Complete Works of Emile Zola (1142 page)

He listened absent-mindedly while his sister explained to him that newspaper opinion seemed to be growing a little more favourable to him. And then, without any transition, looking at her with his dreamy eyes, he inquired, ‘Why do you refuse to see him?’

She trembled; she clearly understood that he referred to Saccard. Shaking her head she answered No, and No again. Then, with considerable embarrassment, in a very low voice, he said:

‘After what he has been to you, you cannot refuse; go and see him!’

O God! he knew. An ardent flush suffused her countenance; she threw herself into his arms to hide her face, and she stammered, and asked who could have told him, how he could know that thing which she had thought known to none, especially himself.

‘My poor Caroline,’ he answered, ‘I learnt it long ago by anonymous letters from wicked people who were jealous of us. I have never spoken to you about it; you are free, we no longer think alike. I know that you are the best woman on earth. Go and see him.’

And then gaily, his smile reappearing on his face, he took down the little bouquet of roses, which he had already slipped behind the crucifix, and placed it in her hand, adding, ‘Take him this, and tell him that I am no longer angry with him.’

Upset by her brother’s compassionate tenderness, experiencing at the same time frightful shame and delightful relief, Madame Caroline did not resist any further. Moreover, ever since morning, the necessity of seeing Saccard had been growing upon her. Could she abstain from warning him of Victor’s flight, of that atrocious affair which still made her tremble? At the outset of his imprisonment he had set down her name among those of the persons whom he desired to see; and she had only to say who she was and a warder at once led her to the prisoner’s cell.

When she entered, Saccard, with his back to the door, was sitting at a little table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. He rose quickly, with a shout of joy. ‘You! Oh, how kind you are, and how happy I am!’

He had taken one of her hands in both his own. She was smiling with an embarrassed air, deeply moved, unable to find the right word to say. Then, with her free hand, she laid her little bouquet among the sheets of paper, covered with figures, that littered the table.

‘You are an angel!’ he murmured, delighted, and kissing her fingers.

At last she spoke. ‘It is true, it was all over, I had condemned you in my heart. But my brother wished me to come.’

‘No, no, do not say that! Say that you are too intelligent, that you are too good, and that you have understood, and forgive me.’

With a gesture she interrupted him. ‘Do not ask so much, I implore you. I do not know myself. Is it not enough that I have come? And, besides, I have something very sad to tell you.’

Then, in an undertone, she swiftly told him of the awakening of Victor’s savage instincts, his attack upon Mademoiselle de Beauvilliers, his extraordinary, inexplicable flight, the fruitlessness thus far of all search, the little hope there was of ever finding him. He listened to her, astonished, without asking a question or making a gesture; and, when she had finished, two big tears dilated his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, while he stammered: ‘The wretched fellow! the wretched fellow!’

She had never seen him weep before. She was deeply agitated and astonished, so singular did these tears of Saccard seem to her, gray and heavy, coming from afar, from a heart hardened and debased by years of brigandage. Immediately afterwards, moreover, he burst into noisy despair. ‘But it is frightful; I have never embraced this boy. For you know that I had not seen him. Mon Dieu! yes, I had sworn to go and see him, and I did not have the time, not a free hour, with all those cursed business matters which were devouring me. Ah! that is always the way; when you don’t do a thing immediately, you are certain never to do it at all. And so now you are sure that I cannot see him? They might bring him to me here.’

She shook her head. ‘Who knows,’ she answered, ‘in what unknown depths of this terrible Paris he may now be?’

For another moment he continued striding up and down, dropping scraps of phrases as he walked. ‘The child is found for me, and here I lose him. I shall never see him now. The fact is, I have no luck; no! no luck at all. Oh! mon Dieu! it is just the same as in the matter of the Universal.’

