Burchell, S. C.,
Imperial Masquerades: The Paris of Napoleon III
(New York: Atheneum, 1971).
Guillais, Joëlle,
Crimes of Passion: Dramas of Private Life in Nineteenth-Century France,
translated by Jane Dunnett (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Hemmings, F. W. J.,
Émile
Zola, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Hemmings, F. W. J.,
Culture and Society in France,
1849
-
1898 (London: Batsford, 1971), especially chapter 4, ‘Fête Impériale’ .
Hemmings, F. W. J.,
The Life and Times of Émile Zola
(London: Paul Elek, 1977).
Horne, Alistair,
Seven Ages of Paris
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), especially chapter 14, ‘The Second Empire’.
Jones, Colin,
Paris: Biography of a City
(London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2004), especially chapter 9, ‘Haussmannism and the City of Modernity’.
McLynn, Pauline, “‘Human Beasts?”: Criminal Perspectives in
La Bête humaine’,
in Geoff Woollen (ed.),
La Bête humaine: texte et explications
(Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).
McMillan, James, F.,
Napoleon III
(New York: Longman, 1991).
Nye, Robert,
Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Price, Roger,
The French Second Republic: A Social History
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).
Semmens, P. W. B. and A. J. Goldfinch,
How Steam Locomotives Really Work
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Simmons, Jack and Gordon Biddle,
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge, 1985).
Williams, Roger L.,
Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).
Wilson, Nelly, ‘A Question of Motives: Heredity and Inheritance in
La Bête humaine’,
in Geoff Woollen (ed.),
La Bête humaine: texte et explications
(Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).
Zola, Émile,
Œuvres Complètes,
edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), vol. VI. This edition of the French text of
La Bête humaine
contains a number of contemporary illustrations of places mentioned in the novel, including photographs taken by Zola himself.
A Note on This and Some Other Translations
The text used for this translation of
La Bête humaine
is that published in the fourth volume of Zola’s Les
Rougon-Macquart
(Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), edited by Henri Mitterand.
The first translation into English of
La Bête humaine
appeared in 1890 (in the same year as the publication of the novel in French) under the title
Human Brutes,
described in The National Union Catalogue as ‘a realistic novel by Émile Zola, translated from the French by Count Edgar de V. Vermont’. It was published by Laird and Lee in Chicago. The first translation to appear in Britain was that of Edward Vizetelly, published by Hutchinson in 1901 under the title
The Monomaniac.
Vizetelly & Co., the publishing house founded by Edward’s father, Henry, had been prosecuted following the publication in 1888 of
Earth (La Terre)
on the grounds that the novel was pornographic. Henry Vizetelly was sentenced to three months in prison and a heavy fine, and his publishing house subsequently went bankrupt. These censorious measures might explain why it was only ten years later that Edward Vizetelly felt able to risk translating another novel by Zola and why, when it was eventually published, it appeared in a bowdlerized version prepared by his brother Ernest. Scenes of a sexual nature and anything that might be considered in the least indelicate were removed. The fact that Madame Victoire works as a lavatory attendant is not mentioned. Roubaud’s attempt to make love to his wife and the first love-making between Jacques and Séverine are omitted. The novel does not work convincingly without these scenes. The difficulties that are reflected in Vizetelly’s translation would make a very rewarding study for anyone interested in the practicalities of Victorian censorship. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) these excisions
The Monomaniac
was reprinted in 1902. and again in 1915 and 1920. More recent translations have benefited from a more open approach to such matters. They include Alec Brown’s
The Beast in Man
(1956), Leonard Tancock’s
La Bête Humaine
(1977) and Roger Pearson’s
La Bête Humaine
(1996).
