If Mme Sidonie did not amass a fortune, it was because she often labored for sheer love of her art. With her fondness for legal formalities and willingness to neglect her own affairs for the sake of others, court clerks picked her pockets clean, but she allowed them to get away with this because she derived from her legal entanglements pleasures known only to the litigious. The woman in her died; she became nothing but a business agent, a deal-maker forever bustling about Paris with her legendary basket full of the most dubious merchandise, ready to sell anything and everything, dreaming of billions, yet willing to go to the justice of peace to plead for ten francs on behalf of a favorite client. Tiny, slight, pale, clad in the thin black dress that seemed to have been cut from a lawyer’s toga, she had shriveled, and to see her scuttle past a row of houses one might have thought she was an errand boy disguised as a girl. Her complexion had the awful pallor of an official document. The smile on her lips seemed to have been snuffed out, while her eyes seemed to swim in the swirl of business deals and other matters that preoccupied her mind. Timid and discreet in her manner, moreover, and with a vague odor of the confessional and the midwife’s consulting room, she had a gentle and maternal way about her, like a nun who has renounced the affections of this world and therefore takes pity on those whose hearts ache. She never spoke of her husband, any more than she spoke of her childhood, family, or interests. There was only one thing she did not sell: herself. Not because she had any scruples, but because the idea of such a bargain could never have occurred to her. She was as dry as an invoice, as cold as an unpaid bill, as indifferent and brutal inside as a sheriff ’s deputy.

Saccard, newly arrived from his province, could not at first fathom the intricate depths of Mme Sidonie’s numerous occupations. Since he had done a year of law, she spoke to him one day about the three billion francs with an air of seriousness that left him with a poor opinion of her intelligence. She gave the apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques the once over, took Angèle’s measure at a glance, and did not reappear until her errands brought her back to the neighborhood and she felt a need to allude once more to the matter of the three billion francs. Angèle had been hooked by the story of the English debt. The saleswoman mounted her hobbyhorse and for an hour made the heavens rain with gold. This was the crack in her nimble mind, the tempting folly with which she compensated for a life squandered in squalid deals, the magical bait with which she bewitched not only herself but the most credulous of her clients. She was so convinced of her case, moreover, that she ended up speaking of the three billion as her own personal fortune, which sooner or later the judges must restore to its rightful owner. Her miserable black hat, garnished with faded violets swaying on stems of bare brass wire, was thus wreathed in a miraculous aureole. Angèle’s enormous eyes opened wide. On several occasions she spoke of her sister-in-law to her husband with respect, saying that Mme Sidonie might one day make them rich. Saccard shrugged. He had visited the boutique and the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière and had sniffed nothing but impending bankruptcy. He asked his brother’s opinion of their sister, but Eugène turned grave and replied only that he never saw her and knew her to be highly intelligent but perhaps a little disreputable. Some time later, however, as Saccard was returning to the rue de Penthièvre, he thought he saw Mme Sidonie’s black dress slip out of his brother’s apartment and scurry down the street. He ran after the woman in black but lost sight of her. The businesswoman’s appearance was of the unremarkable sort that is easily lost in a crowd. But the incident made an impression on him, and from that moment on he began to study his sister more carefully. It did not take him long to grasp the immensity of the labor performed by this pale, shapeless little woman, whose whole face seemed to melt into a covetous gaze. He respected her. She had the Rougon blood in her veins. He recognized the family’s characteristic appetite for money and craving for intrigue. But thanks to the milieu in which she had grown old—Paris, the city she had been obliged to scour in the morning in order to have black bread to eat at night—the common temperament had been warped to produce this strange hermaphrodite, this neutered female, this woman of affairs and procuress rolled into one.

When Saccard, having settled on a plan, set out in search of seed money, he naturally thought of his sister. She shook her head and sighed with an allusion to the three billion francs. But the clerk had no patience with her folly and cut her short whenever she brought up the matter of the Stuart debt. Daydreams of that sort in so practical a mind struck him as disgraceful. Mme Sidonie, whose convictions were impervious to the harshest sarcasms, went on to explain in the clearest of terms that since he had no collateral to offer, he would find it impossible to borrow a cent. This conversation took place in front of the Bourse,⁷ where she no doubt gambled with her savings. At around three o’clock you could be sure of finding her leaning against the railing on the left, on the side facing the post office, where she held court for characters as suspect and dubious as herself. Her brother was about to take his leave when she murmured wistfully, “Ah, if only you weren’t married.” This reticence, the full and precise meaning of which he did not wish to inquire into, put Saccard in an unusually reflective frame of mind.

Months passed. War had just been declared in Crimea.⁸ Paris, unmoved by hostilities in a faraway land, displayed far more enthusiasm for speculation and prostitution. Saccard, who had foreseen the rampant mania, looked on and gnawed his knuckles. The city was a giant forge, and each time a hammer struck gold on one of its anvils he quivered with rage and impatience. His mind and will were so fraught with tension that he lived as in a dream, teetering along the edges of rooftops like a sleepwalker in the grip of an idea he could not shake. He was therefore surprised and irritated one evening to find Angèle sick in her bed. His home life, as regular as clockwork, had gone awry, and this exasperated him as if fate had deliberately played him a dirty trick. Poor Angèle complained mildly; she had caught a chill. When the doctor arrived, he seemed quite worried. On the landing he told the husband that his wife had pneumonia and he could not answer for her life. From that moment on the clerk nursed the patient without a trace of anger. He stopped going to the office, remained at her side, and stared at her with an inscrutable expression as she slept, flushed with fever and short of breath. Mme Sidonie, despite her crushing workload, found time every evening to stop in and prepare a tisane,⁹ which she claimed would cure anything. To all her other professions she added that of a born nurse, pleased to be in close proximity to suffering, medications, and the kinds of anguished conversations that take place around the beds of the dying. She seemed taken, moreover, by a tender friendship for Angèle. She truly loved women and lavished them with a thousand kindnesses, no doubt for the pleasure they gave men. She treated them with the same delicate attention that merchants reserve for the most precious items on their shelves, called them “my darling, my beauty,” cooed over them and swooned before them like a lover before his mistress. Although Angèle was not the sort from whom she hoped to gain anything, she flattered her as she did the others, obedient to a general rule of conduct. When the young woman took to her bed, Mme Sidonie’s effusions turned maudlin, and she filled the silent bedroom with signs of her devotion. Her brother watched her move about the room with her lips pressed together as though devastated by unspoken grief.