“Oh, look!” Saccard exclaimed with a child’s laugh. “Twenty-franc gold pieces are raining down on Paris!”

Angèle, too, began to laugh, remarking that those particular gold pieces were not easy to pick up. But her husband had stood up and gone over to the window, where he leaned against the sill. “That’s the Vendôme column, isn’t it, gleaming down there? . . . And over there, farther to the right, that’s the Madeleine. . . . A beautiful neighborhood, where there’s plenty of work to be done. . . . Yes, this time, it’s all going to burn! Do you see? . . . It’s as if the neighborhood were being boiled down in some chemist’s retort.”

His voice turned grave and tremulous. The comparison he had hit upon seemed to make a great impression on him. He had drunk the Burgundy, and he forgot himself. Stretching out his arms to show Paris to Angèle, who was now also leaning against the windowsill by his side, he went on. “Yes, yes, as I was saying, more than one neighborhood is about to be melted down, and gold will stick to the fingers of everybody who stokes the furnace and stirs the boiling pot. Paris is so big and simpleminded! Look how huge the city is and how calmly it lies sleeping! These big cities are so stupid! This one has no idea that one fine day it will be set upon by an army of pickaxes. Some of those mansions on the rue d’Anjou wouldn’t gleam quite so brightly in the sunset if they knew that they had only three or four more years to live.”

Angèle thought her husband was joking. He had a taste at times for elaborate, nettlesome tomfoolery. She laughed, but with a vague disquiet, at the sight of this little man standing over the giant asleep at his feet and shaking his fist at it while pressing his lips together with an ironic twist.

“They’ve already begun,” he went on. “But it’s nothing to speak of yet. Look over there, toward Les Halles.¹⁹ They’ve cut Paris into four.”

With that, extending his open hand and wielding it like the sharp edge of a cutlass, he made as if to slice the city into four parts.

“You mean the rue de Rivoli and the new boulevard they’re putting through?” his wife asked.

“Yes, the ‘Great Crossing’ of Paris, as they’re calling it. They’re clearing out the area around the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville. But that’s mere child’s play! Just enough to whet the public’s appetite. . . . When the first network of new streets is finished, the big dance will begin. The second network will cut through the city in all directions to link the suburbs to the first network. The buildings that need to be cleared away will collapse in clouds of plaster. . . . Look, follow my hand. From the boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, one cut; then, over this way, from the Madeleine to the Monceau plain, another cut; and a third cut in this direction, a fourth in that direction, a cut here, another farther out. Cuts everywhere. Paris slashed to pieces with a saber, its veins laid open to provide nourishment for a hundred thousand excavators and masons, and in the end you’ll have a city crisscrossed by fine strategic highways that will put fortresses right in the heart of the old neighborhoods.”

Night was coming on. Saccard’s wizened, muscular hand continued slashing away at the void. Angèle trembled slightly at the sight of this living blade, these iron fingers pitilessly hacking at the endless expanse of dark rooftops. The haze on the horizon had just begun to roll in from the heights, and in her imagination she heard distant cracking sounds from the darkening vales below, as if her husband’s hand really were making the cuts he was describing, slicing Paris up from one end to the other, smashing beams, crushing masonry, and leaving behind long and hideous wounds where walls had collapsed. The smallness of the hand so implacably attacking its giant prey was ultimately frightening to behold, and as it effortlessly ripped the entrails of the enormous city to shreds, it seemed to take on a peculiar glint of steel in the twilight tinged with blue.

“There will be a third network,” Saccard continued after an interval of silence, as if talking to himself. “That one is still too far in the future. I can’t envision it very clearly. I’ve picked up few clues to where it will go. But it will be sheer madness, millions changing hands at a breakneck pace, Paris drunk and reeling!”

He lapsed again into silence, his eyes fixed ardently on the city, which darkness gathered in its folds. He must have been pondering that future so remote that even he could not yet grasp it. Then night fell, and the city dissolved into a blur and seemed to breathe heavily, like the sea when nothing can be seen but the pale crests of the waves. Here and there, the whiteness of a wall still stood out, and one by one the yellow flames of the gaslights pierced the shadows, like stars making their appearance in the blackness of a stormy night.

Angèle put aside her discomfort and returned to the joke her husband had made at dessert. “Well, then,” she said with a smile, “there’s been quite a shower of those twenty-franc pieces! The people of Paris are counting them now. Look at those nice piles they’re lining up down there!”

She pointed to the streets descending the Buttes Montmartre, whose gaslights seemed to form two golden rows. “And over there,” she shouted, pointing at a cluster of stars, “that has to be the Caisse Générale.”

This allusion to the state treasury made Saccard laugh. He and Angèle remained at the window a few moments longer, delighted by the shower of gold that eventually engulfed the entire city. On the way down from the heights of Montmartre the clerk had second thoughts about having talked so much. He blamed the wine and begged his wife not to repeat the “foolish things” he had said. He wanted, he said, to be taken for a sober head.

Saccard had long studied these three networks of streets and boulevards, the plan for which he had been careless enough to describe in reasonably accurate terms to Angèle. When she died, he was by no means upset to know that she took with her to the grave all memory of his loose talk from that day on the Buttes Montmartre. There, in the slashes he had made with his hand in the heart of Paris, lay the seeds of his fortune, and he had no intention of sharing his idea with anyone, knowing full well that when the day came to divide the spoils, there would be plenty of crows circling the gutted city. His initial plan had been to acquire, at a good price, a building he knew to be slated for imminent demolition and then to make a killing on the indemnity. He might have gone ahead and taken his chances without a cent to his name, buying the building on credit and pocketing the difference when the price went up as in buying shares of stock on margin, but then the 200,000-franc bonus from his marriage encouraged him to think big. His calculations were now complete: he would use a front to purchase his wife’s house on the rue de la Pépinière, leaving his name out of the transaction entirely, and triple his investment thanks to the knowledge he had acquired in the corridors of the Hôtel de Ville and through his connections with certain influential individuals. The reason he had been startled when Aunt Elisabeth mentioned the location of the house was that it happened to be situated right in the middle of a proposed new thoroughfare, knowledge of which was still confined to the offices of the Prefect of the Seine.²⁰ The boulevard Malesherbes was to sweep away everything in its path. This was an old project of Napoleon I, which there was now talk of reviving in order “to allow a normal traffic flow to and from neighborhoods cut off by the maze of narrow streets on the slopes of the Paris perimeter,” to use the earnest official phraseology. That phraseology of course avowed nothing of the interest the Empire had in opening the spigots of cash or in the vast projects of excavation and filling that would capture the imagination of the working class. Saccard had once taken the liberty of examining the famous map of Paris in the prefect’s office on which “an august hand” had traced in red ink the main roads of the second network. Those bloody strokes of the pen had cut into Paris even more deeply than the hand of our surveyor of roads. The boulevard Malesherbes, which would require the demolition of any number of superb mansions on the rue d’Anjou and the rue de la Ville-l’Evêque as well as the construction of substantial embankments, was one of the first slated to be put through. When Saccard went to inspect the building on the rue de la Pépinière, he thought back on that autumn night, on that dinner he had eaten with Angèle on the Buttes Montmartre, during which showers of gold louis had rained on the neighborhood around the Madeleine at sunset. He smiled. The shining cloud had just burst over his head, above his courtyard, and he was soon to start scooping up those golden coins.