He spoke with deep contempt for his brother’s adolescent impatience. In his gruff speech one sensed higher ambitions, a desire for pure power. Aristide’s naïve appetite for money must have struck him as bourgeois and puerile. Speaking in a gentler voice and smiling a sly smile, he went on: “Of course your attitude is excellent, and I’ll be careful not to stand in your way. Men like you are precious. We intend to choose our good friends carefully from the ranks of the most famished. And rest assured, we shall keep an open table, and the biggest appetites will eat their fill. No one has yet found a better way to rule. . . . But please, do me a favor, wait until the table has been laid, and if you want my advice, take the trouble to fetch your own silver from the kitchen.”
Aristide remained somber. His brother’s amiable metaphors failed to elicit a smile. Eugène again gave vent to his wrath. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “I was right in the first place: you are a fool. . . . So what were you hoping for? What did you think I was going to come up with for an illustrious personage like yourself ? You lacked the stomach even to finish your law degree, you hid out for ten years in a wretched clerical post in a subprefecture, and you come to me with a detestable reputation as a republican who waited until the coup to convert. . . . Do you think you’ve got the makings of a minister, with a record like that? Don’t tell me, I already know: what you’ve got going for you is your fierce desire to succeed by any and all means. And that, I grant you, is a great virtue and is precisely what I had in mind when I got you the job at city hall.”
He then got up, walked over to Aristide, and placed the nomination in his hand. “Take it,” he went on. “Someday you’ll thank me. I chose the post personally, so I know what can be got out of it. . . . All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open. If you’re intelligent, you’ll understand, and you’ll act. . . . Now listen carefully to the rest of what I have to say. The time is coming when anyone will be able to make a fortune. Make piles of money: I give you my permission. But nothing stupid, and no unseemly scandals, or I’ll get rid of you.”
This threat had the effect that Eugène’s promises had failed to achieve. The thought of the fortune that Aristide heard his brother describe rekindled all his fever. At last, he felt, he had been sent into the fray with permission to slit people’s throats, but legally, without provoking too much of an outcry. Eugène gave him 200 francs to last until the end of the month and then lapsed into silent thought.
At length he said, “I’m thinking of changing my name. You ought to do the same. . . . We’d be less in each other’s way.”
“As you wish,” Aristide answered quietly.
“You won’t have to do anything. I’ll take care of all the formalities. . . . Do you want to be known as Sicardot, your wife’s family name?”
Aristide looked up at the ceiling, repeating the syllables, listening to their music: “Sicardot . . . Aristide Sicardot. . . . Heavens, no. It’s imbecilic and reeks of failure.”
“Think of something else,” said Eugène.
“I’d prefer just plain Sicard,” his brother replied after pondering the matter in silence. “Aristide Sicard. . . . Not bad, eh? . . . Perhaps a bit cheery.”
He mused a while longer, then crowed, “I’ve got it. . . . Saccard, Aristide Saccard. . . . With two c’s. . . . Eh? There’s money in a name like that. It sounds like the chink of coins being counted.”
Eugène had a savage sense of humor. As he dismissed his brother, he smiled and said, “Yes, a name like that can either land you in prison or make you millions.”
A few days later, Aristide Saccard went down to city hall. He learned that his brother had had to call in a good many chits to get him the job without the usual examinations.
