Money (Oxford World’s Classics) by Émile Zola Page A

watching, with inside contacts in every level of society. As soon as he learned of a bankruptcy he would rush along, prowling around the receiver, eventually buying up everything that offered no immediate profit to anyone. He kept an eye on solicitors’ offices, waiting for the opening of difficult inheritance cases and attending the auctioning of hopeless debts. He also advertised, attracting impatient creditors who preferred to get a few sous at once rather than run the risk of taking their debtors to court. From these multiple sources came paper by the basketful, constantly adding to the heap of this ragpicker of debts—unpaid promissory notes, failed agreements, fruitless acknowledgements of liability, commitments unfulfilled. Then came the sorting, the picking through these seedy remains, and this required a special and very delicate flair. In this ocean of disappeared or insolvent debtors choices had to be made to avoid waste of effort. Busch maintained as a general principle that any debt, however seemingly hopeless, might prove to be of value, and he had a series of admirably classified files, with a corresponding index of names, which he read over from time to time to refresh his memory. But among the insolvents he naturally followed most closely those he felt might perhaps come into money one day; his investigations stripped people bare, delved into family secrets, took note of wealthy relatives, of any resources people had, and especially of any new employment which would allow him to sequester payments. Often he would allow a man to ‘ripen’ over several years, only to strangle him at his first success. As for debtors who had disappeared, they excited his passions even more, throwing him into a fever of search after search, scanning the business signboards and every name printed in the newspapers, seeking out addresses like a dog hunting game. Once he had his hands on them, the insolvent and the disappeared, he became ferocious, devouring them with allsorts of charges, bleeding them dry, getting a hundred francs for what had cost him ten sous, with brutal explanations of the risks involved in his operations, which meant he had to recoup from those he caught all that he claimed to lose on the ones who slipped through his fingers like smoke.
    In this hunt for debtors La Méchain was one of the helpers he most liked to use, for though he had to have a little troupe of hunting-assistants working for him, he was always distrustful of that disreputable and hungry gang; La Méchain, on the other hand, had her own property, a sort of housing estate behind the Butte Montmartre called the Cité de Naples, a vast acreage covered with rickety sheds that she leased by the month: a place of appalling poverty, with starvelings living on top of each other in the filth, fighting over holes fit for pigs from which she would ruthlessly sweep them, along with their rubbish, the minute they ceased to pay. What was eating her up and swallowing the profits of her ‘estate’ was her unfortunate passion for speculation. She also had a taste for financial disasters, ruins and fires from which one can steal melted jewels. When Busch set her to seeking some information or unearthing a debtor, she threw herself into it for sheer pleasure, even using some of her own money. She described herself as a widow, but no one had ever met her husband. She came from who knows where, seemed always to have been fifty and hugely fat, with the reedy voice of a little girl.
    On this occasion, as soon as La Méchain was seated on the only chair, the office was full, as if bunged up by the arrival of this last packet of flesh. Busch, imprisoned at his desk, seemed quite buried, with only his square head rising above the sea of files.
    ‘Here,’ she said, emptying her old bag of the enormous pile of papers with which it bulged, ‘here’s what Fayeux sent me from Vendôme… He bought everything for you in that Charpier bankruptcy you asked me to point