Saccard had just had his mansion of the Parc Monceaux built on some ground stolen from the city. He had reserved for himself on the first floor, a superb private room, all violet ebony and gold, with lofty glass doors to the book-cases, which were full of business papers but where not a book was to be seen; the safe, embedded in the wall, had the depths of an iron alcove large enough to accommodate the amours of a milliard. It was here that his fortune bloomed, impudently displayed itself. Everything seemed to succeed with him. When he left the Rue de Rivoli, increasing his household, doubling his expenditure, he talked to his friends about some considerable winnings. According to his account his partnership with Mignon and Charrier brought him enormous profits; his speculations on house property were more remunerative still; and as for the Crédit Viticole, it was an inexhaustible milch cow. He had a way of enumerating his riches that bewildered his listeners and prevented them from clearly seeing the truth. His Provençal snuffling increased, and, with his curt phrases and nervous gestures, he let off fireworks, in which millions rose like rockets, and which finished by dazzling even the most incredulous. The reputation which he had acquired as a lucky gamester was mainly due to this turbulent pantomimic action. To tell the truth, no one knew him to be possessed of a clear solid capital. His different partners, who perforce were acquainted with his situation as regarded themselves, explained his colossal fortune by believing him to be invariably fortunate in other speculations, those which they were not acquainted with. He spent a deal of money: the effluence of his cash-box continued, without the sources of this golden river having so far been discovered. It was pure madness, a frenzy for scattering money, handfuls of louis flung out of window, the safe emptied every evening to its last copper, but filling itself again during the night, no one knew how, and never supplying such large sums as when Saccard pretended he had lost the keys.
Renée's dowry was shaken, carried off and drowned in this fortune which clamoured and overflowed like a winter-torrent. The young wife, who had been distrustful in earlier days and desirous of managing her fortune herself, soon grew tired of business matters; besides, she felt herself poor beside her husband, and crushed by her debts, she was obliged to have recourse to him, to borrow money from him, and place herself at his discretion. At each fresh bill, which he paid with the smile of a man who is indulgent towards human weakness, she surrendered herself a little more, confided State bonds to him, and authorized him to sell this or that. When they went to live in the mansion in the Parc Monceaux she already found herself almost completely stripped. He had taken the place of the State and served her the interest of the hundred thousand francs coming from the Rue de la Pépinière; on the other hand, he had induced her to sell the estate in La Sologne to place the proceeds in a great affair, a superb investment, he said. She therefore had nothing left her excepting the property at Charonne, which she obstinately refused to part with so as not to sadden that excellent Aunt Élisabeth. And, in this respect again, he was preparing a stroke of genius with the assistance of his former accomplice Larsonneau. She certainly remained under obligations to him; if he had taken her fortune, he paid her the income it would have furnished, five or six times over. The interest on the hundred thousand francs, with the revenue of the Sologne money, scarcely amounted to nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to pay for her linen and boots. He gave her or paid away for her fifteen and twenty times that paltry sum. He would have worked for a week to rob her of a hundred francs, but he kept her in regal style. And thus like everybody she held her husband's monumental safe in respect without trying to penetrate the nihility of the river of gold which passed under her eyes and into which she threw herself every morning.
