Eugène, who at first didn’t know what to think, slowly began to grasp the truth. He managed to strike the right tone to express his pleasure. “Well, now, aren’t you a clever fellow? . . . You’ve come to ask me to be your best man, haven’t you? You may count on me. . . . If necessary, I shall bring the whole right wing of the legislature to your wedding. That should get you off to a nice start.”
Then, as he opened the door, he lowered his voice and added, “Tell me, I wouldn’t want to stick my neck out too far just now, we’ve got a very tough bill to get through. . . . The girl isn’t showing too much, I trust?”
Saccard shot him a look so cutting that Eugène, as he closed the door behind him, mused to himself that “that little pleasantry would no doubt cost me dearly if I weren’t a Rougon.”
The marriage was celebrated in the church of Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile. Saccard and Renée did not meet until the eve of the great day. The scene unfolded at dusk in a downstairs parlor of the Béraud mansion. The two studied each other with curiosity. Once her marriage had been negotiated, Renée had gone back to her wild and heedless ways. She was a tall girl of exquisite and irrepressible beauty who had indulged her every whim at boarding school. She found Saccard short and ugly, but his ugliness was of a tormented and intelligent kind that did not displease her. In any case, his tone and manners were impeccable. He winced slightly at his first glimpse of her. She no doubt seemed too tall, taller at any rate than he. Without apparent embarrassment they exchanged a few words. Had the girl’s father been present, he might actually have come away thinking that they had known each other for some time and been partners in past sin. Aunt Elisabeth, who was present for the interview, blushed for both of them.
On the day after the wedding—which counted as a major event on the Ile Saint-Louis owing to the presence of Eugène Rougon, a deputy thrust into the limelight by a recent speech—the two newlyweds were at last granted an audience with M. Béraud Du Châtel. Renée cried at the sight of her father looking older, graver, and sadder than she remembered him. Saccard, who had thus far retained his composure through it all, was frozen by the chill and gloom of the apartment and the lugubrious severity of the old man, whose penetrating eye seemed to plumb the depths of his conscience. The former magistrate slowly kissed his daughter on the forehead, as if to say that he forgave her. Then he turned to his son-in-law and said simply, “Monsieur, we have suffered greatly. I am counting on you to make us forget your wrongs.”
He extended his hand, but Saccard stood on the spot trembling. He believed that if the judge had not buckled under the tragic burden of grief at Renée’s disgrace, he would have thwarted Mme Sidonie’s machinations with a glance or a gesture. After putting the clerk in touch with Aunt Elisabeth, his sister had prudently stepped aside. She had not even come to the wedding. He took a very straightforward line with the old man, having read in his eyes a look of surprise at discovering that his daughter had been seduced by a man who was short, ugly, and forty years old. The newlyweds were obliged to spend their first nights together in the Hôtel Béraud. Christine, a child of fourteen, had been sent away two months earlier in order to make sure that she would not get wind of the drama unfolding in the house, as calm and serene as a convent. When she returned, she was aghast at the sight of her sister’s husband, whom she also found old and ugly. Only Renée seemed to take relatively little notice of her husband’s age or the slyness of his countenance. She showed him neither contempt nor affection and dealt with him in absolute tranquillity, through which a hint of ironic disdain manifested itself from time to time. Saccard settled in, made himself at home, and with his verve and frankness gradually won the genuine friendship of everyone involved. By the time the couple left to take up residence in a superb apartment in a new house on the rue de Rivoli, there was no longer any amazement in M. Béraud Du Châtel’s gaze, and little Christine had made a playmate of her brother-in-law. Renée was then four months pregnant. Her husband was about to send her to the country in order to be able to lie about the child’s age later on when, as Mme Sidonie had predicted, she miscarried. She had laced herself up so tightly to hide her condition, which in any case was concealed by the fullness of her skirts, that she was obliged to take to her bed for several weeks. Saccard was delighted by the outcome. Fortune had kept faith with him. He had made a fabulous bargain: a superb dowry, a wife beautiful enough to earn him a decoration six months hence, and no obligations whatsoever. They had paid him 200,000 francs for his name on behalf of a fetus the mother did not even wish to see. Already the Charonne properties had become the object of his fondest dreams, but for the time being he devoted all his attention to a speculative venture that was to become the basis of his fortune.
Despite the high position of his wife’s family, he did not immediately resign his position as surveyor of roads. He spoke of work to be finished and jobs to be done. In reality, he wanted to remain until the end on the battlefield where he was about to strike his first blow. As in a game of cards, it would be easier to cheat if he played at home with his own deck.
The clerk’s plan was simple and pragmatic. Now that he had more money than he had ever dreamed of with which to launch his operations, he was ready to think big. He knew Paris like the back of his hand. He knew that the shower of gold already beating down on the city’s walls would only intensify with each passing day. Clever people had only to open their pockets. He had joined the ranks of the clever by reading the future in the offices of city hall. In the course of his duties he had learned how much could be stolen in the purchase and sale of buildings and land. He was well versed in the usual ways of fraud: he knew how to sell for a million francs what had been bought for 500,000; he knew how to pay for the right to pick the locks of the state treasury, while the state shut its eyes and smiled; he knew how to juggle six-story buildings when a boulevard was cut through the heart of an old neighborhood while the dupes looked on and applauded. And in a time still beset by turmoil, before the canker of speculation had progressed beyond the incubation stage, what made him a gambler to be feared was that he saw more deeply than his own superiors into the future of granite and plaster that lay in store for the capital. He had dug up so much, collected such quantities of intelligence, that he could have told you what the city’s new quarters would look like in 1870. In the street sometimes, he looked at certain houses in a peculiar way, as if they were acquaintances whose fate, known to him alone, touched him deeply.
Two months before Angèle’s death, he had taken her one Sunday to the Buttes Montmartre.16 The poor woman loved to eat out in restaurants. She was happy when, at the end of a long walk, he led her to a table in some suburban cabaret. On that day they dined at the top of the hill, in a restaurant with a view of Paris, with windows that looked out over an ocean of blue-tinted roofs that filled the vast horizon with its surging swell. Their table stood in front of one of those windows. The sight of the roofs of Paris put Saccard in a good mood. He ordered a bottle of Burgundy to go with dessert. He smiled absentmindedly and was more attentive to his wife than usual. But his eyes, like a lover’s, kept being drawn back to the living, seething sea of rooftops and the deep rumble of the crowd beneath. It was autumn. The city, languishing under pale skies, was a soft and tender gray, pierced here and there by somber patches of green reminiscent of the broad leaves of water lilies floating on the surface of a lake. The sun was setting in a cloud of red, and as a light haze filled the background, a golden dust or dew fell on the city’s right bank over toward the Madeleine 17 and the Tuileries. It was like an enchanted spot in one of the cities of A Thousand and One Nights,18 with emerald trees, sapphire roofs, and ruby weathervanes. At one point a ray of sunlight slipped its way between two clouds and cast such a glorious light on the houses below that they seemed to flare up and melt like a bar of gold in a crucible.