DREAMS AND SCHEMES
When, after his last and disastrous land speculation, Saccard had been
obliged to leave his palace in the Parc Monceau, which he abandoned to
his creditors in order to avoid a yet greater catastrophe, his first
idea had been to take refuge with his son Maxime. The latter, since
the death of his wife, now sleeping in a little cemetery in Lombardy,
had been living alone in a mansion in the Avenue de l'Impératrice,
where he had planned out his life with a prudent and ferocious egoism.
There he spent the fortune of the deceased, methodically, without ever
overstepping the bounds, like a man in feeble health whom vice had
prematurely ripened; and it was in a clear voice that he refused to
lodge his father in his house, wishing, he explained with his smiling,
prudent air, that they might continue on good terms together.
Saccard thereupon thought of some other retreat, and was on the point
of taking a little house at Passy, a retired merchant's _bourgeois_
asylum, when he recollected that the first and second floors of the
Orviedo mansion, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, were still unoccupied, with
doors and windows closed. The Princess d'Orviedo, who had withdrawn
into three rooms on the second floor since her husband's death, had not
even put up any notice 'To Let' at the carriage entrance, where the
weeds were growing. A low door at the other end of the façade led to
the second storey by a servants' staircase. And in the course of his
business relations with the Princess, during the visits that he paid
her, Saccard had often been astonished at the negligence which she
showed in the matter of deriving some profit from her property. But
she shook her head in reply to his remarks; she had theories of her
own as to money matters. However, when he applied in his own name, she
consented at once, and for the ridiculous rent of ten thousand francs
made over to him both the sumptuous ground and first floors, decorated
in princely fashion, and worth certainly double the money.
The magnificence displayed by Prince d'Orviedo was well remembered.
It was in the feverish flush of his immense financial fortune, when
he had come from Spain to Paris amid a rain of millions, that he had
bought and redecorated this mansion, pending the erection of the
palace of marble and gold with which he dreamed of astonishing the
world. The edifice dated from the last century; it had been one of
those pleasure-houses built in the midst of vast gardens by noble
gallants. Partially demolished, however, and re-erected in a severer
style, it had of its park of former days merely retained a large
court, bordered with stables and coach-houses, which the projected Rue
du Cardinal-Fesch would surely sweep away. The Prince acquired the
mansion from the heirs of a Mademoiselle Saint-Germain, whose property
had formerly extended to the Rue des Trois-Frères, as the further end
of the Rue Taitbout was once called. The entrance of the mansion was
still in the Rue Saint-Lazare, adjoining a large building of the same
period, the whilom Folie-Beauvilliers, which the Beauvilliers still
occupied, after passing through a period of slow ruin; and they there
possessed some remnants of an admirable garden, with magnificent trees,
likewise condemned to disappear in the approaching transformation of
the district.
In the midst of his disaster, Saccard still dragged about with him a
number of servants, the _débris_ of his over-numerous household, a
valet, a _chef_, and his wife who had charge of the linen, another
woman who had remained no one knew why, a coachman and two ostlers; and
he filled up the stables and coach-houses, putting two horses and three
carriages in them, and arranged a servants' dining-hall on the ground
floor of the house. He had not five hundred francs in cash in his
coffers, but lived at the rate of two or three hundred thousand francs
a year. And with his own person he managed to fill the vast first-floor
apartments, the three drawing- and five bed-rooms, not to mention the
immense dining-room, where covers could be laid for fifty persons. Here
a door had formerly opened upon an inner staircase, leading to another
and smaller dining-room on the second floor, and the Princess, who had
recently let this part of the second floor to an engineer, M. Hamelin,
a bachelor, living with his sister, had contented herself with closing
the door by the aid of a couple of stout screws. She herself shared the
old servants' staircase with the Hamelins, while Saccard had the main
stairway at his own entire disposal. He partially furnished a few rooms
with some remnants from his Parc Monceau establishment, and left the
others empty, succeeding, nevertheless, in restoring some life to that
series of bare, gloomy walls, whence an obstinate hand seemed to have
torn even the smallest shreds of hangings on the very morrow of the
Prince's death. And here then he was able to indulge afresh his dream
of a great fortune.
The Princess d'Orviedo was at that time one of the most curious
notabilities of Paris. Fifteen years previously she had resignedly
married the Prince, whom she did not love, in obedience to the formal
command of her mother, the Duchess de Combeville. At that period this
young girl of twenty had been famous for her beauty and exemplary
conduct, being very religious, and perhaps a little too serious,
although loving society passionately. She was ignorant of the singular
stories current regarding the Prince, the sources of his regal fortune
estimated at three hundred millions of francs--his whole life of
frightful robberies, perpetrated, not on the skirts of a wood and
weapon in hand, after the fashion of the noble adventurers of former
days, but according to the system of the correct modern bandit, in
the broad sunlight of the Bourse, where amidst death and ruin he had
emptied the pockets of poor credulous folks. Over there in Spain, and
here in France, the Prince for twenty years had appropriated the lion's
share in every great legendary piece of rascality. Although suspecting
nothing of the mire and blood in which he had just picked up so many
millions, his wife at their first meeting had felt a repugnance towards
him, which even her religious sentiments were powerless to overcome;
and to this antipathy was soon added a secret, growing rancour at
having no child by this marriage, to which she had submitted for
obedience' sake. Maternity would have sufficed her, for she adored
children; and thus she came to hate this man, who, after taking from
her all hope of love, had even been unable to satisfy her maternal
longings. It was then that the Princess was seen to precipitate herself
into a life of unheard-of luxury, dazzling Paris with the brilliancy
of her _fêtes_, and displaying in all things such magnificence that
even the Tuileries were said to be jealous. Then suddenly, on the day
after the Prince died from a stroke of apoplexy, the mansion in the
Rue Saint-Lazare fell into absolute silence, complete darkness. Not a
light, not a sound; doors and windows alike remained closed; and the
rumour spread that the Princess, after violently stripping the lower
part of the house, had withdrawn, like a recluse, into three little
rooms on the second floor, with old Sophie, her mother's former maid,
who had brought her up. When she reappeared in public, she wore a
simple black woollen dress, with a lace _fichu_ concealing her hair.
Short and still plump, with her narrow forehead and her pretty round
face with pearly teeth hidden by tightly-set lips, she already had
a yellow complexion, with the silent countenance of a woman who has
but one desire, one purpose in life, like a nun long immured in the
cloister. She had just reached thirty, and lived henceforth solely for
deeds of charity on a colossal scale.
