by Emile Zola
‘I was expecting you, Monsieur Saccard. We need to talk… You received my letter, no doubt?’
In that tiny room, full of papers and already dark, lit only by one feeble, smoky lamp, La Méchain, still and silent, did not budge from the only chair in the room. Still standing, and not wanting to look as if he had come in answer to a threat, Saccard at once embarked on the Jordan affair, in a harsh and contemptuous tone.
‘Excuse me, I came to settle a debt for one of my contributors… young Jordan, a very charming fellow whom you are pursuing most cruelly, with a truly revolting ferocity. This very morning, it seems, you conducted yourself with his wife in a manner any gentleman would find shameful…’
Shocked at being attacked in this way when he was expecting to take the offensive, Busch lost his grip on things and, forgetting the other matter, became annoyed over this one.
‘The Jordans, you’ve come about the Jordans… There’s no such thing as wife or gentlemanly behaviour in business. When people owe, they pay, that’s all I know… Wretched pests who’ve been messing me about for years, from whom I’ve had the devil’s own job getting four hundred francs, sou by sou!… Oh yes, by God, I’ll sell them up, I’ll throw them on to the street tomorrow morning if I don’t get, this evening, right here on my desk, the three hundred francs and fifteen centimes they still owe me.’
When Saccard deliberately, to drive him mad with rage, said that he had already been paid forty times over for that bill, which had surely cost him less than ten francs, Busch did indeed choke with anger.
‘There we go again! That’s what you all say… But there are also the expenses, aren’t there? This debt of three hundred francs that has risen to more than seven hundred… is that my fault? When people don’t pay, I sue. And if justice is expensive, too bad! It’s their fault!… So, when I’ve bought a ten-franc debt, I should just get repaid the ten francs, and that would be the end of it, eh? And what about my risks? My comings and goings, my mental efforts—yes! and all my research? Indeed, now, with regard to this Jordan affair, you can ask Madame here. It’s she who has been in charge of it. Ah! She has done so much walking, approached so many people, used up lots of shoe-leather climbing the stairs of all the newspapers, from which she was often driven away like a beggar, without even being given the address she wanted. We have been nursing this affair for months, we have dreamed about it, worked on it like one of our masterpieces, it has cost me a crazy amount, even at only ten sous an hour!’
He was getting carried away, and with a sweeping gesture pointed to the folders filling the room.
‘I have papers here for debts of twenty million, owed by people of all ages and every level of society, debts both tiny and colossal… Do you want them for a million? I’ll give them to you. When you remember that there are debtors here that I’ve been tracking for a quarter of a century! To get a few miserable hundreds of francs, sometimes even less, I wait for years, I wait for them to be successful or to inherit… The rest, the unknown ones, the most numerous, lie sleeping there—look!—in that corner, all that huge pile. That’s the rubbish, or rather the raw material, out of which I have to make my living, after heaven only knows what complications of searching and worrying!… And you’re asking me, when at last I get hold of a solvent one, not to squeeze him dry? Ah, no, you’d think I was too stupid—you certainly wouldn’t be that stupid yourself!’
Without waiting for any further discussion, Saccard drew out his wallet.
‘I’m going to give you two hundred francs, and you’re going to give me the Jordan papers, with a receipt showing everything fully paid.’
Busch leaped up in exasperation.
‘Two hundred francs, never!… It’s three hundred and thirty francs and fifteen centimes… and I want the centimes.’
But in an even voice, with the tranquil assurance of a man who knows the power of money visibly offered and displayed, Saccard repeated two or three times:
‘I’m going to give you two hundred francs…’
And the Jew, convinced at heart that it was sensible to compromise, finally agreed, with a cry of rage and tears in his eyes.
‘I am too weak. What a wretched occupation!… Upon my word! I am stripped and robbed… Go on! While you’re at it, don’t hold back, take some more, yes! Rummage about in this heap, for your two hundred francs!’
Then when he had signed a receipt and written a note for the bailiff, who was now holding the documents, Busch stood panting for a moment in front of his desk, so shaken that he would have let Saccard leave, were it not for La Méchain, who had not thus far made a gesture or uttered a word.
‘And the other matter?’ she asked.
He suddenly remembered, he was going to get his revenge. But everything he had prepared, his story, his questions, the cunningly planned unfolding of the interview, all were forgotten in his haste to get to the point.
‘That matter, yes indeed… I wrote to you, Monsieur Saccard. We have an old account to settle…’
He had stretched out his hand to take down the Sicardot folder, which he opened out in front of him.
‘In 1852 you stayed in lodgings on the Rue de la Harpe, and you signed twelve promissory notes of fifty francs each to a certain Rosalie Chavaille, then sixteen years old, whom you assaulted one evening on the stairs… Here they are, those notes. You never paid a single one of them, for you went off, leaving no address, before the payment of the first one fell due. And what is even worse is that you signed with a false name, Sicardot, the surname of your first wife…’
Saccard, now very pale, was listening and staring. Suddenly, in an unspeakable spasm, his whole past was conjured up, he had a sensation of something crumbling, of a huge, confused mass falling upon him. In the alarm of that first moment he lost his head, and stammered:
‘How do you know?… How did you get this?’
