Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (10 page)

Without a word, Busch had stretched out his arm to take the Jordan file out of its alphabetical niche. There were six fifty-franc promissory notes, already five years old, and spread out over several months, a total of three hundred francs that the young man had signed to a tailor when he was hard up. Not paid when presented, the notes had accumulated huge charges, and the whole file was over-flowing with papers of legal proceedings. At this time the debt had reached seven hundred and thirty francs and fifteen centimes.

‘If the lad has any future,’ murmured Busch, ‘we’ll catch him yet.’

Then, doubtless following an association of ideas, he cried out:

‘Now tell me, what about the Sicardot affair? Are we giving up on it?’

La Méchain raised her fat arms heavenwards, in a mournful gesture. A shudder of despair shook her whole monstrous person.

‘Oh! Dear Lord!’ she moaned in her fluting voice, ‘it’ll be the death of me!’

The Sicardot affair was a quite novelettish story that she loved to tell. A cousin of hers, Rosalie Chavaille, a daughter born late in life to one of her father’s sisters, had, one evening when she was sixteen, been taken on a staircase in a house on the Rue de la Harpe, where she and her mother occupied a small lodging on the sixth floor. The worst of it was that the gentleman, a married man who had come with his wife, barely a week before, to a room sub-let by a lady on the second floor, had proved so amorous that poor Rosalie, pushed back too eagerly against the edge of one of the steps, had suffered a dislocated shoulder. Thereupon came justifiable rage from her mother, almost leading to a frightful scene, in spite of the tears of the girl who admitted she had been quite willing, that it was just an accident, and she would be too miserable if the gentleman was sent to prison. At this the mother quietened down and contented herself with demanding from him the sum of six hundred francs, to be paid in twelve notes of hand, at fifty francs a month for a year, and there had been no ugly haggling; indeed the demand was even rather modest, since the daughter, just completing her apprenticeship as a dressmaker, now had no earnings, lying ill in
bed, costing a lot, and getting such poor treatment that the muscles in her arm had shrunk, leaving her disabled. Before the end of the first month the gentleman had disappeared, leaving no address. And misfortunes continued, falling thick as hail: Rosalie gave birth to a boy, lost her mother, and fell into a life of wretchedness and dire poverty. Ending up at her cousin’s Cité de Naples, she had trailed around the streets until she was twenty-six, sometimes selling lemons at Les Halles, and disappearing for weeks with various men, to return drunk and bruised black and blue. At last, just a year ago, she had had the good fortune to die, as a result of an even more thorough beating than usual. And La Méchain had been left looking after the baby, Victor; all that remained of this adventure were the twelve unpaid notes, signed Sicardot. Nothing more had ever been discovered about him: the gentleman’s name was Sicardot.

Reaching out again, Busch took down the Sicardot file, a slim folder of grey paper. No costs had been added, all it contained were the twelve promissory notes.

‘If Victor were at least a nice child,’ lamented the old woman. ‘But honestly, he’s simply dreadful… Oh! It’s hard getting that sort of inheritance, a kid who’ll end up on the scaffold, and these bits of paper I’ll never make anything out of!’

Busch kept his big, pale eyes stubbornly fixed on the notes. So many times he had studied them like this, always hoping to find a clue in some overlooked detail, the shape of the letters or the grain of the stamped paper. He maintained that this fine, pointed handwriting could not be quite unknown to him.

‘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 framework 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.