The surprise of Paris was very great, and all sorts of extraordinary
stories began to circulate. The Princess had inherited her husband's
entire fortune, the famous three hundred millions of francs,[10] which
the newspapers were always talking about. And the legend which finally
sprang up was a romantic one. A man, a mysterious stranger dressed in
black, it was said, had suddenly appeared one evening in the Princess's
chamber just as she was going to bed, without her ever understanding
by what secret door he had gained admission; and what this man had told
her no one in the world knew; but he must have revealed to her the
abominable origin of those three hundred millions, and perhaps have
exacted from her an oath to offer reparation for so many iniquities,
if she wished to avoid the most frightful catastrophes. Then the man
had disappeared; and now during the five years that she had been
a widow, either in obedience to an order received from the realms
beyond, or through a simple revolt of honesty when the record of her
fortune had fallen into her hands, she had lived in a burning fever of
renunciation and reparation. All the pent-up feelings of this woman,
who had not known love, and who had not succeeded in becoming a mother,
and especially her unsatisfied affection for children, blossomed forth
in a veritable passion for the poor, the weak, the disinherited, the
suffering, from whom she believed the stolen millions to be withheld,
to whom she swore to restore them royally in a rain of alms. A fixed
idea took possession of her, a thought she could not get rid of had
been driven into her brain; she henceforth simply looked upon herself
as a banker with whom the poor had deposited those millions, in order
that they might be employed for their benefit in the most advantageous
way. She herself was but an accountant, a business agent, living in
a realm to figures, amidst a population of notaries, architects, and
workmen. She had established a vast office in town, where a score of
employees worked. In her three small rooms at home she only received
four or five intermediaries, her lieutenants; and there she passed
her days, at a desk, like the director of some great enterprise,
cloistered far away from the importunate among a growing heap of
papers spread out all around her. It was a dream to relieve every
misery, from that of the child who suffers from being born, to that
of the old man who cannot die without suffering. During those five
years, scattering gold by the handful, she had founded the St. Mary's
Infant Asylum at La Villette--an asylum with white cradles for the
very little and blue beds for the bigger ones--a vast, well-lighted
establishment, already occupied by three hundred children; then had
come the St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum at Saint Mandé, where a hundred
boys and a hundred girls received such education and training as
are given in _bourgeois_ families; next an asylum for the aged at
Châtillon, capable of accommodating fifty men and fifty women, and
finally a hospital--the St. Marceau Hospital it was called--in one of
the suburbs of Paris. Here the wards, containing a couple of hundred
beds, had only just been opened. But her favourite foundation, that
which at this moment absorbed her whole heart, was the Institute of
Work,[11] a creation of her own, which was to take the place of the
House of Correction, and where three hundred children, one hundred and
fifty girls and one hundred and fifty boys, rescued from crime and
debauchery on the pavements of Paris, were to be regenerated by good
care and apprenticeship at a trade. These various foundations, with
large donations to public establishments and a reckless prodigality in
private charity, had in five years devoured almost a hundred millions
of francs. At this rate, in a few years more she would be ruined,
without having reserved even a small income to buy the bread and milk
upon which she now lived. When her old servant Sophie, breaking her
accustomed silence, scolded her with a harsh word, prophesying that she
would die a beggar, she gave a feeble smile, now the only one that ever
appeared on her colourless lips, a divine smile of hope.
It was precisely in connection with the Institute of Work that Saccard
made Princess d'Orviedo's acquaintance. He was one of the owners of
the land which she bought for this institution, an old garden planted
with beautiful trees reaching to the Park of Neuilly, and skirting
the Boulevard Bineau. He had attracted her by his brisk way of doing
business; and, certain difficulties arising with her contractors, she
wished to see him again. He himself had become greatly interested in
what she was doing--struck, charmed by the grand plan which she had
imposed upon the architect: two monumental wings, one for the boys,
the other for the girls, connected with each other by a main building
containing the chapel, the common departments, the offices, and
various services; and each wing with its spacious yard, its workshops,
its outbuildings of all sorts. But what particularly fired his
enthusiasm, given his own taste for the grand and the gorgeous, was
the luxury displayed, the very vastness of the edifice, the materials
employed in building it--materials which would defy the centuries--the
marble lavished upon all sides, the kitchen walled and floored with
_faïence_, and with sufficient accommodation for the roasting of an ox,
the gigantic dining-halls with rich oak panellings and ceilings, the
dormitories flooded with light and enlivened with bright paintings,
the linen room, the bath room, and the infirmary, where all the
appointments bespoke extreme refinement; and on all sides there were
broad entrances, stairways, corridors, ventilated in summer and heated
in winter; and the entire house, bathed in the sunlight, had the gaiety
of youth, the complete comfort which only immense wealth can procure.
When the anxious architect, considering all this magnificence useless,
spoke to the Princess of the expense, she stopped him with a word:
she had enjoyed luxury; she wished to give it to the poor, that they
might enjoy it in their turn--they who create the luxury of the rich.
Her fixed idea centred in this dream; to gratify every desire of the
wretched, to provide them with the same beds, the same fare, as the
fortunate ones of this world.
There was to be no question of a crust of bread, or a chance pallet
by way of alms; but life on a large scale within this palace, where
they would be at home, taking their revenge, tasting the enjoyment
of conquerors. Only, amidst all this squandering, all these enormous
estimates, she was abominably robbed; a swarm of contractors lived upon
her, to say nothing of the losses due to inadequate superintendence;
the property of the poor was being wasted. And it was Saccard who
opened her eyes to this, begging her to let him set her accounts
straight. And he did this in a thoroughly disinterested way, solely for
the pleasure of regulating this mad dance of millions which aroused his
enthusiasm. Never before had he shown himself so scrupulously honest.
In this colossal, complicated affair he proved the most active, most
upright of helpers, giving his time and even his money, taking his
reward simply in the delight which he felt at such large sums passing
through his hands. Scarcely anyone but himself was known at the
Institute of Work, whither the Princess never went, any more than she
visited her other establishments, preferring to remain hidden within
her three little rooms, like some invisible good fairy, whilst he was
adored, blessed, overwhelmed with all the gratitude which she did not
seem to desire.
It was at this time undoubtedly that Saccard began nursing the
indefinite project, which, when once he was installed as a tenant in
the Orviedo mansion, became transformed into a sharp, well-defined
desire. Why should he not devote himself entirely to the management
of the Princess's charitable enterprises? In the period of doubt in
which he found himself, vanquished on the field of speculation, not
knowing how to rebuild his fortune, this course appeared to him like
a new incarnation, a sudden deifical ascent. To become the dispenser
of that royal charity, the channel through which would roll that flood
of gold that was pouring upon Paris! There were two hundred millions
left; what works might still be created, what a city of miracle might
be made to spring from the soil! To say nothing of the fact that he
would make those millions fruitful, double, triple them, know so
well how to employ them that he would make them yield a world. Then,
in his passionate fever, his ideas broadened; he lived in this one
intoxicating thought of scattering those millions broadcast in endless
alms, of drowning all happy France with them; and he grew sentimental,
for his probity was without a reproach--not a sou stuck to his fingers.
In his brain--the brain of a visionary--a giant idyl took shape, the
idyl of one free from all self-consciousness, an idyl in no wise due
to any desire to atone for his old financial brigandage. There was
the less cause for any such desire, as at the end there still lay the
dream of his entire life, the conquest of Paris. To be the king of
charity, the adored God of the multitude of the poor, to become unique
and popular, to occupy the attention of the world--it even surpassed
his ambition. What prodigies could he not realize, should he employ
in goodness his business faculties, his strategy, obstinacy, and utter
freedom from prejudice! And he would have the irresistible power which
wins battles, money, coffers full of money, which often does so much
harm, and which would do so much good as soon as it should be used to
satisfy his pride and pleasure.
Then, enlarging his project still further, Saccard came to the point
of asking himself why he should not marry the Princess d'Orviedo.
That would determine their mutual position, and prevent all evil
interpretations. For a month he manœuvred adroitly, disclosed superb
plans, sought to make himself indispensable; and one day, in a tranquil
voice, again becoming ingenuous, he made his proposal, developed his
great project. It was a veritable partnership that he proposed; he
offered himself as the liquidator of the sums stolen by the Prince;
pledged himself to return them to the poor tenfold. The Princess, in
her eternal black dress, with her lace fichu on her head, listened to
him attentively, no emotion whatever animating her sallow face. She was
very much struck with the advantages that such an association might
offer, and quite indifferent to the other considerations. However,
having postponed her answer till the next day, she finally refused;
she had upon reflection doubtless realized that she would no longer be
sole mistress of her charities, and these she meant to dispense with
absolute sovereignty, even if she did so madly. However, she explained
that she would be happy to retain him as a counsellor; and showed how
precious she considered his collaboration by begging him to continue to
attend to the Institute of Work, of which he was the real director.
