by Emile Zola
‘It’s curious,’ he repeated once more, ‘I’ve certainly seen “a”s and “o”s like these before, so elongated that they look like “i”s.’
Just then there was a knock at the door, and he asked La Méchain to reach out to open it, for the room opened directly on to the stairs. You had to go through this room to reach the other, the one on the street side. As for the kitchen, an airless cubby-hole, it was on the other side of the landing.
‘Come in, Monsieur.’
And it was Saccard who came in. He was smiling, inwardly amused by the brass plate screwed on the door, bearing in bold black letters the word: ‘Litigation.’
‘Ah, yes, Monsieur Saccard, you’ve come about that translation… My brother is there, in the next room… Come in, come in.’
But La Méchain was absolutely blocking the way, and she was staring at the newcomer, looking more and more surprised. It took quite a lot of manoeuvring; he backed out into the staircase, then she went out, squeezing past him on the landing, so that he could go in and at last get to the next room, into which he disappeared. During all these complicated manoeuvres she never once took her eyes off him.
‘Oh!’ she gasped, as if overcome, ‘this Monsieur Saccard, I had never seen much of him before… Victor is the spitting image of him.’
Busch, not understanding at once, was gazing at her. Then, with a sudden illumination, he let out a strangled oath.
‘Hell-fire! That’s it, I knew I’d seen that somewhere before.’
This time he stood up and ransacked the files, at last finding a letter Saccard had written to him the year before, asking for more time on behalf of some bankrupt lady. He hastily compared the writing on the notes to that on the letter: the ‘a’s and the ‘o’s were indeed the same, having with time become even more pointed; and the capital letters too were identical.
‘It’s him, it’s him…’, he kept saying. ‘Only, after all, why Sicardot, why not Saccard?’
But a vague story was now stirring in his memory, he had been told of Saccard’s past by a business agent called Larsonneau, now a millionaire: Saccard turning up in Paris on the morrow of the coup d’état to take advantage of the growing power of his brother Rougon, and at first wretched poverty in the dark streets of the old Latin Quarter, then a rapid rise to fortune thanks to a somewhat shady marriage, after he’d had the good luck to lose his first wife.* It was during these difficult beginnings that he had changed his name of Rougon to that of Saccard, simply altering the name of the first wife, who was called Sicardot.
‘Yes, yes, Sicardot, I remember now,’ Busch murmured. ‘He had the gall to use his wife’s name to sign the notes. The couple had no doubt used that name when they arrived in the Rue de la Harpe. The rotter must have been taking every precaution, ready to move out at the first sign of danger… Oh! he wasn’t only after money, he was also into tumbling young girls on the stairs! That’s stupid. That’ll catch him out one of these days.’
‘Hush, hush!’ said La Méchain. ‘We’ve got him, that just shows there is a God. I shall at last be rewarded for all I’ve done for that poor little Victor. I do love him after all, even if there’s no way of civilizing him.’
She was beaming, her narrow eyes sparkling in the greasy fat of her face.
But Busch, after the sudden excitement of the long-sought solution that chance had suddenly brought him, had cooled down on reflection and was shaking his head. Even if Saccard was ruined just now, he was still worth fleecing. There were less profitable fathers in the world. Only this one wouldn’t stand for any hassling, he could turn savage. And then what? He certainly didn’t even know he had a son, he could deny everything, in spite of the extraordinary resemblance that so amazed La Méchain. Besides, he was a widower for the second time, a free man, not having to account for his past to anyone, so even if he were to accept the boy there would be no fear or threat to hold over him. As for getting out of his paternity only the six hundred francs of the promissory notes, that would really be too wretched; hardly worth being given such a miraculous stroke of luck. No, no, he needed to think, to let it mature, and find a way to gather the harvest when it was fully ripe.
‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Busch concluded. ‘Besides, he’s right down now, let’s give him time to get himself up again.’
