By the time Mme Sidonie returned, it was all over. With the deft touch of a woman accustomed to performing this final act, she closed Angèle’s eyes, much to Saccard’s relief. Then, after putting the child to bed, she rapidly tidied up the death chamber. After lighting two candles on the dresser and carefully drawing the coverlet up to the dead woman’s chin, she looked around with a satisfied glance and stretched out in an armchair, where she slept until daybreak. Saccard spent the night in the next room writing letters announcing his wife’s death. From time to time he stopped what he was doing, mused about something else, and jotted down columns of figures on scraps of paper.

On the night of the burial, Mme Sidonie brought Saccard to her apartment, where important decisions were taken. The clerk made up his mind to send little Clotilde to live with one of his brothers, Pascal Rougon, an unmarried doctor in love with science who made his home in Plassans and who had several times offered to take in his niece in the hope of bringing a little joy to the silence of his scholarly abode. Mme Sidonie impressed on him that he could no longer go on living on the rue Saint-Jacques. She would rent an elegantly furnished apartment for him somewhere near the Hôtel de Ville for a period of one month. She would try to find an apartment in a decent building, so that the furniture would appear to be his. Meanwhile, the furniture from the rue Saint-Jacques apartment would be sold, so as to eliminate the last vestiges of the past. He would use the money to buy a suitable trousseau and clothing. Three days later, Clotilde was entrusted to an elderly lady who happened to be traveling south. And a triumphant Aristide Saccard—with his cheeks now a healthy crimson color and, though fortune had been smiling on him for just three days, with more flesh already on his bones—moved into a charming five-room apartment in an austere and respectable house on rue Payenne in the Marais,¹⁰ where he padded about in embroidered slippers. The apartment belonged to a young abbé, who had departed suddenly for Italy with orders to his serving woman to find a tenant. This servant was a friend of Mme Sidonie’s, who had something of a weakness for men of the cloth. She loved priests in the same way she loved women, by instinct, perhaps drawing certain uneasy parallels between cassocks and silk skirts. By this point Saccard was prepared. He composed his role with exquisite art and unflinchingly anticipated the difficulties and delicacies of the situation to which he had committed himself.

On the terrible night of Angèle’s death, Mme Sidonie faithfully if briefly recounted the calamity that had befallen the Béraud family. Its patriarch, M. Béraud Du Châtel, a tall, elderly man of sixty, was the last in a long and respectable bourgeois line whose pedigree could be traced back farther than that of many a noble clan. One of his ancestors had been a companion of Etienne Marcel.¹¹ In 1793, his father had died on the scaffold ¹² after welcoming the Revolution with all the enthusiasm of a bourgeois de Paris in whose veins flowed the city’s revolutionary blood. He himself was one of those Spartan republicans who dreamed of a government of thoroughgoing justice and sage liberty. After a lifetime in the magistracy, where he acquired the rigidity and severity associated with his profession, he resigned as chief judge after the coup d’état of 1851 because he had been unwilling to take part in the kangaroo courts that had discredited French justice by punishing those who had resisted the takeover. Since that time he had lived a withdrawn and solitary existence in his home on the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, almost opposite the Hôtel Lambert. His wife had died young. Some private tragedy, the wound from which was still raw, made his already-grave judicial countenance even gloomier. He had a daughter, Renée, who had been eight when his wife passed away while giving birth to a second girl. The younger child, baptized Christine, had been taken in by one of his sisters, the wife of the notary Aubertot. Renée had been sent off to a convent school. Mme Aubertot, who had no children of her own, loved Christine like a daughter and raised her under her own roof. When her husband died, she returned the girl to her father’s home and lived there as companion to the silent old man and his smiling blonde daughter. Renée was left at boarding school. During school vacations she raised such a ruckus in the house that her aunt heaved a great sigh of relief on returning her to the Dames de la Visitation, in whose custody she had been from the age of eight. She did not leave the convent until she was nineteen, at which time she went to spend the summer with the parents of her good friend Adeline, who owned a fine estate in the Nivernais.¹³ When she returned home in October, her aunt Elisabeth was surprised to find her in a very pensive mood and profoundly sad. One night she found the girl sobbing into her pillow and writhing on her bed in anguish. In the throes of despair, the child told a heartrending tale: a man of forty, wealthy and married, whose young and charming wife was also staying at the house, had raped her in a field, and she had not dared to defend herself, nor would she have known how. This confession filled Aunt Elisabeth with terror. She blamed herself, as if she felt somehow an accomplice. Her preference for Christine weighed on her mind, and she believed that if she had kept Renée at home, the poor child would not have succumbed. To cope with her remorse, which her tender nature only compounded, she supported the wayward child. She bore the brunt of the father’s anger when the very zealousness of their efforts to conceal the terrible truth from him gave it away. In her alarmed state of anxiety she came up with the strange plan of arranging a marriage, which she hoped would fix everything, calming the wrath of Renée’s father and restoring the child to the ranks of respectable womanhood. She refused to see what was shameful about the plan or to acknowledge its inevitable consequences.

No one ever found out how Mme Sidonie had got wind of this stroke of fortune. The honor of the Bérauds had moldered in the bottom of her basket along with the overdue bills of the capital’s prostitutes. When she learned of the story, she all but forced her brother on the unfortunate family even as his wife lay dying. Aunt Elisabeth ended up believing that she owed a debt of gratitude to this woman, so gentle, so humble, and so devoted to Renée as to find the unfortunate girl a husband from her own family. The aunt’s first interview with Saccard took place in the apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. The city-hall employee, who had come in through the carriage entrance on the rue Papillon, saw Mme Aubertot enter by way of the shop and the hidden staircase and immediately grasped the ingenious contrivance of the two entrances. He was as tactful and polite as could be. He treated the marriage as a business deal, but with the attitude of a man of the world settling a gambling debt. Aunt Elisabeth trembled a good deal more than he. She stammered and did not dare mention the hundred thousand francs she had promised him. It was he who brought up the matter of money, and he did so with the detachment of an attorney discussing the case of a client. In his view, a hundred thousand francs was a ridiculously small sum for Mademoiselle Renée’s prospective husband to bring to the marriage. He laid slight stress on the word “mademoiselle.” M. Béraud Du Châtel, already ill disposed toward his future son-in-law, would be all the more contemptuous if the prospective bridegroom appeared to be impoverished. The judge would accuse him of seducing his daughter for her fortune, and it might even occur to him to make private inquiries. Mme Aubertot, unsettled, not to say alarmed, by Saccard’s calm and polite presentation, lost her head and agreed to double the sum when he let it be known that with anything less than 200,000 francs in his pocket he would never dare to ask for Renée’s hand lest he be mistaken for a contemptible fortune-hunter. The worthy lady departed in a state of considerable confusion, not knowing what to think of a young man capable of such indignation yet willing to enter into such a bargain.