For a whole week Saccard experienced violent chagrin, as one does at
the loss of a cherished idea; not that he felt himself falling back
into the abyss of brigandage; but, just as a sentimental song will
bring tears to the eyes of the most abject drunkard, so this colossal
idyl of good accomplished by dint of millions had moved his corsair
soul. Once more he fell, and from a great height: it seemed to him
that he was dethroned. From money he had always sought to derive,
in addition to the satisfaction of his appetites, the magnificence
of a princely life, and never had he sufficiently achieved it. He
grew enraged as one by one his tumbles carried away his hopes. And
thus, when his project was destroyed by the Princess's quiet, precise
refusal, he was thrown back into a furious desire for battle. To fight,
to prove the strongest in the stern war of speculation, to eat up
others in order to keep them from eating him, was, after his thirst
for splendour and enjoyment, the one great motive of his passion
for business. Though he did not heap up treasure, he had another
joy, the delight attending on the struggle between vast amounts of
money pitted against one another--fortunes set in battle array, like
contending army corps, the clash of conflicting millions, with defeats
and victories that intoxicated him. And forthwith there returned his
hatred of Gundermann, his ungovernable longing for revenge. To conquer
Gundermann was the chimerical desire that haunted him, each time that
he found himself prostrate, vanquished. Though he felt the childish
folly attaching to such an attempt, might he not at least cut into
him, make a place for himself opposite him, force him to share, like
those monarchs of neighbouring countries and equal power who treat
each other as cousins? Then it was that the Bourse again attracted
him; his head once more became full of schemes that he might launch;
conflicting projects claimed him in all directions, putting him in
such a fever that he knew not what to decide until the day came when a
supreme, stupendous idea evolved itself from amidst all the others, and
gradually gained entire possession of him.
Since he had been living in the Orviedo mansion, Saccard had
occasionally seen the sister of the engineer Hamelin, who lived in the
little suite of rooms on the second floor, a woman with an admirable
figure--Madame Caroline she was familiarly called. What had especially
struck him, at their first meeting, was her superb white hair, a royal
crown of white hair, which had a most singular effect on the brow
of this woman, who was still young, scarcely thirty-six years old.
At the age of five and twenty her hair had thus turned completely
white. Her eyebrows, which had remained black and very thick, imparted
an expression of youth, and of extreme oddity, to her ermine-girt
countenance. She had never been pretty, for her nose and chin were too
pronounced, and her mouth large with thick lips expressive of exquisite
kindliness. But certainly that white fleece, that wavy whiteness of
fine silken hair, softened her rather stern physiognomy, and added a
grandmother's smiling charm to the freshness and vigour of a beautiful,
passionate woman. She was tall and strongly built, with a free and very
noble carriage.
Every time he met her, Saccard, shorter than she was, followed her
with his eyes, in an interested way, secretly envying her tall figure,
her healthy breadth of shoulders. And gradually, through the servants,
he became acquainted with the whole history of the Hamelins, Caroline
and George. They were the children of a Montpellier physician, a
remarkable _savant_, an enthusiastic Catholic, who had died poor.
At the time of their father's death the girl was eighteen and the
boy nineteen; and, the latter having just entered the Polytechnic
School, his sister followed him to Paris, where she secured a place
as governess. It was she who slipped five-franc pieces into his hand,
and kept him in pocket-money during his two years' course; later,
when, having graduated with a low rank, he had to tramp the pavements,
it was still she who supported him until he found employment.
They adored each other, and it was their dream never to separate.
Nevertheless, an unhoped-for marriage offering itself--the good grace
and keen intelligence of the young girl having made the conquest of a
millionaire brewer in the house where she was employed--George wished
her to accept; a thing which he cruelly repented of, for, after a few
years of married life, Caroline was obliged to apply for a separation
in order to avoid being killed by her husband, who drank and pursued
her with a knife in fits of imbecile jealousy. She was then twenty-six
years old, and again found herself poor, obstinately refusing to claim
any alimony from the man whom she left. But her brother had at last,
after many attempts, put his hand upon a work that pleased him: he was
about to start for Egypt, with the Commission appointed to prosecute
the first investigations connected with the Suez Canal, and he took
his sister with him. She bravely established herself at Alexandria,
and again began giving lessons, while he travelled about the country.
Thus they remained in Egypt until 1859, and saw the first blows of the
pick struck upon the shore at Port Said by a meagre gang of barely a
hundred and fifty navvies, lost amid the sands, and commanded by a
handful of engineers. Then Hamelin, having been sent to Syria to ensure
a constant supply of provisions, remained there, in consequence of a
quarrel with his chiefs. He made Caroline come to Beyrout, where other
pupils awaited her, and launched out into a big enterprise, under
the patronage of a French company--the laying out of a carriage road
from Beyrout to Damascus, the first, the only route opened through
the passes of the Lebanon range. And thus they lived there three
years longer, until the road was finished; he visiting the mountains,
absenting himself for two months to make a trip to Constantinople
through the Taurus, she following him as soon as she could escape,
and fully sharing the revivalist projects which he formed, whilst
tramping about this old land, slumbering beneath the ashes of dead and
vanished civilisations. He had a portfolio full of ideas and plans,
and felt the imperative necessity of returning to France if he was to
give shape to all his vast schemes, establish companies, and find the
necessary capital. And so, after nine years' residence in the East,
they started off, and curiosity prompted them to return by way of
Egypt, where the progress made with the works of the Suez Canal filled
them with enthusiasm. In four years a city had grown up on the strand
at Port Said; an entire people was swarming there; the human ants were
multiplying, changing the face of the earth. In Paris, however, dire
ill-luck awaited Hamelin. For fifteen months he struggled on with his
projects, unable to impart his faith to anyone, too modest as he was,
too taciturn, stranded on that second floor of the Orviedo mansion, in
a little suite of five rooms, for which he paid twelve hundred francs
a year, farther from success than he had even been when roaming over
the mountains and plains of Asia. Their savings rapidly decreased, and
brother and sister came at last to a position of great embarrassment.
In fact, it was this that interested Saccard--the growing sadness of
Madame Caroline, whose hearty gaiety was dimmed by the discouragement
into which she saw her brother falling. She was to some extent the man
of the household; George, who greatly resembled her physically, though
of slighter build, had a rare faculty for work, but he became absorbed
in his studies, and did not like to be roused from them. Never had he
cared to marry, not feeling the need of doing so, his adoration of his
sister sufficing him. This whilom student of the Polytechnic School,
whose conceptions were so vast, whose zeal was so ardent in everything
he undertook, at times evinced such simplicity that one would have
deemed him rather stupid. Brought up, too, in the narrowest Romanism he
had kept the religious faith of a child, careful in his observance of
all rites and ceremonies like a thorough believer; whereas his sister
had regained possession of herself by dint of reading and learning
during the long hours when he was plunged in his technical tasks. She
spoke four languages; she had read the economists and the philosophers,
and had for a time been moved to enthusiasm by socialistic and
evolutionary theories. Subsequently, however, she had quieted
down, acquiring--notably by her travels, her long residence among
far-off civilisations--a broad spirit of tolerance and well-balanced
common-sense. Though she herself no longer believed, she retained great
respect for her brother's faith. There had been one explanation between
them, after which they had never referred to the matter again. She,
with her simplicity and good-nature, was a woman of real intelligence;
and, facing life with extraordinary courage, with a gay bravery which
withstood the cruel blows of fate, she was in the habit of saying that
a single sorrow alone remained within her--that of never having had a
child.
Saccard was able to render Hamelin a service--some little work which
he secured for him from some investors who needed an engineer to
report upon the output of a new machine, and thus he forced an intimacy
with the brother and sister, and frequently went up to spend an hour
with them in their _salon_, their only large room, which they had
transformed into a work room. This room remained virtually bare, for
its only furniture consisted of a long designing table, a smaller
table covered with papers, and half a dozen chairs. Books were heaped
up on the mantel-shelf, whilst on the walls an improvised decoration
enlivened the blank space--a series of plans, of bright water-colour
drawings, each held in place by four tacks. The plans were those which
Hamelin had gathered together in his portfolio of projects; they were
the notes he had taken in Syria, the bases on which he hoped to build
up all his future fortune; whereas the water-colours were the work of
Madame Caroline--Eastern views, types, and costumes which she had noted
while accompanying her brother about, which she had sketched with keen
insight into the laws of colour, though in a very unpretending way.
