A still greater familiarity and lack of restraint existed between father and son. Saccard had grasped the fact that a great financier is bound to make love to women and on occasion lose his head over them. He was brusque in love and preferred money. It was a part of his plan, however, to frequent women’s bedrooms, to strew banknotes on certain mantelpieces, and from time to time to use a celebrated prostitute as a gold-plated advertisement for one of his speculations. When Maxime left school, he and his father would occasionally run into each other at the home of the same lady, and they would laugh about it. To some extent they were even rivals. Sometimes, when the young man dined at the Maison d’Or with a noisy group of friends, he could hear Saccard’s voice in a private room nearby.

“Well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t Daddy next door!” he would shout, with an expression on his face borrowed from one of the popular actors of the day.

“Oh, it’s you!” his father would rejoin in a jocular tone of voice. “Come in, why don’t you? You’re making so much noise I can’t hear myself eat. So who are you with tonight?”

“Laure d’Aurigny, Sylvia, Crayfish, and two others I think. They’re astonishing: they poke at the plates with their fingers and throw handfuls of salad at our heads. My clothes are covered with oil.”

His father laughed at this story, which he thought quite funny.

“Ah, young people, young people,” he murmured. “Not like us, are they, my kitten? We’ve had a very quiet meal and will soon hit the hay.”

And with that he grabbed the chin of the woman next to him and cooed at her in his nasal Provençal, which produced a strange amorous music.

“Oh, you old fool!” the woman shouted. “Hello, Maxime. If I’m willing to have supper with your nasty father, I must be in love with you, don’t you think? . . . Where have you been keeping yourself? Come see me the day after tomorrow, early in the morning. . . . No, I mean it, I have something to tell you.”

With a blissful look on his face, Saccard polished off a dish of ice cream or fruit, taking small mouthfuls. He kissed the woman’s shoulders and said teasingly, “You know, my loves, if I’m in your way, I’ll be off. . . . You can ring when it’s safe to return.”

Then he would take the lady off, or sometimes he would take her to join the boisterous crowd next door. He and Maxime shared the same shoulders; their hands encircled the same waists. They called out to each other from the divans and repeated out loud confidences that women had whispered in their ears. Indeed, they carried intimacy to the point of conspiring, when one or the other had chosen a blonde or brunette from the company, to lure her away from the group and make off with her.

They were well-known at Mabille.⁹ They used to go there arm in arm after an elegant dinner party and stroll about the garden, nodding at the women and shouting comments after them as they passed. They laughed loudly without letting go of each other’s arms and when conversations became heated helped each other out. The father, who knew how to drive a hard bargain, negotiated a very good price when it came to his son’s amours. Occasionally they would sit down and have a drink with a group of whores. Then they might move to another table or continue their stroll. Until midnight they could always be seen, arms linked like a couple of schoolfellows, chasing skirts down the yellow walkways under the harsh flame of the gaslights.

When they returned home, they brought with them, on their clothing, traces of the tarts they had been with outdoors. Their provocative poses, hints of risqué language, and vulgar gestures filled the apartment on the rue de Rivoli with the reek of dubious alcoves. The lackadaisical and wanton way in which the father offered his hand to his son was in itself enough to indicate where they had been. This was the air that Renée breathed, the source of her sensual caprices and longings. She used to tease the two men nervously.

“So where are you coming from?” she would say. “You reek of tobacco and perfume. . . . I’m sure I’m going to have a migraine.”

And something about the peculiar odor did indeed trouble her deeply. Such was the persistent fragrance of this unusual household.

Meanwhile, Maxime was smitten with a grand passion for little Sylvia. For months on end he bored his stepmother with talk of this prostitute. Renée soon knew all there was to know about her, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. She had a slight bruise on her hip; nothing was lovelier than her knees; her shoulders were peculiar in that only the left one was dimpled. Maxime took malicious pleasure in recounting the perfections of his mistress to Renée during their drives together. One evening, on the way home from the Bois, Renée’s carriage was caught with Sylvia’s in a traffic jam, and the two were obliged to sit for a time side by side on the Champs-Elysées.¹⁰ The two women stared at each other with keen curiosity, while Maxime, delighted by this critical encounter, snickered to himself. When the calèche resumed its forward motion, Renée’s somber silence made Maxime think she was sulking, and he expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those odd scoldings with which she still occasionally diverted herself in her lassitude.