And before dismissing La Méchain he finished going over with her some petty matters that she was dealing with, a young woman who had pawned her jewels for a lover; a son-in-law whose debt would be paid by his mother-in-law, who was his mistress, if they played their cards right; in short, the most delicate varieties of the so complex and difficult business of collecting bad debts.
Saccard, entering the adjoining room, stood dazzled for a moment by the bright light from the uncurtained, sunlit window. This room, with its light wallpaper patterned with little blue flowers, was bare: just a small iron bed in one corner, a pine table in the middle, and two straw-bottomed chairs. Along the left-hand wall some planks, hardly even planed, served as bookshelves, loaded with books, pamphlets, newspapers, papers of all sorts. But the light flooding from the sky on this top floor gave the bareness of the room a sort of youthful gaiety, like the sound of fresh and innocent laughter. And Busch’s brother, Sigismond, a fellow of thirty-five, clean-shaven with long and sparse brown hair, was sitting at the table with his broad, domed brow held in his bony hand, so absorbed by the manuscript he was reading that he didn’t even turn his head, not having heard the door opening.
He was an intelligent man, this Sigismond, educated in the German universities and speaking German, English, and Russian, as well as his native French. In 1849, in Cologne, he had met Karl Marx, and had become the most appreciated contributor to his New Rhenish Gazette,* and from that moment on his religion had been fixed, he embraced socialism with an ardent faith, giving himself body and soul to the idea of the coming social reforms which would assure the happiness of the poor and humble. Ever since his master, banished from Germany and forced, after the June Days,* to leave Paris, had settled in London, writing and trying to organize the Party, he, for his part, had been vegetating, lost in his dreams, so careless of his material existence that he would surely have died of hunger if his brother had not taken him in on the Rue Feydeau, near the Bourse, and given him the idea of using his knowledge of languages to set himself up as a translator. The elder brother adored his young sibling with a maternal passion, a ferocious wolf with debtors, capable of spilling a man’s blood to steal ten sous, yet immediately moved to tears, full of the devoted and passionate tenderness of a woman, where this tall and absent-minded fellow was concerned, this boy who had never grown up. He had given him the good room overlooking the street, and tended him like a servant, running their strange household, sweeping, making the beds, getting the food delivered twice a day from a little restaurant nearby. He, so active, his head crammed with a thousand business matters, tolerated idleness in his brother, for the translation business, always hindered by his personal work, was not going well; he would even forbid him to work, worried by his nasty little cough; and in spite of his steely love of money, and the murderous greed which made the acquisition of money his sole reason for living, he would smile indulgently at the theories of this revolutionary and hand over his money, as one hands a toy to a child, knowing it may get broken.
Sigismond, for his part, had no idea what his brother did in the next room. He knew nothing of that dreadful trading in depreciated stock and buying up of debts, he lived on a higher plane, in a sovereign dream of justice. The idea of charity wounded him, made him terribly angry; charity was alms-giving, it was inequality consecrated by kindness; he accepted only justice, the rights of the individual reasserted and laid down as immutable principles in the new social order. So, like Karl Marx, with whom he was constantly in correspondence, he would spend his days studying this organization, modifying, ceaselessly improving on paper the society of tomorrow, covering page after page with figures, finding a base in science for the complicated framewor
k of universal happiness.* He took away capital from some to share it out among others, and with one stroke of his pen he moved billions, rearranging the wealth of the world; and all in this bare room, with no other passion than his dream, with no need for any enjoyment, and of such frugality that his brother had to scold him to make him drink wine and eat meat. What he wanted was that each man’s work, measured according to his strength, should be sufficient to satisfy his appetites: while he, for his own part, was killing himself with work and living on nothing. A real sage, impassioned about his studies, detached from material existence, very gentle and very pure. Ever since the previous autumn he had been coughing more and more, as the consumption spread through him, without his even deigning to notice and take care of himself.
But at a movement from Saccard, Sigismond at last looked up with his big, vague eyes, and expressed surprise, although he knew the visitor.
