Emile Zola Germinal (Oxford) CHAPTER I

Full text of "Emile Zola Germinal ( Oxford World’s Classics)"

CHAPTER I 

Crossing the open plain, wading through the thick, dark ink 

of a starless night, a solitary figure followed the highway from 

Marchiennes to Montsou,* which cut its paved pathway 

straight through ten kilometres of beet fields. The man could 

not even see the black earth beneath his feet, and his only 

sense of the vast, flat horizons came from the gusting March 

wind, blowing in wide swathes as if sweeping across the sea, 

but icy cold from its passage over leagues of marshland and 

barren earth. Not a tree marked the sky with its shadow, and 

the paved road jutted forward like a pier straight out into the 

murky waves of this world of shadows. 

He had left Marchiennes around two o’clock. He was walking 

with long strides, shivering in his thin, worn, cotton jacket and 

corduroy trousers. He was rather hampered by a small bundle, 

tied up in a check handkerchief, which he wedged against his 

ribs, first under one arm, then under the other, so that he 

could keep both hands plunged deep in his pockets, since they 

were already numb and chapped from the whiplash of the east 

wind. He was unemployed and homeless, and had only one 

thought in his head; the hope that the cold would be less keen 

after daybreak. He had been struggling onward like this for an 

hour, and was still a good way from Montsou, when he noticed 

the red glow of three braziers, burning apparently suspended 

in mid-air. At first he hesitated, apprehensively; then he could 

no longer resist the painful need to warm his hands, if only for 

a moment. 

There was a dip in the road, and the vision vanished. On his 

right a fence appeared, a rough wooden barricade blocking off 

a railway track; while over to the left rose a grass mound, 

covered with a jumbled arrangement of gables, giving the 

impression of a village with a low, regular line of rooftops. 

About 200 paces further on, a sudden bend in the road 

brought the fires back into sight, nearer this time, yet he could 

not guess how they could be burning so high up in the lifeless 

sky, looking like smouldering moons. But then he was suddenly 

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brought to a halt by the sight at ground level of a great 

shapeless heap of low buildings topped by the outline of a 

factory chimney rising from its midst; here and there a lonely 

light flickered through a filthy window, five or six miserable 

lanterns were hung up outside on brackets whose blackened 

timber projected mysterious silhouettes like giant scaffolds, 

and, from the midst of this fantastic apparition, swimming in 

smoke and darkness, there rose a lone voice, the prolonged, 

loud wheezing of a steam engine exhaust valve, hidden some¬ 

where out of sight. 

Then he recognized it as a pit-head. A feeling of defeat 

came over him again. What was the use? There wouldn’t be 

any work for him. Instead of walking towards the buildings, he 

decided at last to climb up the slag-heap where the three coal 

fires were burning in cast-iron braziers, lighting and heating 

the working area. The stonemen, digging the tunnels, must 

have been working late, they were still sending out the rubble. 

Now he could hear the sorters pushing the coal-tubs over the 

trestles, and was able to distinguish moving shadows emptying 

the tubs near each of the fires. 

‘Morning,’ he said, going nearer to one of the braziers. 

The driver was standing upright with his back to the 

brazier. He was an old man, clad in a mauve woollen jersey 

and a rabbit-skin cap; while his big, sand-coloured horse stood 

still as a statue, waiting for the six tubs which he had hauled 

up there to be emptied. The workman operating the tippler,* a 

gangling, red-haired fellow, took his time, pulling the lever 

with a sleepy hand. And over their heads the wind howled 

fiercer than ever, an icy winter wind cutting like a scythe in 

strong, rhythmical blasts. 

‘Morning,’ the old man replied. 

They fell silent. The young man felt that he was under 

suspicion, so he said who he was straight away. 

‘My name is Etienne Lantier.* I’m a mechanic ... I suppose 

there isn’t any work going here?’ 

The flames lit him up. He had a very dark complexion, and 

seemed about twenty-one years old. He was handsome and 

looked strong, although his limbs were rather spare. 

The driver looked reassured and shook his head. 

Part I 

1 

‘No, there’s no work for a mechanic, nothing . .. There 

were two more of you asking only yesterday. There’s nothing 

at all.’ 

A blast of wind carried their words away. Then Etienne 

pointed at the dark heap of buildings at the foot of the slag- 

heap, and asked: 

Tt is a pit, isn’t it.^^’ 

But this time the old man couldn’t answer. He w'as choked 

by a violent fit of coughing. Finally he managed to cough up a 

great gobbet of phlegm which made a black stain on the flame- 

tinted ground. 

‘Yes, it’s a pit, it’s Le Voreux* .. . Look, the mining village 

is just next door.’ 

Then it was his turn to reach out and point into the night 

towards the village whose roofs the young man had dimly 

glimpsed. But the six tubs were empty, and he followed them 

back with his stiff rheumatic gait, without so much as a flick of 

the whip, while the big sandy horse went off without needing 

to be prompted, straining laboriously along the tracks in the 

teeth of a fresh squall of wind which made his hackles rise. 

Now Le Voreux started to emerge from its shadowy dream 

world. Etienne was engrossed in the process of warming his 

poor chapped hands at the brazier, and, as he watched, each 

part of the pit took shape before his eyes: the pitch-roofed 

screening shed, the headgear* standing over the shaft, the 

great winding-engine house, the square tower of the drainage 

pump. The pit, with its squat brick buildings crammed into 

the bottom of the valley, raised its chimney like a threatening 

horn, and seemed to take on the sinister air of a voracious 

beast, crouching ready to pounce and gobble you up. As 

Etienne looked it up and down, he thought of himself and his 

nomadic existence seeking work for the last week; he pictured 

himself in his railway workshop, hitting his boss, thrown out 

of Lille, thrown out of everywhere; on Saturday he had got to 

Marchiennes, where he had heard there was work at the Les 

Forges* metalworks; but no luck, not at Les Forges’s, and not 

at Sonneville’s either, he’d had to spend Sunday holed up in a 

woodpile in a Cartwrights’ timber yard, where he had just been 

kicked out by the watchman at two o’clock in the morning. No 

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luck, not a penny, not even a crust of bread: how long could he 

hold out like this, wandering aimlessly over the countryside, 

without the slightest shelter from the winter wind? Yes, of 

course, now he recognized the pit, as the scattered lanterns lit 

the paved yard, and a door suddenly flew open, giving him a 

glimpse of the generator furnaces, blazing with light. He 

worked out what everything was, and could even locate the 

pump letting off steam, with its long, raucous, repetitive 

wheezing, like the hoarse snorting of some monster. 

The tippler operator was doubled up over his work and had 

not bothered even to look up at Etienne, who was just about to 

pick his small bundle up from where he had dropped it, when 

a fit of coughing announced the return of the driver. He 

gradually emerged from the shadows followed by his sandy 

horse, pulling six more loaded tubs. 

‘Are there any factories in Montsou?’ the young man asked. 

The old man coughed up some black phlegm* and then 

spoke up loudly against the wind: 

‘Oh, there are plenty of factories, all right. You should’ve 

seen ’em three or four years ago, thundering away, they 

couldn’t find enough workmen, never was so much money 

about ... but now we’ve got to tighten our belts again. It’s a 

crying shame round here, people laid off, workshops closing 

down,* one after the other . .. Maybe it’s not the Emperor’s* 

own fault; but why does he need to go off to fight in 

America?* Not to mention the cattle that’s dying of cholera,* 

like everyone else.’ 

Thus the pair of them swapped complaints, in short, wind¬ 

swept phrases. Etienne listed the futile approaches he had 

made over the last week; so should he give up and die of 

hunger? Soon the roads would be chock-full of beggars. Yes, 

said the old man, things couldn’t go on like that, after all, for 

Christ’s sake, you couldn’t just keep on throwing all God’s 

creatures out on the streets like that. 

‘You don’t get to eat meat every day, either.’ 

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if there was enough bread to go round.’ 

‘That’s true, if only there was enough bread!’ 

Their voices were pummelled and funnelled into a melan¬ 

choly wailing by the blustering gale. 

Part I 

9 

‘Look!’ the driver continued at the top of his voice^ turning 

towards the south, ‘there’s Montsou . . 

And stretching his arm out again he pointed at places 

invisible in the darkness, and he named them. Over there, at 

Montsou, the Fauvelle sugar-refinery was still working, but 

the Hoton refinery had just cut back its work-force, there was 

really only the Dutilleul flour-mill and the Bleuze works, 

which made mine cables, which weren’t going under. Then 

with a sweep of his arms he marked out an area covering half 

of the northern horizon: the Sonneville building works had 

had less than two-thirds of their normal orders; only two of 

the three blast-furnaces at Les Forges, in Marchiennes, were 

burning; and, last but not least, a strike was in the offing at the 

Gagebois glassworks, because they were talking of cutting the 

men’s wages. 

