole and carted away five or six thousand cubic meters of soil so as to create the impression that it was involved in a gigantic project, and which then went bankrupt, so that the hole had to be filled in again with fill from Saint-Ouen. 5 Saccard escaped with a clear conscience and full pockets thanks to his brother Eugène, who was kind enough to intervene. At Chaillot 6 he helped to pare away the heights and cart them off as fill in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont de l’Alma. Over toward Passy it was he who had the idea of covering the plateau with rubble from the Trocadéro,7 so that today the good soil lies two meters deep and nothing grows on the debris, not even weeds. He was in twenty places at once, wherever there was some insurmountable obstacle: dirt that nobody knew what to do with, an embankment that was impossible to build, a nice pile of soil and rubble that the engineers chafed to get out of the way—no matter what the mess, he would always dig his fingers into it and ultimately come away with a kickback or work out some kind of deal. In the course of a day he would race from construction sites around the Arc de Triomphe to others on the boulevard Saint-Michel, from the piles of rubble on the boulevard Malesherbes to the pits at Chaillot, dragging an army of workmen, law clerks, stockholders, dupes, and scoundrels in his wake.
His greatest claim to fame, however, was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was officially in charge; Saccard figured only as a member of the board of directors. In this instance Eugène had once again done his brother an important favor. Thanks to him, the government had granted the company authorization to do business and watched over its operations most indulgently. At a particularly ticklish moment, when a hostile newspaper took the liberty of criticizing something the company had done, the official government bulletin went so far as to publish a note banning all discussion of a firm so honorable that the state itself deigned to sponsor it. The Crédit Viticole relied on an excellent system of financing: it lent farmers up to half the estimated value of their property, guaranteed the loan with a mortgage, and collected interest plus amortization from the borrowers. No system was ever more prudent or proper. With a knowing smile Eugène had told his brother that the Tuileries wanted everything aboveboard. Interpreting this wish to suit himself, M. Toutin-Laroche allowed the lending machinery to operate without interference while he set up alongside it a bank that attracted capital, which he then used to gamble with abandon, plunging headlong into any number of ventures. Thanks to the energetic leadership of its managing director, the Crédit Viticole soon enjoyed an unshakable reputation as a solid and prosperous firm. At first, when Saccard wanted to put a large number of new shares on the market all at once, he was shrewd enough to make it look as though they had been in circulation for a long time by having bank tellers spend the night tromping on them and beating