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

by Émile Zola

She did not finish. Maxime was laughing with her. Such was the fine ending of Renée's lecture on this occasion.

Meanwhile Saccard troubled himself but little concerning the two children, as he called his son and his second wife. He left them complete liberty, feeling happy at seeing them such good friends, whereby the flat was filled with noisy gaiety. It was a singular flat, this first floor in the Rue de Rivoli. The doors were opening and shutting all day long, the servants talked aloud; through the fresh bright luxury of the place there constantly swept a flight of huge skirts, and processions of tradespeople; and in addition there was all the disorder occasioned by Renée's friends, Maxime's chums, and Saccard's visitors. From nine till eleven a.m. the last named received the strangest throng one could find, senators and lawyers' clerks, duchesses and old clothes-dealers, all the scum that the tempests of Paris landed of a morning at his door; silk dresses, dirty skirts, blouses, dress coats, all of which he received with the same hasty language and the same impatient nervous gestures. He settled a business affair in a couple of minutes, dealt with twenty difficulties at once and furnished solutions on the run. One would have thought that this restless little man, whose voice was very loud, was fighting in his study with his visitors, with the furniture, turning somersaults, knocking his head against the ceiling to make ideas flash forth from it, and always falling victorious on his feet again. Then at eleven o'clock he went out and was not seen again for the day; he lunched, and indeed, he often dined away from home. Then the house belonged to Renée and Maxime. They took possession of the father's study, they unpacked the tradespeoples' cardboard boxes there, and articles of finery lay about among the business papers. At times serious people waited for an hour at the door of the study whilst the collegian and the young woman seated at either end of Saccard's writing table, discussed a bow of ribbon. Renée had the horses put to ten times a day. They seldom shared a meal together; two of the three were ever on the wing, forgetting time, and only returning home at midnight. It was a dwelling of noise, business and pleasure, into which modern life swept like a gust of wind, with a sound of chinking gold and rustling dresses.

Aristide Saccard had found his vein at last. He had revealed himself as a great speculator and juggled with millions. After the masterly stroke of the Rue de la Pépinière he boldly threw himself into the struggle, which was beginning to scatter flashing triumphs and shameful wrecks through Paris. At first he executed safe strokes, repeating his first success, buying up houses which he knew to be threatened with the pickaxe, and utilising his friends so as to obtain heavy indemnities. There came a moment when he had five or six houses, those houses that he had looked at so strangely in former times, as acquaintances of his when he was merely a poor road inspector. But all that was the mere infancy of art, it did not require much cunning to run out leases, to plot with tenants, and to rob the State and private people; and he considered that the game was not sufficiently remunerative. For that reason he soon placed his genius at the service of more complicated affairs.

Saccard at first invented the dodge of buying houses secretly on behalf of the city of Paris. The latter's situation had become a difficult one owing to a decision of the Council of State. The city authorities had purchased, by private contract, a large number of houses in the hope of running out the leases and getting rid of the tenants without the payment of an indemnity. But these purchases were considered by the Council of State to be real expropriations and the city had to pay. It was then that Saccard offered to lend his name to the city; he bought houses, ran out the leases, and for a consideration handed the property over to the authorities at the date agreed upon. Indeed he finished by playing a double game; he bought property both for the city and for the prefect. When the affair was too tempting he stuck to the house himself. The State paid. In reward for his services he obtained the right to cut bits of streets and open spaces which had been planned, a right which he sold again to some one else before the new thoroughfare was even commenced. It was a hot game; people gambled with the new streets just as with stocks and shares. Certain ladies, pretty prostitutes, intimate with high functionaries, were in the swing; one of them, whose white teeth are famous, nibbled whole streets on various occasions. Saccard grew more hungry than ever, feeling his desires increase at the sight of the flood of gold which glided between his fingers. It seemed to him as if a sea of twenty-franc pieces expanded around him, swelling from a lake to an ocean, filling the vast horizon with a strange wave-like noise, a metallic music which tickled his heart; and he grew adventurous, becoming each day a bolder swimmer, diving, rising again to the surface, now on his back, now on his belly, crossing this immensity in fair and foul weather alike, and relying on his strength and skill to prevent him from ever sinking to the bottom.