‘I know, don’t tell me,’ the young man repeated after every 

assertion, ‘that’s where I’ve just been.’ 

‘Over here we’re all right so far,’ the driver added. ‘But the 

pits have cut back their production. And look, over the other 

side there, at La Victoire, they’ve only lit two of their batteries 

of coke ovens.’ 

He spat, then followed on after his sleepy horse, after 

hitching it up to the empty tubs. 

Now Etienne was able to survey the whole countryside. The 

shadows were still deep, but the old man’s hand had somehow 

fleshed them out with a breadth of suffering that the young 

man could now intuitively feel living in the limitless space that 

surrounded him, as if the March wind were wringing a cry of 

famine from the bare countryside. The squalls of wind shrieked 

crazily, as if they were murdering work, bringing a famine 

which would cause untold slaughter. And his eyes darted back 

and forth as he tried to penetrate the darkness, racked with an 

anguished urge to see and understand. 

Everything was swallowed up in the unknowable darkness of 

night; all he could see, far off, were the blast-furnaces and the 

coke ovens. The latter, with their batteries of lOO chimneys 

each set at a slant, traced out their parallel slopes of scarlet 

flames; while further over to the left the two tall stacks blasted 

their blue light high into the heavens, like giant torches. It was 

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a tragic vision, like a town gutted by a disastrous blaze. There 

were no stars rising over the lowering horizon other than these 

northern lights hanging over the land of coal and iron. 

‘Would you be from Belgium.^’ The driver spoke again, he 

had come up behind Etienne on his way back up. 

This time he had brought along only three tubs. They 

might as well tip those out to be going on with: there had been 

a breakdown in the cage, due to a broken nut, which would 

halt work for at least a quarter of an hour. Around the base of 

the slag-heap things had gone quiet; the labourers could no 

longer be heard shaking the trestles with their continuous 

rumbling and rattling. All you could hear was the distant 

sound of a hammer beating on an iron plate down in the pit 

shaft. 

‘No, I’m from the south,’ the young man replied. 

The tippler operator emptied the trucks, then sat down on 

the ground, pleased at the interruption; he remained locked in 

his awkward silence, merely looking up at the driver with 

wide, lifeless eyes, as if all this talking bothered him. Indeed, 

the old man was not usually so talkative. He must have taken a 

fancy to the newcomer’s face and been bitten with one of those 

sudden urges to confide which sometimes make old people talk 

to themselves out loud. 

‘I’m from Montsou, myself,’ he said, ‘my name is 

Bonnemort.’* 

‘That’s never your real name!’ said Etienne in astonishment. 

The old man chuckled delightedly, and pointed at Le 

Voreux: 

‘No, of course not . . . I’ve been dragged out of there three 

times in little pieces, once with my hair singed to the roots, 

once with my guts bunged up with mud, the third time with 

my belly blown up with water like a frog ... So when they 

saw I wasn’t going to kick the bucket they called me Bonnemort 

for a laugh.’ 

He laughed with renewed vigour, like the creaking of a rusty 

pulley, but his mirth tailed off into a terrible fit of coughing. 

The light from the brazier now shone directly on his head. He 

had a large, flat face, sparse white hair, and a livid complexion 

covered in slate-coloured blotches. He was a short man, with a 

Parti 

I 

massive neck and bandy legs. He had long arms, and his 

square hands reached down to his knees. Moreover, like his 

horse, which was standing there motionless, apparently untrou- 

bled by the wind, he resembled a stone statue, seeming not to 

notice the cold, nor the wind buffeting and whistling around 

his ears. When he had finished coughing up, raking his throat 

with a great rasping noise, he spat out on the ground beneath 

the brazier, staining it black. 

Etienne looked at him, then looked at the soil which he had 

just discoloured. 

‘Have you been working at the mine for long?’ he asked. 

Bonnemort flung his arms open wide. 

‘For long? Oh, yes! ... I was still only seven when I first 

went down, just here as it happens, down Le Voreux, and now 

here we are and Fm fifty-eight. Work it out for yourself ... 

Fve done the lot in there, pit boy to start with, then trammer* 

pushing coal-tubs when I was strong enough to push, then 

hewer for eighteen years. Then with my gammy legs they 

made me a stoneman, on digging tunnels, then seam-filler, 

then repair man, until they had to drag me back up to the 

daylight in the end because the doctor said otherwise Fd never 

come out alive. So now that’s five years ago and they made me 

a driver . , . Hey, that’s quite something, isn’t it, fifty years at 

the pit, and forty-five of those underground!’ 

While he was speaking, the pieces of burning coal which 

dropped from the brazier from time to time lit up his pale 

face, giving it a bloodshot appearance. 

‘They keep telling me to take a rest,’ he continued, ‘but I 

won’t buy that one, Fm not that daft ... Fm going to see out 

the next two years till Fm sixty, to get my hundred-and- 

eighty-franc pension. If I said my goodbyes today they’d jump 

at the chance of paying me off with the hundred-and-fifty- 

franc one, the crafty buggers ... Anyway Fm fighting fit, 

apart from the legs. It’s only the water that got under my 

skin,* you see, what with being rained on at the coal-face. 

Some days I can’t put one foot in front of the other without 

crying out loud,’ 

He was interrupted by another fit of coughing. 

‘And it’s given you that cough, too, hasn’t it?’ said Etienne. 

12 

Germinal 

But Bonnemort shook his head in violent dissent. And as 

soon as he could speak, he said: 

‘No, it’s not that, I caught a cold a month or so ago. I never 

had a cough before, now I can’t get rid of it... and the funny 

thing is that now I just keep on coughing all the time, 

coughing and coughing.’ 

A rasping sound came up from the back of his throat, and 

he spat out more black phlegm, 

‘Is that blood.^’ Etienne asked, finally plucking up the 

courage to put the question. 

Bonnemort wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, 

slowly. 

‘No, it’s coal.. . I’ve got enough of it stored in my bones to 

keep me warm till my dying day. And I haven’t put a foot 

underground for the last five years. So I must have been 

stocking it up in my cellars in advance without realizing it. Oh 

well, keeps you young,’ 

They fell silent. The sound of the hammer rang out rhythmi¬ 

cally from far down in the pit, the wind wailed past them like a 

cry of hunger and fatigue torn from the bowels of the night. 

The flames danced frantically as the old man picked up his 

story, chewing over his memories in a quieter voice now. Oh 

yes, of course, he was no newcomer to cutting the coal, him 

and his family. They’d been working for the Montsou Mining 

Company since it was founded; and that was long enough ago, 

a hundred and six years now. One of his grandfathers, Guil¬ 

laume Maheu, a fifteen-year-old kid at the time, had discovered 

the soft-coal measures at Requillart, the Company’s first pit, 

an old pit, disused now, over there by the Fauvelle sugar- 

refinery. The whole neighbourhood knew it was true, on 

account of the seam he discovered was called the Guillaume 

seam after his grandfather’s Christian name. He never knew 

him himself, a big man so people said, died of old age at sixty 

years old. Then his father, Nicolas Maheu, they called him 

The Red, only just forty when he breathed his last, down 

under in Le Voreux which was just being sunk at the time: 

tunnel collapsed, squashed him flat as your hand, blood, 

bones, and everything swallowed up by the rocks. Two of his 

uncles and three brothers later on had met their maker down 

below. He himself, Vincent Maheu, had come out more or less 

in one piece, with just his legs out of kilter; he was the smart 

one, if you asked what folks thought. But what could you do 

about it, anyway? You had to work. It was handed down from 

father to son like any other job. His own son, Toussaint 

Maheu, was wearing himself out at the same game, and his 

grandsons, and the whole family, who lived just opposite, in 

the mining village. A hundred and six years of hard labour, 

first the old men then the kids, all for the same boss: hey, 

there weren’t many of your upper-class blokes who could give 

you such a good long family history!* 

‘And even then, it’s all right as long as you have enough to 

eat!' Etienne murmured again. 

‘That’s what I always say, as long as you’ve got enough 

bread to eat, you can keep alive.' 

Bonnemort fell silent, and turned his gaze towards the 

mining village, where the lights were coming on one by one. 

The bells of Montsou rang out four o’clock. The cold 

turned sharper. 

Etienne was the next to speak: ‘Is your Company rich?’ 

The old man raised his shoulders, then let them fall limp 

again, as if he had suddenly been buried by a landslide of gold 

coins. 

