The Rush for the Spoil (La Curée): A Realistic Novel

by Émile Zola

He again relapsed into silence, his eyes ardently fixed on the city, where the shadows were gathering deeper and deeper. He was probably interrogating that too distant future which escaped him. Then night enveloped all, the city became lost in a confused mass, one could hear it breathing plentifully, like some sea, the crest of the pale waves of which is all the eye can distinguish. Here and there, a few walls still preserved a whitish hue; and the yellow flames of the gas-jets pierced the gloom one by one, similar to stars shining amidst the darkness of a stormy sky.

Angèle shook off her feeling of uneasiness and continued the jest her husband had commenced at dessert.

"Ah! well," said she with a smile, "there's been a good shower of those twenty-franc pieces! The Parisians are counting them now. Look at the fine piles they're making at our feet!"

She pointed to the streets which descend from the Buttes Montmartre, with their double rows of lighted gas-lamps looking like piles of gold.

"And over there," cried she, indicating a galaxy of lights, "that is surely the treasury!"

The remark made Saccard laugh. They remained a few minutes longer at the window, delighted with this flood of "twenty-franc pieces," which was ending by covering the whole of Paris. On returning from Montmartre, the civil servant no doubt regretted having gossiped so much. He put it down to the Burgundy, and requested his wife not to repeat the "nonsense" he had been saying; he wished, said he, to be considered a serious person.

For a long time past, Saccard had been studying these three lines of streets and Boulevards, the pretty correct plan of which he had so far forgotten himself as to place before Angèle. When the latter died, he in nowise regretted that she carried with her into the tomb the recollection of all he had said up on the Buttes Montmartre. It was there that his fortune lay, in those famous gaps which his hand had, so to say, opened in the very heart of Paris, and he had made up his mind to share his idea with no one, knowing well enough that on the day of the sharing of the spoil there would be plenty of crows hovering over the gutted city.

His original plan had been to purchase, on low terms, some building or other which he knew beforehand was condemned to shortly come down, and to realize an immense profit by obtaining a substantial indemnity. He would, perhaps, have decided to make the attempt without a sou, to buy the building on credit and merely to pocket the difference afterwards, like people do on the Bourse, when his second marriage, bringing him in a premium of two hundred thousand francs, fixed and developed his plan. He had now made his calculations: under the name of an intermediary, and without appearing personally in the matter, he would purchase the house in the Rue de la Pépinière from his wife, and treble his outlay, thanks to the knowledge he had acquired in his perambulations through the Hôtel de Ville, and to his friendly relations with certain influential personages.

The reason he started when Aunt Élisabeth told him where the house was situated, was because it happened to be in the line of a contemplated thoroughfare, the piercing of which was at that time kept secret outside the sanctum of the prefect of the Seine. This thoroughfare, the Boulevard Malesherbes, would necessitate the clearance of the entire house. It was one of the first Napoleon's old projects which it was proposed to put into execution, "to give a normal outlet," so said serious people, "to districts lost behind a labyrinth of narrow streets, on the slopes of the hills which hem in Paris." This official phrase did not, of course, admit the interest the Empire had in the turning over of money, in those vast alterations about the city which left the working classes no time to think. One day at the prefect's, Saccard had ventured to consult that famous plan of Paris on which "an august hand" had marked, in red ink, the principal thoroughfares of the second network of streets. These gory-looking strokes from a pen cut deeper into Paris even than did the civil servant's hand.

The Boulevard Malesherbes, which razed to the ground some superb mansions in the Rue d'Anjou and the Rue de la Ville-l'Évêque, and which necessitated some very considerable levelling works, was to be laid out one of the first. When Saccard went to inspect the building in the Rue de la Pépinière, his thoughts reverted to that autumn evening, to that dinner he had eaten with Angèle up on the Buttes Montmartre, and during which, while the sun was setting, so thick a shower of gold had seemed to fall about the neighbourhood of the Madeleine. He smiled; he fancied that the dazzling cloud had burst right over his own courtyard, and that all he had to do was to go and gather up the twenty-franc pieces.