The times were momentarily bad for speculation. Saccard was the worthy offspring of the Hôtel de Ville. Like Paris, he had been eager for transformation, feverishly bent upon enjoyment, and blindly lavish in expenditure. And at this moment, like the city itself, he found himself in the presence of a formidable deficit which it was necessary he should make good secretly; for he would not hear speak of sobriety, economy, calm, and simple life. He preferred to retain the useless luxury and real misery of these new thoroughfares, whence he had derived that colossal fortune ushered each morning into being, but always swallowed up when evening came. Passing from adventure to adventure, he now only possessed the gilded façade of an absent capital. In that time of fierce madness, Paris herself did not engage her future with less self-restraint, or march more straightly towards every folly and every financial trickery. The liquidation threatened to be a terrible one. The finest speculations fell through in Saccard's hands. As he confessed, he had just experienced considerable losses on the Bourse. M. Toutin-Laroche had almost capsized the Crédit Viticole by a "bulling" game which had suddenly turned against him; fortunately the government, intervening secretly, had reset the famous farmers' loan machine on its legs. Saccard--already badly shaken by this double blow, warmly rated by his brother the minister on account of the danger which had threatened the delegation bonds of the city of Paris, compromised at the same time at the Crédit Viticole--was yet even unluckier in his speculations in house property. Mignon and Charrier had altogether ceased dealing with him. If he accused them it was because he was secretly enraged to think that he had blundered by building on his share of the land, whilst they prudently sold theirs. While they were netting a fortune, he remained hampered by his houses which he was often only able to dispose of at a loss. Among others he sold a mansion in the Rue de Marignan, on which he still owed three hundred and eighty thousand francs, for three hundred thousand. He had certainly invented a dodge worthy of him, which consisted in demanding ten thousand francs for a flat worth eight thousand at the most. The frightened tenant only signed a lease when the landlord consented to make him a present of the first two years' rent; the apartment was thus brought down to its real value, but the lease enunciated the figure of ten thousand francs, and when Saccard found a purchaser and capitalized the income of the property the valuation proved most fantastic. He could not apply this swindle on a large scale as his houses did not let; indeed he had built them too soon; the clearings, amid which they were so to say lost, in the mud and the winter cold, isolated them and lowered their value considerably. The affair, which affected Saccard the most, was the vulgar swindle of Messieurs Mignon and Charrier,