Two larger windows overlooking the garden of the Beauvilliers mansion
admitted a bright light to illumine these straggling designs, typical
of another life, of an ancient society sinking into dust, which the
plans, firmly and mathematically outlined, seemed about to put upon its
feet again, supported, as it were, by the solid scaffolding of modern
science. And Saccard, when he had rendered himself useful, with that
display of activity which made him so charming, would often linger
before the plans and water-colours, seduced, and continually asking for
fresh explanations. Vast schemes were already germinating in his brain.
One morning he found Madame Caroline seated alone at the little table
which she used as her desk. She was dreadfully sad, her hands resting
among her papers.
'What can you expect?' said she, 'things are turning out very badly.
I am brave, but everything seems about to fail us at once; and what
distresses me is the powerlessness to which misfortune reduces my poor
brother, for he is not valiant, he has no strength except for work.
I thought of getting another situation as governess, that I might at
least help him. But I have sought, and found nothing. Yet I cannot go
out working as a charwoman.'
Never had Saccard seen her so upset, so dejected. 'The devil! you have
not come to that!' he cried.
She shook her head, and evinced great bitterness against life, which
she usually accepted so jovially, even when at its worst. And Hamelin
just then coming in with the news of a fresh disappointment, big tears
ran slowly down her cheeks. She spoke no further, but sat there, her
hands clenched on the table, her eyes wandering away into space.
'And to think,' said Hamelin, 'that there are millions awaiting us in
the East, if someone would only help me to make them!'
Saccard had planted himself in front of a plan representing a view of a
pavilion surrounded by vast store-houses. 'What is that?' he asked.
'Oh! something I did for my amusement,' explained the engineer. 'It's
the plan of a dwelling at Beyrout for the manager of the Company which
I dreamed of, you know, the United Steam Navigation Company.'
He became animated, and went into fresh particulars. During his stay
in the East, he had noticed how defective were all the transport
services. The various companies established at Marseilles were ruining
one another by competition, and were unable to provide vessels in
sufficient number or of sufficient comfort. One of his first ideas,
the very basis indeed of his many enterprises, was to syndicate these
services, to unite them in one vast, wealthy company, which should
exploit the entire Mediterranean, and acquire the sovereign control
thereof, by establishing lines to all the ports of Africa, Spain,
Italy, Greece, Egypt, Asia, and even the remotest parts of the Black
Sea. It was a scheme worthy at once of a shrewd organiser and a good
patriot; it meant the East conquered, given to France, to say nothing
of the close relations which it would establish with Syria, where lay
the vast field of his proposed operations.
'Syndicates,' murmured Saccard--'yes, nowadays the future seems to
lie in that direction. It is such a powerful form of association!
Three or four little enterprises, which vegetate in isolation, acquire
irresistible vitality and prosperity as soon as they unite. Yes,
to-morrow belongs to the association of capital, to the centralised
efforts of immense masses. All industry and commerce will end in a
single huge bazaar, where a man will provide himself with everything.'
He had stopped again, this time before a water-colour which represented
a wild locality, an arid gorge, blocked up by a gigantic pile of rocks
crowned with brambles. 'Oh! oh!' he resumed, 'here is the end of the
world. There can be no danger of being jostled by passers-by in that
nook.'
'A Carmel gorge,' answered Hamelin. 'My sister sketched it while I was
making my studies in that neighbourhood,' and he added simply: 'See!
between the cretaceous limestone and the porphyry which raised up that
limestone over the entire mountain-side, there is a considerable vein
of sulphuretted silver--yes, a silver mine, the working of which,
according to my calculations, would yield enormous profits.'
'A silver mine?' repeated Saccard eagerly.
Madame Caroline, with her eyes still wandering far away, had overheard
them amid her fit of sadness, and, as if a vision had risen before
her, she said: 'Carmel, ah! what a desert, what days of solitude! It
is full of myrtle and broom, which make the warm air balmy. And there
are eagles continually circling aloft--and to think of all this silver,
sleeping in that sepulchre, beside so much misery, where one would like
to see happy multitudes, workshops, cities spring up--a whole people
regenerated by toil.'
'A road could easily be opened from Carmel to Saint Jean d'Acre,'
continued Hamelin. 'And I firmly believe that iron, too, would be found
there, for it abounds in all the mountains in the neighbourhood. I have
also studied a new system of extraction, by which large savings could
be made. All is ready; it is only a matter of finding the capital.'
'The Carmel Silver Mining Company!' murmured Saccard.
But it was now the engineer who, with raised eyes, went from one plan
to another, again full of this labour of his life, seized with fever,
at thought of the brilliant future which was sleeping there while
want was paralysing him. 'And these are only the small preliminary
affairs,' he continued. 'Look at this series of plans; here is the
grand stroke, a complete railway system traversing Asia Minor from end
to end. The lack of convenient and rapid communication, that is the
primary cause of the stagnation into which this rich country has sunk.
You would not find a single carriage road there, travel and transport
being invariably effected by means of mules or camels. So imagine the
revolution if the iron horse could penetrate to the confines of the
desert! Industry and commerce would be increased tenfold, civilisation
would be victorious, Europe would at last open the gates of the East.
Oh! if it interests you, we will talk of it in detail. And you shall
see, you shall see!'
And such was his excitement that he could not refrain from straightway
entering into explanations. It was especially during his journey to
Constantinople that he had studied his projected railway system. The
great, the only difficulty was presented by the Taurus mountains; but
he had explored the different passes, and asserted that a direct and
comparatively inexpensive line was possible. However, it was not his
intention to make the system complete at one stroke. On obtaining
a full grant from the Sultan, it would be prudent at the outset to
merely lay down the mother line, from Broussa to Beyrout, by way of
Angora and Aleppo. Later on, they might lay down branch lines from
Smyrna to Angora, and from Trebizond to Angora, by way of Erzeroum and
Sivas. 'And after that, and after that,' he continued; but, instead of
finishing, he contented himself with a smile, not daring to tell how
far he had carried the audacity of his projects.
'Ah! the plains at the foot of Taurus,' said Madame Caroline, in
the slow, low voice of an awakened sleeper; 'what a delightful
paradise! One has only to scratch the earth, and harvests spring up
in abundance. The boughs of the fruit trees, peach, cherry, fig, and
almond, break under their weight of fruit. And what fields of olive and
mulberry--dense as woods! And what a natural, easy existence in that
light atmosphere, under that sky for ever blue!'
Saccard began to laugh, with that shrill laugh betokening a fine
appetite, which was his whenever he scented fortune. And, as Hamelin
went on talking yet of more projects, notably of the establishment of
a bank at Constantinople, with just an allusion to the all-powerful
relations which he had left behind him, especially with the _entourage_
of the Grand Vizier, he interrupted him to say gaily: 'Why, it is Tom
Tiddler's land, one could sell it!' Then, very familiarly resting both
hands on the shoulders of Madame Caroline, who was still sitting at the
table, he added: 'Don't despair, madame. I have great sympathy for you;
between us, your brother and I, we will do something that will benefit
all of us. You'll see; be patient, and wait.'
During the ensuing month Saccard again procured some little jobs for
the engineer; and though he talked no further of the latter's grand
enterprises, he must have steadily thought of them, hesitating the
while on account of their crushing magnitude.
The bond of intimacy between them was drawn tighter, however, by the
wholly natural fashion in which Madame Caroline came to occupy herself
with his household, the household of a single man, whose resources were
diminished by useless expenses, and who was the worse served the more
servants he had. He, so shrewd out of doors, famous for the vigour and
cunning of his hand when any huge robbery had to be perpetrated, let
everything go helter-skelter at home, careless of the frightful waste
that tripled his expenses; and the absence of a woman was cruelly
felt, even in the smallest matters. When Madame Caroline perceived
how he was being pillaged, she at first gave him advice, and then
intervened in person, with the result of effecting a saving in two or
three directions, so that one day he laughingly offered her a position
as his housekeeper. Why not? She had sought a place as governess, and
might well accept an honourable situation, which would permit her to
wait. The offer made in jest became a serious one. Would it not give
her occupation, and enable her to assist her brother to the extent, at
any rate, of the three hundred francs a month that Saccard was willing
to give? And so she accepted. She reformed the household in a week,
discharging the _chef_ and his wife, and replacing them by a female
cook, who, with the valet and the coachman, would suffice for Saccard's
requirements. Further, she retained but one horse and one carriage,
assumed authority over everything, and examined the accounts with such
scrupulous care that at the end of the first fortnight she had reduced
expenses by one-half. He was delighted, and jokingly told her that it
was he who was now robbing her, and that she ought to have claimed a
percentage on all the profits that she realised for him.
