Complete Works of Emile Zola (242 page)

“Make the notes payable to me,” he said. “You understand, I did not want to compromise you. We will settle that between ourselves…. Six bills of twenty-five thousand francs each, see?”

Laure counted the “curl-papers” at a corner of the table. Rozan did not even see them. When he had signed, and raised his head, they had disappeared in the woman’s pocket. But she came up to him and kissed him on both cheeks, to his evident delight. Larsonneau watched them philosophically as he folded up the bills, and replaced the inkstand and the pen-holder in his pocket.

Laure was still with her arms round Rozan’s neck, when Aristide Saccard lifted a corner of the door-hangings.

“That’s right, don’t mind me,” he said, laughing.

The duc blushed. But Laure went and shook hands with the financier, exchanging a wink of intelligence with him. She was radiant.

“It’s done, my dear,” she said; “I warned you. You’re not very angry with me?”

Saccard shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly. He pulled back the hangings, and standing aside to allow Laure and the duc to pass, he cried, in the shrill voice of a gentleman-usher:

“Monsieur the duc, madame the duchesse!”

This joke met with immense success. The newspapers printed it the next day, giving Laure d’Aurigny’s real name, and describing the two men by very transparent initials. The rupture between Aristide Saccard and the fat Laure caused even more stir than their pretended love-affair.

Meantime Saccard had let fall the curtain on the burst of merriment which his joke had occasioned in the drawing-room.

“Eh! what a jolly girl!” he said, turning towards Larsonneau. “And so depraved!… It’s you, you scamp, who get the most out of all this. What are you to have?”

But the other protested with smiles; and he pulled down his shirt-cuffs, which were working up. At last he came and sat down near the door on a couch to which Saccard beckoned him.

“Come here, I don’t want to confess you, dash it all!… Let’s get to serious business, old chap. I had a long conversation with my wife to-night…. It’s all settled.”

“Does she consent to transfer her share?” asked Larsonneau.

“Yes, but it was not without difficulty…. Women are so obstinate! You know my wife had promised an old aunt of hers not to sell out. There was no end to her scruples…. Fortunately I had a quite unanswerable story ready.”

He rose to light a cigar at the candle which Laure had left on the table, and returning stretched himself at his ease on the couch:

“I told my wife,” he continued, “that you were completely ruined…. You had gambled on the Bourse, squandered your money on women, plunged into stupid speculations: in short, you are on the verge of a terrible bankruptcy…. I even gave her to understand that I did not consider you perfectly honest…. Then I explained to her that the Charonne affair would be swallowed up in your disaster, and that the best would be for her to accept the proposal you had made me to release her and to buy her out for an old song, no doubt.”

“I don’t call that clever,” muttered the expropriation-agent. “Do you think your wife will believe such rot as that?”

Saccard smiled. He was in one of his communicative moods.

“How simple you are, my dear fellow!” he resumed. “What has the plot of the story to do with it? It’s the details, the gesture, the accent: that’s the thing. Call Rozan over, and I bet I persuade him it’s broad daylight. And my wife has no more brains than Rozan…. I gave her a glimpse of an abyss. She has no suspicion of the coming expropriation. As she expressed surprise that in the midst of a catastrophe you could think of taking over a still heavier burden, I told her that she no doubt stood in the way of some ugly trick you proposed to play your creditors…. At last I advised her to consent, as being the only way to avoid being mixed up in endless lawsuits and to get some money out of her property.”

Larsonneau still thought the story rather clumsy. His own method was less melodramatic; each of his transactions was put together and unravelled with all the elegance of a drawing-room comedy.

“Personally, I should have thought of something different,” he said. “However, everyone has his own system…. So all we have to do now is to pay up.”

“It is on this subject,” replied Saccard, “that I want to come to an arrangement with you…. To-morrow I will take the deed of transfer to my wife, and she will only have to send you this deed in order to receive the stipulated price…. I prefer to avoid an interview.”

As a matter of fact he had never allowed Larsonneau to visit them on an intimate footing. He did not ask him to the house, and he went with him to Renée whenever it was absolutely necessary for the two partners to meet; that had happened thrice. He nearly always acted with a power of attorney from his wife, not seeing the use of allowing her to know too much of his affairs.