Thus began, for Saccard and his wife, the monotonous life of the minor bureaucrat. The couple reverted to the routine they had adopted in Plassans, only now they were putting aside their dreams of sudden fortune, and their shabby life seemed more oppressive because they saw it as an ordeal whose duration could not be predicted. To be poor in Paris is to be poor twice over. Angèle accepted misery with the passivity of the anemic woman she was. She spent her days either in the kitchen or lying on the floor playing with her daughter, not feeling sorry for herself until the last franc was gone from the kitty. But Aristide quivered with rage over this poverty, this cramped existence, in which he prowled endlessly like a caged beast. For him it was a time of unspeakable suffering. His pride bled, his unassuaged ardor lashed him furiously. His brother managed to get himself elected to the Corps Législatif 4 as deputy for the Plassans district, and Aristide suffered even more. He was too keenly aware of Eugène’s superiority to feel anything as foolish as jealousy, but he accused his brother of not doing as much for him as he might have done. Need forced him more than once to knock on Eugène’s door in search of a loan. Eugène lent him the money but also berated him roundly for lacking courage and will. This immediately stiffened Aristide’s resolve. He swore that he would never again ask anyone for a cent, and he kept his word. The last week of every month, Angèle ate dry bread and sighed. This apprenticeship completed Saccard’s appalling education. His lips grew thinner. He was no longer so foolish as to dream of his millions out loud. His meager person stood mute, henceforth expressing but a single will, a single idée fixe—one cherished thought that filled every hour. When he hurried from the rue Saint-Jacques to the Hôtel de Ville, his worn heels struck the sidewalk with a sharp sound, and he buttoned himself into his frayed overcoat as into an asylum of hatred, while his weasel’s snout sniffed the air of the streets. The figure he cut was an angular one of envious misery prowling the Paris pavement with a plan for amassing a fortune and a dream of successfully carrying it off.
Early in 1853, Aristide Saccard was promoted to surveyor of roads. He now earned 4,500 francs a month. This raise came just in time. Angèle was wasting away; little Clotilde was deathly pale. He kept his cramped two-room apartment, with its dining room furnished in walnut and its bedroom in mahogany, and continued to lead a life of rigid discipline, avoiding debt and refusing to dip into other people’s money until he was able to plunge his arms in up to the elbows. In so doing he went against his instincts, turning up his nose at the few extra sous that came his way and maintaining his vigilance. Angèle was perfectly content. She bought herself some old clothes and put a roast on the spit daily. Her husband’s silent rages surpassed her understanding, as did the somber look he sometimes wore of a man searching for the solution to some intractable problem.
Aristide followed Eugène’s advice: he kept his eyes and ears open. When he went to thank his brother for the promotion, Eugène immediately grasped the change that had come over him and complimented him on what he called his “correct attire.” Though envy had stiffened his backbone, outwardly the clerk had become more pliable and ingratiating. Within the space of a few months he had become a prodigious actor. All his southern verve was now aroused, and he had developed his art to such a high pitch that his comrades at city hall looked upon him as a fine fellow destined for an important position on account of his close relationship to a deputy. That same relationship also put him in the good graces of his superiors. Hence he enjoyed greater authority than his position indicated, and this allowed him to open certain doors and poke his nose into certain boxes of files without his indiscretions seeming culpable. For two years he prowled all the corridors, lingered in all the chambers, and rose twenty times a day to chat with a coworker or deliver an order or make the rounds of the offices. Because he was perpetually in motion, his colleagues said, “That devil of a Provençal! He can’t sit still. He has quicksilver in his legs.” Those closest to him mistook him for lazy, and the worthy fellow laughed when they accused him of wanting nothing more than to steal a few minutes from his administrative chores. Never once did he commit the blunder of listening at keyholes, but he had a forthright way of opening doors and walking across rooms with a piece of paper in his hand and an abstracted look, yet at a pace so slow and deliberate that he never missed a word of what was being said. The tactic proved ingenious, because eventually people stopped interrupting themselves when this very busy clerk, apparently so preoccupied with his work, glided through the shadowy recesses of their offices. He had another method as well: he was extremely helpful, always offering to assist his fellow workers whenever they fell behind in their work and then studying with rapt attention whatever ledgers and documents were set before him. But one of his foibles was his penchant for befriending office boys. He went so far as to shake their hands and spent hour after hour with them in private conversation, stifling laughs, telling them stories, and encouraging them to open up to him. These fine lads adored him: “That fellow there isn’t stuck-up like the rest of them,” they said when he passed by. Whenever a scandal erupted, he was the first to learn about it. So after two years, the Hôtel de Ville no longer held any mysteries for him. He knew the personnel down to the lowliest factotum and the paperwork down to the laundry bills.