Paris in those days was a most interesting spectacle for a man like Aristide Saccard. The Empire had just been proclaimed following the famous trip during which the Prince-President⁵ had succeeded in kindling the enthusiasm of a few Bonapartist départements. Both the legislature and the press had been silenced. Saved yet again, society congratulated itself, relaxed, and slept in now that a strong government protected it and freed it from the cares of thinking and dealing with its own affairs. Its one abiding preoccupation was to decide which amusements it would choose to kill the time. In Eugène Rougon’s felicitous phrase, Paris sat down to dinner and dreamed bawdy dreams for dessert. Politics was terrifying, like a dangerous drug. Weary minds turned to business and pleasure. Those who had money dug it up, and those who had none searched high and low for forgotten treasures. The throngs quivered in rapt anticipation, straining to hear the first jingle of gold coins, the bright laughter of women, and the still-faint clatter of dishes and smack of kisses. In the deep ambient silence order reigned, and from the abject peace surrounding the new government arose a pleasant hum of gilded and voluptuous promises. It was as though one were passing by one of those little houses where carefully drawn curtains reveal only the silhouettes of women, and where the clink of gold coins can be heard as they drop onto marble mantelpieces. The Empire was soon to transform Paris into Europe’s den of iniquity. A handful of rogues had just stolen a throne, and what they needed now was a reign of adventures, of shady deals, of consciences sold and women bought, of mad and all-consuming revelry. In a city from which the blood of December had only just been washed away there grew—timidly at first—a rage for pleasure that would ultimately land the country in the padded cell reserved for debauched and dishonored nations.

From the very first days Aristide Saccard sensed the approach of this rising tide of speculation, whose spume would one day cover all of Paris. He followed its progress closely. He found himself smack in the middle of the torrential downpour of gold raining down on the city’s roofs. In his incessant turns around city hall, he had caught wind of the vast project to transform Paris, of the plans for demolition, of the new streets and hastily planned neighborhoods, and of the massive wheeling and dealing in land and buildings that had ignited a clash of interests across the capital and set off an unbridled pursuit of luxury. From then on his efforts had a goal. It was at this time that he developed his pleasant manner. He even put on a little weight and stopped prowling the streets like a scrawny cat in search of prey. At the office he was more talkative and obliging than ever. His brother, whom he visited for more or less official purposes, congratulated him on having put his advice to such good use. Early in 1854, the clerk confided to the deputy that he had several business ventures in mind but would require fairly substantial advances.

“You’ll need to look around,” Eugène said.

“You’re right, I’ll look around,” answered Aristide, without a trace of rancor, seeming not to notice that his brother was refusing to start him off with an initial contribution.

The thought of that initial investment now burned within him. His plan was set; with each passing day it grew more mature. But the first few thousand francs were still nowhere to be found. His tension increased. He looked at people now with a nervous and searching eye, as if scrutinizing every passerby for a potential lender. At home, Angèle continued to lead a happy if retiring life, but Aristide remained on the lookout for an opportunity, and his gregarious laughter grew increasingly shrill as time passed and no such opportunity presented itself.

Aristide had a sister in Paris. Sidonie Rougon had married a law clerk from Plassans, whom she had accompanied to the capital to set up a shop on the rue Saint-Honoré selling fruits from the south of France. By the time her brother caught up with her, the husband had vanished, and the shop had long since gone under. She was living in a small three-room apartment above another shop on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonière. She leased the shop as well, a cramped and mysterious boutique in which she pretended to sell lace. And the window did contain pieces of guipure and Valenciennes ⁶ suspended from gold-plated rods. The interior, however, resembled a waiting room, with gleaming woodwork and no sign of merchandise for sale. Light curtains on the door and window hid the inside of the shop from prying eyes, contributing to the impression that the boutique was actually the discreet and veiled antechamber to a strange temple of some sort. It was rare to see a customer enter Mme Sidonie’s shop. Usually, in fact, the knob was removed from the door. She always told people in the neighborhood that she went personally to the homes of wealthy clients to display her wares. Her only reason for renting the shop, she said, was the layout of the apartment, which communicated with the boutique below via a stairway hidden in the wall. Indeed, the lace merchant was seldom in. She came and went ten times a day, always with a hurried air. In any case, she did not limit herself to selling lace. She used her apartment to store goods picked up Lord knows where. There she sold rubber overshoes, raincoats, suspenders, and countless other items. Later she added to her inventory a new oil said to promote the growth of hair, various orthopedic devices, and an automatic coffeemaker, a patented invention, the commercialization of which gave her a great deal of trouble. When her brother came to see her, she was dealing in pianos, and her apartment was crammed with these instruments. There were pianos even in her bedroom, which was very smartly decorated in a manner that clashed with the commercial jumble of the other two rooms. She ran her two businesses in a perfectly methodical way. Customers who came for the merchandise upstairs entered and exited through the carriage entrance on the rue Papillon. You had to be in on the mystery of the hidden staircase to be aware of the lace merchant’s double life. Upstairs she went by the name of Mme Touche, using her husband’s surname, whereas the door that led to the shop directly from the street bore only her first name, so that most people knew her as Mme Sidonie.

