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By Root 1278 0

right now while deferring enjoyment of their gains till later on. If Saccard set a deal in motion and invested his passion in it, his avid craving, Mignon and Charrier with their down-to-earth ways and strict, methodical management had what it took to prevent their partner’s extravagant imagination from derailing it at twenty different junctures. They never agreed to build the superb offices, the impressive headquarters with which he hoped to astonish Paris. Nor did they want any part of the lesser speculations that spewed from his brain every morning: plans to build concert halls and huge bathhouses adjacent to newly laid streets; railways to parallel new boulevards; and glass-roofed malls that would have raised commercial rents tenfold and allowed customers to shop without getting wet. Terrified of such proposals, the contractors nipped them in the bud by deciding that the land adjacent to the new streets would be divided among the three partners and each would be free to do as he pleased with his share. Mignon and Charrier wisely continued to sell their lots. Saccard built on his. His brain seethed with ideas. He was capable of proposing in all seriousness that Paris should be placed under an enormous bell jar, so as to turn the city into a hothouse where pineapples and sugarcane could be grown.

Moving capital by the shovelful, he soon owned eight houses on the new boulevards. Four were completely finished, two on the rue de Marignan and two on the boulevard Haussmann. The other four, located on the boulevard Malesherbes, were still under construction, and one of them, on a vast lot enclosed by a wooden fence within which a splendid mansion was to rise, had got no further than the installation of the second-story flooring. At this stage, his affairs had become so complicated, he had so many strings attached to each of his fingers, so many interests to oversee and so many marionettes to keep in motion, that he barely slept three hours a night and read his correspondence in his carriage. The wonder was that his cash box seemed bottomless. He owned stock in all sorts of companies, built with a kind of frenzy, was involved in traffic of many kinds, and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, yet he never seemed to realize a clear profit or pocket a substantial sum of gleaming gold coins. This river of gold, flowing from unknown sources, which seemed to gush from his office in wave after wave, astonished observers and made him at one point the man of the hour to whom the Paris papers attributed every clever remark about the stock exchange.

With a husband like this, Renée was about as little married as she could be. She went for weeks on end almost without seeing him. In any event, he was perfect: he opened his coffers wide whenever she needed money. Deep down, she loved him as she would have loved any obliging banker. Whenever she visited the Béraud household, she praised him to her father, who remained severe and cold toward his son-in-law despite his good fortune. Her contempt for him had evaporated. This man seemed so convinced that life is nothing but business and was so clearly born to mint money out of whatever came his way—women, children, paving stones, sacks of plaster, consciences— that she could not blame him for the bargain he had struck in marrying her. Since striking that bargain, he looked at her in much the same way as he looked at those beautiful houses that earned him esteem and would hopefully bring him huge profits. He liked to see her well dressed, making a splash, turning heads all over Paris. This enhanced his stature and made people double their estimate of his probable net worth. Because of his wife, people thought him handsome, young, amorous, and giddy. She was a partner, an unwitting accomplice. A new team of horses, an outfit that cost 2,000 écus, an indulgence for one of her lovers facilitated some of his best deals and frequently turned out to be the decisive factor. Often, too, he pretended to be busy and sent her in his stead to seek a necessary authorization from some minister or