Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (56 page)

Madame Caroline was not at home at the time of her brother’s arrest, and he could do no more than leave her a few hastily scribbled lines. When she returned home, she was aghast. Never had she thought even for a moment that anyone could think of prosecuting her brother, so entirely free did he seem of any shady dealings, his innocence seemingly proved by his long absences. The day after the bankruptcy, the brother and sister had stripped themselves of all they possessed, in order to increase the assets,
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wanting to remain as naked, coming out of this adventure, as when they had gone into it; and the sum was considerable, nearly eight million, in which the three hundred thousand francs inherited from an aunt had also been swallowed up. Madame Caroline immediately threw herself into all sorts of activities and appeals; she now lived with the sole purpose of
improving the lot, and preparing the defence, of her poor dear Georges, bursting into tears, despite her courage, whenever she thought of him, innocent as he was, behind bars, stained by this fearful scandal, his life in ruins and soiled for ever. He, so gentle and weak, with the piety of a child, and, apart from his technical work, the ignorance of ‘a big ninny’, as she used to say. At first she had raged against Saccard, sole cause of the disaster, creator of their adversity, whose execrable handiwork she could now reconstruct and clearly judge, from those very first days when he had teased her so merrily for reading the Code, to these final days when, with the severe consequences of failure, all the irregularities had to be paid for, irregularities she had foreseen and allowed to happen. Then, tortured by remorse for the complicity that haunted her, she fell silent, and tried to avoid openly concerning herself with him, doing her utmost to act as if he did not exist. When she had to pronounce his name, it seemed as if she were speaking of a stranger, an adversary, whose interests were quite other than hers. She, who visited her brother almost every day at the Conciergerie,
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had not even requested a permit to go and see Saccard. And she was very brave, still living in their apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare, receiving all comers, even those who arrived with insults on their lips, transformed now into a businesswoman, determined to salvage whatever she could of their honesty and happiness.

During the long days she spent in this way in the workroom, where she had lived such lovely days of work and hope, one sight particularly distressed her. When she drew near a window and looked down upon the house next door, it was with a pang at her heart that she saw, behind the windows of the little room where the two poor women lived, the pale profiles of the Countess de Beauvilliers and her daughter Alice. These February days were very mild, so she saw them frequently, walking slowly, with heads bent, along the alleys of the mossy, winter-ravaged garden. The crash had been terrible for these two lives. The unhappy ladies who, a fortnight before, had been in possession of eighteen hundred thousand francs through their six hundred shares, would today be able to get only eighteen thousand for them, now that the shares had fallen from three thousand francs to thirty. Their entire fortune had been lost, swept away at a stroke: the twenty thousand francs for the dowry, so painfully saved by the Countess, the seventy thousand francs, first borrowed on the farm at Les Aublets, then the two hundred and forty thousand francs from the sale of Les Aublets,
when it had actually been worth four hundred thousand. What was to become of them, when the many mortgages on their house already ate up eight thousand francs a year, and they had never been able to reduce the household expenses to less than seven thousand, despite all their miserliness and the sordid miracles of economy they achieved to keep up appearances and maintain their status? Even if they sold their shares, how could they now live, how meet all their needs, with just eighteen thousand francs, the final debris from the shipwreck? One necessity imposed itself, one that the Countess had not yet been able to face with resolution: to leave their house, since it was impossible to pay the interest, abandon it to the mortgagees rather than waiting until the latter put the house up for sale, retire at once to some quiet little lodging and there live a restricted and obscure life until the last crust of bread was gone. If the Countess still resisted, it was because this meant a tearing away of her whole person, the death of what she had believed herself to be, the crumbling of that edifice of her race that for years, with heroic obstinacy, she had upheld with her trembling hands. The Beauvilliers in rented accommodation, no longer under the ancestral roof but living in the houses of others, in the acknowledged penury of the defeated—wasn’t that, really, enough to make one die of shame? So she went on struggling.