‘I’ve come about a letter to translate.’
The young man was even more surprised, for he had been discouraging clients, the bankers, speculators, and currency dealers, all those Bourse people who receive, especially from England and Germany, a great deal of correspondence, circulars, and company statutes.
‘Yes, a letter in Russian. Oh! only ten lines.’
At this Sigismond held out his hand, for Russian had remained his speciality; he alone, among the other translators of the neighbourhood who made their living on English and German, translated it fluently. The rarity of Russian documents in the Paris market explained his long periods of unemployment.
He read the letter aloud, in French. It was a favourable response, in three sentences, from a banker in Constantinople, a simple ‘Yes’ to a deal.
‘Ah, thank you,’ exclaimed Saccard, who seemed delighted.
And he asked Sigismond to write the few lines of the translation on the back of the letter. But Sigismond was seized by a terrible fit of coughing that he tried to smother in his handkerchief so as not to disturb his brother, who would come running as soon as he heard him coughing like that. When the spasm was over he got up and went to the window, throwing it wide open, suffocating, needing air. Saccard, who had followed him, glanced outside and gave a slight gasp.
‘Oh, you can see the Bourse! My! How funny it looks from here.’
Indeed he had never before seen it from such a strange angle, a bird’s-eye-view, with the four huge zinc slopes of the roof exposed in amazing detail, bristling with a forest of pipes. The points of the lightning-conductors stood up like giant lances, threatening the sky. And the great building itself was now no more than a cube of stone, striped by rows of columns, a dirty, grey cube, bare and ugly, with a ragged flag on top. But what astonished him most was the steps and the peristyle, dotted with black ants, a whole anthill in turmoil, restlessly moving, creating a huge disturbance that from up here seemed incomprehensible, and even pitiable.
‘How small it all looks!’ he continued. ‘As if one could grab them all up in one handful!’
Then, being familiar with the ideas of his companion, he added with a laugh:
‘When are you going to get rid of all that, with one swift kick?’
Sigismond shrugged.
‘What’s the point? You’re already doing the demolishing yourselves.’
And bit by bit he grew animated, overflowing with the subject he was so full of. A proselytizing urge launched him, at the slightest excuse, into an exposition of his system.
‘Yes indeed, you’re working for us without realizing it… There you are, a few usurpers, dispossessing the masses, and once you are gorged we, in turn, will only have to dispossess you… Every kind of monopolizing, every centralization, leads to collectivism. You are giving us a practical lesson: in the same way that big estates swallow up small plots of land, big manufacturers devour cottage industry and large banks and big stores kill off all competition, growing fat on the ruin of small banks and little shops—they are all, in fact, slowly but surely moving towards the new social order… We are waiting for it all to break down, waiting for the current mode of production to end in the intolerable disorder of its final consequences. Then the bourgeois and the peasants themselves will help us.’
Intrigued, Saccard gazed at him with a vague disquiet, although he thought him quite mad.
‘Well all right, tell me about it, what is this collectivism of yours?’
‘Collectivism is the transformation of private capital, living by the strife of competition, into a unitary social capital, created by the work of all… Imagine a society in which the instruments of production are the property of all, in which everyone works according to his intelligence and strength and the products of this social co-operation are distributed to each and all, in proportion to their effort. Surely nothing could be simpler? Communal production in the factories, yards, and workshops of the nation; then an exchange, a payment in kind. If there is a surplus of production it’s placed in public warehouses, from where it can be recovered to make good any shortages that may occur. It’s a matter of striking a balance… And all this, like the stroke of an axe, fells the rotten tree. No more competition, no more private capital, so no more business of any kind, no commerce, no markets, no stock exchanges. The idea of profit no longer has any meaning. The sources of speculation, unearned incomes, simply are no more.’
‘Oh! Oh!’ Saccard interrupted, ‘that would make a terrific change in the way of life of a lot of people! But what about those who live on private incomes now? Gundermann, for instance, would you take away his billion?’