Then a very intimate life began. Saccard had the idea of removing the
screws that fastened the door which supplied communication between
the two suites of rooms, and they went up and down freely, from one
dining-room to the other, by the inner staircase. While her brother
was at work, shut up from morning till night, busy with the task of
putting his Eastern designs in order, Madame Caroline, leaving her own
household to the care of the one servant in her employ, came down at
all hours of the day to give her orders, as though she were at home. It
had become Saccard's joy to see this tall, stately woman continually
appear and cross the rooms with a firm, superb step, bringing with her
the ever-unexpected gaiety of her white hair flying about her young
face. Again she was very gay; she had recovered her courage now that
she felt she was useful once more, her time occupied, her feet ever
on the move. Without any affectation of simplicity, she always wore a
black dress, in the pocket of which could be heard the jingling of her
bunch of keys; and it certainly amused her--she, the woman of learning,
the philosopher--to be solely a good housewife, the housekeeper of a
prodigal, whom she was beginning to love as one loves naughty children.
He, greatly attracted for a time, calculating that after all there was
but a difference of fourteen years between them, had asked himself what
would happen should he some day talk to her of love. He knew, however,
that a friend of her brother's, a Monsieur Beaudoin, a merchant whom
they had left at Beyrout, and whose return to France was near at hand,
had been much in love with her, to the point indeed of offering to wait
for the death of her husband, who had just been shut up in an asylum,
crazy with alcoholism.
In this connection it suddenly happened that Madame Caroline subsided
into deep sorrow. One morning she came down dejected, extremely pale,
and with heavy eyes. Saccard could learn nothing from her; in fact, he
ceased to question her, so obstinately did she declare that there was
no trouble, and that she was just as usual. Only on the following day
did he understand matters on finding in the rooms upstairs the printed
notification of M. Beaudoin's marriage to an English consul's daughter,
who was both very young and immensely rich. The blow must have been
the harder because of the arrival of the news in this way, without
any preparation, without even a farewell. It was a complete collapse
in the unfortunate woman's existence, the loss of the far-off hope
to which she had clung in hours of disaster. And chance also proved
abominably cruel, for only two days before she had learnt that her
husband was dead; for forty-eight hours she had been able to believe in
the approaching realisation of her dream, and then her life had fallen
into ruin, leaving her as if annihilated. That same evening, when, in
accordance with her habit, she entered Saccard's rooms to talk of the
orders for the next day, he spoke to her of her misfortune so gently
that she burst out sobbing; and then the inevitable came to pass, words
of comfort were at last followed by words of love, and Madame Caroline
fell.
For a fortnight afterwards she remained in a state of frightful
sadness. The strength of life, that impulse which makes existence
a necessity and a delight, had abandoned her. She attended to her
manifold occupations, but like one whose mind was far away, without any
illusion as to the ratio and interest of things. She personified the
human machine still toiling on, but in despair over the annihilation
of everything. And, amid this shipwreck of her bravery and gaiety,
she had but one distraction, that of passing all her spare time with
her brow pressed against the panes of one of the windows of the large
work-room, her eyes fixed upon the garden of the neighbouring mansion,
that Hôtel Beauvilliers where, since the first days of her sojourn in
the neighbourhood, she had divined the presence of anguish, of one of
those hidden miseries which are all the more distressing by reason
of the effort made to save appearances. There, too, were beings who
suffered, and her sorrow was, so to speak, steeped in their tears; at
sight of which she was so overcome with melancholy as to deem herself
insensible, dead, lost in the sorrow of others.
These Beauvilliers--who, to say nothing of their immense estates in
Touraine and Anjou, had formerly possessed a magnificent mansion in the
Rue de Grenelle--now, in Paris, only owned this old pleasure-house,
built at the beginning of the last century outside the city walls, and
at present shut in among the gloomy buildings of the Rue Saint-Lazare.
The few beautiful trees of the garden lingered there, as at the bottom
of a well; and the cracked, crumbling entrance-steps were covered
with moss. The place seemed like some corner of Nature put in prison,
a meek, mournful nook where dumb despair reigned, and where the sun
only cast a greenish light, which chilled one's shoulders. And in this
still, damp, cellar-like place, at the top of the disjoined steps,
the first person noticed by Madame Caroline had been the Countess de
Beauvilliers, a tall, thin woman of sixty, with perfectly white hair
and a very noble old-time air. With her large straight nose, thin lips,
and particularly long neck, she looked like a very old swan, meekly
woeful. Then, almost immediately behind her, had come her daughter,
Alice de Beauvilliers, now twenty-five years old, but with such an
impoverished constitution that one would have taken her for a little
girl, had it not been for the spoiled complexion and already drawn
features of her face. She was her mother over again, but more puny
and with less aristocratic nobility, her neck elongated to the point
of ugliness, having nothing left her, indeed, but the pitiful charm
that may cling to the last daughter of a great race. The two women
had been living alone since the son, Ferdinand de Beauvilliers, had
enlisted in the Pontifical Zouaves, after the battle of Castelfidardo,
lost by Lamoricière. Every day, when it did not rain, they thus
appeared, one behind the other, and, descending the steps, made the
circuit of the little central grass-plot, without exchanging a word.
The path was merely edged with ivy; flowers would not have grown in
such a spot, or perhaps they would have cost too dear. And the slow
promenade--undoubtedly a simple constitutional--made by those two pale
women, under the centenarian trees which long ago had witnessed so many
festivities, and which the neighbouring _bourgeois_ houses were now
stifling, was suggestive of a melancholy grief, as though they had been
performing some mourning ceremony for old, dead things.
Her interest aroused, Madame Caroline had watched her neighbours out of
tender sympathy, without evil curiosity of any kind; and gradually from
her view of the garden she penetrated their life, which they hid with
jealous care from the street. There was still a horse in the stable,
and a carriage in the coach-house, in the care of an old domestic who
was at once valet, coachman, and door-porter; just as there was a cook,
who also served as a chambermaid; but if the carriage went out at
the main gate, with the horse properly harnessed, to take the ladies
visiting, and if there was a certain display at table in the winter, at
the fortnightly dinners to which a few friends came, how long were the
fasts, how sordid the economies that were hourly practised in order to
secure this false semblance of fortune! In a little shed, screened from
every eye, there were, in order to reduce the laundry bill, continual
washings of wretched garments worn out by frequent soaping, and mended
thread by thread; three or four vegetables were picked for the evening
meal; bread was allowed to grow stale on a board, in order that less
of it might be eaten; all sorts of avaricious, mean, and touching
practices were resorted to: the old coachman would sew up the holes in
Mademoiselle's boots, the cook would blacken the tips of Madame's faded
gloves with ink; and then the mother's dresses were passed over to the
daughter after ingenious transformations; and hats and bonnets lasted
for years, thanks to changes of flowers and ribbons.
When they were expecting no one, the reception rooms on the ground
floor were kept carefully closed, as well as the large apartments of
the first storey; for, of the whole large pile, the two women now
occupied but one small room, which they used both as their dining-room
and boudoir. When the window was partly open, the Countess could be
seen mending her linen, like some needy little _bourgeoise_; while
the young girl, between her piano and her box of water-colours, knit
stockings and mittens for her mother. One very stormy day, both were
seen to go down into the garden, and gather up the sand of the pathway,
which the violence of the rain was sweeping away.
Madame Caroline now knew their history. The Countess de Beauvilliers
had suffered much from her husband, a rake of whom she had never
complained. One evening they had brought him home to her at Vendôme,
with the death-rattle in his throat and a bullet-hole through his body.
There was talk of a hunting accident, some shot fired by a jealous
gamekeeper whose wife or daughter he had probably seduced. And the
worst of it was that with him vanished that formerly colossal fortune
of the Beauvilliers, consisting of immense tracts of land, regal
domains, which the Revolution had already found diminished, and which
his father and himself had now exhausted. Of all the vast property,
a single farm remained, the Aublets, situated at a few leagues from
Vendôme and yielding a rental of about fifteen thousand francs, the
sole resource left for the widow and her two children. The mansion
in the Rue de Grenelle had long since been sold; and that in the Rue
Saint-Lazare consumed the larger part of the fifteen thousand francs
derived from the farm, for it was heavily mortgaged, and would in its
turn be sold if they did not pay the interest. Thus scarcely six or
seven thousand francs were left for the support of four persons, of
the household of a noble family still unwilling to abdicate. It was
now eight years since the Countess, on becoming a widow with a son of
twenty and a daughter of seventeen, had, amid the crumbling of her
fortune, and with her aristocratic pride waxing within her, sworn that
she would live on bread and water rather than fall. From that time
she had indeed had but one thought--to hold her rank, to marry her
daughter to a man of equal nobility, and to make a soldier of her son.
At first Ferdinand had caused her mortal anxieties in consequence of
some youthful follies, debts which it became necessary to pay; but,
warned of the situation in a solemn interview with his mother, he had
not repeated the offence, for he had a tender heart at bottom, albeit
he was simply an idle cypher in the world, unfitted for any employment,
any possible place in contemporary society. And, now that he was a
soldier of the Pope, he was still a cause of secret anguish to the
Countess, for he lacked health, delicate despite his proud bearing,
with impoverished, feeble blood, which rendered the Roman climate
dangerous for him. As for Alice's marriage, it was so slow in coming
that the sad mother's eyes filled with tears when she looked at her
daughter already growing old, withering whilst she waited. Despite
her air of melancholy insignificance, the girl was not stupid; she
had ardent aspirations for life, for a man who would love her, for
happiness; but, not wishing to plunge the house into yet deeper grief,
she pretended to have renounced everything; making a jest of marriage,
and saying that it was her vocation to be an old maid; though at night
she would weep on her pillow, almost dying of grief at the thought
that she would never be mated. The Countess, however, by prodigies of
avarice, had succeeded in laying aside twenty thousand francs, which
constituted Alice's entire dowry. She had likewise saved from the wreck
a few jewels--a bracelet, some finger-rings and ear-rings, the whole
possibly worth ten thousand francs--a very meagre dowry, a wedding-gift
of which she did not dare to speak, since it was scarcely enough to
meet the necessary expenditure, should the awaited husband ever appear.
And yet she would not despair, but struggled on in spite of everything,
unwilling to abandon a single one of the privileges of her birth,
still as haughty, as observant of the proprieties as ever, incapable
of going out on foot, or of cutting off a single _entremets_ when she
was receiving guests, but ever reducing the outlay of her hidden life,
condemning herself for weeks to potatoes without butter, in order that
she might add another fifty francs to her daughter's ever-insufficient
dowry. It was a painful, puerile daily heroism that she practised,
whilst week by week the house was crumbling a little more about their
heads.
So far, however, Madame Caroline had not had an opportunity of speaking
to the Countess and her daughter. Although she finally came to know
the most private details of their life, those which they hid from
the entire world, she had as yet only exchanged glances with them,
those glances that suddenly turn into a feeling of secret sympathy.
The Princess d'Orviedo was destined to bring them together. She had
the idea of appointing a sort of committee of superintendence for her
Institute of Work--a committee composed of ten ladies, who would meet
twice a month, visit the Institute in detail, and see that all the
departments were properly managed. Having reserved the selection of
these ladies for herself, she designated, among the very first, Madame
de Beauvilliers, who had been a great friend of hers in former days,
but had become simply her neighbour, now that she had retired from the
world. And it had come about that the committee of superintendence,
having suddenly lost its secretary, Saccard, who retained authority
over the management of the establishment, had recommended Madame
Caroline as a model secretary, such a one as could not be found
elsewhere. The duties of the post were rather arduous; there was
much clerical work, and even some material cares, that were somewhat
repugnant to the ladies of the committee. From the start, however,
Madame Caroline had shown herself an admirable hospitaller; for her
unsatisfied longing for maternity, her hopeless love of children,
kindled within her an active tenderness for all those poor creatures
whom it was sought to save from the Parisian gutter. In this wise,
at the last meeting of the committee, she had met the Countess de
Beauvilliers; but the latter had given her rather a cold salute,
striving to conceal her secret embarrassment, for she undoubtedly
realised that this Madame Caroline was an eye-witness of her poverty.
However, they now both bowed whenever their eyes met, since it would
have been gross impoliteness to pretend they did not recognise each
other.
One day, in the large workroom, while Hamelin was correcting a plan
in accordance with some new calculations he had made, and Saccard,
standing by, was watching his work, Madame Caroline, at the window as
usual, gazed at the Countess and her daughter as they made their tour
of the garden. That morning she noticed that they were wearing shoes
which a rag-picker would have scorned to touch.
'Ah! the poor women!' she murmured; 'how terrible and distressing it
must be, that comedy of luxury which they think themselves obliged to
play!'
So saying, she drew back, hiding herself behind the window-curtain, for
fear lest the mother should see her and suffer yet more intensely at
being thus watched. She herself had grown calmer during the three weeks
that she had been lingering every morning at that window; the great
sorrow born of her abandonment was quieting down; it seemed as if the
sight of the woes of others induced a more courageous acceptance of her
own, that fall which she had deemed the fall of her entire life. Again,
indeed, she occasionally caught herself laughing.
For a moment longer, and with an air of profound meditation, she
watched the two women pace the garden, green with moss; then, quickly
turning towards Saccard, she exclaimed: 'Tell me why it is that I
cannot be sad. No, it never lasts, has never lasted; I cannot be sad,
whatever happens to me. Is it egotism? Really, I do not think so.
Egotism would be wrong; and, besides, it is in vain that I am gay; my
heart seems ready to break at sight of the least sorrow. Reconcile
these things; I am gay, and yet I should weep over all the unfortunates
who pass if I did not restrain myself--understanding as I do that the
smallest scrap of bread would serve their purpose better than my vain
tears.'
So speaking, she laughed her beautiful brave laugh, like a courageous
woman who prefers action to garrulous pity.
'And yet,' she continued, 'God knows that I have had occasion to
despair of everything! Ah! fortune has not favoured me so far. After
my marriage, falling as I did into a perfect hell, insulted, beaten,
I really believed that there was nothing for me to do but to throw
myself into the water. I did not throw myself into it, however, and a
fortnight later, when I started with my brother for the East, I was
quite lively again, full of immense hope. And at the time of our return
to Paris, when almost everything else failed us, I passed abominable
nights, when I pictured ourselves dying of hunger amid all our fine
projects. We did not die, however, and again I began to dream of
wonderful things, happy things, that sometimes made me laugh as I sat
alone. And lately, when I received that frightful blow, which I still
don't dare to speak of, my heart seemed torn away; yes, I positively
felt it stop beating; I thought that it had ceased to be, I fancied
that I myself no longer existed, annihilated as I was. But not at
all! Here is existence returning; to-day I laugh, and to-morrow I
shall hope; I shall be longing to live on, to live for ever. Is it not
extraordinary that I cannot long be sad?'
Saccard, who was laughing also, shrugged his shoulders. 'Bah! you are
like the rest of the world. Such is life,' he said.
