Paris was then disappearing in a cloud of plaster dust. The times that Saccard had predicted on the heights of Montmartre had come. The city was being slashed to pieces with sabre strokes and he had a finger in every slash, in every wound. He had piles of building materials derived from demolished houses in the four corners of the city. In the Rue de Rome he was mixed up in that astonishing story of a pit which a company dug to carry off five or six thousand cubic metres of soil and create a belief in a gigantic enterprise, and which had to be filled up again by bringing soil from Saint-Ouen when the company had failed. Saccard got out of the affair with his conscience at ease and his pockets full, thanks to his brother Eugène, who was kind enough to intervene. At Chaillot he assisted in cutting through the heights and throwing them into a hollow to make way for the boulevard running from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Alma bridge. In the direction of Passy it was he who had the idea of scattering the refuse cleared away from the Trocadéro, upon the plateau, so that the good soil is now-a-days two yards below the surface, and even weeds refuse to grow amid the broken plaster. He might have been found in twenty directions at once, at every spot where there was some insurmountable obstacle, a mass of clearings which no one knew what to do with, a hollow which it was difficult to fill up, a pile of soil mingled with plaster over which the engineers in their feverish haste grew impatient, but which he sifted with his own hands and in which he always finished by finding some sop or other, or a speculation in his own peculiar line. On the same day he ran from the works round about the Arc-de-Triomphe to those of the Boulevard St. Michel, from the clearings of the Boulevard Malesherbes to the embankments of Chaillot, dragging with him an army of workmen, lawyers, shareholders, dupes, and scamps.