from the
presidency of the council of state to the portfolio of minister; made by
his party, a hungry crowd of followers, who at the same time supported
and devoured him; conquered for an instant by a woman, the beautiful
Clorinde, with whom he had been imbecile enough to fall in love, but
having so strong a will, and burning with so vehement a desire to rule,
that he won back power by giving the lie to his whole life, marching to
his triumphal sovereignty of vice emperor.

With Aristide Saccard, appetite ran to low pleasures, the whole hot
quarry of money, luxury, women--a devouring hunger which left him
homeless, at the time when millions were changing hands, when the
whirlwind of wild speculation was blowing through the city, tearing
down everywhere to construct anew, when princely fortunes were made,
squandered, and remade in six months; a greed of gold whose ever
increasing fury carried him away, causing him, almost before the body
of his wife Angele was cold in death, to sell his name, in order to have
the first indispensable thousand francs, by marrying Renee. And it
was Saccard, too, who, a few years later, put in motion the immense
money-press of the Banque Universelle. Saccard, the never vanquished;
Saccard, grown more powerful, risen to be the clever and daring grand
financier, comprehending the fierce and civilizing role that money
plays, fighting, winning, and losing battles on the Bourse, like
Napoleon at Austerlitz and Waterloo; engulfing in disaster a world of
miserable people; sending forth into the unknown realms of crime his
natural son Victor, who disappeared, fleeing through the dark night,
while he himself, under the impassable protection of unjust nature, was
loved by the adorable Mme. Caroline, no doubt in recompense of all the
evil he had done.

Here a tall, spotless lily had bloomed in this compost, Sidonie Rougon,
the sycophant of her brother, the go-between in a hundred suspicious
affairs, giving birth to the pure and divine Angelique, the little
embroiderer with fairylike fingers who worked into the gold of
the chasubles the dream of her Prince Charming, so happy among her
companions the saints, so little made for the hard realities of
life, that she obtained the grace of dying of love, on the day of her
marriage, at the first kiss of Felicien de Hautecoeur, in the triumphant
peal of bells ringing for her splendid nuptials.

The union of the two branches, the legitimate and the illegitim