That was how Aristide Saccard won his first victory. He quadrupled his investment and gained two accomplices. Only one thing worried him. When he went to destroy Mme Sidonie’s fraudulent books, they were nowhere to be found. He rushed over to see Larsonneau, who told him bluntly that he had the books and planned to keep them. Saccard did not lose his temper. His only worry, he intimated, was for his dear friend, who was far more compromised than Saccard himself by these forgeries—almost all of which were in his friend’s hand—but he was reassured now that he knew the books to be in Larsonneau’s possession. Actually, he would gladly have strangled his “dear friend.” He remembered one highly compromising document, a bogus inventory that he had been stupid enough to draw up and that must still be in one of the ledgers. Larsonneau, richly rewarded for his services, opened a consulting office on the rue de Rivoli, which he furnished as luxuriously as any kept woman’s apartment. Saccard quit his job at city hall and, with a considerable quantity of capital now at his disposal, plunged into speculation with a vengeance, while Renée, excited and out of control, filled Paris with the clatter of her carriages, the sparkle of her diamonds, and the dizzying whirl of her swank and ostentatious existence.

Occasionally husband and wife, both feverish in their pursuit of money and pleasure, returned to the icy mists of the Ile Saint-Louis. When they did, they felt as though they were entering a ghost town.

The Béraud mansion, built around the beginning of the seventeenth century, was one of those dark, square, solemn buildings with high, narrow windows that are so common in the Marais and are often rented out to boarding schools, manufacturers of seltzer water, and distributors of wine and spirits. It was admirably preserved, however. Situated on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, it had only three upper stories, each fifteen to twenty feet high. The ground floor had lower ceilings, with windows protected by depressingly heavy iron bars set right into the somber thickness of the walls and an arched doorway almost as wide as it was tall, which was shut by double doors bearing a cast-iron knocker, painted dark green, and studded with huge nails that formed star and diamond patterns on both panels. It was the classic carriage entrance, flanked by off-kilter hitching posts circled by iron hoops. One could see that a gutter had once run through the center of the gate and that the ballast beneath the porch had been gently sloped to channel water into it from either side. M. Béraud had decided, however, to pave the entrance and block this gutter. This was the only sacrifice to modern architecture to which he ever agreed. The windows on the upper floors were enclosed by thin iron handrails through which the colossal casements, with their heavy brown sashes and small greenish panes, could be seen. Above, the line of the roof was broken by dormers, leaving the gutters to continue by themselves to funnel rainwater into the downspouts. The austere nakedness of the façade was further aggravated by the total absence of shutters and blinds, the pale and melancholy stones of this front wall being untouched by sunlight throughout the year. This façade, with its venerable air, its bourgeois severity, slumbered solemnly in this neighborhood of dignified repose and silent streets seldom disturbed by the clatter of carriages.

Inside the gate was a square courtyard surrounded by arcades, a scaled-down version of the place Royale,²² paved with enormous slabs of stone, which added the finishing touch needed to make this lifeless house look exactly like a cloister. Facing the porch, a fountain— a lion’s head half worn away so that only its gaping jaws remained— spouted a heavy, monotonous stream of water from an iron pipe into a trough green with moss and worn smooth along the edges. The water was icy cold. Grass pushed its way up between the stone slabs. During the summer a thin sliver of sunlight penetrated the courtyard, and this rare visitation of the sun’s rays had whitened one corner of the façade, on the south side, leaving the remaining three-quarters of the front wall gloomy and black and streaked with mold. Standing in the middle of this courtyard, as cool and quiet as the bottom of a well, in the glaring light of a winter day, one could easily believe that the new Paris, ablaze with fiery passions and reverberating with the din of millions, was a thousand miles away.

The apartments within the mansion exuded the same mournful calm and frigid formality as the courtyard. The stairwell leading up to them was broad and guarded with an iron rail, and within it every footstep, every cough, resounded as beneath the vault of a church. Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery. M. Béraud Du Châtel had chosen for himself an apartment in the gloomiest part of the house, on the second floor between the street and the courtyard. There he found himself in surroundings remarkable for their shadowy silence and conducive to meditation. When he pushed open the doors and made his slow, lugubrious way through the solemn apartments, he resembled one of the members of the old parlements whose portraits were affixed to the walls, a man lost in thought on his way home after debating and refusing to sign a royal edict.

