by Emile Zola
When her brother had again set off for the East Madame Caroline found herself once more alone with Saccard, taking up again their life of close, almost conjugal, intimacy. She insisted on continuing to manage the household, making savings for him as a loyal housekeeper, even though both their fortunes had considerably changed. And in her good-humoured quietness, her always even temper, she had just one worry, and that was her uneasy conscience about Victor, her hesitation about whether she should go on concealing the existence of his son from the father. At the Work Foundation they were very unhappy about Victor, for he was causing serious trouble. His six months’ trial was coming to an end, so was she going to produce the little monster before he was cleansed of his vices? There were times when she really suffered over this.
One evening she was on the point of speaking up. Saccard, more and more frustrated at the inadequacy of the premises for the Universal, had just persuaded the board to rent the ground floor of the adjoining house in order to enlarge the offices, until such time as he could dare to propose the construction of the luxurious building of his dreams. Once more he was creating new communicating doors, knocking down partition walls, installing new cash desks. And when she came back from the Boulevard Bineau, distraught at the appalling behaviour of Victor who had almost bitten off the ear of one of his schoolfellows, Madame Caroline asked Saccard to come up with her to their rooms.
‘My dear, I have something to tell you.’
But when she saw him, one shoulder covered with plaster, delighted at a new idea he’d just had for further enlargement, by glazing over the courtyard of the adjoining house as he had already done in the Orviedo house, she did not have the heart to upset him with the deplorable secret. No, she would wait a while yet, the dreadful lout had to be reformed. When faced by the suffering of others she lost all her strength:
‘Ah yes, my dear, it was about that courtyard. I’d had the very same idea.’
CHAPTER VI
THE offices of L’Espérance, the failing Catholic paper that Saccard had bought at Jantrou’s suggestion to help launch the Universal, were in the Rue Saint-Joseph, in a dark and damp old building of which they occupied the first floor, at the far end of the courtyard. A corridor led off from the antechamber, where a gaslight was always burning; on the left was the office of Jantrou the editor, then a room that Saccard had allocated to himself, whilst on the right were the communal journalists’ room, the secretary’s office, and various departmental offices. On the other side of the landing were the administrative and cashier’s offices, linked to the journalists’ room by an inner passage running behind the staircase.
That day Jordan, who had installed himself early in the journalists’ room to finish a column without being disturbed, went out just as it was striking four o’clock and came upon Dejoie the office-boy who, in spite of the glorious June day outside, was avidly reading by the broad flame of the gaslight the bulletin from the Bourse, which had just been delivered and which he was always the first to see.
‘Tell me, Dejoie, was that Monsieur Jantrou who just came in?’
‘Yes, Monsieur Jordan.’
The young man paused, feeling a momentary pang that made him pause a few seconds. In the difficult first days of his happy household some old debts had fallen upon him; and in spite of his good luck in finding this newspaper where he could place articles, he was going through a period of gruelling difficulty, all the worse in that his salary had been seized and he had, that very day, to pay another promissory note or else see his few bits of furniture sold. Twice already he had asked in vain for an advance from the editor, who had fallen back on the legal distraint which tied his hands.
However, he was just making up his mind and approaching the door when the office-boy added:
‘But Monsieur Jantrou is not alone.’
‘Ah! Who is with him?’
‘He came in with Monsieur Saccard, and Monsieur Saccard told me to let nobody in except Monsieur Huret, whom he’s expecting.’
Jordan took a deep breath, finding the delay a relief since asking for money was so painful for him.
‘All right. I’ll go and finish my article. Let me know when the editor’s free.’
But as he was moving away Dejoie held him back, with a shout of extreme delight.
‘You know, Universal shares have gone up to 750.’
With a gesture the young man indicated his total indifference and returned to the communal room.
Almost every day, after the Bourse, Saccard went on to the newspaper and often had meetings there in the room he had reserved for himself, dealing with some special and mysterious affairs. Jantrou, anyway, although officially only the editor of L’Espérance, for which he wrote political articles in a very academic, polished, and flowery language, recognized even by his enemies as of the ‘purest Attic style’, was Saccard’s secret agent, the complaisant performer of delicate tasks. Among other things, it was he who had just organized a vast publicity campaign for the Universal. From the myriad little financial papers that existed he had selected and bought ten or so. The best of them belonged to seedy banking-houses, whose very simple tactics consisted in publishing then distributing them for two or three francs a year, a sum which did not even cover the cost of postage; they made their money in another way, dealing in the money and shares of the clients that the papers brought them. Under cover of publishing the current stock-exchange rates, the numbers drawn in the bond lotteries, and all the technical information useful to small investors, advertisements were gradually slipped in, in the form of recommendations and advice, at first modest and reasonable but soon becoming extravagant, and with cool impudence spreading ruin among their gullible subscribers. From the great heap of the two or three hundred publications that were wreaking their havoc across Paris and indeed France, Jantrou had cleverly sniffed out the ones that had not yet lied too vigorously and were not already too discredited. But the big deal he had in mind was to buy one of them, the Cote financière,* which had twelve years of absolute probity behind it—but such probity was likely to be expensive; he was waiting for the Universal to get richer and reach the point at which a last trumpet-blast can bring about deafening peals of triumph. His efforts, anyway, were not limited to creating a docile battalion of these special news-sheets celebrating the glories of Saccard’s works in every issue; he was also contracted to the main political and literary newspapers, keeping up a flow of pleasant notes and approving articles at so much a line, and assuring their support by gifts of shares when there were new share-issues. All this in addition to the daily campaign he was running in L’Espérance, not a crude campaign of extravagant plaudits but including explanations and even discussions, thus slowly taking hold of the public and strangling it in a very proper manner.
