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  ‘The price is rather high,’ murmured Rougon with a smile.

  Monsieur Kahn sat with his arms folded, shaking his head.

  ‘You have no idea how brazen those people are!’ he went on. ‘You should have heard the whole conversation I had with this entrepreneur. For a million francs, de Marsy undertakes to back me and get me the concession within a month. All he wants is his cut, that’s all… And when I mentioned the Emperor, this fellow just laughed in my face, and told me in so many words that if I thought the Emperor was on my side, I was a fool.’

  The cab came out on the Place de la Concorde. Rougon emerged from his corner. He was warmed up now, there was blood in his cheeks.

  ‘So you kicked him out?’ he said.

  The former deputy seemed very surprised at these words, and stared at him for a moment without responding. Then his anger suddenly vanished. It was now his turn to huddle into the corner, ignoring the jolts of the cab.

  ‘Oh no,’ he murmured. ‘Not at all. You don’t just kick people out like that, without thinking things over… Besides, I wanted to ask your advice first. I must confess, I’m inclined to accept.’

  ‘Never, Kahn!’ cried Rougon furiously. ‘Never!’

  They began to argue. Monsieur Kahn produced figures. No doubt a million was a big sum for a bribe, but he explained that this could easily be made up by juggling with the shares. Rougon, however, would have none of it. He refused to listen. He didn’t care about the money, he said. His reason for not wanting de Marsy to pocket a million was that this would be an admission of his own impotence, recognition of defeat, a gross overvaluation of his rival’s influence, which would be greatly increased relative to his own.

  ‘You can see that de Marsy is beginning to weaken,’ he said. ‘He’s going to go under… Wait a while. We’ll have that concession for nothing.’

  Then, almost threateningly, he added:

  ‘We’d all be very annoyed, I can tell you, if you give in. I can’t allow one of my friends to be held to ransom like that.’

  There was a silence. The cab was now proceeding up the Champs-Élysées. The two men, both very pensive, seemed to be counting the trees along the side avenues. Monsieur Kahn was the first to speak again, in subdued tones:

  ‘Now look here, Rougon, I’d like nothing better, I’d like to stay with you, of course; but you must admit, it will soon be two years…’

  He did not finish the sentence, but suddenly changed his tone:

  ‘Oh, I know it’s not your fault. Your hands are tied at present… We should pay the million, in my view.’

  ‘Never!’ Rougon repeated, very forcibly. ‘You will have your concession within the next two weeks, do you hear!’

  The cab had now drawn up outside the house in the Rue Marbeuf, but they did not get out. Instead, with the windows closed, they sat talking a while longer, as if they had been sitting comfortably in Rougon’s study. That evening, Monsieur Bouchard and Colonel Jobelin were to dine with Rougon. He tried to persuade Monsieur Kahn to join them, but Kahn declined. He was very sorry, but he had another engagement. The great man now spoke enthusiastically again about Kahn’s concession. When at last he got out, as a friendly gesture he carefully closed the door of the cab for him. They both nodded to each other.

  ‘Till tomorrow, Thursday, then,’ Kahn cried, leaning forward as the cab moved off.

  Rougon felt quite feverish as he went in. He could not even read the evening papers. Though it was hardly five, he went straight to the drawing room and paced up and down, waiting for his guests. The first sunshine of the year, the pale January sunshine, had given him a slight headache. The afternoon’s events had deeply affected him. It involved the whole gang, the friends he put up with, those he was afraid of, and those he really liked. They were all pressing him, forcing him to take immediate, decisive action. He did not find this at all displeasing. He fully understood their impatience. But at the same time he felt within him a kind of mounting anger compounded of all their separate feelings of anger. It was as if his room to move had been gradually reduced. The time had come when he would be forced to make a great leap.

  Suddenly he thought of Gilquin, whom he had completely forgotten. He rang to ask his manservant if ‘the gentleman in the green overcoat’ had called again while he was out. The servant had seen nobody. Rougon gave instructions that if the visitor should come back in the course of the evening, he was to be shown straight into the study.

  ‘And tell me at once,’ he added, ‘even if we’re having dinner.’

