one moment to allow more two millions and a half, despite the mute efforts of M. Michelin and the speeches of M. Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud. Saccard had foreseen this repulse; he refused the offer, let the case go before the jury, of which he happened to be a member, together with M. de Mareuil, by an accident to which he had no doubt contributed. And it was thus that, with four of his colleagues, he found himself appointed to make an enquiry upon his own site.
M. de Mareuil accompanied him. The three other committeemen consisted of a doctor, who smoked a cigar without caring the least in the world for the heaps of lime-rubbish he stepped over, and two business men, of whom one, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly turned a grindstone in the streets.
The path which these gentlemen followed was abominable. It had been raining all night. The ground, soaked through and through, was turning into a river of mud, running between the demolished houses over a path cutting across the soft ground in which the dobbin-carts sank up to their axles. On either side, great pieces of wall, crenulated by the pickaxe, remained erect; tall, gutted buildings, displaying their pallid entrails, opened to mid-air their wells stripped of stairs, their gaping rooms suspended on high and resembling the broken drawers of a big, ugly piece of furniture. Nothing could be more woebegone than the wallpapers of these rooms, blue or yellow squares falling in tatters, marking the positions, five or six stories high, close under the roofing, of wretched little garrets, cramped cabins to which perhaps a whole human existence had been limited. On the bare walls, ribbons of flues ascended side by side, lugubriously black and with abrupt bends. A forgotten weathercock grated at the extremity of a roof, while gutters, half detached, depended like rags. And the gap yawned still wider in the midst of these ruins, like a breach opened by cannon; the roadway, as yet hardly set out, filled with rubbish, with mounds of earth and deep pools of water, stretched along under the leaden sky, amid the sinister pallor of the falling plaster-dust, edged with the black strips of chimneys as with a mourning border.
The gentlemen, with their well-blackened boots, their frockcoats and tall hats, struck a strange note in this muddy, dirty yellow landscape, across which there passed nothing but sallow workmen, horses splashed to their backs, carts whose sides were hidden beneath a coating of dust. They went in Indian file, hopping from stone to stone, avoiding the pools of liquid mire, sometimes sinking in up to their ankles and then cursing as they shook their feet. Saccard had suggested taking the Rue de Charonne, by which they would have avoided this tramp over broken ground; but unfortunately they had several plots of land to visit on the long line of the boulevard; curiosity impelled them, they had decided to go right through the works. And moreover it interested them greatly. Sometimes they stopped, balancing themselves on a piece of plaster that had fallen into a rut, lifted their noses, called out to point out to one another a yawning flooring, a flue pointing into the air, a joist that had fallen on to a neighbouring roof. This bit of razed city at the end of the Rue du Temple seemed to them quite droll.
“It’s really curious,” said M. de Mareuil. “See, Saccard, look at that kitchen, up there; an old fryingpan has remained hanging there over the stove…. I can see it quite plainly.”
But the doctor, his cigar between his teeth, had planted himself before a demolished house of which there remained only the ground-floor rooms, filled with the debris of the other stories. A solitary large piece of walling rose from the heap of brick-rubbish; and in order to overthrow it with one effort they had tied round it a rope at which some thirty workmen were tugging.
“They won’t do it,” muttered the doctor. “They’re pulling too much to the left.”
The four others retraced their steps to see the wall come down. And all five of them, with staring eyes, with bated breath waited for the fall with a thrill of rapture. The workmen, relaxing, and then suddenly stiffening themselves, cried, “Oh! heave oh!”
“They won’t do it,” repeated the doctor.
Then, after a few seconds of anxiety:
“It’s moving, it’s moving,” joyously said one of the businessmen.
And when the wall at last gave way and came down with a thundering crash, raising a cloud of plaster, the gentlemen looked at one another with smiles. They were enchanted. Their frockcoats were covered with a fine dust, which whitened their arms and shoulders.
They now talked of the workmen, while resuming their cautious progress across the puddles. There were not many good ones amongst them. They were all sluggards, spendthrifts, and obstinate into the bargain, having but one dream, the ruin of their employers. M. de Mareuil, who for the last minute had with a shudder been watching two poor devils perched on the corner of a roof hacking at a wall with their pickaxes, expressed the opinion that those fellows were very plucky all the same. The others stopped once more, raised their eyes to the labourers balancing themselves, leaning over, striking with all their might; they shoved down the stones with their feet and quietly watched them smashing beneath them: had their pickaxe gone wide of the mark, the mere momentum of their arms would have hurled them to the bottom.
“Bah! they’re used to it,” said the doctor, replacing his cigar between his lips. “They’re brutes.”
They now reached one of the houses they had to inspect. They hurried through their task in a quarter of an hour, and resumed their walk. They gradually lost their disgust for the mud; they walked straight across the pools, giving up all hope of keeping their boots clean. When they had passed the Rue Ménilmontant, one of the businessmen, the ex-knife-grinder, became restless. He examined the ruins around him, failed to recognize the neighbourhood. He said he had lived thereabouts, more than thirty years ago, on his first arrival in Paris, and that he should much like to find the place again. He kept on searching with his eyes, when the sight of a house which the labourers’ picks had already cut into two made him stop short in the middle of the road. He studied the door, the windows. Then, pointing with his finger to a corner of the demolished building, right up above:
“There it is,” he cried. “I recognize it!”
“What?” asked the doctor.
“My room, of course! That’s it!”
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
