by Emile Zola
This allusion to his meanness was the ultimate provocation for Delcambre. He became unrecognizable, frightening, as if the human animal, all the hidden priapism within him, was bursting out through his skin. That face, so dignified and cold, had suddenly turned red and was swelling, bulging, protruding like the muzzle of a furious beast. His rage was releasing the carnal brute within, in the awful pain of all this stirred-up filth.
‘Needs? Needs?’ he spluttered. ‘What she needs is the gutter… Ah! The slut!’
And he made such a violent gesture at the Baroness that she took fright. She had remained standing, motionless, only managing to hide her bosom with the petticoat by leaving her belly and thighs exposed. Realizing that this display of her guilty nudity was enraging him further, she retreated to the chaise longue and sat on it, with her legs together and knees drawn up in such a way as to hide as much as she could. Then she just stayed there, without a gesture or word, her head lowered, casting sly, sidelong glances at the battle, a female being fought over by men, waiting to become the prize of the victor.
Saccard had bravely thrown himself in front of her.
‘At least you’re not going to strike her!’
The two men were now face to face.
‘Come now, Monsieur,’ Saccard went on, ‘this has got to stop. We can’t go on rowing like cabbies… It is indeed true, I am Madame’s lover. And I tell you again, if you paid for the furniture here, I have paid for…’
‘For what?’
‘Lots of things: the other day for instance, the ten thousand francs owing on her old account with Mazaud that you had absolutely refused to pay… I have the same rights as you. A pig, possibly! But a thief? Oh no! You will withdraw that word.’
Beside himself, Delcambre shouted:
‘You are a thief, and I’m going to smash your face in if you don’t clear off this instant.’
But now Saccard too was growing angry. As he pulled his trousers back on, he protested:
‘Ah, that’s enough, you’re seriously annoying me now! I shall go if and when I choose… And it certainly won’t be a fellow like you who’ll frighten me away!’
And when he had put his boots back on, he firmly stamped his feet on the carpet, and said:
‘There, I’m all fixed now, and here I stay.’
Choking with rage, Delcambre moved nearer, his face thrust forward.
‘Filthy pig, will you get out!’
‘Not before you, you old scoundrel!’
‘And if I give you a good slap across the face!’
‘Then I’ll give you a good kick somewhere else.’
Nose to nose and teeth bared, the two men barked at each other. Quite forgetting themselves, making a nonsense of their education, caught in the flow of filthy mud in this rut they were fighting over, the magistrate and the financier were reduced to rowing like drunken carters, hurling appalling words at each other, seeking ever-fouler language. Their voices were strangled in their throats, they were frothing at the mouth with filth.
On the chaise longue, the Baroness was still waiting for one of them to throw the other one out. Now that she had calmed down and was thinking of the future, the only thing still bothering her was the presence of the chambermaid, whom she knew to be waiting behind the dressing-room door, enjoying the scene. As the girl craned her neck, with a satisfied chuckle at hearing these gentlemen saying such disgusting things, the two women caught sight of each other, the mistress huddled up in her nudity, the servant standing there all neat and tidy, with her little flat collar; and they exchanged a look that blazed with the age-old hatred of female rivals, in that equality that levels farm-girls and duchesses, when they have no clothes on.
But Saccard too had seen Clarisse. He angrily finished getting dressed, pulled on his waistcoat, turned back to fling another insult into Delcambre’s face, pulled on the left sleeve of his coat, yelling another insult, then the right sleeve with yet more, and more again, hurling them out by the bucketful. Then suddenly, to bring things to an end:
‘Clarisse! Come on in!… Open the doors, open the windows, so the whole house and the whole street can hear! Monsieur the Public Prosecutor wants people to know he’s here, and I’m going to make sure they do!’
Turning pale, Delcambre stepped back when he saw him moving towards one of the windows as if to undo the catch. This terrible man was quite capable of carrying out his threat, since he didn’t give a hoot about scandal.