  Then, his curiosity reawakened, he went to fetch the card Gilquin had left. He read it several times: Urgent. Funny goings-on, without advancing any further. When Monsieur Bouchard and the Colonel arrived, he slipped the card into his pocket. He was disturbed by those words. They bothered him. He could not get them out of his head.

  The dinner was a very simple one. Monsieur Bouchard had been a grass widow again for the last two days, his wife having had to go and care for an ailing aunt whom Monsieur Bouchard said she had never even mentioned before. As for the Colonel, who always had a place laid at Rougon’s, he had brought his boy Auguste, who was on holiday. Madame Rougon did the honours, and the dishes were served under her supervision, all very slowly and meticulously, without any clatter of dishes or cutlery. The conversation turned to their time at school. The civil servant recited by heart some lines of Horace and recalled the national prizes he had won in about 1813. The Colonel would have preferred more discipline, as in the army; and he also explained why Auguste had failed his baccalauréat in November: the lad was so bright that he was always one step ahead of his teachers, and this had annoyed them. While his father was offering this explanation of his failure, Auguste munched steadily at a breast of chicken with the sly, self-satisfied grin of a dunce.

  When they were having dessert, the sound of the doorbell seemed to excite Rougon, who until then had seemed rather distracted. He thought it must be Gilquin, and looked quickly up at the door, already automatically folding his napkin, in expectation of being called. But it was Du Poizat who appeared. Thoroughly at home in the house, the former sub-prefect sat down close to the table. He often dropped in early in the evening, immediately after finishing his own supper, which he took in a little boarding house in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  ‘I’m worn out,’ he muttered, without giving any details of all the things he had done that afternoon. ‘I would have gone straight to bed, if I hadn’t thought of having a look at today’s papers… They’re in your study, Rougon, aren’t they?’

  However, he did not budge, but accepted a pear and a little wine. The talk had turned to the cost of food. Everything was twice as expensive as it had been twenty years before. Monsieur Bouchard said he could remember, when he was a very young man, seeing pigeons at fifteen sous the pair. Meanwhile, coffee and liqueurs having been served, Madame Rougon slipped quietly away, and they returned to the drawing room without her. The Colonel and the civil servant carried the card table to the fireplace, where, totally engrossed, lost in abstruse combinations, they shuffled their cards and played their inevitable piquet. Auguste sat on a stool and leafed through a pile of illustrated weeklies. Du Poizat had disappeared.

  ‘Just look at this hand,’ cried the Colonel suddenly. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’

  Rougon went up to the table and nodded. He was just about to sit down again in the silence that followed, and had taken the tongs to rearrange the logs, when his servant came in quietly and whispered in his ear:

  ‘The gentleman who called this morning is here.’

  Rougon gave a violent start. He had not heard the bell ring. He found Gilquin waiting in his study, a rattan walking stick under his arm. Squinting like an artist, he was examining a magnificent engraving of Napoleon at St Helena. He was wearing his big green overcoat, buttoned up to his chin. He was wearing an almost new black silk hat, cocked to one side.

  ‘So, what is it?’ Rougon asked impatiently.

  Gilquin, howev
er, was in no hurry. He shook his head. Still contemplating the engraving, he said:

  ‘A bit overdone, isn’t it?… Makes him look really fed up!’

  The only light in the room was a single lamp, which stood on the corner of the desk. When Rougon entered there had been a faint sound as of paper rustling, coming from a wing-backed armchair opposite the fireplace, but it was followed by such complete silence that one might have thought it had simply been a piece of coal collapsing. Gilquin preferred to stand, so the two men remained by the door, in a patch of shadow cast by a bookcase.

  ‘So, what is it?’ Rougon repeated.

  He added that he had been round to the Rue Guisarde in the afternoon. Gilquin then talked about the concierge. An excellent woman, he said, but clearly dying of consumption, all because of the house. The ground floor was so damp.

  ‘But what about your urgent business? What is it?’

  ‘Hang on. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? We’ll get to it… So you went up to my room, did you? And you heard the cat? She came in from the gutter. I left the window open one night, and when I woke up I found her in bed with me, licking my whiskers. I thought it was so comical, I thought I’d keep her.’