‘Oh yes, you can say that again . ., Maybe not as rich as the 

d’Anzin* Company, next door. But worth millions and millions 

all the same. You couldn’t count it all up . . . Nineteen pits, 

thirteen producing, Le Voreux, La Victoire, Crevecoeur, 

Mirou, Saint-Thomas, Madeleine, Feutry-Cantel, and still 

more, and six for drainage or ventilation, like Requillart . . . 

Ten thousand workers, concessions covering sixty-seven par¬ 

ishes, producing 5,000 tons a day, railway links to every pit, 

and workshops, and factories ... Oh yes, you can say that 

again, there’s money there all right!’ 

The sound of tubs rumbling over the trestles made the big 

sandy horse prick up its ears. Down below the cage must have 

been repaired, for the sorters had returned to their labours. 

While he harnessed the horse to go back down again, the 

driver added quietly, addressing the animal confidentially: 

‘Mustn’t get used to nattering, lazy old boy! ... What 

14 Germinal 

would Monsieur Hennebeau think if he knew how you wasted 

your time?’ 

Etienne looked out into the night, meditatively. He asked: 

‘So the mine belongs to Monsieur Hennebeau, then, does 

it?’ 

‘No,’ the old man explained, ‘Monsieur Hennebeau is only 

the manager. He draws his wages like the rest of us.’ 

The young man pointed towards the vast domain that lay 

hidden in the darkness. 

‘So who does it all belong to, then?’ 

But Bonnemort was momentarily choked by another attack, 

so violent that he had to fight for breath. When he had finally 

spat out, and wiped the black foam off his lips, he spoke 

against the wind, which was gusting more fiercely than ever: 

‘What? Who does it all belong to? .. . Who knows? Other 

people.’ 

And with his hand he indicated an imaginary point in the 

shadows, some distant, unknown place, inhabited by those 

other people, for whom the Maheu family had been hacking 

their hearts out for over a century. 

His voice had taken on a kind of religious awe; it was as if 

he had spoken of some untouchable tabernacle which concealed 

the crouching, greedy god to whom they all offered up their 

flesh, but whom they had never seen. 

‘If only we had enough bread to eat,’ Etienne repeated for 

the third time, with no apparent connection. 

‘Lord, yes, if we had all the bread we could eat, that would 

be too good to be true!’ 

The horse had started off, then the driver disappeared after 

him with his cripple’s limp. By the tippler, the operator hadn’t 

moved an inch; he was still sitting hunched up with his chin 

between his knees, staring at nothing with his wide, vacant 

eyes. 

Etienne picked up his bundle, but he didn’t move off again 

straight away. He felt the icy blasts of wind biting into his 

back, while his chest was roasting in front of the blazing fire. 

Perhaps, all the same, he could do worse than ask at the pit: 

the old man might not be well informed: and then, he was 

resigned to the fact that he would have to accept whatever was 

Part / 

15 

on offer. Where could he go; and what future was there for 

him anywhere in this country starving from unemployment? 

Why leave his carcass behind a wall somewhere like a dead 

dog? Yet one thing still made him hesitate, a feeling of fear as 

he looked at Le Voreux, in the middle of that bare plain, 

drowned so deep in such black night. With every new squall 

the wind seemed to gather strength, as if the horizons it blew 

from kept opening wider. There was no sign of dawn to relight 

the dead sky, only the blast-furnaces burning alongside the 

coke ovens, bloodying the shadows without illuminating their 

hidden depths. And Le Voreux lay lower and squatter, deep in 

its den, crouching like a vicious beast of prey, snorting louder 

and longer, as if choking on its painful digestion of human 

flesh. 

CHAPTER II 

Amid the fields of wheat and sugar-beet, mining village 

number Two Hundred and Forty* slumbered in the depths of 

night. You could just detect the bulk of the four massive 

blocks of small back-to-back houses, running geometrically in 

parallel lines like a barracks or a hospital, and divided by three 

wide avenuCvS, laid out with regular gardens. And, over the 

deserted plain, the only sound to be heard was the wailing of 

the wind, tearing the trellises away from the fences. 

In the Maheus' house, which was number 16 of the second 

block, nothing moved. The single first-floor bedroom was 

cloaked in thick shadows, as if their very weight was driving 

sleep into the creatures whose presence could almost be felt, as 

they lay there in a heap, with their mouths open, drugged with 

fatigue. Despite the sharp cold outside, the fetid air gave out a 

living warmth, the suffocating warmth of even the most com¬ 

fortable sleeping quarters, with their smell of human cattle. 

The cuckoo clock on the ground floor struck four o’clock, 

but nothing stirred; there was the whistle of faint breathing, 

accompanied by two deeper snores. But suddenly Catherine 

started. Despite her fatigue she had intuitively recognized the 

16 Germinal 

four chimes of the clock echoing up through the floorboards, 

without having the energy to wake up altogether. Then she 

swung her legs out of bed, groped for a match, and lit the 

candle. But she stayed sitting down, her head so heavy that it 

sagged back behind her shoulders, drawn irresistibly by the 

urge to collapse on to the bolster. 

Now the candle lit up the square room, its two windows, 

and the three beds which were crammed into it. There was a 

wardrobe, and a table and two chairs, all made of old walnut 

wood, whose smoky hues clashed starkly with the bright 

yellow paint on the walls. There was no other furniture, only 

some clothes hung up on nails, and a jug on the floor, 

alongside a red cooking pot which served as a basin. In the 

left-hand bed, Zacharie, the oldest child, a lad of twenty-one, 

lay alongside his brother Jeanlin, who was nearly eleven years 

old; in the right-hand bed there were two kids, Lenore and 

Henri, one six and the other four, asleep in each other’s arms; 

while Catherine shared the third bed with her sister Alzire, 

who was so skinny for her nine years that she wouldn’t even 

have felt her presence at her side, if the poor little cripple’s 

hump hadn’t dug into her ribs. The glass-panelled door was 

open, and you could see the landing, where in a kind of recess 

the father and mother slept in a fourth bed, beside which they 

had managed to lodge the cradle of their youngest, Estelle, 

who was only just three months old. 

Catherine forced herself to make a supreme effort. She 

stretched out her arms, and tugged at the red hair which 

cascaded over her neck and forehead. She was slim for a fifteen- 

year-old, and all that could be seen of her limbs, tightly 

wrapped in her nightshirt, were her feet, seemingly tattooed 

with bluish coal-stains, and her delicate arms, whose milky 

whiteness glowed in contrast to her sallow complexion, which 

was already worn by repeated scrubbing with black soap. A 

final yawn revealed a generous mouth, and gleaming teeth set in 

anaemic gums; while from her grey-green eyes, brimming with 

the wreckage of sleep, seeped a broken and suffering expression 

which radiated out from her naked body in waves of fatigue. 

But a voice croaked out from the landing, as Maheu stam¬ 

mered through the mists of sleep: 

Part / 

17 

‘God damn! It’s time ... Did you put the light on, Cather¬ 

ine?’ 

‘Yes, Father .. . The dock’s just chimed, downstairs.’ 

‘Well hurry up then, lazybones! If you hadn’t spent all 

Sunday night dancing, you could have woken us earlier this 

morning . .. What a life of idle luxury!’ 

And he carried on scolding her, but he lapsed into sleep 

again, and his complaints became confused and died away in a 

new fit of snoring. 

The girl crossed the bedroom in her nightshirt, walking 

barefoot on the tiled floor. As she went past Henri and 

Lenore, she tucked in the blanket, which had slipped off their 

bed; they didn’t awake, but stayed drowned in their deep, 

childish sleep. Alzire opened her eyes, and turned over to take 

the warm place left by her big sister, without saying a word. 

‘Hey, Zachariel Hey, there, Jeanlin, come on!’ Catherine 

said, twice over, standing over her two brothers, as they 

remained oblivious, with their heads buried in the bolster. 

She had to grab her elder brother by the shoulders and 

shake him; then, while he was mumbling insults at her, she 

decided to strip off the sheet. She thought the two boys looked 

funny as they thrashed out their bare legs in protest, and she 

laughed out loud. 

‘Let go, stupid!’ grumbled Zacharie sulkily, as he sat up. ‘I 

don’t like your games ... My God, just think! We’ve got to 

get up!’ 

He was a thin, gangling young man, whose long face was 

darkened at the chin, shadowed by a few scraps of nascent 

beard. He had the same straw-coloured hair and anaemic 

complexion as the rest of the family. His nightshirt had ridden 

up around his belly, and he tugged it down again, not from 

modesty, but to keep himself warm. 

‘It’s struck four downstairs,’ Catherine repeated. ‘Come on, 

move it, Father’s getting mad.’ 

Jeanlin, who had curled back up into a ball, closed his eyes 

again, and said: 

‘Piss off, I’m tired!’ 

She gave another good-natured laugh. He was so small, with 

his thin limbs, and his oversized joints swollen with scabs, that 

18 Germinal 

she swept him up bodily in her arms. But he wriggled furiously, 

and his livid monkey-like features were lit up by his fierce 

green eyes. His tight, curly hair and his big ears emphasized 

the pallor of his sullen, angry features, and, humiliated by his 

impotence, he said nothing, but bit her right breast. 

‘Rotten bastard!’ she swore quietly, choking back a cry and 

putting him down on the ground. 

Alzire remained silent, the sheet drawn up to her chin, but 

she had not gone back to sleep. Her pensive, sickly eyes 

followed the movements of her sister and her two brothers as 

they started to get dressed. Another quarrel broke out around 

the basin, with the boys elbowing the girl aside because she 

was taking too long to get washed. Then they threw off their 

nightshirts and relieved themselves, still half-asleep, naturally 

and unembarrassedly, like a litter of puppies raised together. 

In fact, Catherine was the first to be ready. She slipped on her 

miner’s breeches, put on her cotton jacket, tied her hair into a 

bun and tucked it into her blue cap. In her clean Monday¬ 

morning clothes she looked like a little man, with nothing 

betraying her gender but a slight swaying of the hips. 

‘When the old man comes in,’ said Zacharie spitefully, ‘he’ll 

be really pleased to see the bed in a mess ... and you can bet 

I’ll tell him it’s your fault,’ 

The old man was their grandfather, Bonnemort, who worked 

at night and slept in the daytime: so the bed never cooled off, 

there was always someone snoring away in it. 

Catherine said nothing, but started to straighten out the 

blanket and tuck it in. But a few moments earlier she had 

heard noises behind the wall, coming from the neighbours’ 

house. These brick partitions, one of the Company’s more 

frugal investments, were so thin that the slightest whisper was 

audible on the other side. The occupants lived back to back; 

nothing private stayed secret, even in front of the children. A 

heavy footstep had shaken the staircase; then there was a sort 

of soft thump, followed by a sigh of relief. 

‘Well!’ said Catherine, ‘Levaque’s gone downstairs, so now 

it’s Bouteloup’s turn to go up and keep La Levaque warm.’ 

Jeanlin sniggered, and even Alzire’s eyes lit up. Every 

morning they joked over the menage d trois next door, made 

up of a hewer, his lodger, who was a stoneman,* and the 

hewer’s wife, who was thus provided with two men, one 

working nights, and the other on the day shift. 

‘Philomene’s coughing,’ said Catherine, after listening 

quietly for a moment. 

This was the eldest Levaque child, a tall nineteen-year-old 

girl, who was Zacharie’s mistress, and had already had two 

children by him, although she had such a weak chest that she 

had always worked as a sorter at the pit, because she had never 

been able to work below ground. 

‘Oh yes, like hell!’ Zacharie replied. ‘Philomene doesn’t give 

a damn, she’s fast asleep . .. What a slut, to think she can 

sleep until six o’clock!’ 

He put his breeches on, then opened a window, struck by a 

sudden thought. Outside, in the darkness, the village awoke, as 

the lights came twinkling one by one through the slats of the 

blinds. And that caused another quarrel: he leant forward, 

peering out, hoping to see the overman* emerge from the 

Pierrons’ house over the way, since he was reputed to be 

sleeping with La Pierronne; while his sister shouted out that 

the husband had gone over to a day shift at the loading bay 

since yesterday, so that, obviously, Dansaert couldn’t have 

shacked up there last night. The wind burst through in icy 

gusts, as Zacharie and Catherine shouted at each other, both 

equally convinced of the accuracy of their information, until 

they were interrupted by a fit of screaming and crying, 

coming from Estelle’s cot. She had been disturbed by the 

cold. 

This woke Maheu up. What the hell had got into his bones, 

to make him doze off again like a layabout? And he swore so 

loud that the children in the next room fell silent. Zacharie 

and Jeanlin were finishing washing, with a slowness that 

betrayed their fatigue. Alzire had opened her eyes wide and 

was looking around her. The two youngsters, Lenore and 

Henri, were still asleep in each other’s arms, breathing quietly 

and rhythmically in time together, despite the row. 

‘Catherine, give me the candle!’ shouted Maheu. 

She finished buttoning up her jacket, then took the candle 

into the recess on the landing, leaving her brothers to look for 

20 

Germinal 

their clothes in the faint light that filtered through the doorway. 

Her father jumped out of bed. But she didn’t stop, she felt her 

way down the stairs in her thick woollen stockings and lit 

another candle at the bottom, so that she could see to get the 

coffee ready. The family all kept their clogs under the dresser. 

‘Will you shut up, you little rat!’ Maheu shouted, exasper¬ 

ated by Estelle, who was still crying. 

He was short, like old Bonnemort, and in fact he was like a 

plumper version of him, with a large head, a flat, pallid face, 

and straw-coloured hair cut very short. The child screamed 

louder, frightened by the big muscular arms waving around 

over her head. 

‘Leave her alone, you know she won’t shut up,’ said La 

Maheude, lying back in the middle of the bed. 

She too had just woken up, and she complained how rotten 

it was never to be able to get a proper night’s sleep. Couldn’t 

they just go out quietly? All that emerged from under the 

blanket tucked snugly round her was her long face, with its 

striking features, whose ripe beauty had already been under¬ 

mined at the age of only thirty-nine by a life of poverty and 

the seven children she had borne. She stared up at the ceiling 

and spoke slowly, while her old man got dressed. Neither of 

them noticed the baby, who was gradually running out of 

breath to scream with. 

‘Look, you realize I’m clean out of cash, and it’s only Monday: 

another six days to go before we get our fortnight’s pay* ... it 

can’t go on like this. All the lot of you earn is nine francs. How can 

you expect me to make ends meet? There are ten of us to feed.’ 

‘Oh! Nine francs!’ protested Maheu. ‘Me and Zacharie are 

both on three, that makes six .. . Catherine and Father on two, 

that makes four; four and six is ten ... and Jeanlin gets one, 

which makes eleven.’ 

‘All right, eleven, but don’t forget there’s Sundays and days 

off work ... so you never get more than nine, do you?’ 

He was too busy looking on the floor for his leather belt to 

reply. Then he straightened up, and said: 

‘You shouldn’t complain. I’m good and strong. There are 

plenty of fellows who are reduced to repair work by the time 

they’re forty-two.’ 

Part / 

21 

‘Maybe, my friend, but that doesn’t bring home the bacon 

. . . What the hell am I supposed to do, then? Haven’t you got 

a penny on you?’ 

‘I’ve got two sous.’* 

‘Keep them for the pub ... My God! What the hell am I 

going to do? Six days to go, it’s endless. We owe sixty francs to 

Maigrat, who shut the door on me the day before yesterday. 

That won’t stop me going back to see him. But if he keeps on 

turning me down ...’ 

And La Maheude droned on, without moving her head, 

closing her eyes from time to time to shut out the sad light of 

the candle. She said the cupboard was bare, the little ones kept 

asking for bread and butter, there wasn’t even any coffee left, 

the water gave you the runs, and day after day you kept your 

mind off the hunger by chewing boiled cabbage leaves. She 

must have been gradually raising her voice, to make herself 

heard over the screams of the baby. This screaming was now 

too much to bear. Maheu suddenly seemed to hear it, he 

couldn’t stand it, he snatched the kid out of her cot and 

dumped her on her mother’s bed, stammering with rage: 

‘Here! take her, before I do her an injury ,.. God almighty, 

what a child! She has everything she wants, she gulps it down, 

and she moans worse than the others!’ 

And sure enough Estelle had started sucking. She was 

already buried under the blankets, enveloped in the soothing 

warmth of the bed, and the only sign of life she gave was a 

greedy little slurping of the lips. 

‘Didn’t the bourgeois* at La Pioiaine tell you to go and see 

them?’ the father resumed, after a moment of silence. 

The mother pursed her lips, with an air of doubt and discour¬ 

agement. 

‘Yes, I met them. They give out clothes for poor children 

... All right. I’ll take Lenore and Henri to see them this 

morning. If they’d just give me a hundred sous,* even.’ 

Silence fell again. Maheu was ready. He stayed motionless 

for a moment, then he concluded, with his gruff voice: 

‘What do you expect, that’s the way things are, it’s your job 

to rake up the food . . . Sitting here talking won’t do any good. 

I’d do better to get off to work.’ 

22 

Germinal 

‘Of course/ replied La Maheude. ‘Blow the candle out, I 

don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.’ 

He blew the candle out. Zacharie and Jeanlin were already 

on their way downstairs; as he followed them down, the 

wooden stairs creaked under the heavy tread of their woollen- 

stockinged feet. Behind them, the recess and the bedroom had 

relapsed into darkness. The children were asleep, and even 

Alzire had closed her eyes. But now their mother was staring 

wide-eyed into the darkness, while Estelle, pumping away at 

the exhausted woman’s empty breast, purred like a kitten. 

Downstairs, Catherine had started by lighting the fire. The 

cast-iron hearth, which had a griddle in the centre and a stove 

on each side, was permanently lit with a coal fire. Once a 

month the Company handed out to each family eight hectolitres 

of slack, the hard coal fiakes which accumulated beside the 

tracks. It was difficult to get it to light, so the girl merely 

damped down the fire every night and then stoked it up in the 

morning, adding little pieces of carefully chosen soft coal. 

Then, when she had put a kettle on the griddle, she squatted 

down in front of the dresser. 

It was a fairly large room, which took up the whole of the 

ground floor. It was painted apple green, and gleamed with 

Nordic cleanliness, since its flagstones were sluiced down with 

water and then sprinkled with white sand. In addition to the 

dresser, of varnished pine, the furniture consisted of a table 

and chairs of the same wood. The walls were covered with 

garish prints, including portraits of the Emperor and 

Empress,* donated by the Company, as well as copiously 

gilded soldiers and saints, contrasting blatantly with the stark 

austerity of the room; and the only ornaments to be seen were 

a pink cardboard box on the sideboard, and the multicoloured 

cuckoo clock, whose loud tick-tock seemed to echo right up 

through the air to the ceiling. Next to the door at the foot of 

the stairs was another door, leading down to the cellar. 

Despite the cleanliness, the warm air was tainted with a 

smell of fried onion which had lingered captive overnight and 

now hung rankly in the warm air, permanently thick and 

heavy with the acrid tang of burning coal. 

In front of the open sideboard, Catherine reflected. There 

Part / 

23 

was only one piece of bread left, there was enough cottage 

cheese, but only a single pat of butter; and she was supposed 

to prepare slices for four of them. But then she made up her 

mind, cut the bread into slices, spreading cheese on one piece 

and smearing butter on another, then sticking them together: 

making a ‘slab’,* the sandwich which they took to the pit 

each morning. Soon she had lined up the four slabs on the 

table, having calculated their size with the most rigorous 

justice, from the father’s man-size bite down to Jeanlin’s little 

nibble. 

Catherine, who seemed quite absorbed by her housework, 

was no doubt dreaming of the stories that Zacharie had been 

telling about the overman and La Pierronne, for she pushed the 

door half-open and glanced ouside. The wind was still strong, 

but the light playing on the low walls of the village buildings 

was brighter now, and the air was filled with the muffled 

sounds of people waking up. Already doors were opening and 

closing, as dark lines of workmen moved off into the night. 

What a fool she was to get cold, because you could bet that the 

cage-loader was still asleep; he was in no hurry to go off to his 

shift, which didn’t start until six o’clock! But she stayed there 

looking at the house at the bottom of the garden. The door 

opened, and her curiosity was whetted. But it must only have 

been the Pierrons’ daughter Lydie, going off to the pit. 

A hiss of steam made her turn round. She shut the door and 

hurried back to the stove: the water was boiling and spilling 

over, putting the fire out. There was no coffee left, she had to 

make do with pouring the boiling water over yesterday’s 

grounds; then she put some raw sugar in the coffee-pot. Just 

then her father and two brothers came down. 

‘Ye gods!’ proclaimed Zacharie, raising his bowl to his lips, 

‘I reckon there’s no danger to life and limb in this brew.’ 

Maheu shrugged his shoulders philosophically. 

‘Well, it’s hot, so it’s better than nothing.’ 

Jeanlin collected all the crumbs from the sandwiches to 

dunk in his bowl. Catherine finished drinking, and then poured 

what was left of the coffee out of the pot into their tin flasks. 

All four of them remained standing, as they drank up quickly, 

by the dim light of the smoking candle. 

24 

Germinal 

‘That’s it, and about time, too!’ said their father. ‘Anyone 

would think we had a private income!’ 

But they heard a voice from upstairs, through the door, 

which they had left open. It was their mother, La Maheude, 

who shouted out: 

‘Take all the bread, I’ve got a bit of vermicelli for the chil¬ 

dren.’ 

‘Yes, all right,’ answered Catherine. 

She had damped down the fire, but put a drop of soup to 

simmer on a hot part of the griddle for the grandfather to find 

when he got home at six o’clock. They all took their clogs out 

from under the dresser, slung the straps of their flasks over 

their shoulders, and wedged their slabs down between their 

shirts and their jackets. Then they went out with the men 

leading and the girl bringing up the rear, after she had blown 

out the candle and locked the door. The house went dark 

again. 

‘Hello there! We’re all off together,’ said a man who was 

closing the door of the neighbouring house. 

It was Levaque, with his son Bebert, a twelve-year-old kid 

who was a great friend of Jeaniin. Catherine was amazed, and 

had to smother her laughter, as she whispered to Zacharie: 

‘How about that.? Now Bouteloup doesn’t even wait till her 

husband has left!’ 

Back in the village the lights started to go out again. The 

last door banged shut, and sleep descended, as the women and 

children dozed off again, in their cosier beds. And all the way 

from the silent village to the roaring pit of Le Voreux, a slow 

procession of shadows wended its way through the gusts of 

wind, as the colliers set off for work, shoulders swaying and 

arms crossed on their chests to keep them out of the way, with 

their lunchtime slab giving them a hump in the small of the 

back. In their thin cotton clothes they shivered with cold, but 

never quickened their pace, as they tramped along the road 

like a wandering herd of animals. 

Part I 

25 

CHAPTER III 

When Etienne finally came down from the slag-heap, he went 

into the pit-head at Le Voreux; and the men he approached to 

ask if there was any work shook their heads, but they all told 

him to wait until the overman arrived. They left him to his 

own devices amid the twilit buildings, with their pools of 

darkness, and their confusing maze of rooms and floors. He 

mounted a dark and ramshackle staircase, and found himself 

on a shaky gangway, leading across the screening shed, which 

was still so plunged in darkness that he groped his way 

forwards with his arms outstretched to avoid bumping into 

things. Suddenly two large yellow eyes cut through the dark¬ 

ness, He was right underneath the headgear, in the coal receipt 

hall at the top landing-stage, at the very mouth of the pit. 

A deputy,* old Richomme, a fat man with a face like a 

benevolent policeman, and a wide grey moustache, was walking 

at that very moment towards the office of the receiving clerk, 

the checkweighman. 

‘Could you use a workman here, for any kind of job at all.^’ 

Etienne asked again. 

Richomme was about to say no; but he thought twice and 

replied as the others had, as he walked away: 

‘Wait for Monsieur Dansaert, the overman.’ 

Four lanterns had been set up there, with reflectors, to cast 

their light right down into the pit, illuminating the iron 

railings, the signal levers and the cage keeps, and the timber 

beams of the guides which the two cages ran along. The rest of 

the vast hall seemed like the nave of a church, or a shipwrecked 

vessel, haunted by great, floundering shadowy souls. The only 

bright patch came from the lamp depot blazing at the end, 

while, in the coal receipt office, a weak lamp guttered like a 

waning star. Production had just started up again; a constant 

rumbling sound came from the cast-iron plates of the flooring 

as the coal trucks rolled endlessly by, and the labourers were 

running back and forth, their long curved spines occasionally 

visible above the dark, turbulent, noisy chaos. 

For a moment Etienne stood motionless, deafened and 

26 

Germinal 

blinded. He felt frozen; there were draughts coming at him 

from all sides. So he walked forward a few steps, drawn 

towards the winding engine, watching its steel and copper 

parts fitfully gleaming. It was set back from the shaft, twenty- 

five metres higher up, in a separate room, and so solidly fixed 

on its own brick foundations that despite its steam engine 

running at top speed with its full 400 horsepower, its enormous 

crank rod surged and dived with well-oiled smoothness, trans¬ 

mitting not the slightest vibration to the surrounding walls. 