He opened his pocket-book, and added:

“Here are the two hundred thousand francs’ worth of bills accepted by my wife; you must give her those in payment, and add one hundred thousand francs, which I will bring you tomorrow in the course of the morning…. I am ruining myself, my dear friend. This business will cost me a fortune.”

“But that,” observed the expropriation-agent, “will only make three hundred thousand francs…. Will the receipt be made out for that sum?”

“A receipt for three hundred thousand francs!” rejoined Saccard, laughing. “I should think so! We should be in a nice fix later on. According to our inventories, the property must now be estimated at two million five hundred thousand francs. The receipt will be for half that, of course.”

“Your wife will never sign it.”

“Yes, she will. I tell you it’s all right…. Why, I told her it was your first condition. You hold a pistol to our heads, don’t you see, with your bankruptcy? And it is in that matter that I pretended to doubt your honesty and accused you of wishing to cheat your creditors…. Do you think my wife understands a word of all that?”

Larsonneau shook his head and murmured:

“No matter, you ought to have thought of something simpler.”

“But my story is simplicity itself!” said Saccard, in great astonishment. “Where the devil do you find it complicated?”

He was quite unconscious of the incredible number of threads with which he interwove the most ordinary piece of business. He derived a real joy from the cock-and-bull story he had just told Renée; and what enraptured him was the impudence of the lie, the heaping up of impossibilities, the astonishing complication of the plot. He could have had the building-land long ago had he not worked out all this drama; but he would have found less enjoyment in obtaining it easily. He set to work, on the contrary, with the utmost naïveté to make a whole financial melodrama out of the Charonne speculation.

He rose, and taking Larsonneau’s arm, walked towards the drawing-room.

“You have quite understood me, have you not? Be content to follow my instructions, and later on you’ll applaud me…. I say, my dear fellow, you ought not to wear yellow gloves, they spoil the look of your hands.”

The expropriation-agent only smiled and murmured:

“Oh, gloves have their advantages, my dear master: you can touch anything without being defiled.”

As they entered the drawing-room, Saccard was surprised and somewhat alarmed to find Maxime on the other side of the hangings. The young man was seated on a couch beside a blonde lady who was telling him, in a monotonous voice, a long story, her own no doubt. He had, in point of fact, overheard his father’s conversation with Larsonneau. The two accomplices seemed to him a pair of cunning dogs. Still annoyed by Renée’s betrayal, he felt a cowardly pleasure in learning of the theft of which she was to be the victim. It avenged him a little. His father came and shook hands with him with a suspicious look, but Maxime whispered to him, motioning to the blonde lady:

“She’s not bad, is she? I’m going to ‘bag’ her for to-night.”

Then Saccard began to pose and play the gallant. Laure d’Aurigny joined them for a moment; she complained that Maxime barely called on her once a month. But he professed to have been very busy, whereat everyone laughed. He added that in future they would see him wherever they went.

“I have been writing a tragedy,” he said, “and I only hit upon the fifth act yesterday…. I now mean to seek repose in the bosoms of all the pretty women in Paris.”

He laughed. He relished his allusions, which only he could understand. Meantime there was no one left in the drawing-room except Rozan and Larsonneau, at either side of the chimney. The Saccards rose to go, as did the blonde lady, who lived in the same house. Then the d’Aurigny went and spoke to the duc in a low voice. He seemed surprised and annoyed. Seeing that he could not make up his mind to leave his chair:

“No, really, not to-night,” she said in an undertone. “I have a headache!… To-morrow, I promise you.”

Rozan could not but obey. Laure waited till he was on the landing, and then said quickly in Larsonneau’s ear:

“See, big Lar? I keep my word…. Stuff him into his carriage.”

When the blonde lady took leave of the gentlemen to go up to her apartment, which was on the floor above, Saccard was astonished not to see Maxime follow her.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, no,” replied the young man. “I’ve thought better of it….”

Then he had an idea that struck him as very funny:

“I’ll resign in your favour if you like. Hurry up, she hasn’t shut her door yet.”