One morning Madame Caroline saw the two ladies doing their washing in the little shed in the garden. The old cook, now almost helpless, was no longer much use to them; during the recent cold weather they had had to look after her; and it was the same story with the cook’s husband, who was porter, coachman and valet all in one; it was now only with great difficulty that he swept the house, and kept the old horse on its feet, stumbling now and wrecked by age, as he was himself. So the ladies had resolutely applied themselves to the housework, the daughter sometimes leaving her watercolours to make the thin broths on which the four people were frugally living, the mother dusting the furniture, mending the clothes and shoes, thinking she was making some minute economy in the use of dusters, needles and thread now that it was she who was using them. But as soon as a visitor arrived it was quite a sight to see the way they both fled, throwing off aprons, having a quick wash, and reappearing as the ladies of the house, with white and idle hands. Viewed from the street, their lifestyle had not changed: their honour was intact, the carriage came out properly equipped to take the Countess and her daughter on their visits, and the fortnightly dinners
still brought together the same guests as every winter, with not one dish less on the table nor one candle less in the candelabra. Only someone who was able, like Madame Caroline, to look down into their garden could know what terrible days of fasting followed all that show, that illusory façade of a vanished fortune. When she saw them, down there in that damp well of a garden, squashed between neighbouring houses, walking with their mortal melancholy under the greenish skeletons of the centenarian trees, she was seized by immense pity, and would leave the window, her heart torn with remorse, as if she felt she had been Saccard’s accomplice in causing this wretchedness.

Then, on another morning, Madame Caroline felt a sadness more direct, and even more painful. A visit from Dejoie was announced, and she bravely insisted on seeing him.

‘Well, my poor Dejoie…’

But she stopped in alarm when she saw the pallor of the former office-boy. His eyes seemed lifeless, his face was distraught, and formerly very tall, he had shrunk, as if folded up.

‘Come now, you must not let yourself be demoralized by the thought of all that money being lost.’

And then he spoke, in a slow voice:

‘Oh, Madame, it’s not that… Of course, in the first moment it was a hard blow, because I had got used to thinking we were rich. When you’re winning, it goes to your head, it’s as if you were drunk… But Lord! I was already resigned to going back to work, and I’d have worked so hard I would have managed to make up the sum again… But, you can’t imagine…’

Fat tears rolled down his cheeks.

‘You can’t imagine… She’s gone…’

‘Gone? Who’s gone?’ asked Madame Caroline in some surprise.

‘Nathalie, my daughter. Her marriage had fallen through, and she was furious when Théodore’s father came to tell us that his son had waited too long, and he was going to marry a haberdasher’s daughter who was bringing him nearly eight thousand francs. That, of course, I understand—that she should be angry at being left with no money, and no prospect of marriage. But I loved her so much! Even last winter, I would get up in the night to tuck in her blankets. And I went without tobacco so she could have prettier hats, and I was a real mother to her, I brought her up, I only lived for the pleasure of seeing her, in our little apartment.’

His tears were choking him, and he broke into sobs.

‘So it’s all the fault of my ambition… If I had sold, as soon as my eight shares gave me the six thousand francs for the dowry, she would have been married by now. But there, do you see? The price kept going up, and I thought of myself; first I wanted to get an income of six hundred, then eight hundred, then a thousand francs; all the more eagerly in that my little girl would later inherit that money… To think that at one moment, when the price was three thousand, I had twenty-four thousand francs in hand, enough to give her a dowry of six thousand, and retire, myself, with an income of nine hundred francs. No! I wanted a thousand, isn’t that stupid? And now it’s not even two hundred francs… Ah, it’s my fault! I’d have done better to throw myself in the river.’

Madame Caroline, very moved by his grief, let him relieve his feelings. But she still wanted to know more.

‘So she’s gone, my poor Dejoie, but gone where?’

Then he looked embarrassed, and a faint flush rose to his pallid face.

‘Yes, gone, disappeared, three days ago. She had become acquainted with a gentleman who lived across the street from us—oh! a very proper gentleman, a man of forty… So, she has run away.’

While he gave some details, searching for words, tripping over his tongue, Madame Caroline could see Nathalie again in her mind’s eye, slim and blonde, with the frail grace of a pretty girl of the Paris streets. She had noticed especially her wide eyes, so tranquil and so cold, with the extraordinary limpidity of egoism. The child had allowed herself to be adored by her father, happy to be idolized, and behaving well as long as it was in her interests to do so, incapable of a stupid fall for as long as she was expecting a dowry, a marriage, and a counter in a little shop, where she could have played the queen. But to go on with a penniless life, living in rags with her good old father, having to go back to work—ah, no, she had had enough of that dreary life, now unrelieved by hope! And she had gone, had coldly put on her boots and her hat, and gone elsewhere.

