Money (L'Argent)

by Émile Zola

'Such examples age you quickly, do they not?' he said. 'For my part, I promptly settled down; I married a young girl who was ill and is now dead; I swear to-day that no one shall ever induce me to act foolishly again. No! But papa, you see, is incorrigible, because he has no moral sense.'

He took her hand, and, holding it for a moment in his own, felt that it was quite cold.

'I am going, since he doesn't come back. But pray don't grieve like this. I thought you so strong! And you ought to thank me, for there is only one thing that is stupid in life—to let oneself be duped.'

Finally he started off, but at the door he stopped to add, with a laugh: 'I was forgetting; tell him that Madame de Jeumont expects him to dinner.'

Left to herself, Madame Caroline did not stir. Bowed down on her chair in the spacious room, which had sunk into an oppressive silence, she gazed fixedly at the lamp with dilated eyes. It seemed to her that the veil had been suddenly torn aside. All that she had hitherto been unwilling to distinguish plainly, which she had only tremblingly suspected, now appeared before her in its frightful crudity, so clear that it would henceforth be impossible to doubt it, to gloss it over. She beheld Saccard naked, with the ravaged, complicated soul of a man of money, murky and rotting. For him there were neither bonds nor barriers; he rushed on to the satisfaction of his appetites with the unbridled instincts of a man who knows no other limit than powerlessness. He had sold his son, his wife, all who had fallen into his clutches; he had sold himself, and he would sell her too, and sell her brother, dispose of their hearts and their brains for money. He was nothing but a maker of money, one who threw beings and things into the melting-pot to coin them into money. In a brief interval of lucidity she saw the Universal diffusing money like perspiration in all directions—a lake, an ocean of money, into the midst of which, all at once, with a frightful crash, the whole house would topple down. Ah! money, horrible money, that smirches and devours!

Madame Caroline rose up in angry haste. No, no, it was monstrous; it was all over; she could no longer remain near that man. She would have forgiven him his betrayal; but loathing seized upon her at thought of all that old-time filth; terror distracted her at thought of the crimes which were possible in the future. There was nothing left for her but to start off at once if she did not wish to be splashed with mud herself, crushed beneath the ruins. And a pressing desire came to her to go far, far away, to join her brother in the distant East, less to warn him than to disappear herself. Yes, she must start, start at once! It was not yet six o'clock; she could take the rapide for Marseilles at seven fifty-five; for it seemed to her that to see Saccard again would be beyond her strength. She would make whatever purchases were necessary at Marseilles before embarking. A little linen in a trunk, one spare dress, and she would be off. In a quarter of an hour she could be ready.

Then the sight of her work on the table, the memoir which she had begun writing, made her pause for a moment. But what would be the use of taking that with her, since the whole thing was rotten at the foundation and was bound to fall? Nevertheless she began carefully arranging the documents and memoranda, like a good housewife who never likes to leave things in disorder. And the task occupied her for some moments, calming the first fever of her decision. She was again fully mistress of herself, when she gave a last glance round the room before leaving it. But just then the valet came in again, bringing a number of papers and letters.

In a mechanical kind of way Madame Caroline looked at the superscriptions, and perceived in the pile a letter from her brother addressed to herself. It came from Damascus, where Hamelin was then staying, making arrangements for the proposed branch line from that city to Beyrout. At first she began to glance over the letter, standing near the lamp, and resolving that she would read it more carefully later on in the train. But each sentence held her attention, she was unable to skip a word; and she finally sat down again at the table, and gave herself up to the absorbing perusal of this long letter, which filled twelve pages.

Hamelin happened to be in one of his gayest moods. He thanked his sister for the last good news which she had sent him from Paris, and sent her still better news in return, for everything, said he, was going to his liking. The first balance-sheet of the United Steam Navigation Company promised well; the new steamships were realising large receipts, thanks to their perfect equipment and superior speed. He jokingly said that folks travelled in them for pleasure, and pointed to the sea-ports invaded by tourists from the Western world, and declared that he could not make a journey by highway or byway without coming face to face with some Parisian of the Boulevards. As he had foreseen, it was really the East opened up to France. Cities, said he, would before long spring up on the fertile slopes of the Lebanon range. But particularly did he give a vivid picture of the lonely Carmel gorge, where the silver mine was now being actively worked. The savage site was being humanised; springs had been discovered amidst the gigantic pile of fallen rocks which barred the valley on the north; and fields were being formed, wheat was replacing the mastic-trees, whilst a whole village had sprung up near the mines, at first merely some wooden cabins, huts to shelter the workmen, but now little stone-built houses with gardens—the beginning of a city which would continue growing so long as the veins were not exhausted. There were now nearly five hundred inhabitants on the spot, and a road had just been finished connecting the village with Saint Jean d'Acre. From morning till night the extraction machines were roaring, waggons set out amid the loud cracking of whips, women sang, and children played and cried where formerly there had been a desert and death-like silence, which only the eagles had broken with the sound of their slowly beating pinions. And myrtle and broom still perfumed the atmosphere, which was so delightfully pure.

On the subject of the first railway which he had to lay, the line from Broussa to Beyrout by way of Angora and Aleppo, Hamelin wrote at great length. All the formalities had been concluded at Constantinople. He was delighted with certain happy alterations which he had made in the line of route, so as to overcome the difficult passage through the Taurus passes; and of these passes and of the plains that stretched away at the foot of the mountains he wrote with the rapture of a man of science who had found new coal deposits there, and expected to see the country covered with factories. He had located his guiding points, and chosen the sites of his stations, some in the midst of the wild solitudes—one here, another farther on. Cities would spring up around those stations at the intersection of the natural highways. The seed was already sown for the crop of men and grand things of the future; everything was already germinating; within a few years there would here be a new world. And he concluded with a loving kiss for his dear sister, happy at being able to associate her in this resurrection of a people, telling her that much of it would be due to her, to her who had so long helped him, buoyed him up by her fine bravery and health.