'Do you think so?' she cried, in astonishment. 'It seems to me there
are some people who are so sad that they never know a gay moment,
people who render their own life intolerable, in such dark colours
do they paint it. Oh! not that I entertain any illusion as to the
pleasantness and beauty which it offers. In my case it has been too
hard: I have seen it too closely, too freely, under all aspects. It
is execrable when it is not ignoble. But what would you have? I love
it all the same. Why? I do not know. In vain does everything crumble
around me; on the morrow I find myself standing on the ruins, gay and
confident. I have often thought that my case is, on a small scale, the
case of humanity, which certainly lives in frightful wretchedness,
cheered up, however, by the youth of each succeeding generation. After
each crisis that throws me down, there comes something like a new
youth, a spring time whose promise of sap warms me and inspirits my
heart. So true is this that, after some severe affliction, if I go
out into the street, into the sunshine, I straightway begin loving,
hoping, feeling happy again. And age has no influence upon me; I am
simple enough to grow old without noticing it. You see, I have read a
great deal more than a woman should; I no longer know where I myself
am going, any more than this vast world knows where it is going,
for that matter. Only, in spite of myself, it seems to me that I am
going, indeed that we are all going, towards something very good and
thoroughly gay.'
Although affected, she ended by turning the matter into jest, trying to
hide the emotion born of her hope; whilst her brother, who had raised
his head, looked at her with mingled adoration and gratitude.
'Oh! you,' he declared, 'you are made for catastrophes; you personify
the love of life, whatever it may be.'
These daily morning conversations gradually became instinct with a kind
of fever. If Madame Caroline returned to that natural inherent gaiety
of hers, it was due to the courage which Saccard, with his active zeal
for great enterprises, imparted. It was, indeed, now almost decided:
they were going to turn the famous portfolio to account; and when the
financier's shrill voice rang out everything seemed to acquire life, to
assume colossal proportions. They would, in the first place, lay hands
on the Mediterranean, conquer it by means of their steamship company.
And, enumerating all the ports where they would establish stations,
he mingled dim classical memories with his stock-exchange enthusiasm,
chanting the praises of that sea, the only one which the old world had
known, that blue sea around which civilisation had blossomed, and whose
waves had bathed the ancient cities--Athens, Rome, Tyre, Alexandria,
Carthage, Marseilles--all those seats of commerce and empire that have
made Europe. Then, when they had ensured themselves possession of that
vast waterway to the East, they would make a start in Syria with that
little matter of the Carmel Silver Mining Company, just a few millions
to gain _en passant_, but a capital thing to introduce, for the idea of
a silver mine, of money found in the bowels of the earth and thrown up
by the shovelful, was still attractive to the public, especially when
ticketed with a prodigious, resounding name like that of Carmel. There
were also coal mines there, coal just beneath the rock, which would be
worth gold when the country should be covered with factories; to say
nothing of other little ventures, which would serve as interludes--the
establishment of banks and industrial syndicates, and the opening up
and felling of the vast Lebanon forests, whose huge trees were rotting
where they stood for want of roads. Finally, he came to the giant
morsel, the Oriental Railway Company, and then he began to rave, for
that system of railroads cast over Asia Minor from one end to the
other, like a net, to him meant speculation, financial life, at one
stroke seizing hold of a new prey--that old world still intact, with
incalculable wealth concealed under the ignorance and grime of ages.
He scented the treasure, and neighed like a war-horse at the smell of
powder.
Madame Caroline, albeit possessed of sterling good sense, and not
easily influenced by feverish imaginations, yielded at last to this
enthusiasm, no longer detecting its extravagance. In truth, it fanned
her affection for the East, her longing to again behold that wonderful
country, where she had thought herself so happy; and, by a logical
counter-effect, without calculation on her part, it was she who, by her
glowing descriptions and wealth of information, stimulated the fever
of Saccard. When she began talking of Beyrout, where she had lived for
three years, she could never stop; Beyrout lying at the foot of the
Lebanon range, on a tongue of land, between a stretch of red sand and
piles of fallen rock; Beyrout with its houses reared in amphitheatral
fashion amid vast gardens; a delightful paradise of orange, lemon, and
palm trees. Then there were all the cities of the coast: on the north,
Antioch, fallen from its whilom splendour; on the south, Saida, the
Sidon of long ago, Saint Jean d'Acre, Jaffa, and Tyre, now Sur, which
sums them all up: Tyre, whose merchants were kings, whose mariners made
the circuit of Africa, and which to-day, with its sand-choked harbour,
is nothing but a field of ruins, the dust of palaces, where stand only
a few fishermen's wretched and scattered huts.
And Madame Caroline had accompanied her brother everywhere; she knew
Aleppo, Angora, Broussa, Smyrna, and even Trebizond. She had lived a
month at Jerusalem, sleeping amid the traffic of the holy places; then
two months more at Damascus, the queen of the East, standing in the
midst of a vast plain--a commercial, industrial city, which the Mecca
and Bagdad caravans fill with swarming life. She was also acquainted
with the valleys and mountains, with the villages of the Maronites and
the Druses, perched upon table-lands or hidden away in gorges, and with
the cultivated and the sterile fields. And from the smallest nooks,
from the silent deserts as from the great cities, she had brought back
the same admiration for inexhaustible, luxuriant nature, the same wrath
against evil-minded humanity. How much natural wealth was disdained
or wasted! She spoke of the burdens that crushed both commerce and
industry, the imbecile law that prevents the investment of more than a
certain amount of capital in agriculture, the routine that leaves the
peasant with nothing but the old plough which was in use before the
days of Christ, and the ignorance in which millions of men are steeped
even to-day, like idiotic children stopped in their growth. Once upon a
time the coast had proved too small; the cities had touched each other;
but now life had gone away towards the West, and only an immense,
abandoned cemetery seemed to remain. No schools, no roads, the worst of
Governments, justice sold, execrable officials, crushing taxes, absurd
laws, idleness, and fanaticism, to say nothing of the continual shocks
of civil war, massacres which destroyed entire villages.
And at thought of this she became angry, and asked if it was allowable
that men should thus spoil the work of nature, a land so blest, of such
exquisite beauty, where all climates were to be found--the glowing
plains, the temperate mountain-sides, the perpetual snows of the lofty
peaks. And her love of life, her ever-buoyant hopefulness, filled
her with enthusiasm at the idea of the all-powerful magic wand with
which science and speculation could strike this old sleeping soil, and
suddenly reawaken it.
'Look here!' cried Saccard, 'that Carmel gorge which you have sketched,
where there are now only stones and mastic-trees, well! as soon as we
begin to work the silver mine, there will start up first a village,
then a city! And we will clear all those sand-choked harbours, and
protect them with strong breakwaters. Large ships will anchor where
now mere skiffs do not venture to moor. And you will behold a complete
resurrection over all those depopulated plains, those deserted passes,
which our railway lines will traverse--yes! fields will be cleared,
roads and canals built, new cities will spring from the soil, life
will return as it returns to a sick body, when we stimulate the system
by injecting new blood into the exhausted veins. Yes! money will work
these miracles!'
And such was the evoking power of his piercing voice that Madame
Caroline really saw the predicted civilisation rise up before her.
Those bare diagrams, those sketches in outline, became animated and
peopled; it was the dream that she had sometimes had of an East
cleansed of its filth, drawn from its ignorance, enjoying its fertile
soil and charming sky, amid all the refinements of science. She had
already witnessed such a miracle at Port Said, which in so few years
had lately sprung up on a barren shore; at first some huts to shelter
the few labourers who began the operations, then a city of two thousand
souls, followed by one of ten thousand, with houses, huge shops, a
gigantic pier, life and comfort stubbornly created by toiling human
ants. And it was just this that she saw rising again--the forward,
irresistible march, the social impulse towards the greatest possible
sum of happiness, the need of action, of going ahead, without knowing
exactly whither, but at all events with more elbow-room and under
improved circumstances; and amid it all there was the globe turned
upside down by the ant-swarm rebuilding its abode, its work never
ending, fresh sources of enjoyment ever being discovered, man's power
increasing tenfold, the earth belonging to him more and more every day.
