The Kill - Emile Zola [90]
He was thus able to pretend to his wife that he was strapped for cash all the more convincingly as his business dealings became increasingly entangled. He was not a man to confess for love of truth.
“But monsieur,” Renée asked with an air of doubt, “if you are in difficulty, why did you buy me that aigrette and necklace, which I believe cost you 65,000 francs? . . . I have no use for those jewels, and I shall be obliged to ask your permission to dispose of them in order to raise money to pay Worms a first installment on what I owe.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” he exclaimed anxiously. “If you’re not seen wearing those jewels tomorrow night at the ministry ball, there will be talk about my position.”
He was in a good mood that morning. He ended with a smile and a wink, whispering, “My dear, we speculators are like pretty women. We have our sly ways. . . . Please, I beg you, for my sake, keep your aigrette and your necklace.”
He could not tell her the story, which was quite a good one but rather risqué. One night after supper, Saccard and Laure d’Aurigny had formed an alliance. Laure was up to her eyes in debt and had only one thought in mind: to find a nice young man willing to run off to London with her. Saccard, for his part, felt the ground giving way beneath him. With his back to the wall, his imagination cast about for an expedient that would display him to the public sprawled upon a bed of gold and banknotes. Lingering over dessert, both half-drunk, the whore and the speculator came to an understanding. He hatched the plan of selling Laure’s diamonds in a sale that would grip the imagination of all of Paris. He would then make a great splash by buying some of the jewels himself, for his wife. With the proceeds from this sale, around 400,000 francs, he managed to satisfy Laure’s creditors, to whom she owed almost twice that amount. It was quite likely that he pocketed part of his 65,000 francs himself. When people saw him putting the Aurigny woman’s affairs in order, they took him to be her lover and concluded that he must have paid off all her debts and made a fool of himself for her. Suddenly he was the man of the hour, and his credit was miraculously restored. At the Bourse everyone teased him about his passion with smiles and allusions that pleased him no end. Meanwhile, Laure d’Aurigny, notorious as a result of all this fuss even though he had never spent a single night with her, pretended to deceive him with eight or ten imbeciles spurred on by the idea of stealing her from a man of such colossal wealth. Within a month she had two sets of furniture and more diamonds than she had been forced to sell. Saccard had taken to going to her place to smoke a cigar every afternoon after leaving the Bourse. He often glimpsed coattails fleeing out the door in terror as he arrived. When they were alone, they couldn’t look at each other without laughing. He kissed her on the forehead, as if her perverse mischief excited him. He never gave her a cent, and once she even lent him money to pay off a gambling debt.
Renée felt compelled to press her point and brought up the idea of at least pawning the jewels, but her husband insisted that this was impossible because all Paris expected to see her wearing them the next night. The young woman, quite worried about Worms’s bill, then tried another tack.
“But my business in Charonne is going well, isn’t it?” she blurted out. “You were telling me the other day that the profits would be superb. . . . Maybe Larsonneau would advance me the