But the father shrugged his shoulders, and said:

“Thanks, I have something better than that at present.”

The four men went downstairs. Outside the duc insisted on taking Larsonneau in his carriage; his mother lived in the Marais, he could drop the expropriation-agent at his door in the Rue de Rivoli. The latter refused, closed the door himself, and told the coachman to drive on. And he remained on the pavement of the Boulevard Haussmann with the two others, talking, staying where he was.

“Ah! poor Rozan!” said Saccard, who suddenly understood.

Larsonneau swore that it was not so, that he didn’t care a rush for that, that he was a practical man. And as the two others continued to joke, and as the cold was very sharp, he ended by exclaiming:

“Upon my word, I don’t care, I’m going to ring…. You are two busybodies, messieurs.”

“Good night!” cried Maxime, as the door closed to.

And taking his father’s arm, he walked up the boulevard with him. It was one of those clear, frosty nights when it is so pleasant to walk on the hard ground through the icy atmosphere. Saccard said that Larsonneau made a mistake, that he ought merely to be the d’Aurigny’s friend. From there he went on to declare that the love of those women was really a bad thing. He assumed an air of morality, gave utterance to maxims and precepts of astonishing propriety.

“You see,” he said to his son, “that only lasts for a time, my boy…. You lose your health at it, and you don’t taste real happiness. You know I’m not a Puritan. Well, I tell you, I’ve had enough of it; I’m going to settle down.”

Maxime chuckled; he stopped his father, looked at him in the moonlight, and told him he was “an old fat-head.” But Saccard became still more serious:

“Joke as much as you like. I tell you again, there is nothing like marriage to keep a man in good condition and make him happy.”

Then he spoke to him of Louise. And he walked more slowly, to finish the business, he said, as they were once on the subject. The thing was completely arranged. He even informed him that he and M. de Mareuil had fixed the date for signing the contract for the Sunday following the Thursday in mid-Lent. On that Thursday there was to be a great entertainment at the house in the Parc Monceau, and he would then take the opportunity publicly to announce the marriage. Maxime thought all this very satisfactory. He was rid of Renée, he saw no further obstacle, he surrendered himself to his father as he had surrendered himself to his stepmother.

“Well then, that’s settled,” he said. “Only don’t talk about it to Renée. Her friends would chaff me and tease me, and I prefer that she should know of it at the same time as everybody else.”

Saccard promised to be silent. Then, as they approached the top of the Boulevard Malesherbes, he again gave him a heap of excellent advice. He told him how he ought to set about in order to make his home a paradise.

“Above all, never break off with your wife. It’s folly. A wife with whom you cease having connection costs you a fortune…. In the first place, you have to keep a woman, don’t you? And then the house expenses are much greater: there are dresses, madame’s private amusements, her dearest friends, the devil and all his retinue.”

He was in a mood of extraordinary virtue. The success of his Charonne business had filled his heart with idyllic affection.

“As for me,” he continued, “I was born to live in happy obscurity down in some village, with all my family around me…. People don’t know me, my boy…. I give the impression of being very frivolous. Well, that’s quite a mistake. I should love to be always near my wife, I would willingly exchange my business for a modest income that would enable me to retire to Plassans…. You are going to be a rich man; make yourself a home with Louise in which you will live like two turtle-doves. It’s so pleasant! I will come and see you. That will do me good.”

He ended with tears in his voice. Meanwhile they had reached the gate of the house, and they stood talking on the kerbstone. A North wind was sweeping over the heights of Paris. No sound arose in the pale night, white with frost; Maxime, surprised at his father’s emotion, had had a question on his lips for the past minute.

“But you,” he said at last, “it seems to me….”

“What?”

“Well, with your wife!”

Saccard shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, just so! I was a fool. That is why I am able to speak to you from experience…. But we have come together again, oh, entirely! It is almost six weeks ago. I go into her at night when I don’t get home too late. To-night the poor little dear will have to do without me; I have to work till daylight. I tell you, she’s jolly well made!…”

As Maxime held out his hand to him, he kept him back, and added, in a confidential whisper: