by Emile Zola
And once more, at this last hour, facing the most terrible threats, Saccard reassured them, winning them over again and leaving them with these words, full of promise and mystery:
‘Sleep easy… I cannot say more, but I am absolutely certain I can get everything back on track again before the end of another week.’
This remark, which he did not explain, he repeated to all the associates of the bank, and all the clients who came to him, frightened or even terrified, seeking advice. For three days now, there had been an endless gallop through his office in the Rue de Londres. The Beauvilliers, the Maugendres, Sédille, and Dejoie all came, one after another. He received them very calmly, with a soldierly air, and with vibrant words that put courage back in their hearts; and when they spoke of selling, of realizing at a loss, he got angry, shouted at them not to do anything so stupid, promising on his honour, to get back to the quote of two thousand or even three thousand francs. In spite of all the mistakes that had been made, they all still had blind faith in him: if only he could be set free to rob them again, he would sort everything out and in the end make them all rich, as he had sworn to do. If no accident occurred before Monday, and if he was given time to call an Extraordinary General Meeting, no one doubted that he would pull the Universal safe and sound out of the ruins.
Saccard had thought of his brother Rougon, that was the all-powerful help he had indicated without giving any further explanation. On meeting the traitor Daigremont face to face and bitterly reproaching him, he had received only this response: ‘But my dear chap, it wasn’t I who abandoned you, it was your brother.’ Of course the man was within his rights, since he had only joined the company on condition that Rougon was in it, and Rougon had been formally promised; so it was not at all astonishing that he should pull out when the minister, far from being in it, was at war with the Universal and its manager. This was at least an excuse to which there was no answer. Struck by this, Saccard realized what a huge mistake he had made by quarrelling with his brother who alone could defend him, and make him so sacred an object that no one would dare to bring about his ruin, knowing the great man was behind him. For Saccard’s pride, this was one of the hardest moments, when he decided to beg Deputy Huret to intervene on his behalf. But he still maintained a threatening attitude, refusing to disappear, and demanding help as if it were a right, from Rougon, who had more to lose than he did from a scandal. The next day, as he awaited Huret’s promised visit, Saccard only received a note, in which he was told in vague terms not to be impatient and to count on a happy outcome later on, if circumstances permitted. He had to content himself with these few lines, which he regarded as a promise of neutrality.
But the truth was that Rougon had just taken the firm decision to finish once and for all with this diseased member of his family, who had been embarrassing him for years with the perpetual terror of unsavoury events, and he preferred to be at last done with him for good. If catastrophe came, he was resolved to let things take their course. Since he would never get Saccard to go voluntarily into exile, the simplest solution, surely, was to force him to leave the country, helping him to take flight after a thorough condemnation. A sudden scandal, quickly swept under the carpet, and that would be an end of it.
Besides, the minister’s position was becoming difficult ever since he had declared to the Legislative Assembly, in a passage of memorable eloquence, that France would never allow Italy to take possession of Rome. Heartily applauded by the Catholics, he had been severely attacked by the increasingly powerful Third Party,* and he could see the time coming when the latter, supported by the Liberal Bonapartists, were going to force him out of power, unless he also gave them some sort of pledge. And the pledge, if circumstances so decreed, would be the abandonment of the Universal Bank, which, under the patronage of Rome, had become disturbingly powerful. Finally, what had clinched his decision was a secret message from his colleague in the Ministry of Finance, who, being about to float a loan, had found Gundermann and all the Jewish bankers very reticent, intimating that they would refuse their capital as long as the market remained uncertain for them, and open to adventurers. It was a triumph for Gundermann. Better the Jews, with their accepted sovereignty of gold, than the Ultramontane Catholics as masters of the world, if they became the kings of the Bourse!
It was later related that the Minister of Justice, Delcambre, with his relentless grudge against Saccard, had had Rougon sounded out about the conduct to be followed with regard to his brother if justice had to intervene, and had received only the heartfelt cry: ‘Ah, if he’ll just get rid of him for me, I’ll light a special candle for him!’