The mechanic stood beside the operating lever, listening out 

for the signal bells and watching the planning board with its 

plan of the shaft, showing its various levels marked off against 

a vertical groove, where lead weights hung on strings ran up 

and down, representing the cages. And with each departure, as 

the engine started up, the drums, two immense wheels ten 

metres wide, around whose hubs the two steel cables were 

constantly wound and then unwound in the opposite direction, 

spun at such speed that they seemed like a grey cloud of dust. 

‘Watch out, there! ^ shouted three labourers, who were lug¬ 

ging a gigantic ladder. 

Etienne had nearly been crushed. As his eyes became accus¬ 

tomed to the darkness, he watched the cables whistling through 

the air, their ribbons of steel cord flying over thirty metres high 

up into the headgear, running over the pulleys, then hurtling 

vertically down into the shaft where they latched on to the 

production cages. The pulleys were supported by an iron 

framework, like the tall framework of a bell-tower. The cable, 

which constantly dipped and soared, flying smoothly and 

silently as a bird despite its enormous weight, was capable of 

lifting 1,200 kilograms at a speed of ten metres per second. 

‘Watch out there, for Christ’s sake!’ the labourers shouted 

again, shifting the ladder over to the other side, to reach the 

left-hand winding-drum. 

Etienne walked slowly back to the receipt hall. The gigantic, 

whirling flight over his head made him feel dizzy. And he 

shivered in the cold draughts, as he watched the movement of 

the cages, and felt his ears deafened by the tubs as they 

thundered past. Near the shaft the signal rang out; it was a 

heavy, swivelling hammer, which fell against a metal block 

Part I 

27 

when pulled by a rope from below. One stroke to stop, two to 

go down, three to come up: like great cudgel blows beating 

down a riot, accompanied by the sharp ringing of a bell; while 

the labourer directing the operation added to the din by 

shouting orders to the mechanic through a loud hailer. The 

cages surfaced suddenly amid this flurry of movement and 

immediately dived down again; they emptied and were refilled, 

without Etienne gaining any idea how these complex man¬ 

oeuvres were achieved. 

There was only one fact that he really took in: the shaft was 

swallowing men down in mouthfuls of twenty or thirty at a 

time, with a swift gulping motion, showing hardly a ripple. 

From four o’clock in the morning the workmen started their 

descent. They came barefoot out of the shed, holding their 

lamps in their hands, gathering in small groups until there 

were enough of them. Soundlessly pouncing like a nocturnal 

beast of prey, the iron cage rose out of the night, to lock into 

its keeps, with its four decks each holding two tubs full of coal. 

Labourers removed the tubs from each deck and replaced 

them with others, either empty, or already loaded with props. 

And the miners then squeezed into the empty tubs, in groups 

of five, up to forty at a time, if all the tubs were filled. An 

order was barked out through the loud hailer, a confused, 

muffled braying, while the operator tugged the cord to ring 

the signal four times down below, calling ‘dinner’s ready’, 

warning them that their next load of human cattle was on its 

way down. Then the cage shuddered slightly, and plunged 

silently downwards, falling like a stone, leaving no trace of its 

passage but the swooping, throbbing cable. 

‘Is it deep?’ Etienne asked a miner who was waiting alongside 

him looking sleepy. 

‘Five hundred and fifty-four metres,’ he replied. ‘But there 

are four stops on the way down, the first one’s at three 

hundred and twenty.’ 

They both fell silent, their eyes on the cable as it rose. 

Etienne spoke again: 

‘And if it breaks?’ 

‘Oh, if it breaks! . . .’ 

The miner finished his sentence with a gesture. His turn 

28 

Germinal 

had come, the cage had reappeared, with its slick, effortless 

movement. He squatted down inside one of the tubs with his 

workmates, it plunged down again, then, barely four minutes 

later, it surged back up again, ready to swallow down another 

load of men. For half an hour the pit gulped down these 

meals, in more or less greedy mouthfuls, depending on the 

depth of the level they were bound for, but without ever 

stopping, always hungry, its giant bowels capable of digesting 

a nation. It filled, and filled again, and the dark depths 

remained silent as the cage rose up from the void, silently 

opening its gaping jaws. 

In the end Etienne felt the disquiet he had experienced 

earlier on the slag-heap returning. Why keep trying? This 

overman would turn him away as the others had. A strange 

feeling of fear made him take a sudden decision: he turned and 

walked away, and when he got outside he did not stop until he 

reached the building which housed the generators. Through 

the wide open doors he could see seven boilers with two 

furnaces each. Amid a white haze and the hiss of escaping 

steam a stoker was busy loading one of the furnaces, whose 

blazing fire could be felt from the entrance; and the young 

man, who was glad to feel some warmth, moved closer, when 

he met the next group of colliers arriving at the pit. It was the 

Maheu and Levaque families. When he saw Catherine at their 

head, her gentle, boyish demeanour inspired him with the 

sudden, irrational urge to make one last appeal. 

‘Listen, friend, isn’t there room for another workman here, 

for any kind of job at all?’ 

She looked at him in surprise, a little frightened by this 

abrupt voice coming out of the shadows. But, behind her, 

Maheu had heard him, and he stopped to talk for a moment in 

reply. No, they didn’t need anybody. But he was struck by this 

poor wretch of a workman wandering around the countryside. 

As he left he said to the others: 

‘You know, we could end up like that!,. . Mustn’t complain, 

it’s not everyone who’s dying of overwork.’ 

The group went straight into the changing shed, a great hall 

roughly plastered and whitewashed, its walls lined all round 

with padlocked lockers. In the centre there was an iron stove, a 

Part I 

29 

sort of open furnace, glowing brightly, and it was crammed so 

full of white-hot coal that pieces kept splitting open and 

shooting out over the earthen floor. The room was lit only by 

this brazier, which sent blood-red reflections dancing along the 

filthy woodwork and up on to the ceiling, which was stained 

with black dust. 

As the Maheus arrived, they heard a gust of laughter 

billowing out from the direction of the blaze. About thirty 

workmen were standing with their backs to the flames, toasting 

themselves voluptuously. Before going down below, they 

all came to stoke up with a good skinful of heat to ward 

off the damp of the pit. But that morning there was an extra 

pleasure, they were teasing La Mouquette, an eighteen-year- 

old tram girl, a good-natured sort, whose ample breasts and 

buttocks threatened to burst out of her jacket and breeches. 

She lived at Requillart with her father, old Mouque, a stable¬ 

man, and her brother Mouquet, a labourer; only, since their 

timetables weren’t the same, she went to the pit on her own; 

and so, laid flat on her arse in a cornfield in summertime, or 

propped up against a wall in wintertime, she took her pleasure 

with whoever happened to be that week’s lover boy. The 

miners had all had their turn, passing her on from mate to 

mate, without thinking twice about it. But on the day that she 

found herself accused of going with a nailsmith from Marchi- 

ennes she flew into a rage, shouting that she had more self- 

respect, that she’d rather lose an arm and a leg than let anyone 

boast he’d seen her with anyone but a collier. 

‘Is it all over with big tall Chaval, then?’ asked one of the 

miners, mockingly. ‘Have you snatched that little whippersnap- 

per? I bet he’d need a ladder to get up there! ... I saw the two 

of you behind Requillart. And the proof is he had to climb up 

on a milestone.’ 

‘So what?’ said La Mouquette spiritedly. ‘What the hell 

does it matter to you? Nobody asked you to come and give him 

a leg up.’ 

Her good-hearted coarseness made the men laugh even 

louder, as they shook their shoulders, half-toasted by the 

stove; while, roaring with laughter herself, she walked among 

them flaunting her indecent attire, with her grotesque but 

30 Germinal 

provocative protrusions of flesh bursting through her clothes 

like some obscene disease. 

But the humour subsided when La Mouquette told Maheu 

that Fleurance, tall Fleurance, wouldn’t be coming any more: 

they had found her the night before stretched out stiff on her 

bed; some said her heart had missed a beat, others blamed it 

on a litre of gin she had downed too quickly. Maheu felt a 

wave of despair: another bit of bad luck, there went another of 

his tram girls, and no chance of finding an instant substitute! 

He had to work on a subcontracting basis; there were four of 

them as hewers in his seam, himself, Zacharie, Lcvaque, and 

Chaval. If there was only Catherine left to push the tubs, their 

output would suffer. Suddenly, he shouted out: 

‘Hey! How about that man who was looking for work.?’ 

Just at that moment Dansaert was walking past the changing 

shed. Maheu told his story, and asked permission to take the 

new man on; and he reminded him that the Company wanted 

to take on boys instead of girls as trammers, like at d’Anzin’s. 

At first the overman smiled, because the plan to remove the 

women from underground usually offended the miners, who 

were much more worried about finding work for their daugh¬ 

ters than about any question of health or morality. But after 

some hesitation he agreed, although he said he would have to 

have his decision ratified by Monsieur Negrel, the engineer in 

charge of the mine. 