‘Ah! You scoundrel, you scoundrel,’ murmured the magistrate. ‘You make a great pair, you and that trollop. I leave her to you…’
‘That’s right, clear off! You’re not wanted here… At least her bills will get paid and she won’t have to moan about poverty any more… Here! Do you want six sous for the omnibus?’
At this insult, Delcambre paused for a moment in the doorway of the dressing-room. He had now regained his tall, lean stature and his pallid face, furrowed by rigid lines. He stretched out his arm, and made a vow:
‘I swear you’ll pay for this… Oh! I’ll get back at you, just look out!’
Then he disappeared. Immediately behind him came the sound of a skirt hurrying away; it was the chambermaid who, fearing a row, was making her escape, greatly amused at the thought of what fun it had been.
Saccard, still shaken, and shuffling his feet, went and closed the doors, then returned to the bedroom, where the Baroness still sat as if glued to her chair. He strode around, poked a falling ember back into the fire; and only then noticing her, so strangely and scantily clad, with that petticoat over her shoulders, he now behaved with great decorum.
‘Come, get yourself dressed, my dear… and don’t be upset. It’s a stupid business, but it’s nothing, nothing at all… We’ll meet again here, the day after tomorrow, and sort things out, all right? I have to go now, I have an appointment with Huret.’
And as she was at last putting her underwear back on, and he was just leaving, he called out from the antechamber:
‘And remember, if you buy any Italian stock don’t do anything silly! Only buy if they’re offering a premium.’
Meanwhile, at that very moment, Madame Caroline was sitting with her head slumped over the work-table, sobbing. The brutal information from the coachman, this betrayal of Saccard’s that she could no longer ignore, stirred up in her all the suspicions and all the fears she had tried to keep buried. She had forced herself to remain serene and hopeful about the dealings of the Universal, and blinded by her feelings, had colluded in all the things she was not being told, the things she didn’t try to find out. Now she reproached herself with savage remorse for the reassuring letter she had written to her brother at the time of the last Annual General Meeting; for she knew, now that jealousy had reopened her eyes and ears, that illegalities were still happening and constantly getting worse; the Sabatani account had grown, and under cover of this frontman the bank was speculating more and more; in addition there were the massive and mendacious advertisements, the foundations of sand and mud on which they were building the whole colossal enterprise, while its rapid, almost miraculous rise filled her with more terror than joy. What worried her above all was the terrible pace of it all, the way the Universal was being urged along at such a gallop, like an engine crammed with coal, launched along diabolical rails until the point when everything would shatter and explode in one final crash. She wasn’t naive, nor was she a simpleton, easily fooled; even if she was ignorant about technical banking operations, she well understood the reason for this overdoing of things, this feverish pace, all intended to intoxicate people, and whirl them into the epidemic madness of the dancing millions. Every morning had to produce a rise in the price, people had to be made to believe in ever-greater success, in monumental cash desks, enchanted cash desks, that took in streams of gold and sent back rivers, oceans of gold. Her poor brother, so gullible, so beguiled and enthused—was she really going to let him down, abandon him to this flood that threatened one day to drown them all? She despaired at her iner
tia and helplessness.
Twilight now was darkening the workroom, not even lit by a glow from the now dead fire, and in the deepening shadows, Madame Caroline wept even more. It was feeble to cry like this, for she knew full well that such a flood of tears did not come from anxiety over the dealings of the Universal. Saccard alone was driving this terrifying gallop, lashing the beast with such ferocity and extraordinary lack of moral conscience, even at the risk of killing it. He was the sole culprit, and it made her shudder when she tried to see into his mind, into the dark soul of this money-man, that soul unknown even to himself, in which darkness hid further darkness, in an infinite mire of every kind of degeneracy. What she couldn’t yet see clearly she already suspected, and it made her tremble. But the gradual discovery of so many lesions, and the fear of some catastrophe to come, would not have had her weeping helplessly at her table like this, but rather would have made her pull herself together in her need to resist and recover. She knew herself, she was a fighter. No, if she sobbed so hard, like a sickly child, it was because she loved Saccard, and because Saccard, at that very moment, was with another woman. And that admission she was forced to make to herself filled her with shame and redoubled her tears until they almost choked her.