After that, with Rougon abandoning him, Saccard was done for. Delcambre, who ever since he got into power had just been waiting for the opportunity, at last had him on the margin of the law, on the very edge of the vast net of the judiciary, needing now only a pretext to launch his police and his judges against him.
One morning Busch, furious at not having acted sooner, took himself off to the Palais de Justice. If he didn’t hurry, he would never now get out of Saccard the four thousand francs still owed to La Méchain on the famous bill of expenses for little Victor. His plan was simply to create an appalling scandal, accusing Saccard of the abduction of a child, which would allow the exposure of all the filthy details of the rape of the mother, and the abandonment of the child. Such a prosecution of the manager of the Universal, in all the heightened emotions of the bank’s current crisis, would rouse the whole of Paris; and Busch still hoped that Saccard would pay up at the first threat. But the surrogate who had been appointed to receive him, a nephew of Delcambre, listened to his story with an air of impatience and boredom: No, no! Nothing serious could be done with such gossip, this did not fall under any article of the law. Disconcerted, Busch grew angry, and was speaking of his long and patient wait, when the magistrate suddenly interrupted him on hearing him say that he had pushed his good-will towards Saccard to the point of depositing funds on credit in the Universal. What? He had funds compromised in the certain failure of that institution, and he was taking no action? Nothing could be simpler; he had only to make a charge of embezzlement, for the law was already aware of fraudulent transactions which were going to result in bankruptcy. This was what would deal a terrible blow, not the other story—that melodrama about a girl who drank herself to death, and a child brought up in the gutter. Busch listened with a grave, attentive face, launched on this new path, pulled towards an act he had not originally intended, but whose decisive consequences he could foresee: Saccard under arrest, and the Universal receiving its death-blow. Simple fear of losing his money would have made him decide at once. He liked nothing better than disasters and the opportunity to fish in troubled waters. Yet he hesitated, saying he would think about it and come back later, and the surrogate Public Prosecutor had to thrust the pen into his hand, and make him write out, there and then in his office, on his desk, the charge of embezzlement, which, as soon as Busch had gone, he carried off in a ferment of zeal to his uncle, the Minister of Justice. The deed was done.
Next day, at the bank in the Rue de Londres, Saccard had a long interview with the auditors and the appointed administrator, to draw up the balance-sheet he wanted to present to the shareholders’ meeting. In spite of the loans from the other financial houses, it had proved necessary to close the counters and suspend all payments, in the face of increasing demands. This bank, which only a month before, had nearly two hundred millions in its coffers, had been able to reimburse its desperate clients only the first few hundreds of thousands of francs. Bankruptcy had been officially declared by a Commercial Court, after a summary report given the day before by an expert called in to examine the books. In spite of everything, Saccard, as if unaware, with an extraordinary mixture of blind hopefulness and obstinate bravura, was still promising to save the situation. And indeed, that very day he was awaiting a response from the floor of the Bourse about fixing a rate of compensation, when the usher came in to tell him that three gentlemen wer
e waiting to see him in an adjoining room. This was perhaps salvation, so Saccard rushed off happily, only to find a police superintendent, accompanied by two constables, who immediately arrested him. The summons had just been issued after perusal of the expert’s report, pointing out irregularities in the accounts, and particularly after the accusation of abuse of trust from Busch, who claimed that funds he had deposited in the bank had been misappropriated. At the same time Hamelin was being arrested at his home in the Rue Saint-Lazare. This time it really was the end, as if every hatred and every kind of ill-luck had relentlessly worked against them. The Extraordinary General Meeting could not now take place: the life of the Universal Bank was over.
