It was on the fifth floor, a little room which must formerly have looked out on a courtyard. A breach in the wall showed it, quite bare, already cut into on one side, with its wallpaper with a pattern of big yellow flowers, a broad torn strip of which trembled in the wind. On the left they could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper. And beside it was the aperture for a stove-pipe, with a bit of piping left in it.
The ex-workman was seized with emotion.
“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “I didn’t have a good time in those days; but no matter, I was young…. You see the cupboard; that’s where I put my three hundred francs, sou by sou. And the hole for the stove-pipe, I can still remember the day I made it. There was no fireplace in the room, it was bitterly cold, the more so as there were not often two of us.”
“Come, come,” interrupted the doctor, joking, “we don’t ask you for any confidences. You sowed your wild oats like the rest of us.”
“That’s true enough,” ingenuously resumed the worthy man. “I still remember an ironing-girl who lived over the way…. Do you see, the bed was on the right, near the window…. Ah, my poor room, what a state they’ve put it in!”
He was really very much upset.
“Get out,” said Saccard. “There’s no harm done in pulling down those old rookeries. We’re going to build fine freestone houses in their stead…. Would you still live in a hole like that? Whereas there is nothing to prevent you from taking up your quarters on the new boulevard.”
“That’s true enough,” replied the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled.
The committee of enquiry halted again two houses further on. The doctor remained outside, smoking, looking at the sky. When they reached the Rue des Amandiers, the houses became more scattered; they now passed through large enclosures, pieces of waste land, where straggled some tumbledown ruins. Saccard seemed enraptured by this walk through devastations. He had just remembered the dinner he had once had with his first wife on the Buttes Montmartre, and he clearly recollected how he had pointed out to her, with the edge of his hand, the cutting that went from the Place du Château-d’Eau to the Barrière du Trône. The realization of this faraway prophecy delighted him. He followed the cutting with the secret joys of authorship, as though he himself had struck the first blows of the pickaxe with his iron fingers. And he skipped over the puddles, reflecting that three millions were awaiting him beneath a heap of building-rubbish, at the end of this stream of greasy mire.
Meanwhile the gentlemen began to fancy themselves in the country. The road passed through gardens, whose separating walls had been pulled down. There were large clumps of budding lilac. The foliage was a very delicate, pale green. Each of these gardens, looking like a retreat hung with the verdure of the shrubs, was hollowed out with a narrow basin, a miniature cascade, bits of wall on which were painted optical delusions in the shape of foreshortened groves, blue backgrounds of landscape. The buildings, disseminated and discreetly hidden, resembled Italian pavilions, Greek temples: moss was crumbling away the bases of the plaster columns, while lichens had already loosened the mortar of the pediments.
“Those are ‘follies,’” said the doctor, with a wink.
But as he saw that the gentlemen did not understand him, he explained to them that under Louis XV the Court nobility kept up houses for their select parties. It was the fashion. And he added:
“Those places were called their ‘follies.’ The neighbourhood is full of them…. I tell you, some stiff things used to happen here.”
The committee of enquiry had become very attentive. The two businessmen had eyes that glittered, they smiled, looked with lively interest at these gardens, these pavilions which they had barely honoured with a glance prior to their colleague’s explanations. They stood long before a grotto. But when the doctor, seeing a house already attacked by the pickaxe, said that he recognized the Comte de Savigny’s ‘folly,’ well-known by reason of that nobleman’s orgies, the whole of the committee deserted the boulevard to go and inspect the ruins. They climbed on to the rubbish-heaps, entered the ground-floor rooms by the windows, and as the workmen were at dinner, they were able to linger there quite at their ease. They stayed a good half-hour, examining the rose-work of the ceilings, the frescoes over the door, the tortuous mouldings of the plaster yellowed with age. The doctor reconstructed the house.
“Look here,” he said, “this room must be the banqueting-hall. There, in that recess of the wall, must certainly have stood a huge divan. And see, I am positive there was a mirror over the divan; there are the feet of the mirror…. Oh! those scamps knew jolly well how to enjoy life!”
They would never have left those old stones, which tickled their curiosity, had not Aristide Saccard, seized with impatience, said to them, laughing:
“You may look as long as you like, the ladies are gone…. Let’s get on with our business.”
But before leaving, the doctor climbed on to a mantelshelf in order delicately to detach, with a blow from a pickaxe, a little painted Cupid’s head, which he put into the pocket of his frockcoat.
They arrived at last at the end of their journey. The land that was formerly Mme. Aubertot’s was very extensive; the music-hall and the garden took up barely the half of it, the rest had here and there a few houses of no importance. The new boulevard cut diagonally across this huge parallelogram, which circumstance had allayed one of Saccard’s fears: he had long imagined that only a corner of the music-hall would be cut off. And accordingly Larsonneau had been instructed to talk very big, as the bordering plots ought to increase at least five-fold in value. He was already threatening against the municipality to avail himself of a recent decree that authorized the landowners to deliver up no more than the ground absolutely necessary for the public works.
The expropriation-agent received the gentlemen in person. He walked them through the garden, made them go over the music-hall, showed them a huge bundle of documents. But the two business men had gone down again, accompanied by the doctor, whom they still questioned about the Comte de Savigny’s folly, of which their minds were full. They listened to him with gaping mouths, all three standing beside a jeu de tonneau. And he talked to them of the Pompadour, told them of the amours of Louis XV, while M. de Mareuil and Saccard continued the enquiry alone.
“That’s finished,” said the latter, returning to the garden, you allow me, messieurs, I will undertake to draw up the report.”
The surgical-instrument maker did not even hear. He was deep in the Regency.
“What queer times, all the same!” he muttered.
Then they found a cab in the Rue de Charonne, and they drove off, splashed up to their knees, but as satisfied with their walk as though they had had a day in the country. The conversation changed in the cab, they talked politics, they said that the Emperor was doing great things. They had never seen anything like what they had seen just now. That great, long, straight street would be splendid when the houses were built.
Saccard drew up the report, and the jury granted three millions. The speculator was at the end of his tether, he could not have waited another month. This money saved him from ruin and even from the dock. He paid five hundred thousand francs on account of the million which he owed to his upholsterer and his builder, for the house in the Parc Monceau. He stopped up other holes, flung himself into new companies, deafened Paris with the sound of the real crown-pieces which he shovelled out on to the shelves of his iron safe. The golden stream had a source at last. But it was not yet a solid, entrenched fortune, flowing with an even, continuous current. Saccard, saved from a crisis, thought himself a beggar with the crumbs of his three millions, said frankly that he was still too poor, that he could not stop. And soon the ground cracked once more beneath his secretaries to help me.”
Larsonneau had behaved so admirably in the Charonne business that Saccard, after a short hesitation, had the honesty to give him his ten per cent, and his bonus of thirty thousand francs. The expropriation-agent thereupon started a banking-house. When his accomplice peevishly accused him of being richer than himself,