Aristide Saccard had at last found his element. He had shown himself to be a great speculator, a man who juggled millions. Following up his masterstroke on the rue de la Pépinière, he threw himself boldly into the battle that was just beginning to leave shameful wrecks and brilliant triumphs scattered about Paris. At first he bet on sure things, repeating his initial success by buying buildings he knew to be slated for demolition and relying on his friends to obtain huge indemnities. At one point he owned five or six houses—the very houses he had once looked at so strangely, as if they were acquaintances, back when he was just a poor clerk in the road department. But his art was still in its infancy. It took no great cleverness to run out leases, conspire with tenants, and rob the state and private owners, and to him the game seemed not worth the candle. So he soon put his genius to work on more complicated tasks.

The first ploy he came up with was to buy buildings secretly on behalf of the city. A decision by the Conseil d’Etat had put the municipal government in a difficult position. It had purchased a large number of houses by private agreement with the owners in the hope of allowing the leases to expire and then evicting the tenants without any indemnity. But the council held that these purchases were in fact expropriations, and the city was obliged to pay. It was at that point that Saccard offered to act as a front. He bought the properties, ran out the leases, and in exchange for a bonus surrendered the buildings on a mutually agreed date. He even wound up playing a double game, buying for both the city and the prefect. When a deal proved too tempting, he slipped the deed for the property into his own pocket. The state paid. In compensation for his assistance he was granted building rights on sections of streets and planned intersections, which he sold to third parties even before work on the new street had begun. The game was fierce; people gambled on neighborhoods under construction as they might gamble on bonds. Certain ladies—pretty prostitutes, intimate friends of high officials—were in on the action. One of them, famous for the whiteness of her teeth, snapped up entire streets on several occasions. Saccard, famished, felt his desires grow as rivers of gold flowed through his hands. It seemed that a sea of twenty-franc coins was swelling before him, growing from a lake into an ocean whose waves stretched as far as the eye could see and made a strange sound, a metallic music that inflamed his heart. With each passing day he ventured more boldly out onto that sea, diving down and returning to the surface, now on his back, now on his belly, navigating the immensity in all weather, fair or foul, and counting on his strength and skill to avoid ever going to the bottom.

Paris was then disappearing in a cloud of plaster. The day that Saccard had predicted on the Buttes Montmartre had arrived. The city was being slashed with a saber, and he had a finger in every gash, in every wound. He owned piles of ruins in all quarters of the city. On the rue de Rome he was mixed up in the amazing story of the company that dug a hole and carted away five or six thousand cubic meters of soil so as to create the impression that it was involved in a gigantic project, and which then went bankrupt, so that the hole had to be filled in again with fill from Saint-Ouen. ⁵ Saccard escaped with a clear conscience and full pockets thanks to his brother Eugène, who was kind enough to intervene. At Chaillot ⁶ he helped to pare away the heights and cart them off as fill in order to make way for the boulevard that runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pont de l’Alma. Over toward Passy it was he who had the idea of covering the plateau with rubble from the Trocadéro,⁷ so that today the good soil lies two meters deep and nothing grows on the debris, not even weeds. He was in twenty places at once, wherever there was some insurmountable obstacle: dirt that nobody knew what to do with, an embankment that was impossible to build, a nice pile of soil and rubble that the engineers chafed to get out of the way—no matter what the mess, he would always dig his fingers into it and ultimately come away with a kickback or work out some kind of deal. In the course of a day he would race from construction sites around the Arc de Triomphe to others on the boulevard Saint-Michel, from the piles of rubble on the boulevard Malesherbes to the pits at Chaillot, dragging an army of workmen, law clerks, stockholders, dupes, and scoundrels in his wake.

His greatest claim to fame, however, was the Crédit Viticole, which he had founded with Toutin-Laroche. The latter was officially in charge; Saccard figured only as a member of the board of directors. In this instance Eugène had once again done his brother an important favor. Thanks to him, the government had granted the company authorization to do business and watched over its operations most indulgently. At a particularly ticklish moment, when a hostile newspaper took the liberty of criticizing something the company had done, the official government bulletin went so far as to publish a note banning all discussion of a firm so honorable that the state itself deigned to sponsor it. The Crédit Viticole relied on an excellent system of financing: it lent farmers up to half the estimated value of their property, guaranteed the loan with a mortgage, and collected interest plus amortization from the borrowers. No system was ever more prudent or proper. With a knowing smile Eugène had told his brother that the Tuileries wanted everything aboveboard. Interpreting this wish to suit himself, M. Toutin-Laroche allowed the lending machinery to operate without interference while he set up alongside it a bank that attracted capital, which he then used to gamble with abandon, plunging headlong into any number of ventures. Thanks to the energetic leadership of its managing director, the Crédit Viticole soon enjoyed an unshakable reputation as a solid and prosperous firm. At first, when Saccard wanted to put a large number of new shares on the market all at once, he was shrewd enough to make it look as though they had been in circulation for a long time by having bank tellers spend the night tromping on them and beating them with birch brooms. The bank’s premises were designed to make it look like a branch office of the Bank of France. The headquarters, with its many offices, courtyard full of carriages, austere iron railings, broad stoop and monumental staircase, suites of sumptuous private rooms, and uniformed personnel and factotums, stood forth as a grave and dignified temple of money, and nothing inspired a more religious emotion in the public than the sanctuary, the counting room, to which one gained access by way of a corridor notable for its sacred nudity, there to glimpse the safe, the god, crouched down, secured to the wall, squat and somnolent, with its triple locks, thick flanks, and air of brute divinity.

Saccard worked a huge swindle on city hall. Oppressed and overburdened by debt, the city, having been dragged into the dance of millions that it had set in motion to please the Emperor and line certain pockets, was reduced to borrowing money in secret so as not to be obliged to confess its own raging fever, its obsession with pickaxe and quarry stone. It had just invented something called delegation bonds, long-term letters of exchange, with which it could pay contractors on the day that papers were signed so that they could then sell the notes at a discount in exchange for needed funds. The Crédit Viticole had graciously accepted this paper from the contractors. The day the city ran short of money, Saccard tried putting temptation in its way. A considerable sum of money was advanced on the security of delegation bonds that M. Toutin-Laroche swore he had obtained from companies doing business with the city, and which he dragged through all the gutters of speculation. The Crédit Viticole was thereafter safe from attack; it held Paris by the throat. From then on the managing director never spoke about the famous Société Générale des Ports du Maroc without a smile. It still existed, however, and the newspapers continued to celebrate the great commercial stations at regular intervals. One day, when M. Toutin-Laroche urged Saccard to take some shares of the company, the latter laughed in his face and asked if he, Toutin-Laroche, thought him fool enough to invest his money in the “The Arabian Nights, Inc.”