Times were hard for speculators. Saccard had proved himself a worthy son of city hall. Like Paris itself, he had enjoyed a rapid transformation, a time of feverish pleasure and blind expenditure. And like the city he now found himself faced with a formidable deficit, which had to be paid off in secret, for he would not hear of sobriety, economy, and a calm, bourgeois existence. He preferred to hold on to the pointless luxury and actual misery of the new boulevards from which he drew each morning the colossal fortune that he consumed by night. As he moved from adventure to adventure, all that he had left was the gilded façade without the capital to back it up. In this time of acute madness, not even Paris itself was more rash in risking its future, or more prompt to plunge itself into financial foolishness and fraud of every kind. The liquidation threatened to be terrifying.

The most promising speculations turned sour in Saccard’s hands. He had recently suffered considerable losses on the Bourse, as he had just confessed. By gambling on rising share prices, M. Toutin-Laroche had nearly sunk the Crédit Viticole when the market suddenly turned against him. Fortunately, the government, intervening behind the scenes, had put the well-known farm loan institution back on its feet. Saccard, shaken by these two blows and raked over the coals by his brother the minister for having threatened the security of the city’s delegation bonds, which depended on the solidity of the Crédit Viticole, proved even less fortunate in his speculation on real estate. Mignon and Charrier had broken with him completely. If he lashed out at them, it was because of the dull rage he felt at having made the mistake of building on his share of the land he’d bought with them, while they had prudently sold their share. While they were making a fortune, he was stuck with a great many empty houses, many of which he was forced to sell at a loss. One of the properties he unloaded was a house on the rue de Marignan, which he sold for 300,000 francs even though he still owed 380,000. He had invented a stratagem of his own, which involved insisting on an annual lease of 10,000 francs for an apartment that was worth 8,000 at most. The frightened tenant would not sign the lease until the landlord agreed to make him a gift of the first two years’ rent. This reduced the cost of the apartment to its actual price, but the lease still bore the figure of 10,000 francs per year, and when Saccard found a buyer and capitalized the income on the property, the calculations were truly fantastic. He was unable to apply this swindle on a large scale, however. His houses went unrented. He had built them too soon. Surrounded by freshly cleared lots that became forlorn mud flats in winter, his buildings were isolated, which seriously diminished their value. The deal that bothered him most was the huge swindle pulled off by Mignon and Charrier, who had bought from him a building on the boulevard Malesherbes when he had been forced to suspend construction. The contractors had finally been bitten by the rage to reside on “their own boulevard.” Although they had sold their share of the land from an earlier deal, they had caught wind of their former partner’s difficulties and now offered to take off his hands a plot on which construction had already begun. Some of the iron beams needed to support the building’s second-story flooring had already been laid. Yet they dismissed the structure’s solid stone foundation as so much useless rubble on the grounds that what they really wanted was a vacant lot on which they would be free to build as they pleased. Saccard was forced to sell without compensation for the hundred and some thousand francs he had already paid out. What exasperated him even more was that the contractors absolutely refused to buy back the land at 250 francs a meter, the figure agreed upon at the time of the split. They knocked off twenty-five francs a meter, like those secondhand clothing dealers who will only pay four francs for an item they sold for five the day before. Two days later, Saccard suffered pangs at the sight of an army of masons invading the fenced-in construction site to resume work on the “useless pile of rubble.”

He was thus able to pretend to his wife that he was strapped for cash all the more convincingly as his business dealings became increasingly entangled. He was not a man to confess for love of truth.

“But monsieur,” Renée asked with an air of doubt, “if you are in difficulty, why did you buy me that aigrette and necklace, which I believe cost you 65,000 francs? . . . I have no use for those jewels, and I shall be obliged to ask your permission to dispose of them in order to raise money to pay Worms a first installment on what I owe.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” he exclaimed anxiously. “If you’re not seen wearing those jewels tomorrow night at the ministry ball, there will be talk about my position.”

He was in a good mood that morning. He ended with a smile and a wink, whispering, “My dear, we speculators are like pretty women. We have our sly ways. . . . Please, I beg you, for my sake, keep your aigrette and your necklace.”

He could not tell her the story, which was quite a good one but rather risqué. One night after supper, Saccard and Laure d’Aurigny had formed an alliance. Laure was up to her eyes in debt and had only one thought in mind: to find a nice young man willing to run off to London with her. Saccard, for his part, felt the ground giving way beneath him. With his back to the wall, his imagination cast about for an expedient that would display him to the public sprawled upon a bed of gold and banknotes. Lingering over dessert, both half-drunk, the whore and the speculator came to an understanding. He hatched the plan of selling Laure’s diamonds in a sale that would grip the imagination of all of Paris. He would then make a great splash by buying some of the jewels himself, for his wife. With the proceeds from this sale, around 400,000 francs, he managed to satisfy Laure’s creditors, to whom she owed almost twice that amount. It was quite likely that he pocketed part of his 65,000 francs himself. When people saw him putting the Aurigny woman’s affairs in order, they took him to be her lover and concluded that he must have paid off all her debts and made a fool of himself for her. Suddenly he was the man of the hour, and his credit was miraculously restored. At the Bourse everyone teased him about his passion with smiles and allusions that pleased him no end. Meanwhile, Laure d’Aurigny, notorious as a result of all this fuss even though he had never spent a single night with her, pretended to deceive him with eight or ten imbeciles spurred on by the idea of stealing her from a man of such colossal wealth. Within a month she had two sets of furniture and more diamonds than she had been forced to sell. Saccard had taken to going to her place to smoke a cigar every afternoon after leaving the Bourse. He often glimpsed coattails fleeing out the door in terror as he arrived. When they were alone, they couldn’t look at each other without laughing. He kissed her on the forehead, as if her perverse mischief excited him. He never gave her a cent, and once she even lent him money to pay off a gambling debt.

Renée felt compelled to press her point and brought up the idea of at least pawning the jewels, but her husband insisted that this was impossible because all Paris expected to see her wearing them the next night. The young woman, quite worried about Worms’s bill, then tried another tack.

“But my business in Charonne is going well, isn’t it?” she blurted out. “You were telling me the other day that the profits would be superb. . . . Maybe Larsonneau would advance me the 136,000 francs?”

Saccard had momentarily left the tongs lying between his legs. Now he grabbed them energetically, leaned forward, and practically disappeared into the fireplace, from which the young woman heard a muffled voice murmur, “Yes, yes, Larsonneau might perhaps—”