‘Oh Lord!’ Dejoie went on, stammering. ‘She didn’t have much fun at home, it’s true, and it’s annoying for a nice girl to be wasting her youth, getting bored… But even so, she has been very hard. Just think of it! Not even saying goodbye to me, not a scrap of a letter, not the tiniest promise to come back and see me now and then… She just shut the door and that was that. You see, my hands are trembling,
I’ve been like a wounded animal ever since. It’s too much for me, I keep on looking for her in the house. After so many years, dear Lord, how is it possible that I don’t have her with me any more, and never shall again, my poor little child!’

He had stopped crying, and his bewildered grief was so distressing that Madame Caroline seized hold of both his hands, finding no other comfort for him than to keep repeating:

‘My poor Dejoie, my poor Dejoie…’

Then, to distract him, she went back to the failure of the Universal. She blamed herself for having let him buy shares, and severely criticized Saccard, without naming him. But suddenly the former office-boy became animated. Bitten by the gambling bug, he was still passionate about it.

‘Ah, Monsieur Saccard, he was so right to stop me selling. It was a splendid business, and we’d have beaten them all, but for the traitors who let us down… Ah, Madame, if Monsieur Saccard were here, things would be different. It was death for us when they put him in prison. And it’s only he who could save us… I told the judge: “Monsieur, give him back to us, and I’ll trust him again with my fortune and my life, because, you see, that man, he’s like God himself! He can do whatever he wants.”’

Madame Caroline gazed at him, quite stupefied. What! Not a word of anger or reproach? This was the ardent faith of a believer. What powerful influence could Saccard have had on the whole flock, to keep them under such a yoke of credulity?

‘In fact, Madame, I came here just to tell you that, and you must forgive me if I told you about my own troubles, because I’m not very steady in my head just now… When you see Monsieur Saccard, please tell him we are still with him.’

He went away with faltering steps, and for a moment she felt a horror of life. That unhappy man had broken her heart. Against the other man, the one she didn’t name, she felt a fresh surge of anger, the force of which she rammed down inside herself. Besides, visitors were now arriving, she had hordes of them that morning.

Among the flow of people, the Jordans especially upset her again. They had come, Paul and Marcelle, like a loving couple who always acted together in serious matters, to ask whether there was really nothing more their parents, the Maugendres, could get out of their shares in the Universal. On that side the disaster was irreparable.
Before the great battles of the last two settlements, the former tarpaulin-manufacturer already held seventy-five shares, which had cost him about eighty thousand francs—a splendid deal, since at one moment, with the price at three thousand francs, the shares represented two hundred and twenty-five thousand. But the awful thing was that in the passion of the fight, he had gambled without cover, believing in the genius of Saccard, and had gone on buying, with the result that the frightful differences he had to pay, more than two hundred thousand francs, had just swept away the last remnants of his fortune, that income of fifteen thousand francs, that he had earned with thirty years of hard work. Now he had nothing, he would hardly be able to clear all his debt, even after selling his little house in the Rue Legendre, of which he had been so proud. And in this disaster, Madame Maugendre had certainly been more guilty than he.

‘Ah, Madame,’ Marcelle explained, with her sweet face, even in the midst of catastrophe, still fresh and smiling, ‘you can’t imagine how Mama changed! She, so prudent, so thrifty, the terror of the servants, always at their heels picking over their accounts, she had taken to speaking only in terms of hundreds of thousands; she kept urging Papa on—oh! he was much less brave, deep down, and would have listened to Uncle Chave if she hadn’t driven him mad with her dream of winning the big prize, the million… They got caught up in speculation at the start through reading the financial papers, and it was Papa who first got enthusiastic about it; indeed, to begin with he used to hide what he was doing; then once Mama went into it too, despite having for so long professed a good housekeeper’s hatred of all gambling, it all blazed up, it didn’t take long. How is it possible that the passion for winning can change decent people to such an extent!’