  At last, he decided to come to the point. But it was a long story. It began with his account of a love affair with a girl who did ironing in a laundry. He had got her to spend the night with him one evening after a show at the Ambigu. The poor girl, Eulalie, had just had to let her landlord have all her sticks of furniture because her lover had abandoned her, just when she was owing five months’ rent. For the past ten days she had been staying in a hotel in the Rue Montmartre, near her laundry. That’s where he had been sleeping all week, in a second-floor room at the end of the corridor, a dark little room giving out on to the courtyard.

  Rougon, resigned to his long-windedness, let him go on.

  ‘Well, three days ago,’ Gilquin continued, ‘I brought in some cake and a bottle of wine… We ate it in bed, if you get me. We turn in early, you see… Eulalie got out of bed a bit before midnight to shake out the crumbs. Then she went out like a light. She sleeps like a log, you know… But I couldn’t sleep. I’d blown out the candle and was lying there with my eyes wide open when some sort of argument started in the room next to ours. I should have said there’s a connecting door between, which has been blocked up. They were quite quiet, though, and then seemed to stop talking; but I heard such funny noises that I had to get up and stick my eye to a crack in the door… Well, you’d never guess…’

  He paused, eyes staring, to enjoy the effect he wanted to produce.

  ‘There were two fellows, one a young ’un of twenty-five, quite pleasant-looking, and an older bloke who must have been over fifty, a thin, sick-looking little fella… And these blokes were looking at pistols and daggers and swords, all sorts of weapons, new too, the steel all shiny… They were talking some sort of special lingo I couldn’t make out to begin with. Then, from some of the words, I recognized Italian. Of course, I travelled in Italy when I was in macaroni. So I listened hard, and then, my friend, I understood… These gentlemen had come to Paris to assassinate the Emperor! How about that!’

  Folding his arms, he hugged his cane to his chest and kept repeating:

  ‘Well, what d’yer say? Isn’t it a funny business?’

  So this was Gilquin’s funny goings-on! Rougon shrugged. He had been warned of such plots a score of times. But Gilquin went into more and more detail.

  ‘You said I was to come and tell you all the gossip. And I’m happy to oblige, aren’t I? I tell you everything. You shouldn’t shake your head like that!… Do you think, if I’d taken this to the police, they wouldn’t have slipped me a nice little tip? The thing is, I’d rather let a friend have the benefit. Believe me, this is serious! Go and tell the Emperor. He’s bound to give you a big kiss.’

  For three days he had been keeping watch on these ‘fine fellas’, as he called them. During the day, two others always came to join them. One was young and one middle-aged, a very handsome man, with a pale face and long black hair. He seemed to be the boss.* They all seemed tired out when they came. They discussed things in veiled terms, and very briefly. The day before, he had watched them filling up some ‘little gadgets’ made of iron. Bombs, he thought. He had asked Eulalie to give him the key to her room. He stayed in all day, in his stockinged feet, listening, and at nine in the evening he fixed things so that Eulalie snored, to put those fellows’ minds at ease. Never mix women and politics, he always said.

  As Gilquin went on, Rougon became increasingly serious. He was convinced now. Under Gilquin’s semi-drunkenness, and in the jumble of odd details with which he larded his story, he sensed a truth that seemed to become clearer and clearer. Now the whole sense of anticipation he had had all day struck him as a presentiment. And the tremulous feeling that had come over him in the morning began again. It was the instinctive reaction of a strong man whose fate now depended on the toss of a card.

  ‘Fools,’ he murmured, pretending to be unimpressed. ‘They must have the whole police force on their tails.’

  Gilquin sniggered.

  ‘The police had better get a move on, in that case,’ he muttered.

  Then, still grinning, he fell silent again, patting his hat affectionately. The great man realized that there was still more information to come. He stared at Gilquin. But Gilquin was already opening the door, when he resumed:

  ‘So, I’ve warned you… I must go and get a bite now, old boy. I haven’t eaten yet, unlike you. I’ve been shadowing these people all afternoon… I could eat a horse.’

