Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (63 page)

She had managed to take hold of his hands, and was pressing close against him.

‘No, no! Be quiet, you’re frightening me!’

And in spite of herself, even in her alarm, she could feel a certain admiration rising within her. Suddenly, in this bleak and bare cell under lock and key, and cut off from every living soul, she had just had the sensation of an overflowing force, an effulgence of life: the eternal illusion of hope, the stubborn refusal of the man who will not die. She sought within herself her anger, her abhorrence of the sins committed, and found they were no longer there. Had she not condemned him, after the irreparable misfortunes he had caused? Had she not called down on him the punishment of a solitary death, despised by all? She now only retained her hatred of evil-doing, and her pity for suffering. As for Saccard, with his heedless, dynamic force, she felt his power once more, as if he were one of those violent, but no doubt necessary, elements of nature. And anyway, even if it was only womanly weakness, she gave herself up to it with delight, yielding to her frustrated maternal instincts and the infinite need for love which had made her love him even without esteem, her normally lofty rationality quite laid low by the experience.

‘It’s over,’ she repeated several times, without ceasing to clasp his hands in hers, ‘so can’t you just be calm now, and rest at last?’

Then, as he stretched up to touch her white hair with his lips, her curls falling about her temples with a youthful and lively profusion, she held him back and, with an air of absolute resolution and profound sadness, giving her words their full significance, she added:

‘No, no! It’s over, over for ever… I’m glad to have seen you this one last time, so that there should be no more anger between us… Goodbye!’

When she left, she saw him standing by the table, clearly moved by the parting, but already, with one hand, instinctively reorganizing the papers he had mixed up in his excitement; and as the little two-sous bouquet had lost its petals among the pages, he was shaking them off one by one, using his fingers to sweep away the rose-petals.

It was only three months later, towards the middle of December, that the case of the Universal Bank at last came to trial. It occupied five long hearings of the Magistrates’ Court,
*
among intense public curiosity. The Press had made an enormous to-do about the catastrophe, and extraordinary rumours were circulating about the slowness of the proceedings. The indictment drawn up by the office of the Public Prosecutor was much remarked upon, it was a masterpiece of ferocious logic, in which the tiniest details had been grouped together, used and interpreted with pitiless clarity. Anyway, people everywhere were saying that the judgement had been decided in advance. And indeed, the obvious good faith of Hamelin, and the heroic attitude of Saccard, who stood up to his accusers throughout the five days, the magnificent and resounding pleas for the defence, did not stop the judges from sentencing each of the accused to five years of prison and a fine of three thousand francs. However, as they had been provisionally released on bail a month before the trial, they had been able to appear as free defendants, so were able to lodge an appeal and leave France in twenty-four hours.
*
It was Rougon who had insisted on this outcome, wanting to avoid the embarrassment of having a brother in prison. The police themselves watched over the departure of Saccard, who fled on a night train to Belgium. That same day Hamelin had left for Rome.

Three more months went by, it was the first days of April, and Madame Caroline was still in Paris, kept there by some complicated matters she had to settle. She remained in the little apartment in the Orviedo mansion, where posters now advertised its sale. She had at
last sorted out the last of the difficulties and was able to get away, though of course without so much as a sou in her pocket, but also without leaving any debts behind her; and she was to leave Paris next day, to go and rejoin her brother in Rome, where he had been lucky enough to find a lowly post as an engineer. He had written that there were pupils waiting for her. It was like starting their life all over again.

When she got up on the morning of her last day in Paris, she felt a sudden impulse not to go away without trying to get some news of Victor. Up to that point all searches had been fruitless. But she remembered the promises of La Méchain, and told herself that the woman perhaps knew something, and it would be easy to question her by going to Busch’s office at about four o’clock. At first she pushed the idea away; what good would it do, wasn’t it all past history now? Then she felt real pain, her heart grieving as if over a child she had lost, and on whose grave she had placed no flowers before leaving. At four o’clock she walked down the Rue Feydeau.

The two doors on to the landing were open, and water was boiling furiously in the dark kitchen, while on the other side, in the tiny office, La Méchain, sitting in Busch’s armchair, seemed drowned in the heap of papers she was pulling out, in enormous sheaves, from her old leather bag.

‘Ah, it’s you, my good lady! You’ve come at a really bad moment. Monsieur Sigismond is dying. And poor Monsieur Busch is positively out of his mind, he so loves his brother. He’s just running about like a madman, and now he’s gone out to get a doctor… As you see, I’ve had to take care of his business affairs, for it’s a whole week now since he even bought a share or got his nose into a claim. Fortunately, I just had a stroke of luck—oh! a real piece of luck, which will console him a bit in his grief, the dear man, when he recovers his senses.’

Madame Caroline, suddenly shocked, quite forgot she had come about Victor, for she had recognized devalued Universal shares among the handfuls of papers La Méchain was drawing out of her bag. The old leather was cracking under the strain, and she went on pulling them out, growing chatty in her joy.

‘Look! I got all that lot for two hundred and fifty francs, and there are at least five thousand of them, which puts them at one sou each… Eh? One sou, for shares that were once quoted at three thousand francs! And there they are, reduced almost to the price of the paper they’re printed on, yes! Just so many pounds of paper… But they’re
worth more than that all the same, we shall sell them on for at least ten sous, as they are wanted by bankrupts. You see, they had such a good reputation that they’re still useful. They look very good on the debit side, as it’s very distinguished to have been a victim of the crash… Anyway, I had an extraordinary bit of luck, I’d sniffed out the pit in which, ever since the battle, all this merchandise was lying, like the remains from a slaughterhouse, and an ignorant idiot let me have it all for next to nothing. You can imagine how I fell upon it! Ah, it didn’t take long, I cleaned it all out in no time!’

And this bird of prey of the battlefields of financial massacres glowed with pleasure, her enormous person oozing with the disgusting food with which she had fattened herself, while with her stubby, claw-like hands, she rummaged among the dead, these almost worthless shares, already yellowing and giving off a rancid smell.

But a deep and ardent voice arose from the next room, the door of which stood wide open, like the two doors on the landing.

‘Good, there’s Monsieur Sigismond, starting to talk again. That’s all he’s done since this morning… Oh heavens! The boiling water! I’d forgotten it! It was for some tisanes… My good lady, since you’re here, go and see if there’s anything he needs.’

La Méchain hurried into the kitchen, and Madame Caroline, always drawn towards suffering, went into the room. Its bareness was quite enlivened by bright April sunshine, a ray of which fell right across the little white wood table, loaded with written notes and huge folders, out of which bulged ten years of work; and there was nothing else save the two chairs with straw seats, and some volumes piled up on planks. On the narrow iron bed, Sigismond, sitting propped up by three pillows, his top half dressed in a short red-flannel smock, was talking, talking incessantly, with that curious cerebral agitation that sometimes precedes the death of consumptives. He was delirious, but with moments of extraordinary lucidity; and in his very thin face, framed by his long curly hair, his eyes, unnaturally wide, seemed to be searching into the void.

As soon as Madame Caroline appeared he seemed to recognize her, although they had never met.

‘Ah, it’s you, Madame… I had seen you, I was calling you with all my strength… Come, come closer, let me tell you quietly…’

In spite of the little shiver of fear she had felt, she drew near, and had to sit on a chair right up against the bed.

‘I didn’t know, but I know now. My brother sells papers, and I’ve heard people crying in there, in his office… My brother—ah! I feel as if I had a red-hot iron in my heart. Yes, that’s what has stayed in my breast, still burning, because this is abominable, the money and the poor suffering people… So, very soon, when I’m dead, my brother will sell my papers, and I don’t want him to, I don’t want that!’

His voice rose steadily higher, pleading.

‘Look, Madame, there they are, on the table. Give them to me so we can make a parcel of them, and you will carry them away, carry them all away… Oh, I was calling for you! I was waiting for you! My papers lost! My whole life of research and effort, all wiped out!’