That day it was to discuss the paper that Saccard had closeted himself with Jantrou. He had found in the paper that morning an article from Huret, so outrageously praising a speech Rougon had made the previous day in the Chamber that he had flown into a rage, and was waiting for the Deputy to arrive to have it out with him. Was he supposed to be working for his brother? Was he being paid to allow the policy of the paper to be compromised by such unqualified approval of the slightest acts of the minister? When he heard him mention the ‘policy of the paper’ Jantrou gave a silent smile. However, he heard Saccard out very calmly, gazing intently at his fingernails, since it was not over his head that the storm was threatening to break. With the cynicism of a disillusioned man of letters, he had the most absolute contempt for literature, for the front page and page two as well, as he was apt to say, indicating the pages on which articles, even his own, appeared; and he showed no real interest in anything except the advertisements. Now he looked quite brand new, in a close-fitting, elegant frock-coat with a buttonhole flourishing a brightly coloured rosette, in summer carrying a thin, light-coloured jacket over his arm, and in winter huddled in a hundred-louis* fur coat; he was taking great care of his hair, and his hats were impeccable, with
a mirror-like sheen. But with all that he still had a few gaps in his elegance, the vague suggestion of a persistent uncleanliness underneath, the old grime of the disgraced professor who had tumbled from the Bordeaux lycée to the Paris Bourse, his skin saturated and stained with all the hideous filth he had endured for ten years; and similarly, even in the arrogant confidence of his new fortune he still showed some features of base submissiveness, quickly getting out of the way when gripped by a sudden fear of a kick on the backside as in former times. He was earning a hundred thousand francs a year and spending twice that, nobody knew on what, for he didn’t appear to have a mistress—prey perhaps to some vile and secret vice which had got him dismissed from the university. Absinthe, in any case, was gradually destroying him, continuing its work from the infamous cafés of his former years of penury to the luxurious clubs of today, scything off his last strands of hair and giving a grey, leaden cast to his skull and face, a face in which his bushy black beard was the only remaining glory, the beard of a handsome man, still creating some illusion. When Saccard again referred to the ‘policy of the paper’ Jantrou interrupted him with the wearied gesture of a man who, not wishing to waste his time on futile emotions, had decided to talk about serious matters, since they were still waiting for Huret.
For some time Jantrou had been hatching a few new ideas about publicity. First he had the notion of writing a brochure of twenty pages or so on the great enterprises being launched by the Universal, giving them the appeal of a novelette, dramatized in a popular style; he would then flood the whole province with this publication, which would be distributed free even in the remotest depths of the countryside. Then he thought of setting up an agency which would create and litho-print a Bourse bulletin and send it to about a hundred of the best regional newspapers; this bulletin would either be given away or else would cost a derisory sum, and soon they would have in their hands a powerful weapon, a force with which all the rival banking houses would have to reckon. Knowing Saccard, he went on murmuring these ideas in his ear until he adopted them, made them his own, and enlarged them to such an extent that he was really re-creating them. The minutes slipped by, and the two men had dealt with the allocation of funds for publicity for the next three months, the subsidies to be paid to the main newspapers, the need to buy the silence of the terrible columnist of a hostile establishment, and what to do about the auctioning of page four of a very old and highly respected paper. And what emerged above all from their prodigality and all the money they were noisily throwing to the four winds in this way was their contempt for the public, the scorn they, as intelligent businessmen, felt for the dire ignorance of the masses, so ready to believe every tall tale, so ignorant of the complex operations of the stock exchange that even the most shameless of sales talks could excite passers-by and cause millions to rain down.
As Jordan was still trying to find another fifty lines to complete his two columns, he was interrupted by Dejoie calling him.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Monsieur Jantrou is alone now?’
‘No, Monsieur Jordan, not yet… but your wife is here, asking for you.’