‘To have so little pride, my God!’ she stammered aloud. ‘To be so weak and wretched. To be so incapable of doing what I need to do!’
Just then, in the darkness of the room, she was astonished to hear a voice. It was Maxime who, familiar with the house, had let himself in.
‘Hello, what are you doing, sitting here weeping in the dark?’
Embarrassed at being caught like this, she struggled to control her sobbing, while he went on:
‘I beg your pardon, I thought my father was back from the Bourse… A lady asked me to bring him to dinner with her.’
But the valet then brought in a lamp, put it on the table, and withdrew. The whole of the vast room was illuminated by the gentle light from the lampshade.
‘It’s nothing,’ Madame Caroline tried to explain, ‘just one of those little upsets that women sometimes have, though I’m generally more stable.’
And dry-eyed, sitting up straight, she was already smiling, valiant and mettlesome as ever. For a moment, the young man looked at her, sitting so proudly, with her large, clear eyes and firm mouth, her face full of noble kindness, softened and made especially charming by her dense crown of white hair; and he thought how young she still looked, with her white hair and equally white teeth, an adorable woman, who had become beautiful. Then he thought of his father, and shrugged his shoulders with a mixture of pity and scorn.
‘It’s because of him, isn’t it? He’s the one who’s got you into such a state.’
She tried to deny it, but she was choking, and her eyes once more filled with tears.
‘Ah! My dear lady, I told you that you had illusions about Papa and that they wouldn’t do you any good… It was inevitable that he’d devour you too!’
Then she remembered the day when she had gone to Maxime to borrow the two thousand francs to pay for Victor’s release. Hadn’t he then promised to talk to her, when she wanted to know more? Wasn’t this her opportunity to question him, and learn all about the past? An irresistible need drove her on: now that she had started on the downward path, she had to go all the way. That was the only brave thing to do, the only thing worthy of her, and useful for everyone. But finding such an interrogation repugnant, she changed the subject, as if wanting to break off the conversation.
‘I still owe you two thousand francs,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind too much having to wait for them?’
He made a gesture indicating that she could have all the time she wanted. Then, suddenly, he added:
‘By the way, how is that monster, my little brother?’
‘He’s making me despair, I haven’t told your father anything yet… I should so like to scrub him up a bit, so the poor thing might be loved!’
Maxime gave a disturbing laugh, and when she looked at him enquiringly:
‘Lord! I think you’re just giving yourself unnecessary bother. Papa won’t understand all the trouble you’ve taken… Family problems are nothing new to him!’
She was still looking at him, so very proper in his self-centred enjoyment of life, so thoroughly cynical about human relations, even those created by pleasure. He had smiled to himself, enjoying the hidden malice of his last remark. And she realized she was getting very close to the secrets of these two men.
‘You lost your mother when you were very young?’
‘Yes, I hardly knew her… I was still in school in Plassans when she died here in Paris… Our uncle, Dr Pascal, kept my sister Clotilde with him in Plassans, and I’ve only ever seen her once since then.’
‘But your father remarried?’
He hesitated. His eyes, so clear and empty, had clouded over with a slight reddish mist.
‘Oh! Yes, yes, remarried… a magistrate’s daughter, a Béraud du Châtel… Renée, not a mother to me, but a good friend…’
Then, with a certain familiarity, he sat down beside her:
‘Look, you have to understand Papa. He’s no worse—God knows!—than the rest. But his children, his wives, in fact everyone and everything around him, all come second to money… Oh, let’s be clear, it’s not that he loves money like a miser, wanting to have a whole heap of it and hide it in a cellar. No! If he wants to make it gush out from everywhere, and if he doesn’t care what sources he taps, it’s just to see it flowing around him in torrents, it’s for all the enjoyment he can get out of it, in luxury, pleasure, and power… What can you do? It’s in his blood, and he’d sell us both, you, me, anyone at all, if we were part of some deal. And he would do all that quite unthinkingly, as a man of quality, for he really is the poet of the million, money simply makes him mad, makes him a scoundrel—oh! a scoundrel on a grand scale!’