‘Oh, that’s great!’ declared Zacharie. ‘Our man must be 

miles away by now if he hasn’t dropped dead in the mean¬ 

time.’ 

‘No,’ said Catherine, ‘I saw him stop at the boiler-house.’ 

‘Get a move on then, lazybones!’ shouted Maheu. 

The girl ran off, while a flood of miners headed for the 

shaft, making room for others to warm themselves at the fire. 

Without waiting for his father, Jeanlin went to get his lamp 

too, with Bebert, a fat, innocent boy, and Lydie, a sickly ten- 

year-old girl. La Mouquette, who had gone on ahead, shouted 

out in the dark stairway that she’d slap the filthy little brats if 

they pinched her. 

And in fact Etienne was still in the boiler-house talking to 

the stoker, who was loading the furnaces with coal. He felt a 

Part / 

31 

deep chill come over him at the thought of going back out into 

the night. Yet he had to make up his mind and start to leave. 

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. 

‘Come on/ said Catherine. ‘We’ve got something for you.’ 

At first he didn’t understand what she meant. Then he felt a 

rush of delight, and shook the girl’s hands enthusiastically. 

‘Thank you, friend .. . You’re a real mate, you are!’ 

She burst out laughing, and looked him up and down in the 

red light of the furnace which lit them. She enjoyed the fun of 

being taken for a boy, because of her slim figure and her long 

hair rolled into a bun and hidden under her cap. He laughed 

too, feeling safe at last; and they stood face to face for a 

moment laughing together, their cheeks glowing red in the 

firelight. 

Maheu was squatting beside his locker in the changing shed, 

pulling off his clogs and his woollen stockings. When Etienne 

arrived, they settled their business in a couple of sentences: 

thirty sous a day, a tiring job, but he’d soon learn. The hewer 

advised him to keep on the shoes he was wearing, and he lent 

him an old skullcap, a leather headpiece designed to protect 

the cranium, a precaution spurned by the father and children 

themselves. They got their tools out of their toolbox, and there 

was Fleurance’s shovel ready waiting for him. Then, when 

Maheu had shut their clogs and stockings inside, as well as 

Etienne’s bundle, he suddenly got impatient. 

‘What’s that damned oaf Chaval doing? Screwing another 

bit of skirt at the roadside!... We’re half an hour late today.’ 

Zacharie and Levaque were quietly toasting their shoulders. 

After a while the former said: 

‘If it’s Chaval you’re waiting for ... He got here before us, 

and he went straight down.’ 

‘What? You knew that and you didn’t tell me! ... Come on! 

Come on! Hurry up!’ 

Catherine, who was warming her hands, went off after the 

group. Etienne let her past, then went up behind her. Again he 

found himself lost in a maze of dark stairways and corridors, 

where their bare feet made a soft slapping noise like old 

slippers. But then they came to the bright patch of the lamp 

depot, a glass-panelled room filled to the ceiling with racks, 

32 

Germinal 

where row after row of Davy lamps* were lined up, after 

having been inspected and cleaned the previous night. They 

sparkled like candles arrayed in a memorial chapel. As he 

reached the counter, each workman took his own lamp, with 

his number stamped on it; then he examined it, and sealed it 

himself; while the clerk at the table recorded the time of 

descent in his register. 

Maheu had to ask for a lamp for his new trammer. And then 

there was another check, when the workmen filed past an 

inspector, who made sure that all the lamps were properly 

sealed. 

‘Damn it! It’s not very warm in here,’ muttered Catherine, 

shivering. 

Etienne merely nodded his head. He found himself facing 

the pit shaft, in the middle of the great entrance hall, swept by 

draughts. He liked to think he was tough, and yet he felt an 

unpleasant sensation grip him by the throat, amid all these 

rumbling tubs, the dull thudding of the signal rapper, the 

stifled bellowing of the loud hailers, and the unceasing flight 

of the cables nearby, as they were wound and unwound at full 

speed by the drums driven by the engine. The cages slid up to 

the surface and then fell smoothly back down again like some 

nocturnal beast, swallowing more and more men, drinking 

them down the dark abyss of its throat. Now it was his turn, 

and he felt very cold, he became tense and silent, and this 

made Zacharie and Levaque laugh at him; for both of them 

disapproved of the employment of this stranger, especially 

Levaque, who had not been consulted. So Catherine was 

pleased to hear her father explain things to the newcomer. 

‘Look, on top of the cage, there’s a “parachute”, an iron 

anchor, with spikes that dig into the guides, if the cable 

breaks. It’s effective enough, unless it breaks down ... Yes, 

that’s right, the shaft is divided into three compartments, 

separated by boards all the way down: in the middle there’s 

the cages, on the left there’s the well for the ladders ...’ 

But he broke off to complain, although he kept his voice 

cautiously low: 

‘What the hell are we hanging about here for, for Christ’s 

sake! It shouldn’t be allowed, making us freeze like this!’ 

Part I 

33 

The deputy, Richomme, who was also waiting to go down, 

with his open lamp fixed on a stud set in his leather skullcap, 

heard him complaining. 

‘Take care, walls have ears!’ he murmured paternally, with 

the reflexes of an ex-miner who still cared for his workmates. 

‘They’ve got to carry out the proper procedure .. , There! 

here we go, get your crew inside.’ 

And indeed the cage, which was strengthened with steel 

bands and covered in a fine wire mesh, was waiting for them, 

locked into its keeps. Maheu, Zacharie, Levaque, and Catherine 

slipped into a tub at the back; and, as they had to get five 

people into it, Etienne got inside too; but as the best places 

were taken, he had to huddle up close to the girl, and her 

elbow dug into his stomach. He did not know what to do with 

his lamp. Someone advised him to fix it to one of the button¬ 

holes of his jacket, but he didn’t hear, and held it awkwardly 

in his hand. Above and below him people continued to fill up 

the tub, piling in wholesale like cattle. Why couldn’t they 

start, what was happening.?^ He seemed to have been waiting 

impatiently for several long minutes. At last he felt shaken by 

a sudden tremor, and everything keeled over, everything that 

had been at hand flew away; at the same time he felt pangs of 

anxiety and waves of vertigo tugging at his bowels, as if he 

were falling. This lasted as long as he could see daylight, while 

he was going down past the two floors of the landing-stage, 

plunging down through the middle of the soaring framework. 

Then, as they fell into the black depths of the shaft, he felt 

dazed, and was unable to perceive his sensations clearly. 

‘We’re off,’ Maheu said calmly. 

Everyone was relaxed. From time to time Etienne wondered 

whether he was rising or falling. There seemed to be pauses, 

when the lift shot straight down without touching the guides; 

and then sudden tremors, when he felt himself swinging 

between the timbers, and he feared disaster was nigh. What 

was more, he was unable to make out the walls of the shaft 

even with his face pressed up against the wire. The lamps 

failed to shed much light on the huddle of bodies at his feet. 

Only the deputy’s open lamp in the tub next to his shone like a 

beacon. 

34 

Germinal 

‘This shaft is four metres in diameter/ continued Maheu, 

finishing his pupil’s education. ‘The wooden lining really 

needs replacing, because there’s water seeping through all the 

way round ... Look! we’ve reached the water-table, can you 

hear it.^’ 

In fact Etienne had just been wondering what this sound of 

rainfall could be. At first a few large drops had rung out on the 

roof of the cage, like the start of a downpour; and now the rain 

increased, streaming down as it turned into a veritable deluge. 

The roof of the cage must have been leaking, for a trickle of 

water ran down his shoulder and soaked through to his skin. 

The cold became icy as they plunged into the damp darkness; 

then they rushed through a sudden bright patch, glimpsing a 

momentary vision of men bustling around in a cave, lit by a 

flash of light. But they had already gone past and were falling 

into the void again. 

Maheu said: 

‘That’s the first level. We’re three hundred and twenty 

metres down ... Look how fast we’re going.’ 

He raised his lamp and shone it on one of the beams holding 

the guides, which shot past like a rail beneath a train going at 

full speed; and, beyond it, there was still nothing to be seen. 

Three other levels passed, each one a brief blur of light. The 

deafening rain battered away at the darkness. 

‘Isn’t it deep!’ murmured Etienne. 

They must have been falling for hours. He suffered from 

the awkward position he had adopted, not daring to move, 

tortured most of all by Catherine’s elbow. She didn’t say a 

word, but he felt her against him, keeping him warm. When 

the cage at last touched bottom, at 554 metres, he was amazed 

to learn that the descent had only lasted a minute. But the 

sound of the keeps locking on to the cage, and the sensation of 

solid ground beneath his feet, suddenly cheered him up, and 

he turned to Catherine, teasing her humorously. 

