Saccard had thus far speculated successfully on sure things, cheating, selling himself, making money on his deals, and extracting some sort of profit from each of his ventures. Before long, however, this wheeling and dealing ceased to satisfy him. He was too proud to scoop up the remains, to pick up the gold that men like Toutin-Laroche and Baron Gouraud let fall in their wake. He plunged his arms into the sack up to his shoulders. He formed a partnership with Mignon, Charrier & Co., the well-known contractors, who were then just starting out on their way to amassing colossal fortunes. The city had already decided not to build the new boulevards itself but to hire contractors to do the work instead. These contractors agreed to deliver a finished street complete with trees, benches, and gaslights in exchange for a fixed fee. Sometimes they laid the roadway for nothing, feeling amply compensated by the adjacent land, from which they derived substantial profits. The speculative fever over land and the dizzying rise in the price of housing date from the same period. With his connections Saccard obtained the rights to develop three stretches of boulevard. What he brought to the partnership was his ardent if somewhat unmethodical spirit. Initially his underlings, MM Mignon and Charrier, proved to be well-heeled, cunning coconspirators, master masons who knew the value of a franc. The two contractors laughed up their sleeves at the sight of Saccard’s horses. They usually wore overalls, did not refuse to shake hands with their workmen, and went home at night covered with plaster. Both were from Langres. To ardent, insatiable Paris they brought their Champenois⁸ prudence and unflappable wits, which, though not very open to new ideas and not very intelligent, were nevertheless quite apt at profiting from opportunities to line their pockets right now while deferring enjoyment of their gains till later on. If Saccard set a deal in motion and invested his passion in it, his avid craving, Mignon and Charrier with their down-to-earth ways and strict, methodical management had what it took to prevent their partner’s extravagant imagination from derailing it at twenty different junctures. They never agreed to build the superb offices, the impressive headquarters with which he hoped to astonish Paris. Nor did they want any part of the lesser speculations that spewed from his brain every morning: plans to build concert halls and huge bathhouses adjacent to newly laid streets; railways to parallel new boulevards; and glass-roofed malls that would have raised commercial rents tenfold and allowed customers to shop without getting wet. Terrified of such proposals, the contractors nipped them in the bud by deciding that the land adjacent to the new streets would be divided among the three partners and each would be free to do as he pleased with his share. Mignon and Charrier wisely continued to sell their lots. Saccard built on his. His brain seethed with ideas. He was capable of proposing in all seriousness that Paris should be placed under an enormous bell jar, so as to turn the city into a hothouse where pineapples and sugarcane could be grown.

Moving capital by the shovelful, he soon owned eight houses on the new boulevards. Four were completely finished, two on the rue de Marignan and two on the boulevard Haussmann. The other four, located on the boulevard Malesherbes, were still under construction, and one of them, on a vast lot enclosed by a wooden fence within which a splendid mansion was to rise, had got no further than the installation of the second-story flooring. At this stage, his affairs had become so complicated, he had so many strings attached to each of his fingers, so many interests to oversee and so many marionettes to keep in motion, that he barely slept three hours a night and read his correspondence in his carriage. The wonder was that his cash box seemed bottomless. He owned stock in all sorts of companies, built with a kind of frenzy, was involved in traffic of many kinds, and threatened to inundate Paris like a rising tide, yet he never seemed to realize a clear profit or pocket a substantial sum of gleaming gold coins. This river of gold, flowing from unknown sources, which seemed to gush from his office in wave after wave, astonished observers and made him at one point the man of the hour to whom the Paris papers attributed every clever remark about the stock exchange.

With a husband like this, Renée was about as little married as she could be. She went for weeks on end almost without seeing him. In any event, he was perfect: he opened his coffers wide whenever she needed money. Deep down, she loved him as she would have loved any obliging banker. Whenever she visited the Béraud household, she praised him to her father, who remained severe and cold toward his son-in-law despite his good fortune. Her contempt for him had evaporated. This man seemed so convinced that life is nothing but business and was so clearly born to mint money out of whatever came his way—women, children, paving stones, sacks of plaster, consciences— that she could not blame him for the bargain he had struck in marrying her. Since striking that bargain, he looked at her in much the same way as he looked at those beautiful houses that earned him esteem and would hopefully bring him huge profits. He liked to see her well dressed, making a splash, turning heads all over Paris. This enhanced his stature and made people double their estimate of his probable net worth. Because of his wife, people thought him handsome, young, amorous, and giddy. She was a partner, an unwitting accomplice. A new team of horses, an outfit that cost 2,000 écus, an indulgence for one of her lovers facilitated some of his best deals and frequently turned out to be the decisive factor. Often, too, he pretended to be busy and sent her in his stead to seek a necessary authorization from some minister or official or to receive his reply. On such occasions he would tell her, “And be good, now!” in a tone of voice that was all his own, at once mocking and cajoling. And when she returned, having been successful in her mission, he would rub his hands together and say, “And I hope you were good!” Renée laughed. He was too busy to want someone like Mme Michelin. He merely liked to make crude jokes and nasty insinuations. In any case, had Renée not “been good,” his only irritation would have been at having had to pay in earnest for the minister’s or official’s favor. He delighted in duping people, in giving them less than their money’s worth. He often said, “If I were a woman, I might sell myself, but I would never deliver the goods. That would be idiotic.”

Irrepressible Renée, who had appeared one night in the Parisian firmament as a strangely enchanted creature from the world of fashionable sensuality, was the least analyzable of women. Had she been raised at home, she would no doubt have turned to religion or some other means of calming the nerves and drawing the sting of desires that now and again drove her wild. Her temperament was solidly bourgeois. She was absolutely honest, much given to logic, afraid of heaven and hell, and full of prejudices. She was her father’s daughter, one of that calm and prudent breed in whom the homely virtues flourish. And yet it was in this nature that prodigious fantasies, persistent curiosities, and unavowable desires germinated and grew. With the Sisters of the Visitation, among whom she was free to explore the mystical sensuality of the chapel and close attachments to her little friends, she had acquired a bizarre education, learning vice, investing it with all the sincerity of her nature, and unsettling her young mind to the point where she embarrassed her confessor no end by telling him that one day during mass she had experienced an impulsive desire to get up from her seat and kiss him. Then she beat her breast and turned pale at the thought of the devil and his cauldrons. The crime that led to her later marriage to Saccard, the brutal rape that she had endured with a sort of terrified anticipation, had made her despise herself and played a large part in the unrestrained way in which she lived her entire life. She believed she no longer had to struggle against evil, that it was inside her, that logic authorized her to pursue wicked knowledge to the end. For her that knowledge was still more a matter of curiosity than of appetite. Thrown into Second Empire society, abandoned to her fantasies, supplied with money, encouraged in her most ostentatious eccentricities, she surrendered, regretted it, and ultimately succeeded in killing off what remained of decency in her, lashed and driven as she was by her insatiable need to know and to feel.