yes,” said the Baron gravely, “nothing underhand must be allowed to taint our decisions.”
The report had already vanished within M. Toutin-Laroche’s capacious pockets. The commission had to give way. As they went out on to the quay, the two confederates looked at each other without a smile. They felt themselves to be accomplices, and this added to their assurance. Two vulgar minds would have sought an explanation; these two continued to plead the cause of the landlords, as though they could still be overheard, and to deprecate the spirit of distrust that was filtering through everything. Just as they were about to separate:
“Ah, I was forgetting, my dear colleague,” said the Baron, with a smile. “I am going into the country almost at once. It would be very kind of you to go and make this little enquiry without me…. And above all don’t give me away, our friends complain that I take too many holidays.”
“Be easy,” replied M. Toutin-Laroche, “I shall go straight to the Rue de la Pépinière.”
He went quietly to his own house, not without a touch of admiration for the baron, who had such a pretty way of unravelling a delicate position. He kept the report in his pocket, and at the next sitting he declared peremptorily, in the baron’s name and his own, that they should split the difference between the offer of five hundred thousand and the claim of seven hundred thousand francs, and allow six hundred thousand. There was not the slightest opposition. The member from the Rue d’Astorg, who had no doubt thought it over, said with great goodnature that he had been mistaken: he thought it was the next house that was in question.
In this way did Aristide Saccard win his first victory. He quadrupled his outlay and secured two accomplices. One thing alone perturbed him; when he wanted to destroy Madame Sidonie’s famous account-books, he was unable to find them. He hastened to Larsonneau, who boldly avowed that he had them and that he meant to keep them. The other showed no vexation; he suggested that he had only been anxious on account of his dear friend, who was much more compromised than himself by these entries, which were almost entirely in his handwriting, but that he was reassured so soon as he knew they were in his keeping. At heart he would have been delighted to strangle his “dear friend;” he remembered a particularly compromising document, a false inventory which he had been fool enough to draw up, and which he knew had been left in one of the ledgers. Larsonneau, handsomely remunerated, set up a business-agency in the Rue de Rivoli, where he had a suite of offices furnished as luxuriously as a courtesan’s rooms. Saccard left the Hotel de Ville and, being in command of considerable funds to work with, launched furiously into speculation, while Renée, in mad intoxication, filled Paris with the clatter of her equipages, the sparkle of her diamonds, the vertigo of her adorably riotous existence.
Sometimes the husband and wife, those two feverish devotees of money and of pleasure, would penetrate the icy mists of the Île Saint-Louis. They felt as though they were entering a city of the dead.
The Hotel Béraud, built about the beginning of the sixteenth century, was one of those square black, solemn edifices, with tall, narrow windows, which are numerous in the Marais, and are let to proprietors of schools, to manufacturers of aerated waters, and to bonders of wines and spirits. Only it was in admirable preservation. On the Rue Saint-Louis side it had only three stories, each fifteen to twenty feet in height. The ground-floor was not so lofty, and was pierced with windows protected by enormous iron bars and sunk dismally into the gloomy thickness of the walls, and with an arched gateway almost as tall as it was broad, and bearing a cast-iron knocker on its doors, which were painted dark-green and studded with enormous nails that formed stars and lozenges on the two folds. This characteristic entrance was flanked on either side with spur-posts sloping backwards, and strapped with broad iron bands. One could see that formerly a gutter had run under the middle of the gateway, between the weatherings of the pebble-work of the porch; but M. Béraud had decided to stop up this gutter and have the entrance asphalted: this, however, was the only concession he could ever be persuaded to make to modern architecture. The windows of the upper floors were ornamented with thin handrails of wrought iron, through which could be seen their colossal casements of strong brown woodwork with little green panes. At the top the roof was interrupted by the dormers, and the gutter alone continued its course so as to discharge the rainwater into the down-pipes. And what still further increased the severe nakedness of the façade was the entire absence of awnings or shutters, for at no season of the year did the sun shine on those pale, melancholy stones. This facade with its venerable air, its burgher severity, slumbered solemnly amid the self-absorption of the district, in the silence of the street that no carriage ever disturbed.
In the interior of the mansion was a square courtyard, surrounded by a colonnade, a reduced copy of the Place Royale, paved with enormous flags, and completing the cloistral appearance of this lifeless house. Opposite the porch a fountain, a lion’s head half worn away, its gaping jaws alone distinguishable, discharged a heavy, monotonous stream of water through an iron tube into a basin green with moss, its edges polished by wear. This water was cold as ice. Weeds sprouted between the flagstones. In the summer a meagre ray of sunlight entered the courtyard, and this infrequent visit had whitened a corner of the south façade, while the three other walls, morose and black, were streaked with moisture. There, in the depth of that courtyard, cold and silent as a well, lighted with a white, wintry light, one would have thought one’s self a thousand leagues away from that new Paris in which every passionate enjoyment flamed amid the racket of gold.
The rooms of the house had the sad calm, the cold solemnity of the courtyard. Approached by a broad iron-railed staircase, on which the footsteps and coughs of visitors resounded as in the aisle of a church, they stretched in long strings of wide, lofty rooms, in which the old-fashioned, heavy furniture of dark wood was lost; and the pale light was peopled only by the figures on the tapestries, whose great, pallid bodies could be vaguely discerned. There was all the luxury of the old-fashioned Parisian middle-class, a luxury that is Spartan and all-enduring. Chairs whose oak seats are barely covered with a little tow, beds with stiff sheets, linen-chests the roughness of whose boards would strangely endanger the frail existence of modern garments. M. Béraud du Châtel had selected his rooms in the darkest part of the mansion, between the street and the courtyard, on the first floor. He there found himself in a wonderful surrounding of peacefulness, silence, and gloom. When he opened the doors, traversing the solemnity of the rooms with his slow, serious step, he might have been taken for one of those members of the old parliaments, whose portraits were hung on the walls, returning home wrapt in thought after discussing and refusing to sign an edict of the king.
Yet in this lifeless house, in this cloister, there was one warm nest full of life, a corner of sunshine and gaiety, a nook of adorable childhood, of fresh air, of bright light. One had to climb a host of little stairways, pass along ten or twelve corridors, go down and up again, make a positive journey, and then at last one reached a huge room, a sort of belvedere built on the roof, at the back of the house, over above the Quai de Bethune. It looked due South. The window opened so wide that the heavens, with all their sunbeams, all their ether, all their blue, seemed to enter there. It was perched aloft like a dovecot, and contained long flower-boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single article of furniture. There was only just some matting spread over the floor. This was “the children’s room.” All over the house it was known and spoken of by that name. The house was so cold, the courtyard so damp, that Aunt Elisabeth had dreaded lest Christine and Renée should suffer harm from the chill breath that hung about the walls; many a time had she scolded the children for running about the arcades and amusing themselves by dipping their little arms into the icy water of the fountain. Thereupon she conceived the idea of making use of this forgotten attic for them, the only corner into which the sun had, for nearly two centuries, entered and rejoiced, in the midst of the cobwebs. She gave them some matting, birds, and flowers. The bairns were wild with delight. Renée lived there during the holidays, bathing in the yellow rays of that good sun, who seemed pleased with the decorations lavished upon his retreat and with the two fair-haired heads sent to keep him company. The room became a paradise, ever resounding with the song of the birds and the children’s babbling. It had