Paris was then disappearing in a cloud of plaster dust. The times that Saccard had predicted on the heights of Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed to pieces with sabre strokes and he had a finger in every slash, in every wound. He had piles of building materials derived from demolished houses in the four corners of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astonishing story of a pit which a company dug to carry off five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in a gigantic enterprise, and which had to be filled up again by bringing soil from Saint-Ouen when the company had failed. Saccard got out of the affair with his conscience at ease and his pockets full, thanks to his brother Eugène, who was kind enough to intervene. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow to make way for the boulevard running from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Alma bridge. In the direction of Passy it was he who had the idea of scattering the refuse cleared away from the Trocadéro, upon the plateau, so that the good soil is now-a-days two yards below the surface, and even weeds refuse to grow amid the broken plaster. He might have been found in twenty directions at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a mass of clearings which no one knew what to do with, a hollow which it was difficult to fill up, a pile of soil mingled with plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but which he sifted with his own hands and in which he always finished by finding some sop or other, or a speculation in his own peculiar line. On the same day he ran from the works round about the Arc-de-Triomphe to those of the Boulevard St. Michel, from the clearings of the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments of Chaillot, dragging with him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and scamps.

But his purest glory was the Crédit Viticole, which he had established in conjunction with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was the official director, he himself only figured as a member of the board. In this circumstance Eugène had again done his brother a good turn. Thanks to him the government authorized the establishment of the company and watched its operations with great indulgence. On one difficult occasion, when an evil-minded newspaper ventured to criticise one of the company's operations, the "Moniteur" went so far as to publish a note forbidding any discussion concerning so honourable an undertaking, which the State deigned to patronize. The Crédit Viticole was based on an excellent financial system; it lent farmers half of the estimated value of their property, obtained a mortgage as guarantee for the loan, and received interest from the borrowers as well as an annual instalment of the principal. No financial system was ever more dignified or proper. Eugène had informed his brother with a sly smile that the Tuileries wished people to be honest. M. Toutin-Laroche interpreted this wish by letting the farmers' loan-machine work quietly, and by annexing to it a banking-house which attracted capital and gambled feverishly, launching forth into all sorts of adventurous enterprises. The Crédit Viticole thanks to the formidable impulsion it received from its director, soon enjoyed a well-established reputation of solidity and prosperity. At the outset, in view of offering at the Bourse, at one go, a mass of shares freshly detached from their counterfoils, and to give them the aspect of having long been in circulation, Saccard ingeniously had them trodden on and beaten, during a whole night, by the bank collectors provided with birch brooms. The headquarters of the Crédit Viticole might have been taken for a branch of the Bank of France. The house where the offices were located seemed to be the grave and dignified temple of Mammon, with its courtyard full of equipages, its solemn iron railings, its broad flight of steps and its monumental staircase, its suites of luxurious private rooms, and its world of clerks and liveried lackeys; and nothing could fill the public with more religious emotion than the sanctuary, the cashier's office, reached by a passage of sacred bareness, and where one perceived the safe, the god, crouching, embedded in the wall, squat and somniferous with its three locks, its massive flanks, and its air of divine brutishness.

Saccard jobbed a big affair with the city of Paris. The latter, hard-up, crushed by its debt, dragged into this dance of millions which it had started to please the Emperor and fill certain people's pockets, was now reduced to borrowing covertly, not caring to own its violent fever, its stone-and-pickaxe madness. It had just begun to issue what it called delegation bonds, real bills of exchange at a distant date, so as to pay the contractors on the very days that the agreements were signed, and thus enable them to obtain money by having these bonds discounted. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper from the contractors; and one day when the city was in need of money Saccard went to tempt it. A considerable sum was lent it on the security of delegation bonds which M. Toutin-Laroche swore he had obtained from contracting companies, and which he had dragged through all the gutters of speculation. After that the Crédit Viticole was above attack; it held Paris by the throat. The director now only talked with a smile about the famous Société Générale of the Ports of Morocco; and yet it still existed, and the newspapers continued regularly extolling the great commercial stations. One day when M. Toutin-Laroche tried to persuade Saccard to take some shares in this enterprise, the latter laughed in his face, asking him if he thought him fool enough to invest his money in the "General Company of the Arabian Nights."