Mme Sidonie was thirty-five years old, but she dressed so carelessly and had so little feminine appeal that one would have thought her much older. In truth she had no age. She always wore the same black dress, frayed at the pleats and rumpled and discolored from use, so that it resembled a lawyer’s robe threadbare from frequent rubbing against the courtroom rail. With a black hat pulled down to her forehead to hide her hair and a pair of heavy shoes, she walked the streets carrying a small basket whose handles were mended with string. This basket, which never left her side, was a whole world unto itself. If she opened it even slightly, all sorts of things spilled out: date books, folders, and above all bundles of paper bearing official stamps whose illegible writing she deciphered with remarkable dexterity. She had in her the makings of a business broker and a clerk of court. She lived among defaulted bills, writs, and court orders. Each time she sold ten francs’ worth of pomade or lace, she wormed her way into the good graces of her clients and became the business agent of her customers, running errands to lawyers and judges on their behalf. Week after week she hauled the dossiers in her basket around the city, putting herself to no end of trouble as she walked at a slow and steady pace from one end of Paris to the other, never taking a carriage. It would have been difficult to say what profit she derived from this work. She did it mainly because she had an instinctive taste for shady deals and a love of chicanery, but she also picked up a host of little benefits along the way: a dinner now and then or a franc added to her purse here and there. Her clearest gain, however, came in the form of the confidences she gleaned everywhere, which put her on the trail of likely scores and probable windfalls. Spending her life as she did, in other people’s homes and deeply involved in their affairs, she was a living catalog of supply and demand. She knew where there was a young girl in immediate need of a husband, a family in need of 3,000 francs, or an elderly gentleman willing to lend such a sum but only against solid collateral and at a high rate of interest. She was also informed of still more delicate matters: the sadness of a certain blonde woman whose husband failed to understand her, and who aspired to be understood; the secret desire of a conscientious mother who dreamed of an advantageous situation for her daughter; the tastes of a baron given to intimate late-night suppers and very young girls. With her wan smile she hawked these offers to buy and sell. She thought nothing of walking two leagues to make contact with the right people. She sent the baron to see the conscientious mother, persuaded the elderly gentleman to lend the 3,000 francs to the family strapped for cash, found consolation for the blonde and a less-than-scrupulous husband for the girl in need. She also had a hand in bigger deals, deals she could talk about out loud, with which she assailed the ears of anyone who came near: an interminable lawsuit that a ruined noble family had asked her to follow and a debt that England had incurred with France in the time of the Stuarts, and that now, with compound interest, amounted to nearly three billion francs. This three-billion-franc debt was her hobbyhorse. She explained the ins and outs of the case with a wealth of detail, a veritable course in history, and as she did so, her cheeks, ordinarily as soft and yellow as wax, turned red with enthusiasm. Occasionally, between an errand to the clerk of courts and a visit to a friend, she would unload a coffeemaker or a rain slicker or sell a remnant of lace or lease a piano. Business of this sort was quickly dispatched. Then she would hasten to her store, where she had an appointment with a client to view a piece of Chantilly. The client would arrive and slip as quietly as a shadow into the discreetly curtained shop. It was not rare on such occasions for a gentleman to enter by way of the carriage entrance on rue Papillon to visit Mme Touche’s pianos on the floor above.