Then with trembling hands, he hastened to pull his wallet out once more, just wanting to pay and get these upsetting documents back.
‘There aren’t any costs, are there?… It’s six hundred francs… Oh, there’s a great deal I could say, but I’d rather just pay, with no further discussion.’
And he held out the six banknotes.
‘Not so fast!’ cried Busch, pushing aside the money. ‘I haven’t finished… Madame, here, is Rosalie’s cousin, and these papers are hers, it’s in her name that I am seeking reimbursement… The unfortunate Rosalie was disabled as a result of your violence. She had a great deal of misfortune and died in atrocious penury in the house of Madame, who had taken her in… Madame, if she chose to, could tell you a few things…’
‘Terrible things!’ emphasized La Méchain in her reedy voice, at last breaking her silence.
Alarmed, Saccard turned towards her; he had forgotten she was there, slumped in a heap like a huge, half-empty wineskin. He had always found her disturbing, with her unsavoury trade as a bird of prey devouring devalued securities; and now there she was again, mixed up in this unpleasant story.
‘No doubt, poor thing, it’s very unfortunate,’ he murmured. ‘But if she’s dead, I don’t really see… Anyway, here are the six hundred francs.’
For a second time, Busch refused to take the money.
‘Excuse me, but you don’t know everything yet; she had a child… Yes, a child now in his fourteenth year, a child who looks so very like you that you cannot deny him.’
Stunned, Saccard repeated several times: ‘A child, a child…’
Then, with a sudden movement putting the six banknotes back in his wallet, now quite reassured and cheery:
‘Ah! Come on, do you take me for a fool? If there’s a child I shan’t give you a sou… The child is his mother’s heir, and it’s he who shall have all that, along with whatever else he wants. A child, well, that’s very nice, it’s very natural, there’s nothing wrong with having a child. On the contrary, I’m really pleased about it. Honestly! That makes me feel quite young… Where is he, so I can go and see him? Why didn’t you
bring him to me at once?’
Now Busch, stupefied in his turn, thought about his long hesitation and the endless care taken by Madame Caroline to avoid revealing Victor’s existence to his father. And quite taken aback, he launched into the most violent and complicated explanations, letting everything out all at once, the six thousand francs claimed by La Méchain for Victor’s keep and the money lent to Rosalie, the two thousand francs Madame Caroline had paid on account, the appalling instincts of Victor, and his entry into the Work Foundation. And it was Saccard now who shuddered at each new detail. What! Six thousand francs! but how could he know, on the contrary, whether they had not robbed the child? A down-payment of two thousand francs! And they had had the audacity to extort two thousand francs from a lady who was a friend of his! But it was theft, an abuse of trust! The little chap, clearly, had been badly brought up, and they wanted him to pay the people responsible for that bad upbringing! Did they take him for an idiot?
‘Not a sou!’ he cried. ‘Do you hear? Don’t expect to get a single sou out of my pocket!’
Busch, his face pale, had stood up in front of the table.
‘We’ll see about that. I’ll take you to court.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense. You know perfectly well that the courts don’t deal with matters of this sort… And if you hope to blackmail me, that’s even more stupid, because as far as I’m concerned I don’t give a damn what you do. A child! I can assure you, I find it very flattering.’
And as La Méchain was blocking the doorway, he had to push past her, and even step across her, to get out. She was choking, but in her piping voice she yelled out to him in the stairway:
‘You scoundrel! You heartless wretch!’
‘You’ll be hearing from us,’ Busch shouted as he slammed the door shut.
Saccard was in such a state of excitement that he told his coachman to go back at once to the Rue Saint-Lazare. He was impatient to see Madame Caroline, and he approached her without any embarrassment and scolded her right away for having given them the two thousand francs.
‘But my dear friend, one never gives money away like that… Why the devil did you act without consulting me?’
Astonished that he already knew the whole story, she remained silent. It had indeed been Busch’s handwriting that she had recognized, and now she had nothing more to hide, since someone else had taken on the burden of revealing the secret. However, she still hesitated, embarrassed for this man who was interrogating her and seemed so much at ease.
‘I wanted to spare you some suffering… That unfortunate child was in such a state of degradation!… I would have told you a long time ago, but for a feeling…’
‘What feeling?… I confess, I don’t understand.’
She did not try to explain herself or excuse herself any more; normally so courageous about life, she was overcome by a wave of sadness, a weariness of everything; while he went on exclaiming, seeming delighted, truly rejuvenated.
‘The poor little fellow! I shall really love him, I assure you… You did well to send him to the Work Foundation to get him cleaned up a bit. But we’re going to take him out of there, we’ll get teachers for him… Tomorrow I’ll go and see him, yes tomorrow, if I’m not too busy.’