Money, aiding science, yielded progress.
Hamelin, who was listening with a smile, then gave vent to a prudent
remark: 'All this is the poetry of results, and we are not yet at the
prose of starting.'
But Saccard's enthusiasm was only increased by the extravagance of
Madame Caroline's conceptions, and matters even became worse when, on
beginning to read some books about the East, he opened a history of
Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition. The memory of the Crusades already
haunted him, the memory of that return of the West to its cradle the
East, that great movement which had carried extreme Europe back to the
original country, still in full flower, and where there was so much to
learn. But he was struck still more by the towering figure of Napoleon,
going thither to wage war, with a grand and mysterious object. Though
he had talked of conquering Egypt, of installing a French establishment
there, and of thus placing the commerce of the Levant in the hands of
France, he had certainly not told all; and in all that was vain and
enigmatical about the expedition, Saccard fancied he could detect some
mysterious, hugely ambitious project, an immense empire refounded,
Napoleon crowned at Constantinople as Emperor of the East and the
Indies, thus realising the dream of Alexander, and rising to a greater
height than even Cæsar and Charlemagne. Had he not said at Saint
Helena, in speaking of Sidney Smith, the general who had stopped him
before Saint Jean d'Acre: 'That man ruined my fortune'? And it was this
gigantic thought of conquering the East, the scheme which the Crusaders
had attempted, and which Napoleon had been unable to accomplish,
that inflamed Saccard; though, in his case, it was to be a rational
conquest, effected by the double agency of science and money. Since
civilisation had flown from the East to the West, why should it not
come back towards the East, returning to the first garden of humanity,
to that Eden of the Hindustan peninsula which had fallen asleep beneath
the fatigue of centuries? He would endow it with fresh youth; he would
galvanise the earthly paradise, make it habitable again by means of
steam and electricity, replace Asia Minor in the centre of the world,
as a point of intersection of the great natural highways that bind
the continents together. And it was no longer a question of gaining
millions, but milliards and milliards.
After that, Hamelin and he engaged in long conversations every morning.
Vast as was their hope, the difficulties that presented themselves were
numerous and colossal. The engineer, who had been at Beyrout in 1862,
at the very time of the horrible butchery of the Maronite Christians
by the Druses--a butchery which had necessitated the intervention
of France--did not conceal the obstacles which would be encountered
among those populations, who were ever battling together, delivered
over to the tender mercies of the local authorities. However, he had
powerful relations at Constantinople, where he had assured himself
the support of the Grand Vizier, Fuad Pasha, a man of great merit, an
avowed partisan of reforms, from whom, he flattered himself, he would
obtain all necessary grants. On the other hand, whilst prophesying
the inevitable bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, he saw a rather
favourable circumstance in its unlimited need of money, in the loans
which followed one upon another from year to year: for although a needy
Government may offer no personal guarantee, it is usually quite ready
to come to an understanding with private enterprises, if it can detect
the slightest profit in them. And would it not be a practical way of
solving the eternal and embarrassing Eastern question to interest the
empire in great works of civilisation, and gradually lead it towards
progress, that it might no longer constitute a monstrous barrier
between Europe and Asia? What a fine patriotic _rôle_ the French
Companies would play in all this!
Then, one morning, Hamelin quietly broached the secret programme to
which he sometimes alluded, and which he smilingly called the crowning
of his edifice.
'When we have become the masters,' said he, 'we will restore the
kingdom of Palestine, and put the Pope there. At first we might content
ourselves with Jerusalem, with Jaffa as a seaport. Then Syria will be
declared independent, and can be annexed. You know that the time is
near when it will be impossible for the Papacy to remain at Rome under
the revolting humiliations in store for it. It is for that day that we
must have all in readiness.'
Saccard listened open-mouthed whilst Hamelin said these things in a
thoroughly unaffected way, actuated solely by his deep Catholic faith.
The financier himself did not shrink from extravagant dreams, but
never would he have gone to such a point as this. This man of science,
apparently so cold, quite astounded him. 'It's madness!' he cried. 'The
Porte won't give up Jerusalem.'
'Oh! why not?' quietly rejoined Hamelin. 'It is always in such
desperate need of money! Jerusalem is a burden to it; it would be a
good riddance. The Porte, you know, often can't tell what course to
take between the various sects which dispute for possession of the
sanctuaries. Moreover, the Pope would have true supporters among the
Syrian Maronites, for you are not unaware that he has established a
college for their priests at Rome. In fact, I have thought the matter
over carefully, have calculated everything, and this will be the new
era, the triumphant era of Catholicism. It may be said that we should
be sending the Pope too far away, that he would find himself isolated,
thrust out of European affairs. But with what brilliancy and authority
would he not radiate when once he was enthroned in the holy places,
and spoke in the name of Christ from the very land where Christ
Himself spoke! That is his patrimony, there should be his kingdom.
And, rest easy, we will build this kingdom up, firm and powerful; we
will put it beyond the reach of political disturbances, by basing its
budget--guaranteed by the resources of the country--on a vast bank for
the shares of which the Catholics of the entire world will scramble.'
Saccard, who had begun to smile, already attracted by the magnitude of
the project, although not convinced, could not help christening this
bank with a joyous 'Eureka! The Treasury of the Holy Sepulchre, eh?
Superb! There you have it!'
But just then his eyes met those of Madame Caroline, beaming with
common-sense. She was smiling also, but like one who is sceptical,
even a little vexed. She felt ashamed of his enthusiasm.
'All the same, my dear Hamelin,' said he, 'it will be best for us to
keep secret this crowning of the edifice, as you call it. Folks might
make fun of us. And, besides, our programme is already a terribly
heavy one; it is a good plan to reserve the final result, the glorious
ending, for the initiated alone.'
'Undoubtedly; such has always been my intention,' declared the
engineer. 'That shall be the mystery.'
And thereupon, that very day, they finally decided to turn the
portfolio of schemes to account, to launch the whole huge series of
projects. They would begin by founding a small financial establishment,
to promote the first enterprises; then success aiding, they would,
little by little, subjugate the market and conquer the world.
The next day, as Saccard went up to take some order from the Princess
d'Orviedo respecting the Institute of Work, he remembered the dream
that he had for a moment cherished of becoming this queen of charity's
prince-consort, the mere dispenser and manager of the fortune of the
poor. And he smiled, for he now thought all that a little silly. He was
built to make life, not to dress the wounds that life has made. And now
he was about to find himself at work again, in the thick of the battle
of interests, in the midst of that race for happiness which has brought
about the very progress of humanity, from century to century, towards
greater joy and greater light.
That same day he found Madame Caroline alone in the work-room among
the diagrams. She was standing at one of the windows, detained there
by the appearance of the Countess de Beauvilliers and her daughter in
the neighbouring garden at an unusual hour. The two women were reading
a letter with an air of deep sadness; a letter, no doubt, from the son
Ferdinand, whose position at Borne could not be a brilliant one.
'Look,' said Madame Caroline, on recognising Saccard. 'Another sorrow
for those unfortunates. The poor women in the streets give me less
pain.'
'Bah!' he gaily cried, 'you shall ask them to come to see me. We will
enrich them also, since we are to make everybody's fortune.'
And, in his happy fever, he sought her lips, to press a kiss upon them.
But she abruptly drew back, and became grave and pale.
'No, I beg of you,' said she.
'Really, would it pain you?'
'Yes, deeply.'
'But I adore you.'
'No, do not say that--you are going to be so busy. Besides, I assure
you that I shall feel true friendship for you if you prove the active
man I think, and do all the great things you say. Come, friendship is
far better!'
He listened to her, still smiling and irresolute. 'Then, friends only?'
said he.
'Yes, I will be your comrade, I will help you. Friends, great friends!'
With these words she offered him her cheeks, and he, conquered, and
realizing that she was right, imprinted two loud kisses upon them.