She thus arrived of her own accord at the point toward which he had been gently leading her since the beginning of the conversation. His masterstroke in Charonne had already been in preparation for two years. His wife had always been unwilling to sell Aunt Elisabeth’s land. She had sworn to her aunt that she would keep the property intact as a bequest for her child, should she become a mother. Faced with such stubbornness, the speculator’s imagination had gone to work and concocted a poem of epic proportions. It was a work of exquisite perfidy, a colossal fraud of which the city, the state, his wife, and even Larsonneau were to be the victims. He no longer spoke of selling the land, though he moaned every day about how foolish it was to leave it unproductive, to settle for a return of two percent. Renée, always hard up for cash, eventually agreed to some sort of speculative venture. He based his plan on the certainty of an imminent expropriation to make way for the boulevard du Prince-Eugène, whose route had not yet been finally decided. At this point he had brought in as a partner his old accomplice Larsonneau, who struck a bargain with his wife on the following terms. She was to contribute the land, representing a value of 500,000 francs. Larsonneau, for his part, promised to invest an equal amount to build on that land a music hall connected to a large park featuring amusements such as swings, skittles, bowling, and the like. Naturally the profits were to be shared, and by the same token any losses were to be borne fifty-fifty. If either partner wished to withdraw from the agreement, he could demand his share based on an estimate of the current value. Renée looked surprised at the figure of 500,000 francs, which seemed high since the land was worth 300,000 at most. But Saccard gave her to understand that this was a clever way of tying Larsonneau’s hands later on, since what he planned to build on the property would never be worth that much.
Larsonneau had become an elegant man about town, who wore fine gloves, dazzling linen, and astonishing ties. To run his errands he had a tilbury as finely tuned as a piece of clockwork, with a high seat on which he sat and drove himself around town. His offices on the rue de Rivoli comprised a suite of sumptuous rooms in which not a single file folder or scrap of paper was to be seen. His clerks wrote on tables of stained pear-wood, inlaid with marquetry and trimmed with chased brass. He had assumed the title of “expropriation agent,” a new profession that the public works of the city of Paris had called into being. His city hall connections yielded him advance information about the routing of new thoroughfares. When he learned the route of a proposed boulevard from one of the surveyors, he offered his services to the threatened landowners. Before the eminent domain decree was issued, he persuaded them to take certain steps to increase their indemnities. When a landowner accepted his proposal, he assumed all the costs himself, had a plan of the property drawn up, shepherded the case through the courts, and paid a lawyer in exchange for a percentage of the difference between the city’s initial offer and the indemnity finally awarded by the jury. In addition to this almost respectable activity, however, he was involved in several other lines of work. In particular, he lent money at usurious rates of interest. He was not a usurer of the old school—shabbily dressed, dirty, with blank eyes as expressionless as a five-franc piece and pale lips drawn as tightly as the strings of a purse. He smiled and darted charming glances here and there, had his suits made by Dusautoy, and lunched at Brébant’s with his victim, whom he called “my good fellow” and plied with Havana cigars over dessert. In fact, despite his penchant for wearing jackets cut narrowly at the waist, Larsonneau was a frightful fellow who, without perceptible change in his friendly demeanor, would hound a man for payment of a promissory note until he’d driven the hapless debtor to suicide.
Saccard would gladly have sought out a different partner, but he was still worried about the fake inventory that Larsonneau guarded like a precious possession. He preferred to involve him in the deal in the hope that circumstances might arise that would allow him to reclaim the compromising document. Larsonneau built the music hall out of wood and plaster topped by small tin turrets painted yellow and red. In the populous Charonne neighborhood, the park and amusements proved successful. After two years, the speculation seemed to have prospered, although the profits were really quite small. Thus far Saccard had spoken to his wife of the future of this fine idea only in the most glowing of terms.
Renée, seeing that her husband was making no move to come out of the fireplace and finding it harder and harder to make out his voice, finally said, “I’ll go see Larsonneau today. He’s my only resource.”
At that point he gave up struggling with the log.
“It’s been taken care of, my dear,” he replied with a smile. “Don’t I anticipate all your desires? . . . I saw Larsonneau last night.”
“And he promised to give you the 136,000 francs?” she asked anxiously.
Between the two burning logs he made a small pile of embers, delicately picking up the tiniest pieces of charcoal with the ends of the tongs and contemplating with an air of satisfaction the heap he was constructing with infinite skill.
“Now, hold on a moment!” he murmured. “A hundred and thirty-six thousand francs is quite a large sum. . . . Larsonneau is a fine fellow, but his means are still modest. He’s quite prepared to help you out. . . .
He paused, blinking his eyes and rebuilding a corner of the pile that had just crumbled. This game was beginning to confuse Renée’s thinking. In spite of herself she watched her husband’s increasingly clumsy efforts at the fireplace. She was tempted to offer him advice. Forgetting Worms, the bill, and her shortage of cash, she finally said, “Why don’t you put that big piece underneath? Then the others will stay in place.”
Her husband docilely obeyed. Then he said, “He can only come up with 50,000 francs. That’s still a nice advance. . . . But he doesn’t want to mix this business up with the Charonne arrangement. He’s only a go-between, you understand. Don’t you, my dear? The person who is lending the money is asking for enormous interest. He wants a promissory note for 80,000 francs due in six months.”
And having placed a sharp-pointed ember atop the pile, he folded his hands over the tongs and fixed his wife with a stare.
“Eighty thousand francs!” she exclaimed. “But that’s robbery! . . . Are you advising me to do something that foolish?”
“No,” he said curtly. “But if you’re in dire need of cash, I won’t forbid it.”
He got up as if to leave. Renée, torn by indecision, looked at her husband and at the bill he’d left on the fireplace. Then she took her poor head in her hands and murmured, “Oh, these business matters! . . . My head is splitting this morning. . . . Look, I’m going to sign this note for 80,000 francs. If I didn’t, I would become ill. I know myself. I’d spend the day in dreadful agony, worrying about what to do. . . . If I’m going to be foolish, I’d rather do it right away. It will ease the pain.”
She said she would ring for someone to bring the necessary forms, but he insisted on performing this service himself. He must have had the papers in his pocket, because he was gone for barely two minutes. While she was writing on a small table he had pushed close to the fireplace, he examined her with eyes bright with astonished desire. It was quite hot in the room, and the fragrance of the bedclothes and the young woman’s morning toilette still hung in the air. While talking she had allowed the dressing gown in which she had wrapped herself to fall open, and, as her husband stood in front of her, his eyes slipped from her bowed head and golden hair all the way down to the whiteness of her neck and bosom. He smiled strangely. The hot fire that had burned his face, the closed bedchamber whose heavy air retained a scent of love, the yellow hair and white skin that tempted him with a sort of conjugal disdain, filled his head with dreams, amplified the drama of which he had just played a scene, and stirred a secret and sensuous calculation in his brutal speculator’s flesh.