Saccard had so far speculated successfully, with safe profits, cheating, selling himself, making money by contracts, deriving some sort of gain from each of his operations. Soon, however, this jobbing did not suffice him, he disdained gleaning, picking up the gold which folks like Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud dropped behind them. He plunged his arms into the bag, up to the shoulders. He went into partnership with Mignon, Charrier & Co., the famous contractors, who were then just starting, and who were destined to make colossal fortunes. The city of Paris had already decided not to execute the works itself, but to have the boulevards laid out by contract. The contracting companies agreed to deliver a thoroughfare complete, with its trees planted, its benches and lamp-posts duly placed, in exchange for a specified indemnity; at times they even delivered the thoroughfare for nothing, finding themselves amply remunerated by retaining the bordering building ground, for which they asked a greatly enhanced price. The fever of speculation in land, the furious rise in the value of house property date from this period. Saccard, thanks to his connections, obtained a grant to lay out three lots of boulevard. He was the ardent and somewhat muddling soul of the partnership. Messieurs Mignon & Charrier, his dependents at the outset, were fat, artful fellows, master masons, who knew the value of money. They laughed slyly at sight of Saccard's equipages; they generally retained their blouses, never refused to shake hands with a workman, and returned home covered with plaster dust. They came from Langres both of them, and into this burning, never satisfied Paris they brought their Champagnese prudence, their calm brains, somewhat obtuse and deficient in intelligence, but very quick in profiting of opportunities for filling their pockets, free to enjoy themselves later on. If Saccard promoted the affair and infused life into it with his fire and rageous appetite, Messieurs Mignon & Charrier by their plodding habits, their narrow methodical management, prevented it a score of times from being capsized by the astonishing imagination of their partner. They would never consent to have superb offices in a mansion which he wanted to build to astonish Paris. They also refused to entertain the secondary speculations which sprouted in his brain every morning, such as the erection of concert halls and vast bathing establishments on the building ground bordering their thoroughfare; of covered galleries, which would have doubled the rent of the shops and have allowed people to circulate through Paris without getting wet. To put a stop to these plans, which frightened them, the contractors decided that the building ground should be divided between the three partners, and that each should do what he pleased with his share. They themselves wisely continued selling their lots while he built upon his. His brain boiled. He would, in all seriousness, have proposed placing Paris under a huge bell-glass to change it into a conservatory and grow pine apples and sugar cane there.

Turning over money by the shovelful he soon had eight houses on the new boulevards. He had four that were completely finished, two in the Rue de Marignan, and two on the Boulevard Haussmann; the four others, situated on the Boulevard Malesherbes, remained in progress, and indeed one of them, a vast enclosure of planks where a magnificent mansion was to rise, had only the flooring of the first floor laid. At this period his affairs became so complicated, he had so many strings attached to each of his fingers, so many interests to watch over and puppets to set in motion, that he slept barely three hours a night and read his correspondence in his carriage. The marvellous thing was that his cash-box seemed inexhaustible. He was a shareholder in every company, built houses with a kind of fury, turned himself to every trade and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, without once being seen to realise a clear profit or pocket a large sum shining in the sunlight. The river of gold, of unknown source, which seemed to flow from his study in quickly recurring waves, astonished the Parisian cockneys, and at one moment made him the prominent man to whom the newspapers ascribed all the witticisms of the Bourse.

With such a husband Renée was about as little married as she could be. She remained for whole weeks almost without seeing him. On the other hand he was perfect; he threw his cash-box wide open for her. In point of fact, she liked him as she would have liked an obliging banker. When she went to the Béraud mansion she praised him highly before her father, whose severity and coldness did not abate on account of his son-in-law's fortune. Her contempt had fled; this man seemed so convinced that life is a mere business affair, he was so plainly born to coin money out of whatever fell into his hands, women, children, paving-stones, sacks of mortar, and consciences, that she could not reproach him for having made their marriage a bargain. Since that bargain he in a measure looked upon her as upon one of those fine houses which honoured him and from which he expected to derive large profits. He liked to see her well dressed, noisy, making all Paris turn the head. It consolidated his position, doubled the probable figure of his fortune. By his wife he seemed handsome, young, amorous, and giddy. She was a partner, an accomplice without knowing it. A new pair of horses, a dress costing two thousand crowns, a weakness for a lover, facilitated, often ensured the success of his most remunerative transactions. Moreover, he frequently pretended to be worn-out, and sent her to a minister's, or some functionary's, to solicit an authorisation or receive a reply. "And be good!" he said to her in a tone, at once jesting and coaxing, which only belonged to himself. And when she returned, when she had succeeded, he rubbed his hands, repeating his famous phrase, "And you were good?" Renée laughed. He was too active to wish his wife to be a Madame Michelin. He simply liked coarse witticisms and indecent suppositions. Besides, if Renée had "not been good" he would only have experienced the mortification of having really paid for the minister's or functionary's compliance. To dupe people, to give them less than their money's worth, was a feast for him. He often said: "If I were a woman I should perhaps sell myself, but I should never deliver the merchandise; it's too stupid."