This was just what Madame Caroline had thought, and she nodded in agreement as she listened to Maxime. Ah! Money! Money the corrupter, the poisoner, shrivelling souls, driving out all goodness, affection and love for others. Money alone was the great culprit, the promoter of all human cruelty and filth. At this moment, she cursed it and loathed it, with all the indignant revulsion of her nobility of soul and her womanly probity. If only she had the power, she would have destroyed all the money in the world, as one would crush disease underfoot to save the world’s health.
‘And your father remarried,’ she repeated after a silence, in a slow, embarrassed voice, caught in a confused awakening of memories. Who was it had mentioned this story to her? She couldn’t tell: a woman no doubt, some friend from the time of her first moving in to the Rue Saint-Lazare, when the new tenant had arrived to occupy the first floor. Wasn’t it something about a marriage for money, a shameful bargain that had been struck, and then later on hadn’t some crime entered the household, tolerated and even thriving, a monstrous kind of adultery, almost incest?
‘Renée’, Maxime went on very quietly, as if in spite of himself, ‘was only a few years older than me.’
He had raised his head and was looking at Madame Caroline; and with sudden abandon, and an irrational surge of confidence in this woman who seemed so robust and reasonable, he related the past, not as a coherent narrative but in bits, in incomplete, seemingly involuntary admissions that she had to stitch together. Was it an old rancour against his father that he was thus settling? That rivalry that had existed between them, and still made them strangers to each other, even now, with nothing in common? He made no accusations against him and seemed incapable of anger, but his quiet laugh turned into a sneer, and he spoke of these abominations with an unpleasant and sneaky pleasure in blackening his father by raking up so many vile events.
And thus it was that Madame Caroline learned the terrible story from beginning to end: Saccard selling his name, taking money to marry a girl whom someone had seduced; Saccard, with his money and wild and dazzling life, finally making that sick, grown-up child
quite unbalanced; Saccard in need of money, and requiring a signature from her, accepting the love affair of his son and his wife under his own roof, shutting his eyes to it, like a good patriarch, happy for people to enjoy themelves. Money, money the king, money the god, reigning high above blood, above tears, adored in its infinite power far above any vain human scruples. And as money grew ever greater, and Saccard was revealed to her with all that diabolical greatness, Madame Caroline was seized by a real terror, frozen and distraught at the thought that she, like so many others, belonged to this monster.
‘There!’ said Maxime, ending his story. ‘It hurts me to see you like this, but it’s better for you to be warned. And don’t let it make you fall out with my father. I’d be really sorry to see that, because it would again be you who’d end up weeping over it, not him… So now do you understand why I refuse to lend him a sou?’
As she made no reply, struck to the heart and unable to speak, he stood up, and glanced at a mirror, with the tranquil ease of a good-looking man, certain of the propriety of his life. Then he came back to her.
‘You see? Such things age one very quickly… I decided to settle down right away, so I married a girl who was sick, and who died, and today I can swear that no one will make me do stupid things ever again… No! You see, Papa is incorrigible, because he has no moral sense.’
He took her hand, and feeling how cold it was, held it for a moment in his own.
‘I’m going now, since he’s still not back… But don’t take it so hard! I thought you were so strong! And say thank-you to me, for the only really stupid thing is to be duped.’
He was at last leaving when he paused at the door with a laugh, and added:
‘I was forgetting—tell him Madame de Jeumont wants him to come to dinner… You know, Madame de Jeumont, the one who slept with the Emperor for a hundred thousand francs… And have no fear on that score, for however mad Papa may be, I dare to hope he’s not capable of paying that sort of price for a woman!’