“Do you know that woman’s jeweler?” she asked him abruptly, just as they reached the place de la Concorde.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he answered with a smile. “I owe him 10,000 francs. . . . Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

Then, after another interval of silence: “She was wearing a very pretty bracelet, the one on her left wrist. . . . I would have liked to have seen it close up.”

They returned home. She said no more about it. But the next day, as Maxime and his father were about to go out together, she took the young man aside and spoke to him in a low voice, with an embarrassed look and a pretty smile as if seeking a favor. He seemed surprised and went off laughing in his wicked way. That evening he brought Sylvia’s bracelet home with him, for his stepmother had begged him to show it to her.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Who wouldn’t steal for you, step-mama?”

“She didn’t see you take it?” Renée asked, as she eagerly examined the bracelet.

“I don’t think so. . . . She wore it yesterday, so she certainly won’t want to wear it today.”

In the meantime the young woman had gone over to the window and put the bracelet on. She held her wrist slightly raised and turned it slowly, ecstatically repeating, “Oh! Very pretty, very pretty. . . . I quite like everything about it, except the emeralds.”

At that moment, with her wrist still held high in the white light of the window, Saccard walked in.

“What have we here?” he cried out in astonishment. “Sylvia’s bracelet!”

“You’re familiar with this item?” she said, more embarrassed than he and not knowing what to do with her arm.

He recovered. He pointed a menacing finger at his son and muttered, “This young scoundrel always has some kind of forbidden fruit in his pocket! . . . One of these days he’ll be bringing us the lady’s arm with the bracelet still on it.”

“Hold on a minute!” Maxime replied with cowardly cunning. “It wasn’t me. It was Renée who wanted to see it.”

“Oh!” was all the husband said.

And he in turn examined the jewelry, repeating the same words as his wife: “It’s very pretty, very pretty indeed.”

Then he quietly left the room, and Renée scolded Maxime for giving her away. He replied that his father couldn’t care less about such things. She returned the bracelet to him.

“You will go see the jeweler,” she said, “and order me one just like this, only you’ll ask him to use sapphires instead of emeralds.”

Saccard could not keep anything or anyone close to him for long without wanting to sell or derive a profit from it. Before his son was twenty it occurred to him that the boy could be useful. A good-looking young man who was the nephew of a minister and the son of an important financier was bound to be a good investment. He was of course a bit young, but one could always search out a wife and dowry for him, and then the wedding could be postponed or hurried along according to the financial needs of the firm. Saccard chose well. At a meeting of a board of directors of which he was a member, he chanced to meet a tall, handsome man by the name of Mareuil, and within two days Mareuil was his. M. de Mareuil had once been a sugar refiner in Le Havre, at which time his name had been Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young noblewoman, also quite wealthy, who had been looking for an imbecile with an impressive face. His first proud trophy was the right to use his wife’s name, but the marriage had made him insanely ambitious: he dreamed of paying Hélène back for her nobility by acquiring a high political position. He immediately invested money in the new newspapers, bought extensive properties in the remote Nièvre, and did all he could to prepare himself to run for a seat in the legislature. Thus far he had failed, though without shedding any of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could possibly encounter. He was a man of superb stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman, and since he was a marvelously good listener, with a deep gaze and a majestic calm in his expression, it was possible to believe that he was engaged in a prodigious inner labor of comprehension and deduction. Of course his mind was completely empty. Yet he had a disturbing effect on people, who had no idea whether they were dealing with a superior man or an imbecile. M. de Mareuil clung to Saccard as to a life raft. He knew that an official candidacy was about to open up in the Nièvre and ardently hoped that the minister would designate him. This was the last card he had to play. Hence he put himself completely in the hands of the minister’s brother. Saccard, who sensed a mutually advantageous alliance, encouraged him to think of marrying his daughter Louise off to Maxime. Mareuil was effusive in gratitude, believed that the idea of a wedding had been his own, and considered himself most fortunate to forge an alliance with the family of a minister and to give Louise to a young man whose prospects seemed bright indeed.