He had just sat down again at the table, and Madame Caroline took a chair opposite him. With his hands wandering among his papers, the whole voluminous brief which he had been preparing for months past, he at once went into the history of his case and explained his methods of defence, as if he felt the need of showing her that he was innocent. The prosecution relied, first, on the repeated increases of capital devised both to bring about a feverish rise in the quotations, and to make people believe that all the shares of the Bank had been taken up; secondly, on the simulation of subscriptions and payments, by means of the accounts opened with Sabatani and other men of straw; thirdly, on the distribution of fictitious dividends under the form of a release of the old shares; and, finally, on the purchase by the Bank of its own stock, all that wild speculation which had brought about the extraordinary, fictitious rise, by which the Bank’s coffers had been drained, and the Bank itself killed. These charges he answered with copious and passionate explanations: he had done what every bank manager does, only he had done it on a large scale, with the vigour of a strong man. There was not one of the heads of the firmest houses in Paris but ought to share his cell, if logic were to count for anything. They made him the scapegoat, however, answerable for the illegalities of all. What a strange way of apportioning the responsibilities! Why did they not prosecute the directors also — the Daigremonts, the Hurets, the Bohains — who, in addition to their fifty thousand francs of attendance fees, had received ten per cent of the profits, and had dabbled in all the jobs? Why also was complete impunity granted to the auditors, Lavignière among others, who were allowed to plead their incapacity and their good faith? This trial was evidently going to be a monstrous piece of iniquity, for they had had to set aside Busch’s charge of swindling, as alleging unsubstantiated facts; and the report made by the expert, after a first examination of the Bank’s books, had just been found to be full of errors. Then, why the bankruptcy, officially declared on the strength of that report and Busch’s charge, when not a sou of the deposits had been embezzled, and all the customers would re-enter into possession of their funds? Had they simply wished to ruin the shareholders? In that case they had succeeded; the disaster was becoming greater and greater, immeasurable. And he did not charge himself with this; he charged the magistracy, the government, all those who had conspired to suppress him and kill the Universal.

‘Ah, the rascals! if they had left me free, you would have seen — you would have seen!’

Madame Caroline looked at him, impressed by his lack of conscience, which was becoming really grand. She remembered his theories of former days, the necessity of speculation in great enterprises, in which all just reward is impossible; gambling regarded as human excess, the necessary manure, the dung-heap from which progress grows. Was it not he who, with his unscrupulous hands, had madly heated the enormous machine, until it had burst to atoms and wounded all those whom it carried along with it? Was it not he who had desired that senseless, idiotic, exaggerated quotation of three thousand francs per share?

He had risen from his seat, however, and was walking up and down the little room with the spasmodic step of a caged conqueror.

‘Ah! the rascals, they well knew what they were doing when they chained me up here,’ he said. ‘I was on the point of triumphing and crushing them all.’

She gave a start of surprise and protest. ‘What! triumph? Why, you hadn’t a sou left; you were conquered.’

‘Evidently,’ he rejoined, bitterly, ‘I was conquered and so I am a blackguard. Honesty, glory, are simply other names for success. A man must not let himself be beaten, for otherwise he will find himself a fool and a fraud on the morrow. Oh, I can guess very well what they are saying; you need not repeat their words to me! They talk of me as a robber; they accuse me of having put all those millions in my pocket; they would strangle me, if they held me in their clutches; and, what is worse, they shrug their shoulders with pity, look upon me as a mere madman, a man of no intelligence. That is it, eh? But, if I had succeeded! Yes, if I had struck down Gundermann, conquered the market, if I were at this hour the undisputed king of gold, what a triumph would there then have been! I should now be a hero, I should have Paris at my feet.’

She openly opposed him, however. ‘You had neither justice nor logic on your side,’ said she; ‘you could not succeed.’

He had stopped short in front of her, and became angry. ‘Not succeed, nonsense! Money was lacking, that was all. If Napoleon, on the day of Waterloo, had had another hundred thousand men to send to the butchery, he would have triumphed, and the face of the world would have been changed. And if I had had the necessary few hundred millions to throw into the gulf, I should now be the master of the world.’

‘But it is frightful!’ she cried, revolting. ‘What! Do you think there have not been ruins enough, not tears enough, not blood enough as it is? You would have more disasters still, more families stripped, more unfortunates reduced to begging in the streets!’