‘Not at all; we are not thieves. We would buy back his billion, his shares, his income bonds, with a set of vouchers divided into annuities. And just imagine that immense capital replaced in this way by a suffocating wealth of consumer vouchers: in less than a hundred years the descendants of that Gundermann of yours would be reduced to personal labour, like all the other citizens, for the annuities would eventually run out and they would not have been able to turn their forced savings, the excess of that crushing surplus of provisions, into capital, even if the right of inheritance were retained… I tell you, this sweeps away at a stroke not only individual businesses, companies of shareholders, and associations of private capital but all the indirect sources of income, all the credit systems, loans, rents, and tenant farming… There would no longer be any measure of value other than labour. Wages are of course abolished, for in the present capitalist system they are not equivalent to the actual product of labour, since they never represent anything more than what is strictly necessary for the worker’s daily livelihood. And it must be admitted that it’s the present system that is alone to blame, for even the most honest employer has to follow the harsh law of competition and exploit his workers if he wants to make a living. Our whole social system has to be destroyed… Oh! Gundermann choking under the weight of his vouchers! And Gundermann’s heirs not managing to use it all up, forced to give to others and take up the pickaxe or the workman’s tools, just like their comrades!’
And Sigismond burst out laughing, like a child in a playground, but still standing at the window with his eyes on the Bourse, where the black ant-hill of speculation still swarmed. Burning patches of red appeared on his cheeks; imagining the amusing ironies of the justice of the future was his one entertainment.
Saccard had grown more and more uneasy. What if this dreamer was right after all? What if he had correctly divined the future? He explained things in a way that seemed very clear and sensible.
‘Bah!’ he muttered to reassure himself. ‘All this is not going to happen next year!’
‘Of course not,’ the young man went on, once more solemn and weary. ‘We’re in the time of transition, the time of agitation. Perhaps there will be some outbreaks of revolutionary violence, they are often inevitable. But the excesses and outbursts are temporary… Oh, I don’t try to disguise the immediate difficulties. All that dreamed-of future seems impossible, it’s hard to give people a reasonable idea of that future society, that societ
y of fair labour whose way of life will be so different from ours. It’s like another world on another planet… And it has to be admitted: reorganization isn’t ready yet, we’re still finding our way. I, who hardly sleep any more, spend my nights on it. For instance, we can certainly be told: “If things are as they are, it’s because the logic of human activity has made them so.” So what a task it is, to take the river back to its source and direct it into another valley!… Certainly, the present state of society has owed its prosperity over the centuries to the individualist principle, which through emulation and personal interest becomes an endlessly renewed source of fertile production. Will collectivism ever reach that level of fecundity, and how are we to activate the productive function of the worker once the idea of earnings has been destroyed? This, for me, is where the doubt and anguish lie, the weak ground on which we must fight if we want the victory of socialism to be won on it one day… But we will overcome, for we are justice itself. Look! You see that monument before you… Do you see it?’
‘The Bourse?’ Saccard answered. ‘Lord, yes, I can see it!’
‘Well, it would be stupid to blow it up, it would simply get rebuilt elsewhere. But I predict that it will blow itself up, once the state has taken it over and become, in consequence, the sole and universal bank of the nation. And who knows? It may then serve as a public warehouse for our excess of wealth, one of those granaries of abundance in which our grandchildren will find the luxuries for their feast-days.’
With an expansive gesture, Sigismond seemed to open up this future of general and widespread happiness. And he was so carried away that a new fit of coughing shook his frame as he returned to his table, with his elbows among the papers and holding his head in his hands to smother the hacking rattle of his throat. But this time it would not calm down. Suddenly the door opened and Busch, having sent away La Méchain, ran in looking distraught, as if he himself was suffering that abominable coughing. He at once leaned over and took his brother in his broad arms, as if rocking an unhappy child.