Filled with anxiety, Jordan rushed out. For some months now, ever since the Méchain woman had discovered he was writing under his own name in L’Espérance, he was being pursued by Busch for the six fifty-franc promissory notes he had formerly signed over to a tailor. He would still have paid the sum of three hundred francs represented by the notes, but what exasperated him was the enormous amount of charges, the total of seven hundred and thirty francs and fifteen centimes, to which the debt had now risen. However, he had made an arrangement by which he would pay a hundred francs a month; and as he was now unable to do this, his young household having more immediate needs, the charges rose further every month and the intolerable harassment began again. At the moment he was going through another severe crisis.
‘What is it?’ he asked his wife when he saw her in the antechamber.
But she didn’t have time to reply before the door of the editor’s office was thrown open and Saccard appeared, shouting:
‘Ah! At last, Dejoie—Monsieur Huret?’
The office-boy began to stammer in bewilderment.
‘My word, Monsieur, he isn’t here—I can’t make him come any faster!’
The door was shut with an oath, and Jordan, who had taken his wife into one of the adjoining offices, was able to question her properly.
‘What is it then, darling?’
Marcelle, usually so cheerful and valiant, a plump little person with her dark hair, her bright face, laughing eyes, and pleasant mouth, always looking happy even in difficult times, now seemed thoroughly upset.
‘Oh, Paul, if you only knew, a man came, oh, a horrible ugly man who smelled awful and had been drinking, I think… Well, he told me it was all over and our furniture would be sold tomorrow… and he had a poster he insisted on sticking on the door downstairs…’
‘But that’s impossible!’ cried Jordan. ‘I’ve received nothing, there are other formalities.’
‘Oh yes, but you know less about it even than I do. When papers arrive you don’t even read them… So, to stop him putting up the poster I gave him two francs and ran to let you know straight away.’
They were in despair. Their poor little household in the Avenue de Clichy, their few little bits of furniture, in mahogany and blue rep, paid for with such difficulty month by month and of which they were so proud, even though they laughed about them sometimes, finding them to be in dreadful bourgeois taste! They loved it all because it had been a part of their happiness ever since their wedding-night in these two tiny rooms, so full of sunshine, looking out to the space outside stretching away to Mont Valérien;* and he had knocked in so many nails and she had so cleverly arranged Turkey-red cotton* about the rooms to give them an artistic look! How was it possible that all of that would be sold, that they would be driven out of their happy nook, where even their poverty was delightful?
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I was counting on asking for an advance, I shall do what I can, but I don’t have much hope.’
Then, hesitantly, she told him her idea.
‘This is what I had thought of… oh! I wouldn’t do it without your agreement, but yes, I would like to appeal to my parents.’
He vehemently refused.
‘No, no, never! You know I don’t want to be obliged to them for anything.’
Certainly the Maugendres continued to behave with every propriety. But Jordan could not forget the coldness they had shown when, after his father’s suicide and the crumbling of his fortune, they had consented to their daughter’s long-planned marriage only because she had insisted, and had taken all sorts of wounding precautions, including their decision not to give them a sou, convinced that a fellow who wrote for the newspapers would devour everything. Their daughter would later inherit. And the Jordans, she just as much as he, had even taken a certain pride in enduring hunger without asking anything of the parents, apart from the meal they had with them once a week on Sunday evenings.
‘Honestly,’ Marcelle went on, ‘it’s ridiculous, these scruples of ours. After all, I’m the only child they have and everything will come to me one day… My father goes around telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s earned an income of fifteen thousand francs from his tarpaulin business at La Villette, and as well as that there’s the little house they’ve retired to, with its lovely garden… It’s stupid to give ourselves so much trouble when they have more than enough of everything. They’ve never been really nasty. I tell you, I’m going to go and see them.’
She was smiling cheerfully, looking quite determined and very practical in her desire to bring happiness to her husband who worked so hard, without getting anything yet from critics or public save a lot of indifference and a few slaps in the face. Ah, money! She would like to have had loads of it to bring to him by the bucketful, and it would really be stupid to be so over-delicate about it when she loved him and owed everything to him. This was her fairy
-tale, her own Cinderella story: the treasures of her royal family which, with her own little hands, she would lay at the feet of her ruined prince to help him in his march towards glory and the conquest of the world.
‘Look,’ she said gaily, with a kiss, ‘I really must be allowed to be of some use to you, you can’t keep all the trouble for yourself.’
He gave way, and it was agreed that she would straight away go back up to the Rue Legendre in the Batignolles, where her parents lived, and return with the money so that he could still try to pay that very evening. And just as he was accompanying her as far as the landing, as anxious as if he were seeing her off on a very dangerous mission, they had to move aside for Huret who had arrived at last. When Jordan returned to finish his column in the contributors’ room he heard a violent noise of voices coming from Jantrou’s office.