He began tramping to and fro again, and with a gesture of supreme indifference shouted: ‘Does life concern itself about that? At every step we take we stamp out thousands of existences.’

Silence fell; she watched him with a freezing heart as he marched up and down. Was he a knave? Was he a hero? She trembled as she asked herself what thoughts he could have revolved, like a great captain, conquered and reduced to powerlessness, during the six months that he had been confined in that cell; and then only did she glance about her and espy the four bare walls, the little iron bedstead, the deal table, and the two straw-bottomed chairs. To think of it! He who had lived amid lavish, dazzling luxury!

But suddenly he sat down again, as if his legs were weary; and then he began talking at length in an undertone, as though making a kind of involuntary confession.

‘Gundermann was right,’ he said; ‘fever is worth nothing at the Bourse. Ah, the rascal, how happy he is in having no blood or nerves left him! I believe, however, that he has always been like that, his veins flowing with ice instead of blood. I am too passionate, that is evident. There is no other reason for my defeat; that is why my back has been so often broken. And it must be added that, if my passion kills me, it is also my passion that gives me life. Yes, it bears me on, it lifts me up on high, and then strikes me down and suddenly destroys all its work. Enjoyment is, after all, perhaps only the devouring of self.’

Then he was stirred by a fit of anger against his conqueror. ‘Ah! that Gundermann, that dirty Jew, who triumphs because he has no desires! The whole race is summed up in him, frigid, stubborn conqueror that he is, on the march towards sovereign sway over the whole world, amid the nations whom he buys up one by one by means of his omnipotent gold. For centuries past his race has been invading us and triumphing over us, no matter how much it may have been cuffed and kicked. He already has one milliard: he will have two, he will have ten, he will eventually have a hundred, he will some day be the master of the earth. I have been shouting this from the housetops for years past, but no one seems to listen to me. Everybody thinks it the mere spite of a jealous speculator, when it is the very cry of my blood. Yes, hatred of the Jew, I have it in me — oh! very deep, in the very roots of my being!’

‘What a singular thing!’ quietly murmured Madame Caroline, who, with her vast knowledge, practised universal toleration. ‘To me the Jews are men like any others. If they are apart, it is because they have been put apart.’

But Saccard, who had not even heard her, continued with increasing violence: ‘And what exasperates me is that I see governments the accomplices of these rascals, governments at their very feet! Thus the Empire has sold itself to Gundermann! As if it were impossible to reign without Gundermann’s money! Certainly, Rougon, that great man my brother, has behaved in a very disgusting manner towards me; for I have not told you of it before, but I was cowardly enough to seek a reconciliation before the catastrophe, and, if I am here, it is because it pleased him. But no matter; since I embarrass him, let him get rid of me; I shall feel no anger against him, except with regard to his alliance with those dirty Jews. Have you thought of that? the Universal strangled in order that Gundermann may continue his commerce; every Catholic bank that grows too powerful crushed, as a social danger, in order to ensure the definitive triumph of the children of Israel, who will devour us, and that soon. Ah, Rougon should be careful! He will be the first to be eaten, swept away from the post of power to which he clings, and for which he betrays everything. His game of see-saw is very cunning, with its guarantees given one day to the Liberals and the next day to the Reactionaries; but it is a game at which one always ends by breaking one’s neck. And, since everything is cracking and falling, let Gundermann’s desires be accomplished, he who predicted that France would be beaten, if we should ever have a war with Germany! We are ready; the Prussians have only to cross the frontier, and take our provinces!’

With a terrified, supplicating gesture, she begged him not to talk like that. It was as though he were calling down the thunder of heaven. ‘No, no! do not say such things. You have no right to say them. Moreover, your brother had nothing to do with your arrest. I know from a certain source that it was Delcambre, the Keeper of the Seals, who did it all.’

On hearing this Saccard’s wrath fell, and he smiled. ‘Oh, the fellow is taking his revenge!’ he said. She gave him a questioning look, and he added: ‘Yes, an old affair between us — I know in advance that I shall be condemned.’

She doubtless suspected the truth, for she did not insist. A brief silence prevailed, during which he again took up the papers on the table, absorbed in his fixed idea.