  Rougon held him back and offered to have a cold supper brought for him. He at once asked for a place to be laid in the dining room. Gilquin seemed quite touched. Closing the study door again, and lowering his voice, so that the valet could not hear, he said:

  ‘You’re a good man… Listen. I’ll tell you the honest truth. If you hadn’t been nice to me, I’d have gone to the police… But as it is, I’ll tell you everything. Fair play, eh? But I hope you won’t forget this favour. At the end of the day, friends are friends…’

  Leaning forward, he whispered:

  ‘It’s planned for tomorrow night… They aim to assassinate Badinguet* outside the Opera, as he’s going in. The carriage, the aides-de-camp, and the rest — all to be blown up in one go.’

  While Gilquin was settling down to his supper in the dining room, Rougon remained standing in the middle of his study, motionless, his face ashen. He was thinking it over, trying to make up his mind. At last he sat down at his desk and took a sheet of paper, but almost at once thrust it away again. For a moment he looked as if he would hurry to the door, to give an order. But slowly he came back, lost in thought, his face in shadow.

  At this moment the wing-backed armchair in front of the fire suddenly shook and Du Poizat stood up, calmly folding a newspaper.

  ‘What, you were here all the time?’ Rougon cried.

  ‘Of course, reading the papers,’ the former sub-prefect replied, with a smile that revealed his uneven white teeth. ‘You knew very well, you saw me when you came in.’

  This brazen lie cut short any discussion. For a few seconds the two men stood gazing at each other in silence. Then, as Rougon again went to his desk, but seemed to be asking Du Poizat what he thought, the latter made a little gesture which clearly meant: ‘No, bide your time, there’s no hurry, see what happens first.’ Not a word was spoken between them. Then they made their way back to the drawing room.

  That evening, there had been such a tremendous argument between the Colonel and Monsieur Bouchard, about the Orléans princes and the Count de Chambord, that they had thrown down their cards and sworn never to play with each other again. They had gone to sit on either side of the fireplace, looking daggers at one another. When Rougon came in, they were just making it up again, with ridulous words of praise for their host.

  ‘No, no, I’d say it to his face,’ the Colonel continued, ‘there’s n
o one else of his stature at the present moment.’

  ‘Listen to what bad things we’re saying about you,’ Monsieur Bouchard said slyly.

  They went on in the same vein:

  ‘A man of extraordinary intelligence!’

  ‘A man of action with the eye of a conqueror.’

  ‘Yes, what we both want is to have him take a little interest in the affairs of France!’

  ‘Indeed! There’d be less of a mess then. He’s the only man who can save the Empire.’

  Rougon swelled his massive shoulders and assumed a morose expression, out of modesty, though he really loved all this flattery. His vanity was never so delightfully titillated as when the Colonel and Monsieur Bouchard spent the whole evening tossing admiring phrases to and fro like this. It was an exhibition of their stupidity, their faces assuming ridiculously serious expressions, but the more banal they were, the more he enjoyed their monotonous voices with their endless false praise. Sometimes he joked about it, when the two cousins were not there, but it did satisfy his enormous thirst for pride and domination. It was a dungheap of compliments big enough for his huge body to wallow in at ease.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I’m really a very poor thing. I only wish I were as strong as you think I am!’

  He broke off, sat down at the card table, and mechanically laid out a game of patience. It came out, which recently had rarely happened. Monsieur Bouchard and the Colonel were still going at it. They declared him a great orator, a great financier, and a great politician. Du Poizat stood by, nodding approval. At last, without looking at Rougon, as if he had not been there, he said:

  ‘Good heavens, it only needs something to happen… The Emperor is very well disposed towards Rougon. If there was some terrible catastrophe tomorrow, so that he felt the need to put a strong man in charge, Rougon would take over immediately… Good heavens, yes!’

  Slowly, the great man raised his eyes. Without finishing his game, he sank back into his armchair, his face ashen once more, lost in shadow. But the flattery of the Colonel and Monsieur Bouchard seemed to soothe him, driving him on to a decision about which he was still unsure. At last he smiled, when young Auguste, who had finished laying out the game for him, cried: