The Beast Within (65 page)

1
he could pay off his debt and he had all this money to wager:
Zola tells us above that Roubaud’s gambling had begun ‘shortly after the murder’. The murder took place in mid-February 1869, which at this point in the novel is still less than a year ago. If it is assumed that the money taken from under the floorboard is used to pay off Roubaud’s gambling debts and that he had already paid money out of his own pocket, he appears to have so far lost something in the region of 1,000 francs and to be acquiring new debts as fast as he settles them. Zola had indicated earlier in the novel that Roubaud’s annual salary was about 2,000 francs (see chapter I, note 15).

2
She had asked him to give her a photograph of himself:
Zola himself was a keen photographer.

3
bristling factory chimneys:
Today Paris is not thought of as an industrial city, but during the Second Empire there was a considerable amount of industrial activity both in the suburbs and close to the city centre. Haussmann opposed the further development of heavy industry (including a proposal for a large railway works at Batignolles) in favour of the manufacture of luxury goods (see Jeanne Gaillard,
Paris la Ville,
Librairie Honoré Champion, 1976, pp. 55 ff.).

4
the right of the strong to destroy the weak who get in their way:
It is here that Zola most clearly confronts the arguments of Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
(see Introduction). Zola had toyed with the idea of giving his novel the title
The Right to Murder
(
Le Droit au meurtre
). Raskolnikov had justified murder by reference to the concept of a ‘superior being’. Jacques here attempts to justify murder by reference to the less rarified concept of animal instinct. 5.
whatever moral scruples had since been invented to keep men living together:
In his ‘discussion’ of the rights and wrongs of murder, both here and elsewhere in the novel, Zola avoids specific mention of any religious imperative.

6
The government had been badly shaken by the general elections:
‘In a poll of around eight million electors, government candidates won only 4.5 million votes, while opposition candidates polled 3.5 million’ (McMillan,
Napoleon III
, p. 126). This represented the most serious challenge to its authority that the Second Empire had ever faced.

1
Misard had been putting the rat poison into her enemas rather than mixing it with the salt:
This is the first confirmation that Misard had indeed been poisoning his wife. In June 1889, Zola had written for advice about poison to a doctor friend of his, Docteur Gouverné. Gouverné provided him with a detailed explanation of how various poisons worked, recommending white arsenic as the most appropriate to Zola’s purposes in the novel, being a tasteless white powder used as an ingredient in rat poison and ideally suited to slow poisoning. Gouverné further explained that it was also used to treat farm animals and would therefore be easily available in a country district such as the one Zola had in mind.

2
she walked out of the Malaunay end of the tunnel
,
safe and sound:
Zola based this episode on an official report on the dangers incurred by railway men working inside tunnels. The report emphasized the disorientating effect of the noise and the dark and recommended that all tunnels should be equipped with electric lighting. Zola himself had a mortal fear of tunnels and confined spaces. In the short story ‘La Mort d’Olivier Bécaille’ a train is immured inside a tunnel. In
Germinal
the miners are trapped below ground.

3
ballast train:
Ballast was broken stone, used as a bed for the tracks.

4
it automatically set the signal at red:
The system of ‘interlocking signalling’ had been described to Zola by Pol Lefèvre. It was a system which linked signals and points and was operated by the signalman. Zola appears to be confusing it with a system of ‘automatic signalling’, in which signal movements were controlled by the passage of trains. Automatic signalling did not come into general use until after the period referred to in the novel.

5
applied the brakes:
Braking systems on early steam locomotives were notoriously inefficient.

6
crashed into the wagon with the full weight of the thirteen carriages she drew behind her:
Zola based the account of this disaster on newspaper reports (in
Le Temps
and
Le Figaro
) of three actual train crashes — at Charenton in September 1881, at Cabbé-Roquebrune (near Monte Carlo) in March 1886, and at Groenendael (Belgium) in February 1889. Although each of these accidents was dissimilar (and unlike the situation depicted in the novel), they provided Zola with details such as the fireman and guard jumping off the train, passengers running into the fields, the telescoping of the train on impact, the fire from the locomotive spreading to the rest of the train, examples of horrific injuries and the difficulty of obtaining assistance and medical help.

7
pilot engine:
An engine used to assist another locomotive when, for example, a train had to climb a steep gradient.

8
to greet a friend as she came towards her:
Zola is careful to make this ‘friend’ feminine (‘une amie’ in French). Flore remains fiercely independent of men to the end.

