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

by Émile Zola

He had recovered himself, and he threatened his son with his finger, muttering:

"That scamp always has some forbidden fruit in his pockets! One of these days he will bring us the lady's arm as well as her bracelet."

"Why! it isn't my doing," replied Maxime with cunning cowardice. "It's Renée who wanted to see it."

The husband contented himself with saying, "Ah!" And he looked at the bracelet in his turn, repeating like his wife, "It is very pretty, very pretty."

Then he quietly went off and Renée scolded Maxime for having betrayed her like that. But he declared that his father did not care a fig about the matter! Whereupon she returned him the bracelet, adding:

"You must call on the jeweller, and order one exactly like it for me; only, you must have the emeralds replaced by sapphires."

Saccard could not keep any living or inanimate object near him for any length of time without trying to sell it, or derive some profit by it. His son was not twenty when he already thought of utilising him. A handsome fellow, the nephew of a minister and the son of a great financier, ought to be invested well. He was certainly rather young, still one could always seek a wife and a dowry for him, and, afterwards, one could have the wedding deferred or hastened according to the financial position of the establishment. Saccard proved lucky. On a board of directors, to which he belonged, he found a tall handsome man, M. de Mareuil, who in a couple of days belonged to him. M. de Mareuil, rightly named Bonnet, was an ex-sugar refiner of Le Havre. After amassing a large fortune he had married a young girl of noble birth and also very rich, who was looking out for a fool of stylish appearance. Bonnet obtained permission to assume his wife's name, which was a first satisfaction for his pride; but his marriage had made him madly ambitious, and he dreamt of remunerating Hélène for this noble name by acquiring a high political position. From that time forward he invested money in new newspapers, bought a large estate in the depths of the Nièvre, and by all known means prepared for himself a candidature to the Corps Législatif. So far he had failed but without losing aught of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain that could be met with. He was of superb stature, with the white pensive face of a great statesman; and as he listened marvellously well, with a deep look, and majestic calmness of face, people could readily imagine that a prodigious work of comprehension and deduction was going on in his mind. In reality he was thinking about nothing. But he succeeded in disturbing people, who no longer knew whether they had to deal with a man of superior attainments or a fool. M. de Mareuil attached himself to Saccard as to a raft that might save him. He was aware that an official candidature would be vacant in the Nièvre, and he ardently hoped that the minister would select him; it was his last card. So he handed himself up, bound hand and foot, to the minister's brother. Saccard, who scented a remunerative transaction, gradually set him thinking of a marriage between his daughter Louise and Maxime. De Mareuil then became most effusive, thought that he himself had initiated this idea of a marriage, and considered himself very fortunate to enter a minister's family and give Louise to a young man who seemed to have such fine prospects.

Louise, said her father, would have a dowry of a million francs. Deformed, ugly, and yet adorable, she was condemned to die young; a chest complaint was stealthily undermining her, lending her nervous gaiety and caressing grace. Young girls who are ailing quickly grow old, and become women before their time. She was sensually ingenuous, she seemed to have been born at fifteen years of age in full puberty. When her father, a healthy brutified colossus, looked at her he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, during her lifetime, had also been a strong well-built woman; but stories were told about her which explained this child's stuntedness, her manners of a millionaire Bohemian, and her vicious and charming ugliness. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died from the most shameful profligacy. Pleasure had eaten into her like an ulcer, without her husband realising her lucid madness, though he ought to have had her shut up in a private asylum. Developed in this diseased form, Louise had left it with impoverished blood and crooked limbs, with her brain attacked and her memory already full of a dirty life. She thought at times that she could confusedly remember another existence, she saw strange scenes unfolded before her in a vague dimness, men and women kissing one another, quite a carnal drama with which her childish curiosity was amused. It was her mother that spoke within her. This vice remained in her throughout her childhood. As she gradually grew up, nothing astonished her, she recollected everything, or rather she knew everything, and she went to forbidden things, with a sureness of hand that made her, in life, seem like a person returning home after a long absence, and only having to stretch out his hand to set himself at ease and partake of the comforts of his abode. This singular girl, whose evil instincts flattered Maxime, and who, moreover—in this second life which she lived as a virgin with all the science and shame of a grown woman—possessed an ingenuous effrontery, a spicy mixture of childishness and boldness, was bound in the result to please the young fellow, and seem to him very much funnier even than Sylvia, who, the daughter of a worthy stationer, possessed a usurer's heart and was horribly middle-class at bottom.

The marriage was arranged with a laugh, and it was decided that "the youngsters" should be allowed to grow up. The two families lived on a footing of close friendship. M. de Mareuil promoted his candidature. Saccard watched his prey. It was understood that Maxime should place his nomination as an auditor of the Council of State among the marriage presents.

Meanwhile the Saccards' fortune seemed to have reached its culminating point. It blazed in the midst of Paris like a colossal bonfire. It was the moment when the ardent sharing of the hounds' fees fills a corner of the forest with the barking of dogs, the clacking of whips and the blazing of torches. The appetites let loose were at last satisfied in the impudence of triumph, amid the racket of falling houses and of fortunes built up in six months. The city was now but a great saturnalia of millions and women. Vice, coming from above, flowed along the gutters, spread itself out in the sheets of ornamental water, reascended in the fountains of the public gardens to fall again on to the roofs in a fine penetrating rain. And at night time, when one passed over the bridges, it seemed as if the Seine drew along with it, amid the sleeping metropolis, all the refuse of the city—crumbs fallen from tables, bows of lace left on divans, false hair forgotten in cabs, bank notes that had slipped out of bodices, everything that the brutality of desire, and the immediate satisfaction of instinct fling into the street broken and soiled. Then amid the feverish sleep of Paris, and better still amid its breathless hankering in the broad daylight, one realised the unsettling of the brain, the golden and voluptuous nightmare of a city, madly enamoured of its gold and its flesh. The violins sounded till midnight: then the windows became dark and shadows descended over the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last virtue extinguished. In the depths of the shade there was nothing left save a great rattle of furious, wearied love; while the Tuileries, on the river bank, stretched their arms out into the night as if for a huge embrace.