Louise, according to her father, was to have a dowry worth a million francs. Misshapen, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young. A lung disease was secretly sapping her health, lending her a nervous gaiety, a soothing grace. Sick little girls age quickly, becoming women before their time. She was naïvely sensual and seemed to have been born at age fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, a healthy, stupid colossus of a man, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, too, had been a big, strong woman in life, but after her death stories were told about her that explained why the child was stunted and had the manners of a bohemian millionaire and the charming ugliness of a debauchee. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died in the most shockingly dissolute excess. Pleasures had eaten away at her like an ulcer, yet her husband, who ought to have had her locked up in an asylum, never noticed her lucid madness. Carried in this diseased womb, Louise emerged with anemic blood, misshapen limbs, and a diseased brain, her memory already steeped in filth. At times she was persuaded that she possessed vague memories of another existence and imagined bizarre, shadowy scenes of men and women embracing, a whole carnal drama that titillated her childish curiosity. It was her mother speaking in her. This vice continued throughout her childhood. As she grew older, nothing shocked her; she remembered everything, or, rather, knew everything already, and she sought out forbidden things with such a sure instinct that she was like a person returning home after a long absence and needing only to reach out in order to feel comfortable and take delight from the surroundings. This strikingly unusual girl, whose instinct for debauchery complemented Maxime’s, also had an innocence in her impudence, a piquant mixture of childishness and boldness, as she went about this second life as a virgin with the knowledge and shame of a grown woman, and in the end Maxime grew to like her and to find her far more amusing even than Sylvia, who, though the daughter of a respectable stationer, had the heart of a moneylender and was at bottom dreadfully middle-class.

The marriage was arranged with smiles all around, and it was decided that the “kids” would be allowed to grow up. The two families enjoyed a close friendship. M. de Mareuil pursued his candidacy. Saccard kept an eye on his prey. It was understood that Maxime’s basket of wedding gifts would include his nomination as an auditor to the Conseil d’Etat.

Meanwhile, the Saccards’ fortune seemed to have reached its apogee. It blazed like a gigantic bonfire in the middle of Paris. It was the hour when the hounds were ardently devouring their share of the spoils, and a corner of the forest was filled with the sounds of dogs barking and whips cracking and the flare of countless torches. The appetites that had been unleashed at last found contentment in the impudence of triumph, in the din of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes built in six months. The city had become an orgy of millions and of women. Vice, come from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread across ornamental basins, and spurted skyward in public fountains only to fall again upon the roofs in a fine driving rain. And at night, when one crossed the bridges, the Seine seemed to carry off all the refuse of the sleeping city: crumbs fallen from tables, lace bows left lying on divans, hairpieces forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices—everything that brutal desire and immediate gratification of instinct shattered and soiled and then tossed into the street. Then, in the capital’s feverish sleep, better even than in its breathless daylight quest, one sensed the mental derangement, the gilded, voluptuous nightmare of a city driven mad by its gold and its flesh. Violins sang until midnight. Then windows went dark, and shadows fell upon the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last vestige of modesty extinguished. In the depths of the darkness there was now only a great gurgle of frenetic and weary love, while the Tuileries, at the water’s edge, reached out its arms as if to embrace the vast blackness.

Saccard had built his Parc Monceau mansion on land stolen from the city. On the second floor he had reserved for himself a superb study in rosewood and gold, its tall glassed bookcases filled with files and not a single book in sight. The safe, built into the wall, created an iron alcove big enough to hide the amours of a billion francs. There his fortune flourished and insolently displayed itself. Everything he tried seemed to succeed. When he left the rue de Rivoli and adopted a grander style of entertaining, doubling his expenditure, he alluded, in conversations with people he knew well, to substantial profits. To hear him tell it, his partnership with Mignon and Charrier had yielded enormous rewards; his speculations on real estate were doing even better; and the Crédit Viticole was an inexhaustible fountain of cash. He had a way of enumerating his riches that dazzled his listeners and prevented them from getting a clear view of his situation. His Provençal twang became thicker than ever. With his short sentences and nervous gestures he fired off rockets that exploded into millions, leaving even the most incredulous listeners dazzled in the end. His frantic mimicry of a man of means played a large part in the reputation he had acquired of being a lucky gambler. In truth, he was not known to possess any clear, solid capital. His various associates, who were of necessity well-informed as to his situation with respect to themselves, explained his colossal fortune by telling themselves that he must have enjoyed perfect luck in his other speculations—the ones they knew nothing about. He spent prodigiously. Cash flowed continually from his coffers, yet the sources of this river of gold had yet to be discovered. It was pure madness: the rage for money, the handfuls of louis thrown out the windows, the strongbox emptied of its last coin night after night only to be refilled before morning, no one knew how; and never did it disgorge such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.

This was a fortune that roared and overflowed like a winter torrent, which buffeted Renée’s dowry, swept it away, and inundated it. Wary at first, the young woman had wanted to manage her own property, but she quickly wearied of business matters. Then she felt poor compared to her husband and, being overwhelmed by debt, was obliged to turn to him for assistance, to borrow money from him, and to rely on his discretion. With each new bill, which he paid with the smile of a man tolerant of human weakness, she surrendered a bit more of herself, entrusting him with bonds or authorizing him to sell this or that property. By the time they moved to the Parc Monceau mansion, she was already nearly picked clean. Saccard, substituting himself for the state, paid her the interest on the hundred thousand francs from the rue de la Pépinière. In addition, he persuaded her to sell the Sologne property in order to invest the money in an important deal—a superb investment, he told her. All she had left, therefore, was the land in Charonne, which she stubbornly refused to sell in order to spare her excellent Aunt Elisabeth the sorrow. There again he plotted a masterstroke with the help of his former accomplice Larsonneau. In any case, she remained in his debt; if he took her fortune, he paid her back five or six times the income it would have earned. The interest on a hundred thousand francs, together with the yield on the money from Sologne, came to barely nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to keep her in underwear and shoes. He gave her, or paid out on her behalf, fifteen to twenty times that paltry sum. He would have put in a week’s work to rob her of a hundred francs, and he kept her royally. So she, along with everyone else, respected her husband’s monumental treasure without investigating the emptiness of the river of gold that flowed before her eyes and into which she dove every morning.