But within this lifeless house, this cloister, there was a warm and vibrant nest, a pocket of sunshine and gaiety, a lovely lair of childish high spirits, fresh air, and bright light. To reach it one had to climb a host of small staircases, proceed along a dozen or so corridors, climb back down and then up again to complete a veritable journey ending at last in a vast chamber, a sort of belvedere on the rooftop in the back of the house above the Quai de Béthune. It enjoyed full southern exposure. The window was so wide that the sky, with all its radiance, all its fresh air, all its blue color seemed to enter in. Perched aloft like a dovecote, it contained long flower boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single piece of furniture. A simple mat had been laid down over the tile floor. This was the “children’s room.” Throughout the house this was the name by which the room was known and referred to. The house was so cold and the courtyard so damp that Aunt Elisabeth had been afraid that Christine and Renée might catch a chill from the walls. She had often scolded the active little girls, who liked to race through the arcades and dip their tiny arms into the frigid water of the fountain. Then it occurred to her to have the forgotten loft fixed up for them, this being for centuries the only spot in the house where the sun was allowed in to disport itself in solitude among the spider-webs. She had given them a mat, some birds, and flowers. The girls were delighted. During vacations, Renée lived up there, bathing in the warm yellow rays of the sun, which seemed pleased with the way its hideout had been fixed up and with the two blondes it had been sent. The chamber became a paradise, resounding with the songs of the birds and the babble of the little girls. Ownership had been ceded entirely to them. They called it “our room.” They were at home in it. They went so far as to lock themselves in to prove to themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the premises. What a happy place! A hecatomb of playthings lay strewn about the mat in the bright sunshine.

The best thing about the children’s room was the vast horizon. Looking out the other windows of the house one saw nothing but black walls a few feet away. But the children’s room offered a view of one end of the Seine, one whole side of Paris stretching from the Ile de la Cité ²³ to the Pont de Bercy, flat and vast and looking like some quaint Dutch town. Below, on the Quai de Béthune, stood a series of ramshackle wooden sheds, and the children often amused themselves by watching enormous rats scamper about the heaps of fallen beams and roofing, feeling a vague sense of dread whenever they saw one scale the high walls. Beyond these ruins, however, the magic began. The pier, with its rows of floating timbers and buttresses like those of some Gothic cathedral, and the delicate Pont de Constantine, swaying like lace beneath the feet of pedestrians, intersected at right angles and seemed to dam the enormous mass of the river and hold it in check. Opposite stood the trees of the Halle aux Vins,²⁴ and, farther on, the greenery of the Jardin des Plantes²⁵ stretching off toward the horizon. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, the Quai Henri IV and Quai de la Rapée were lined with low, uneven structures, rows of houses that looked from above like the little wood and cardboard houses the girls kept in boxes. In the distance, to the right, loomed the slate roof of La Salpêtrière,²⁶ a patch of blue above the trees. Then, in the middle, stretching all the way down to the Seine, the broad paved banks formed two long gray passageways smudged here and there by a row of barrels, a hitched-up wagon, or a boatload of wood or coal piled on the shore. But the soul of it all, the soul that filled the scene, was the Seine, the living river. It came from afar, from the vague and trembling edge of the horizon, from the land of dreams, and flowed in tranquil majesty straight to the children, swelling mightily on its way and finally spreading into a great sheet of water at their feet, at the extremity of the island. The two bridges that crossed it, the Pont de Bercy and the Pont d’Austerlitz, seemed like necessary barriers, responsible for holding the river back and preventing it from rising up to the children’s room. The girls loved the giant river. Their eyes could not get enough of its colossal flow, of the eternal rumbling flood that rolled forward as if pursuing them, and they could feel it divide below them and vanish to the right and to the left, into the unknown, with the docility of a tamed Titan. When the weather was fine, on mornings when the sky was blue, they took delight in the Seine’s beautiful finery. The river decked itself out in variegated gowns, taking on a thousand hues of infinite subtlety ranging from blue to green. It looked like silk patterned with tongues of white flame and trimmed with satin ruffles. And the boats that found shelter along its banks made a ribbon of black velvet along its edges. In the distance especially the fabric seemed lovely and precious, like the enchanted gauze of a fairy’s tunic. Beyond the hem of deep green satin formed by the shadows of the bridges were golden breastplates and rich folds that glowed like the sun. The immense sky looming over the water, the rows of low houses, and the greenery of the two parks seemed to grow deeper before one’s eyes.