The Kill - Emile Zola [74]
This was a fortune that roared and overflowed like a winter torrent, which buffeted Renée’s dowry, swept it away, and inundated it. Wary at first, the young woman had wanted to manage her own property, but she quickly wearied of business matters. Then she felt poor compared to her husband and, being overwhelmed by debt, was obliged to turn to him for assistance, to borrow money from him, and to rely on his discretion. With each new bill, which he paid with the smile of a man tolerant of human weakness, she surrendered a bit more of herself, entrusting him with bonds or authorizing him to sell this or that property. By the time they moved to the Parc Monceau mansion, she was already nearly picked clean. Saccard, substituting himself for the state, paid her the interest on the hundred thousand francs from the rue de la Pépinière. In addition, he persuaded her to sell the Sologne property in order to invest the money in an important deal—a superb investment, he told her. All she had left, therefore, was the land in Charonne, which she stubbornly refused to sell in order to spare her excellent Aunt Elisabeth the sorrow. There again he plotted a masterstroke with the help of his former accomplice Larsonneau. In any case, she remained in his debt; if he took her fortune, he paid her back five or six times the income it would have earned. The interest on a hundred thousand francs, together with the yield on the money from Sologne, came to barely nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to keep her in underwear and shoes. He gave her, or paid out on her behalf, fifteen to twenty times that paltry sum. He would have put in a week’s work to rob her of a hundred francs, and he kept her royally. So she, along with everyone else, respected her husband’s monumental treasure without investigating the emptiness of the river of gold that flowed before her eyes and into which she dove every morning.
At Parc Monceau it was a time of delirium and spectacular triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses. They had an army of servants, whom they dressed in dark blue livery with putty-colored breeches and black-and-yellow-striped waistcoats—rather severe colors that the financier chose in order to give himself a sober appearance, this being one of his fondest wishes. They displayed their luxury on the façade of their house and opened the curtains when they gave great dinners. The fresh breezes of contemporary life, which had rattled the doors of the second-floor flat on the rue de Rivoli, had by now reached the intensity of a genuine hurricane, which threatened to blow down the walls. Amid these princely apartments, along the gilded banisters, upon the thick wool carpets in this fantastic parvenu’s palace, the smell of Mabille lingered; hips were provocatively thrust about as in the fashionable quadrilles of the moment; and the whole era passed by with its mad and foolish laughter, its eternal hunger and eternal thirst. It was a dubious house of worldly pleasure, of impudent ecstasy that enlarged the windows the better to share the secrets of the alcoves with passersby. Here, husband and wife lived lives free of restraint before the eyes of their servants. They divided up the house and camped out in it, appearing to be not in their own home but as if cast ashore at the end of a tumultuous and dizzying voyage, living in a regal hotel, rushing out without even taking the time to unpack their bags so as to savor the pleasures