Madame Caroline was not at home at the time of her brother’s arrest, and he could do no more than leave her a few hastily scribbled lines. When she returned home, she was aghast. Never had she thought even for a moment that anyone could think of prosecuting her brother, so entirely free did he seem of any shady dealings, his innocence seemingly proved by his long absences. The day after the bankruptcy, the brother and sister had stripped themselves of all they possessed, in order to increase the assets,* wanting to remain as naked, coming out of this adventure, as when they had gone into it; and the sum was considerable, nearly eight million, in which the three hundred thousand francs inherited from an aunt had also been swallowed up. Madame Caroline immediately threw herself into all sorts of activities and appeals; she now lived with the sole purpose of improving the lot, and preparing the defence, of her poor dear Georges, bursting into tears, despite her courage, whenever she thought of him, innocent as he was, behind bars, stained by this fearful scandal, his life in ruins and soiled for ever. He, so gentle and weak, with the piety of a child, and, apart from his technical work, the ignorance of ‘a big ninny’, as she used to say. At first she had raged against Saccard, sole cause of the disaster, creator of their adversity, whose execrable handiwork she could now reconstruct and clearly judge, from those very first days when he had teased her so merrily for reading the Code, to these final days when, with the severe consequences of failure, all the irregularities had to be paid for, irregularities she had foreseen and allowed to happen. Then, tortured by remorse for the complicity that haunted her, she fell silent, and tried to avoid openly concerning herself with him, doing her utmost to act as if he did not exist. When she had to pronounce his name, it seemed as if she were speaking of a stranger, an adversary, whose interests were quite other than hers. She, who visited her brother almost every day at the Conciergerie,* had not even requested a permit to go and see Saccard. And she was very brave, still living in their apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare, receiving all comers, even those who arrived with insults on their lips, transformed now into a businesswoman, determined to salvage whatever she could of their honesty and happiness.
During the long days she spent in this way in the workroom, where she had lived such lovely days of work and hope, one sight particularly distressed her. When she drew near a window and looked down upon the house next door, it was with a pang at her heart that she saw, behind the windows of the little room where the two poor women lived, the pale profiles of the Countess de Beauvilliers and her daughter Alice. These February days were very mild, so she saw them frequently, walking slowly, with heads bent, along the alleys of the mossy, winter-ravaged garden. The crash had been terrible for these two lives. The unhappy ladies who, a fortnight before, had been in possession of eighteen hundred thousand francs through their six hundred shares, would today be able to get only eighteen thousand for them, now that the shares had fallen from three thousand francs to thirty. Their entire fortune had been lost, swept away at a stroke: the twenty thousand francs for the dowry, so painfully saved by the Countess, the seventy thousand francs, first borrowed on the farm at Les Aublets, then the two hundred and forty thousand francs from the sale of Les Aublets, when it had actually been worth four hundred thousand. What was to become of them, when the many mortgages on their house already ate up eight thousand francs a year, and they had never been able to reduce the household expenses to less than seven thousand, despite all their miserliness and the sordid miracles of economy they achieved to keep up appearances and maintain their status? Even if they sold their shares, how could they now live, how meet all their needs, with just eighteen thousand francs, the final debris from the shipwreck? One necessity imposed itself, one that the Countess had not yet been able to face with resolution: to leave their house, since it was impossible to pay the interest, abandon it to the mortgagees rather than waiting until the latter put the house up for sale, retire at once to some quiet little lodging and there live a restricted and obscure life until the last crust of bread was gone. If the Countess still resisted, it was because this meant a tearing away of her whole person, the death of what she had believed herself to be, the crumbling of that edifice of her race that for years, with heroic obstinacy, she had upheld with her trembling hands. The Beauvilliers in rented accommodation, no longer under the ancestral roof but living in the houses of others, in the acknowledged penury of the defeated—wasn’t that, really, enough to make one die of shame? So she went on struggling.
