The Kill - Emile Zola [89]
Times were hard for speculators. Saccard had proved himself a worthy son of city hall. Like Paris itself, he had enjoyed a rapid transformation, a time of feverish pleasure and blind expenditure. And like the city he now found himself faced with a formidable deficit, which had to be paid off in secret, for he would not hear of sobriety, economy, and a calm, bourgeois existence. He preferred to hold on to the pointless luxury and actual misery of the new boulevards from which he drew each morning the colossal fortune that he consumed by night. As he moved from adventure to adventure, all that he had left was the gilded façade without the capital to back it up. In this time of acute madness, not even Paris itself was more rash in risking its future, or more prompt to plunge itself into financial foolishness and fraud of every kind. The liquidation threatened to be terrifying.
The most promising speculations turned sour in Saccard’s hands. He had recently suffered considerable losses on the Bourse, as he had just confessed. By gambling on rising share prices, M. Toutin-Laroche had nearly sunk the Crédit Viticole when the market suddenly turned against him. Fortunately, the government, intervening behind the scenes, had put the well-known farm loan institution back on its feet. Saccard, shaken by these two blows and raked over the coals by his brother the minister for having threatened the security of the city’s delegation bonds, which depended on the solidity of the Crédit Viticole, proved even less fortunate in his speculation on real estate. Mignon and Charrier had broken with him completely. If he lashed out at them, it was because of the dull rage he felt at having made the mistake of building on his share of the land he’d bought with them, while they had prudently sold their share. While they were making a fortune, he was stuck with a great many empty houses, many of which he was forced to sell at a loss. One of the properties he unloaded was a house on the rue de Marignan, which he sold for 300,000 francs even though he still owed 380,000. He had invented a stratagem of his own, which involved insisting on an annual lease of 10,000 francs for an apartment that was worth 8,000 at most. The frightened tenant would not sign the lease until the landlord agreed to make him a gift of the first two years’ rent. This reduced the cost of the apartment to its actual price, but the lease still bore the figure of 10,000 francs per year, and when Saccard found a buyer and capitalized the income on the property, the calculations were truly fantastic. He was unable to apply this swindle on a large scale, however. His houses went unrented. He had built them too soon. Surrounded by freshly cleared lots that became forlorn mud flats in winter, his buildings were isolated, which seriously diminished their value. The deal that bothered him most was the huge swindle pulled off by Mignon and Charrier, who had bought from him a building on the boulevard Malesherbes when he had been forced to suspend construction. The contractors had finally been bitten by the rage to reside on “their own boulevard.” Although they had sold their share of the land from an earlier deal, they had caught wind of their former partner’s difficulties and now offered to take off his hands a plot on which construction had already begun. Some of the iron beams needed to support the building’s second-story flooring had already been laid. Yet they dismissed the structure’s solid stone foundation as so much useless rubble on the grounds that what they really wanted was a vacant lot on which they would be free to build as they pleased. Saccard was forced to sell without compensation