1
I’ll be able to say I never left this room:
Séverine’s reasoning here is difficult to follow.

2
Séverine lay in bed on her back
...
watching him walk up and down:
There is an echo here of the scene near the beginning of the novel in which Séverine lies on the bed while Roubaud paces the room, planning the murder of Grandmorin (chapter I).

3
his jaw was pushed forward in a savage grimace that made him appear almost deformed:
The pronounced jaw was, according to Lombroso, one of the bestial features that distinguished the criminal. Zola incorporates the detail into his initial description of Jacques (chapter II). Here he imagines the feature becoming more pronounced as Jacques’s murderous instinct takes hold of him.

1
just because some prince of theirs wants to be King of Spain:
In July, 1870, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1835 — 1905) had been offered and had accepted the vacant throne of Spain. The deal had been arranged by Bismarck; Prince Leopold himself had little enthusiasm for the idea. In France, the prospect of a Prussian prince becoming King of Spain led to fears of encirclement by Prussia.

2
elections and plebiscites and riots in Paris:
The elections of May 1869 had been fiercely contested and had led to civil disturbance. They resulted in a moral victory for the opposition (see chapter IX, note 6). The Emperor was forced to agree to opposition demands for a more liberal form of government. On 8 May 1870, a new constitution was voted on by plebiscite and overwhelmingly approved (see Introduction).

3
which should have corroborated his present account:
It is not immediately obvious how Roubaud’s evidence at the first inquiry should ‘corroborate’ the confession he has just made, since his earlier evidence had pointed in the direction of a murderer other than himself. It is clear, however, that Denizet is so confident he has solved the case that whatever evidence is put before him will simply confirm the conclusions he has already arrived at.

4
assessor:
An assessor sits as adviser to a judge or magistrate and is often skilled in technical points of law.

5
. fashionable ladies of the town:
Roger Williams draws attention to the fact that audiences at trials during the Second Empire tended to be dominated by women, especially if the case involved details of a sordid or unseemly kind (Roger L. Williams,
Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon,
University of Washington Press, 1975, p. 10).

6
Napoleonic bees:
Bees were introduced as a heraldic device by Napoleon Bonaparte as a replacement for the royal fleur-de-lis.

7
war had been declared:
France officially declared war on Prussia on 19 July 1870. Mobilization, however, had begun before this.

8
a skirmish at one of the frontier towns:
The French army achieved an initial minor success at Saarbrücken (Lorraine) on 2 August 1870. This provides a terminal date for the events of the novel. The Franco-Prussian war is the subject of the penultimate novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle,
La Débâcle.

ÉMILE ZOLA

 

 

‘Buried like moles beneath the crushing weight of the earth, and without a breath
of fresh air in their burning lungs, they simply went on tapping’

 

 

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Compelled to take a back-breaking job at the Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all. The thirteenth novel in Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence,
Germinal
expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope.

 

 

Roger Pearson’s lively and modern new translation is accompanied by an introduction that examines the social and political background to Zola’s masterpiece, in particular the changing relationship between labour and capital. This edition also contains a filmography, chronology and notes.

 

 

Translated and edited by Roger Pearson

ÉMILE ZOLA

 

 

‘Her slightest movements fanned the flame of desire,
and with a twitch of her little finger she could stir men’s flesh’

 

 

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Theatre des Variétés. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high-class prostitute of her day. Rich men, Comtes and Marquises fall at her feet, great ladies try to emulate her appearance, lovers even kill themselves for her. Nana’s hedonistic appetite for luxury and decadent pleasures knows no bounds — until, eventually, it consumes her. Nana provoked outrage on its publication in 1880, with its heroine damned as ‘the most crude and bestial sort of whore’. Yet the rich atmosphere and luminous language of this ‘poem of male desire’ transform Nana into an almost mythical figure: a destructive force preying on a corrupt, decaying society.

 

 

George Holden’s lively translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing
Nana
as a key work in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, representing a powerful critique of France’s Second Empire.

 

 

Translated with an introduction by George Holden

Before 1946
... ‘Classics’ are mainly the domain of academics and students; readable editions for everyone else are almost unheard of. This all changes when a little-known classicist, E. V. Rieu, presents Penguin founder Allen Lane with the translation of Homer’s
Odyssey
that he has been working on in his spare time.

 

1946
Penguin Classics debuts with
The Odyssey,
which promptly sells three million copies. Suddenly, classics are no longer for the privileged few.