The novel has also lent itself to a number of film adaptations. The most famous of these is
La Bête Humaine
(1938), directed by Jean Renoir, with Jean Gabin as Lantier, Simone Simon as Séverine, Fernand Ledoux as Roubaud and Renoir himself as Cabuche. For the present-day viewer it is a strikingly ‘period’ piece, although the period in question is different from that depicted in the novel. The film focuses on Séverine’s unhappy marriage to Roubaud and her relationship with Jacques. The stories of Flore and Philomène are sidelined; the blizzard, the train crash and Misard’s murder of Aunt Phasie are omitted entirely. Jacques is portrayed as a killer with a conscience; he eventually takes his own life by leaping from his train. The film redirects Zola’s narrative but it engages with Zola’s text intimately. The dialogue is at times exactly as Zola has written it, and scenes are recreated which draw upon subtle details of Zola’s descriptions of moment and place. A freer adaptation is Fritz Lang’s
Human Desire
(1954). Lang’s film is more properly speaking a reworking of Renoir’s film rather than of Zola’s novel. It translates the action into the context of post-war America. The characters are given new names, and Jacques (Jeff Warren in Lang’s film) becomes an entirely different person. He is no longer the ‘monomaniac’, driven by atavistic instinct to kill women; he is a perfectly ordinary, fun-loving American soldier who has just returned from military service in Korea. The killings are worked out in the context of a domestic rift. There are no steam trains in Lang’s film, and much of the powerful symbolism which Zola attaches to his ‘ferocious’ locomotives is lost. The film is a tame reflection of the disturbing power of Zola’s novel, yet at the same time it succeeds in relating it to a more modern world.
The achievements and insights of previous translators and film-makers have acted as an inspiration and encouragement in the preparation of this new translation. Given the novel’s violent subject matter, the writing displays a remarkable reserve and sobriety. This is not the Zola that the Duchesse de Guermantes delights in referring to as ‘the Homer of the sewers’
1
. The use of idiomatic or colloquial French is limited; ‘expletives’ are few and far between, and fairly mild when they do occur. Zola makes considerable use of free indirect speech, which allows him to transcribe conversations and direct exchanges with a degree of formality that direct speech would lack. There is a controlled precision in the novel’s description of even the most violent scenes, which suggests that Zola was consciously trying to avoid the sensationalism that his subject matter could so easily engender. The violence contained within the novel emerges all the more forcefully as a result of this stylistic restraint. Joanna Richardson’s claim that ‘there is no beauty in
La Bête humaine‘
2
is untenable. Contained within Zola’s closely restrained narrative there are moments of poetic expressiveness, when, like the pent-up forces that the novel describes, the language opens out and moves into a different register. The ‘Impressionist’ play of steam, mists and sunlight at the beginning of the novel, the sombre grandeur of the winter’s night as the express prepares to leave (chapter I), the idyllic picture of dawn rising over Le Havre with the last stars fading in the sky and a salty breeze blowing in from the sea (chapter III), the more macabre lyricism of Séverine’s confession in the still of the night as the stove casts a sinister red glow on the ceiling above (chapter VIII), these are moments of varied and intense suggestive power that serve to complement the stark realities around which the novel is structured. This translation attempts to recreate the balance of staid, measured narrative and poetic suggestiveness that distinguish Zola’s text. The title
The Beast Within
may appear somewhat gothic. It is based on an image that rears throughout the novel, applied initially to Roubaud (chapter I) and subsequently to the central protagonist, Lantier.
NOTES
1
Marcel Proust,
The Guermantes Way,
translated by Mark Treharne (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 498.
2
Joanna Richardson, review of Alec Brown’s translation of
La Bête humaine, Time and Tide
39 (24 May 1958), pp. 650 — 51.
A Note on Money
Zola is determined to give his novel a sense of contemporary realism, and he is specific about money throughout. The figures he mentions would have made more immediate sense to readers of Zola’s time. Their force is inevitably diluted for the present-day reader. The following summary of incomes, expenditures, inheritances and property values gives an idea of how characters in the novel are placed financially relative to each other. The basic unit of French currency under the Second Empire was the franc.
At the upper end of the scale there are fortunes which are incalculable.