The following day there was a board meeting, and two days went by, then the week, without Saccard’s managing to find a free minute. He still talked about the child quite often, while putting off his visit, giving in to the flood-tide which was carrying him along. In the first days of December the rate of two thousand seven hundred francs was reached in the midst of the unhealthy fit of extraordinary fever still overwhelming the Bourse. What was worse was that alarming reports had multiplied, and that the rise went on wildly, in an atmosphere of intolerable and growing unease: now the inevitable catastrophe was being openly predicted, and the price went on rising, rising relentlessly, thanks to the obstinate force of one of those prodigious infatuations which are impervious to evidence. Saccard now was just living in the extravagant fiction of his triumph, as if wearing a halo from the shower of gold he was scattering down on Paris, but still shrewd enough to sense that the ground beneath his feet was undermined, cracking up, and threatening to collapse under him. So, although he remained victorious at each settlement, he continued to be enraged by the short-sellers, whose losses must already be frightful. What possessed these dirty Jews to persist like this? Wasn’t he at last going to destroy them? And he was especially exasperated in that he said he could sniff out others alongside Gundermann who were playing Gundermann’s game, other sellers, even troops from the Universal perhaps, traitors who had gone over to the enemy, shaken in their faith and hastening to realize their gains.
One day when Saccard was expressing his annoyance about this to Madame Caroline, she felt impelled to tell him everything.
‘You know, my dear, I too have sold… I have just sold our last thousand shares at the rate of two thousand seven hundred.’
He was utterly shattered, as if by the blackest of treacheries.
‘You have sold! You! Even you! My God!’
She had taken his hands, and was pressing them, truly grieved, but reminding him that she and her brother had warned him. Her brother, still in Rome, had been writing letters full of mortal anxiety about that exaggerated rise, which he could not account for, and which at all costs had to be stopped, for fear of falling into an abyss. Only the day before, she had received a letter from him giving her formal instructions to sell. And she had sold.
‘You! You!’ Saccard kept repeating. ‘It was you fighting against me, you I sensed in the shadows! It was your shares I had to buy back!’
He did not fly into a rage as he usually did, and she suffered all the more from his dejection, she would have liked to reason with him, to persuade him to abandon this merciless battle that could only end in massacre.
‘My dear, listen to me… Remember that our three thousand shares have produced more than seven and a half million. Isn’t that an unhoped-for, extravagant profit? Personally, all that money horrifies me, I can’t believe it belongs to me… But anyway, it’s not a matter just of our personal interests. Think of the interests of all those who have placed their fortune in your hands, the frightening number of millions you are risking in this game. Why keep on with this senseless rise? Why stimulate it further? People all around are saying that it will inevitably end in catastrophe… You can’t just keep on rising, there’s no shame in letting the shares revert to their real value, then the company will stand firm, and everything will be put right.’
But he had angrily leapt to his feet.
‘I want the rate at three thousand… I have bought, and I shall go on buying, even if it kills me… Yes, let me be killed, and everything along with me, if I don’t reach the rate of three thousand, and keep to it!’
After the settlement of 15 December the share price rose to two thousand eight hundred, two thousand nine hundred. It was on the 21st that the rate of three thousand and twenty francs was announced at the Bourse, amid the commotion of a demented throng. There was no more truth or logic, the very idea of value was corrupted to the point of losing any real meaning. It was rumoured that Gundermann, contrary to his normal habits of prudence, had embarked on fearful risks; for months he had been working towards a fall, and every fortnight, as the rise went on by leaps and bounds, his losses had grown in parallel; and people were beginning to say he might well come a real cropper. Brains were all turned upside-down, people were expecting wonders.
And at that supreme moment, when Saccard, at the summit, felt the earth tremble beneath him and secretly felt the dread of a fall, he was king. When his carriage arrived in the Rue de Londres, stopping outside the triumphant palace of the Universal, a valet came running out, spreading a carpet that rolled down from the steps of the vestibule to the pavement, and down to the very gutter; Saccard then deigned to alight from his coach, and made his entrance, like a sovereign spared from contact with the common paving of the streets.
AT the end of that year, on the day of the December settlement, the great hall of the Bourse was already full at half-past twelve, with an extraordinary commotion of voices and gestures. Excitement had been mounting for weeks, culminating now in this last day of conflict, with a feverish mob in which there were already rumblings of the decisive battle about to be fought. Outside it was freezing hard; but the slanting rays of a bright winter sun came in through the high windows, brightening up the whole of one side of the bare hall, with its stern pillars and sombre vaulting, all made even more chilly by the dreary allegorical pictures on the walls; heating-pipes along the whole length of the arcades puffed out their warm breath into the cold draughts coming from the continual opening of the reinforced doors.
The ‘bear’ Moser, even more anxious and jaundiced-looking than usual, bumped into the ‘bull’ Pillerault, standing arrogantly on his long, heron-like legs.
‘You know what they’re saying?’
But he had to raise his voice to make himself heard in the growing clatter of talk, a regular, monotonous rumble, like the clamour of floodwater endlessly pouring along.