And as she hesitated to do what he asked, he clasped his hands together and said:

‘I beg you, let me be sure that they are all there before I die… My brother isn’t here, my brother won’t be able to say that I’m killing myself… I beg you.’

Then, overwhelmed by the ardour of his appeal, she gave in.

‘You know I’m doing wrong, since your brother says that this does you harm.’

‘Harm? Oh no! And anyway, what does it matter?… At last, after spending so many nights on it, I have managed to set it up, that society of the future! Everything has been foreseen and resolved, there will be all possible justice and happiness… How I regret not having had the time to write this work, with all the necessary developments! But here are my complete notes, all indexed. And you—you will, won’t you?—you are going to save them so that someone else, one day, can make them into the definitive book to be launched upon the world…’

With his long, frail hands, he had picked up the papers and was leafing through them lovingly, while in his large, already cloudy eyes, a flame flickered once more. He was speaking very quickly, in a cracked, monotonous voice, like the tick-tock of a clock’s chain pulled by the weight; it was the very sound of his brain’s mechanisms, going on working even in the throes of death.

‘Ah, how well I see it, how clearly it stands there before me, the city of justice and happiness!… There everyone works, a work at once personal, obligatory, and free. The nation is just a vast cooperative society, where tools are the property of all, and products are centralized in huge public warehouses. When people have done a specific amount of useful labour, they have a right to an equivalent amount of
consumption. The work-hour is the common currency, an object is only worth the hours it cost, and there is only exchange between all the producers, using work-vouchers, and that is all managed by the community, without any further deduction other than the special tax for bringing up children, feeding the old, renewing equipment, and defraying the cost of the free public services… No more money, hence no more speculation, no more thieving, no more abominable trafficking, no more of those crimes incited by cupidity, girls married for their dowry, old parents strangled for their inheritance, passers-by killed for their purses!… No more hostile classes of bosses and workers, proletarians and bourgeois, and therefore no more restrictive laws or tribunals, no armed force protecting the iniquitous hoardings of the few from the enraged hunger of the many!… No more idlers of any sort, hence no more owners living on rent, no more annuity-holders living off their luck like kept women, no more luxury, in short, and no more poverty!… Ah! Isn’t that the ideal of fairness, the sovereign wisdom, no one privileged, no one wretched, everyone making their own happiness by their own effort, the averaging-out of human happiness!’

He was getting excited and his voice became soft and distant, as if it were going far away on high, and disappearing into the future whose coming he was foretelling.

‘And to go into details… You see this separate sheet of paper, with all the marginal notes: that’s on the structure of the family, with a free contract, and children to be educated and supported by the community… However, this is not anarchy. Look at this other note: I want every branch of production to have a managing committee responsible for establishing what is really needed, and balancing production to consumption… And here’s another organizational detail: in the towns and in the fields, industrial and agricultural armies will operate under the leadership of their own elected chiefs, obeying regulations voted by themselves… And look! I’ve indicated here, with rough calculations, how many working hours the working day can be reduced to in twenty years. Thanks to the great number of new hands, and thanks especially to machines, people will work for only four hours, perhaps three, leaving them so much time to enjoy life! For this is no barracks but a place of freedom and gaiety, in which all can choose their own pleasure, with plenty of time to satisfy their legitimate appetites, the joy of loving, of being strong, beautiful, intelligent, and taking their share of inexhaustible nature.’

And his gesture, sweeping around that miserable room, took possession of the world. In the bareness in which he had lived, this poverty without needs, in which he was dying, he was sharing out all the wealth of the earth with a brotherly hand. It was universal happiness, everything good that he had never himself enjoyed, that he was thus distributing, knowing he never would enjoy any part of it. He had hastened his death in order to make this supreme gift to suffering humanity. But his hands were straying, groping about, among the scattered notes, while his eyes, no longer seeing them, filled as they were with the dazzling light of death, seemed, in a rapturous ecstasy that lit up his whole face, to perceive, on the other side of life, an infinite perfection.