One morning Madame Caroline saw the two ladies doing their washing in the little shed in the garden. The old cook, now almost helpless, was no longer much use to them; during the recent cold weather they had had to look after her; and it was the same story with the cook’s husband, who was porter, coachman and valet all in one; it was now only with great difficulty that he swept the house, and kept the old horse on its feet, stumbling now and wrecked by age, as he was himself. So the ladies had resolutely applied themselves to the housework, the daughter sometimes leaving her watercolours to make the thin broths on which the four people were frugally living, the mother dusting the furniture, mending the clothes and shoes, thinking she was making some minute economy in the use of dusters, needles and thread now that it was she who was using them. But as soon as a visitor arrived it was quite a sight to see the way they both fled, throwing off aprons, having a quick wash, and reappearing as the ladies of the house, with white and idle hands. Viewed from the street, their lifestyle had not changed: their honour was intact, the carriage came out properly equipped to take the Countess and her daughter on their visits, and the fortnightly dinners still brought together the same guests as every winter, with not one dish less on the table nor one candle less in the candelabra. Only someone who was able, like Madame Caroline, to look down into their garden could know what terrible days of fasting followed all that show, that illusory façade of a vanished fortune. When she saw them, down there in that damp well of a garden, squashed between neighbouring houses, walking with their mortal melancholy under the greenish skeletons of the centenarian trees, she was seized by immense pity, and would leave the window, her heart torn with remorse, as if she felt she had been Saccard’s accomplice in causing this wretchedness.
Then, on another morning, Madame Caroline felt a sadness more direct, and even more painful. A visit from Dejoie was announced, and she bravely insisted on seeing him.
‘Well, my poor Dejoie…’
But she stopped in alarm when she saw the pallor of the former office-boy. His eyes seemed lifeless, his face was distraught, and formerly very tall, he had shrunk, as if folded up.
‘Come now, you must not let yourself be demoralized by the thought of all that money being lost.’
And then he spoke, in a slow voice:
‘Oh, Madame, it’s not that… Of course, in the first moment it was a hard blow, because I had got used to thinking we were rich. When you’re winning, it goes to your head, it’s as if you were drunk… But Lord! I was already resigned to going back to work, and I’d have worked so hard I would have managed to make up the sum again… But, you can’t imagine…’
Fat tears rolled down his cheeks.
‘You can’t imagine… She’s gone…’
‘Gone? Who’s gone?’ asked Madame Caroline in some surprise.
‘Nathalie
, my daughter. Her marriage had fallen through, and she was furious when Théodore’s father came to tell us that his son had waited too long, and he was going to marry a haberdasher’s daughter who was bringing him nearly eight thousand francs. That, of course, I understand—that she should be angry at being left with no money, and no prospect of marriage. But I loved her so much! Even last winter, I would get up in the night to tuck in her blankets. And I went without tobacco so she could have prettier hats, and I was a real mother to her, I brought her up, I only lived for the pleasure of seeing her, in our little apartment.’
His tears were choking him, and he broke into sobs.
‘So it’s all the fault of my ambition… If I had sold, as soon as my eight shares gave me the six thousand francs for the dowry, she would have been married by now. But there, do you see? The price kept going up, and I thought of myself; first I wanted to get an income of six hundred, then eight hundred, then a thousand francs; all the more eagerly in that my little girl would later inherit that money… To think that at one moment, when the price was three thousand, I had twenty-four thousand francs in hand, enough to give her a dowry of six thousand, and retire, myself, with an income of nine hundred francs. No! I wanted a thousand, isn’t that stupid? And now it’s not even two hundred francs… Ah, it’s my fault! I’d have done better to throw myself in the river.’
Madame Caroline, very moved by his grief, let him relieve his feelings. But she still wanted to know more.
‘So she’s gone, my poor Dejoie, but gone where?’
Then he looked embarrassed, and a faint flush rose to his pallid face.
‘Yes, gone, disappeared, three days ago. She had become acquainted with a gentleman who lived across the street from us—oh! a very proper gentleman, a man of forty… So, she has run away.’
While he gave some details, searching for words, tripping over his tongue, Madame Caroline could see Nathalie again in her mind’s eye, slim and blonde, with the frail grace of a pretty girl of the Paris streets. She had noticed especially her wide eyes, so tranquil and so cold, with the extraordinary limpidity of egoism. The child had allowed herself to be adored by her father, happy to be idolized, and behaving well as long as it was in her interests to do so, incapable of a stupid fall for as long as she was expecting a dowry, a marriage, and a counter in a little shop, where she could have played the queen. But to go on with a penniless life, living in rags with her good old father, having to go back to work—ah, no, she had had enough of that dreary life, now unrelieved by hope! And she had gone, had coldly put on her boots and her hat, and gone elsewhere.
