for long without wanting to sell or derive a profit from it. Before his son was twenty it occurred to him that the boy could be useful. A good-looking young man who was the nephew of a minister and the son of an important financier was bound to be a good investment. He was of course a bit young, but one could always search out a wife and dowry for him, and then the wedding could be postponed or hurried along according to the financial needs of the firm. Saccard chose well. At a meeting of a board of directors of which he was a member, he chanced to meet a tall, handsome man by the name of Mareuil, and within two days Mareuil was his. M. de Mareuil had once been a sugar refiner in Le Havre, at which time his name had been Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young noblewoman, also quite wealthy, who had been looking for an imbecile with an impressive face. His first proud trophy was the right to use his wife’s name, but the marriage had made him insanely ambitious: he dreamed of paying Hélène back for her nobility by acquiring a high political position. He immediately invested money in the new newspapers, bought extensive properties in the remote Nièvre, and did all he could to prepare himself to run for a seat in the legislature. Thus far he had failed, though without shedding any of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could possibly encounter. He was a man of superb stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman, and since he was a marvelously good listener, with a deep gaze and a majestic calm in his expression, it was possible to believe that he was engaged in a prodigious inner labor of comprehension and deduction. Of course his mind was completely empty. Yet he had a disturbing effect on people, who had no idea whether they were dealing with a superior man or an imbecile. M. de Mareuil clung to Saccard as to a life raft. He knew that an official candidacy was about to open up in the Nièvre and ardently hoped that the minister would designate him. This was the last card he had to play. Hence he put himself completely in the hands of the minister’s brother. Saccard, who sensed a mutually advantageous alliance, encouraged him to think of marrying his daughter Louise off to Maxime. Mareuil was effusive in gratitude, believed that the idea of a wedding had been his own, and considered himself most fortunate to forge an alliance with the family of a minister and to give Louise to a young man whose prospects seemed bright indeed.
Louise, according to her father, was to have a dowry worth a million francs. Misshapen, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young. A lung disease was secretly sapping her health, lending her a nervous gaiety, a soothing grace. Sick little girls age quickly, becoming women before their time. She was naïvely sensual and seemed to have been born at age fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, a healthy, stupid colossus of a man, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, too, had been a big, strong woman in life, but after her death stories were told about her that explained why the child was stunted and had the manners of a bohemian millionaire and the charming ugliness of a debauchee. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died in the most shockingly dissolute excess. Pleasures had eaten away at her like an ulcer, yet her husband, who ought to have had her locked up in an asylum, never noticed her lucid madness. Carried in this diseased womb, Louise emerged with anemic blood, misshapen limbs, and a diseased brain, her memory already steeped in filth. At times she was persuaded that she possessed vague memories of another existence and imagined bizarre, shadowy scenes of men and women embracing, a whole carnal drama that titillated her childish curiosity. It was her mother speaking in her. This vice continued throughout her childhood. As she grew older, nothing shocked her; she remembered everything, or, rather, knew everything already, and she sought out forbidden things with such a sure instinct that she