At the Parc Monceaux there was a mad crisis, a flashing triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses; they had an army of servants, whom they dressed in a dark-blue livery with putty-coloured breeches, and waistcoats striped black and yellow—somewhat quiet colours that the financier had selected so as to seem altogether serious-minded, which was one of the dreams he had most caressed. They displayed their luxury on the house top, and drew back the curtains when they gave grand dinners. The breeze of contemporary life, which had banged the doors of the first floor in the Rue de Rivoli, became in the mansion a perfect whirlwind that threatened to carry off the very partitions. In the midst of these princely rooms, along the gilded balustrades, over the fine woollen carpets, in this fairy palace of the parvenu, there trailed the smell of Mabille; the fashionable quadrilles were danced there with all their wriggling jactitance, the whole period passed with its mad stupid laugh, its eternal hunger and its eternal thirst. It was the suspicious abode of fashionable pleasure, the pleasure which widens the windows so that passers-by may see what is transpiring in the alcoves. The husband and the wife lived there, freely, under the eyes of their servants. They had divided the house between them, and they camped in it, scarcely looking as though they were at home, but rather as if tossed, at the end of a tumultuous bewildering journey, into some regal hotel, where they had merely taken the time to open their trunks, so as to hasten the more speedily to the delights of a fresh city. They lodged there by the night, only remaining at home on the days when grand dinners were given, ever carried away by a ceaseless peregrination through Paris, but returning at times for an hour, as one returns into a room at an inn between two excursions. Renée felt herself become more anxious, more nervous there; her silken skirts glided with snake-like hisses over the thick carpets, past the satin of the couches; she was irritated by the stupid gilding which surrounded her, by the high empty ceilings where after fête nights there only lingered the laughter of young fools and the remarks of old scoundrels; and to fill this luxury, to abide amidst this effulgence, she longed for a supreme amusement which her curiosity vainly sought for in all the corners of the mansion, in the little sun-tinted drawing-room, in the conservatory full of luxuriant vegetation. As for Saccard he began to realise his dream; he received great financiers, Monsieur Toutin-Laroche and Monsieur de Lauwerens; and great politicians also, Baron Gouraud and Deputy Haffner; his brother the minister had even condescended to come two or three times to consolidate his position by his presence. And yet like his wife he experienced nervous anxiety, a disquietude which lent a strange sound of broken window panes to his laughter. He became so ungovernable, so scared, that his acquaintances remarked, "That devil of a Saccard! he makes too much money, it will end by driving him mad!" In 1860 he had been decorated with the Legion of Honour, after rendering a mysterious service to the prefect, by lending his name to a lady for the sale of some land.
It was about the time when they went to live near the Parc Monceaux that an apparition crossed Renée's life, leaving her an ineffaceable impression. The minister had so far resisted the supplications of his sister-in-law, who was dying with a longing to be invited to the court balls. However, he gave way at last, believing that his brother's position was definitely established on a sound basis. For a month Renée did not sleep for thinking of it. But the great evening arrived at last, and she sat trembling all over, in the carriage which was taking her to the Tuileries.
She wore a costume of prodigious grace and originality, a real gem which she had lighted upon during a night of sleeplessness, and which three of Worms's workpeople had come to her house to make up under her eyes. It was a simple dress of white gauze, trimmed however with a multitude of little scalloped flounces edged with bands of black velvet. The black velvet tunic was cut square, very low to show her bosom, framed with some narrow lace, barely a finger broad. There was not a flower, not a bit of ribbon; but round her wrists, some bracelets without the least chasing, and on her head a narrow diadem of gold, a plain circlet which seemed to be an aureola.
When she reached the reception rooms, and her husband had left her for Baron Gouraud, she experienced a momentary embarrassment. But the mirrors, in which she saw herself look adorable, soon reassured her, and she was accustoming herself to the warm atmosphere, to the murmur of voices, to the crush of dress coats and white shoulders, when the Emperor appeared. He slowly crossed the room on the arm of a short, fat general, who puffed as if he were troubled with a bad digestion. The bare shoulders ranged themselves in two lines, whilst the dress coats, with a discreet air, instinctively drew back a step. Renée found herself pushed to the end of the line of shoulders near the second door, the one that the Emperor was approaching with a faltering, unsteady step. She thus saw him come towards her from one door to the other.
He wore a dress coat, with the red ribbon of the Grand Cordon. Renée, again seized with emotion, retained but imperfect vision, and to her this bleeding stain seemed to cast splashes over the whole of the sovereign's breast. As a rule, she thought him little, with swaying loins, and legs too short for the trunk of his body; but now she was delighted, and, as she saw him, he looked handsome, despite his pale face and the heavy leaden lids which fell over his lifeless eyes. Under his moustaches, his lips were languidly parted, and his nose alone remained bony amid the whole of his puffy face.
With a worn-out air, and vaguely smiling, the Emperor and the old general continued to advance with short steps, seemingly sustaining each other. They looked at the ladies bending forward, and their glances, cast to the right and to the left, glided into the bodices. The general leant on one side, said a word to his master, and pressed his arm in the manner of a gay companion. And the Emperor, supine and nebulous, duller even than usual, still approached with his lagging step.