Grandmorin is put at 3,700,000 francs. In his will he makes bequests on a lavish scale. The property at La Croix-de-Maufras is valued at 40,000 francs. Séverine receives a dowry of 10,000 francs from Grandmorin when she marries Roubaud. When he is murdered, Grandmorin is carrying 10,000 francs on his person, money from a business transaction which he owes his sister.
Grandmorin’s sister, Madame Bonnehon, is also extremely rich, having inherited the château at Doinville from her parents and also large amounts of money from her deceased husband, a successful factory owner. Madame Bonnehon is beyond caring about money. ‘Money is not everything,’ she tells her niece, Madame Lachesnaye. She employs a full staff of domestic servants, gardeners and coachmen and uses the château to put on glittering receptions for the elite of Rouen.
Lachesnaye, a judge in the Court of Appeal, has inherited a fortune worth two million francs. His wife has also inherited an undisclosed amount from Grandmorin. Although they are well off, the Lachesnayes are not, like Madame Bonnehon, beyond caring about money, and they wish to contest the bequest of the house at La Croix-de-Maufras to Séverine.
Denizet, the examining magistrate, has no private income, his father, a once-prosperous cattle farmer, having gone bankrupt. Denizet is described as a poorly paid magistrate whose ‘meagre salary hardly sufficed to cover his immediate needs’. The novel does not specify his salary, but in his preparatory notes Zola records that the examining magistrate at Rouen earned 6,000 francs, whereas a judge in Paris earned 8,000 francs. Denizet, aged over fifty, covets promotion to Paris. The novel tells us that promotion would mean a rise in salary of 166 francs a month, which would enable him to pay his housekeeper a little more and to buy himself some new clothes.
The lady on the train to Auteuil, who is not named, having previously lived in something like penury, enjoys unexpected prosperity as a result of an advantageous marriage and is able to spend nearly half the year travelling from one holiday resort to another. The novel does not specify what her financial situation is, but she clearly enjoys a very comfortable life-style. She is an example of Second Empire ‘arrivisme’.
The rich and the affluent stand in the wings of the novel. The action of the novel centres on people who work to earn a living and who have more limited means.
The Dauvergnes receive two full-time salaries. The father is an assistant stationmaster at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, and the son, Henri, is a mainline guard. Between them they earn 6,000 francs. They also enjoy subsidized accommodation and heating allowances. The family lives very comfortably and enjoys luxuries such as a piano and a cage of exotic birds.
Jacques is a top-link train driver. He earns 2,800 francs and with bonuses for fuel economies and maintaining his locomotive he increases this to 4,000francs.
Pecqueux, Jacques’s fireman, earns 2,800 francs including bonuses, in other words slightly less than Jacques. Pecqueux squanders most of his income on drink.
Roubaud, an assistant stationmaster at Le Havre, earns approximately 2,000 francs, which is less than half the allegedly ‘meagre’ salary of Denizet. His wife’s shopping spree at the Bon Marché (chapter I) comes to 300 francs, which represents the total of her savings during the winter. The novel does not specify what Roubaud allows her for housekeeping (she pays for laundry and domestic help). Roubaud is surprised at her extravagance; 300 francs is almost as much as two months of his salary. Roubaud’s gambling debts at one point amount to 1,000 francs a month, which is half his annual salary. The 10,000 francs stolen from Grandmorin, which enable him to continue gambling, represent five years’ salary. Roubaud is provided with accommodation and also enjoys first-class concessions for rail travel.
Misard earns 1,200 francs as a section operator. He has come down in the world, having previously earned more as a platelayer. Misard is also provided with accommodation (the level-crossing keeper’s cottage). He is determined to get his hands on the 1,000 francs left to his wife by her father. The money would be the equivalent of almost a year’s salary. He offers ‘hospitality’ to the passengers stranded in the blizzard and seizes the opportunity to scrounge money from them.
Madame Victoire is paid 100 francs as a lavatory attendant but receives 1,400 francs in tips. She is also provided with accommodation and fuel allowances. Roubaud reflects that if her husband did not spend all his money on drink they would be earning between them over twice as much as himself.