‘How does a small chap like you manage to work up such a 

body heat, mate.^... You know your elbow’s burning a hole in 

my guts, I suppose?’ 

She laughed in her turn. What a fool to keep thinking she 

was a boy! Had he got bandages over his eyes? 

Part I 

35 

‘Sounds more like you’ve got my elbow stuck in your eye,’ 

she replied, to the accompaniment of gales of laughter on all 

sides, which the startled young man was unable to interpret. 

The cage emptied, and the workmen crossed the loading 

bay, a room carved out of the rock face, its roof arched with 

brickwork, lit by three open lamps. The onsetters,* who 

loaded the full tubs, were pushing them roughly across the 

cast-iron floor, A cavernous smell of cold saltpetre seeped out 

of the walls, mingling with gusts of fetid air from the neighbour¬ 

ing stables. The entrances to four haulage roads gaped open in 

front of them. 

‘This way,’ said Maheu to Etienne. ‘You’re not there yet. 

We’ve got a good two kilometres to go.’ 

The workmen split up into small groups and dispersed 

down into these black holes. One lot of about fifteen of them 

had just entered the left-hand opening; and Etienne brought 

up the rear, behind Maheu, who followed Catherine, Zacharie, 

and Levaque. It was a fine haulage road, cutting across the 

line of the solid rock, so that it only needed a little masonry 

support in places. They went forward in single file, and they 

kept walking onward without exchanging a word, each accompa¬ 

nied by the little flame of a lamp. The young man stumbled 

at every step, catching his feet in the rails. For a few moments 

now he had been disturbed by a low rumbling noise, sounding 

like a storm far away, which seemed to grow ever fiercer as it 

thundered towards them from out of the very bowels of the 

earth. Was it the thunder of a rock fall, about to fling down on 

their heads the solid mass of earth that separated them from 

the sky? A flash of light stabbed through the darkness, he felt 

the rock tremble; and as he flattened himself against the side 

of the tunnel like his workmates, he saw a big white horse pass 

by, harnessed to a train of tubs. Sitting on the first tub, and 

holding the reins, was Bebert; while Jeanlin ran barefoot 

behind the last one, holding on to the rim with both hands. 

They started walking again. Further on they came to a 

crossing, where two new roads opened up, and the group split 

up again, and thus the workmen gradually spread out to man 

all the workings in the mine. Now the haulage road was lined 

with timber; there were oak stays supporting the roof, and a 

Germinal 

36 

timber framework lining the crumbling rock. Behind the wood¬ 

work they could glimpse the flakes of shale, sparkling with 

mica, and the heavy mass of the sandstone, dull and rough. 

Trains of full or empty tubs continually passed in both 

directions, arriving with a thunderous roar and then swept 

along into the darkness by shadowy beasts with their ghostly 

tread. On the parallel tracks of the sidings the long black 

serpent of a stationary train lay sleeping; as its horse snorted in 

the pitch darkness, the vague forms of its hindquarters seemed 

like a mass of rock that had broken away from the roof The 

trapdoors used for ventilation swung open, then slowly closed 

again. And the further along the road they proceeded, the 

narrower and lower it became, with its uneven roof forcing 

them to keep bending their backs. 

Etienne received a sharp crack on the head. Without his 

leather skullcap, he would have split his skull open. Yet he had 

been aping every movement that Maheu made, following the 

dark silhouette sketched in front of him by the lamplight. 

None of the other workmen bumped their heads; they must 

have known by heart every pothole, every knot in the wood, 

every outcrop of rock. The young man was also hindered by 

the slippery terrain, which became more and more sodden. At 

times he found himself walking through deep puddles, which 

he realized only when his feet sank into a choppy sea of mud. 

But what surprised him most were the sudden changes in 

temperature. Down at the pit bottom it was very cold, and in 

the haulage road, where all the air ventilating the mine was 

channelled, there was an icy wind, which started blowing at 

gale force as the tunnel walls got narrower and narrower. 

Afterwards, as they plunged deeper into the byways, which 

received only a meagre ration of ventilation, the wind dropped, 

and the heat rose, a suffocating, leaden heat. 

Maheu hadn’t opened his mouth again. He turned down a 

new tunnel which loomed up on the right, saying simply to 

Etienne without turning round: 

‘The Guillaume seam.’ 

This was the seam where their coal-face was situated. No 

sooner had he taken a few steps than Etienne bruised his head 

and his elbows. The sloping roof was so low that for whole 

Part I 

37 

stretches of twenty or thirty metres he had to walk bent 

double. The water came up to his ankles. They progressed in 

this fashion for 200 metres; then, all at once, he saw Levaque, 

Zacharie, and Catherine disappear, as if they had been swal¬ 

lowed up in a narrow crevice which had suddenly opened up 

in front of his eyes. 

‘WeVe got to climb up,’ said Maheu. ‘Hook your lamp on 

to one of your buttonholes, and hold on to the wooden beams.’ 

Then he too disappeared. Etienne had to follow him. This 

chimney, cut into the seam, was used by the miners for access 

to all the side passages. It was exactly the width of the coal- 

seam, hardly sixty centimetres across. Luckily the young man 

was slim, for he was still clumsy from inexperience and wasted 

a lot of muscular effort in hauling himself upwards, flattening 

his shoulders and hips, using his wrists to force himself 

forward, clutching frantically at the timber supports. Fifteen 

metres higher up they came across the first side passage, but 

they had to continue, for the face where Maheu and company 

were cutting was on the sixth passage, in what they called 

‘heir, and after every fifteen metres of climbing they came 

across another passage; there seemed no end to their ascent, 

struggling up this crack which tore the skin off his back and 

his chest. Etienne groaned as if the weight of the rocks had 

crushed his limbs, his wrists felt dislocated and his legs 

battered, and above all he was gasping for air till he felt the 

blood bursting out of his veins, Down one passage he thought 

he saw two animals on all fours, a small one and a large one, 

pu.shing tubs: it was Lydie and La Mouquette, hard at work 

already. And he still had to climb past another two coal-faces! 

He was blinded with sweat, and was afraid he would never 

catch up with the others, as he heard their limbs brush 

smoothly and confidently past the surface of the rocks. 

‘Cheer up, we’re there!’ said Catherine’s voice. 

But ju.st as he did get there, another voice called out from 

the depths of the coal-face: 

‘Hey, what the hell have you lot been doing.^ What do you 

take me for.^ I’ve got a two-mile walk from Montsou, and I 

still got here first!’ 

It was Chaval, a tall, thin, bony man of twenty-five, with 

Germinal 

38 

strong features, who was protesting at having had to wait. 

When he saw Etienne, he asked, with as much contempt as curi¬ 

osity: 

‘What have we got here?’ 

And when Maheu had explained things, he added through 

clenched teeth: 

‘So now the boys are stealing the girls’ bread* out of their 

mouths!’ 

The two men exchanged glances, charged with a flash of 

instinctive hatred. Etienne felt himself insulted, without yet 

understanding how or why. Silence fell as they all set to work. 

Finally nearly all the seams were in production and every coal¬ 

face busy, on every level, down each and every passage. The 

gluttonous pit had swallowed its daily ration of men, with 

nearly 700 workmen now sweating away in this giant ant-hill, 

burrowing into the earth on all sides, riddling it with holes like 

worms eating into wood. And despite the silence that hung 

heavy beneath the pressure of the countless layers of rock, if 

one had put an ear to the seam, one might have heard the 

vibrations of these human insects on the march, from the 

whirring of the cable as it raised and lowered the production 

cage, to the chomping of the tools as they chipped away at the 

coal, down in the depths of these sites of destruction. 

As Etienne turned round he found himself pressing up 

against Catherine again. But this time he felt the soft swelling 

of her young breasts, and immediately recognized the source of 

the warmth that he had felt suffuse him. 

‘So you’re a girl, then?’ he murmured in astonishment. 

She replied in her usual cheerful way, quite unembarrassed: 

‘Right at last! , .. Took you long enough, didn’t it!’ 

CHAPTER IV 

The four hewers had just spread themselves out, each lying at 

a different height, so as to cover the whole expanse of the coal¬ 

face. They were separated by boards, hung on hooks, which 

caught the coal as they hewed it away; they each worked over 

Part / 

39 

about four metres of the seam at a time; and the seam was so 

thin, hardly more than half a metre thick at that point, that 

they were more or less flattened between the roof and the wall, 

dragging themselves around on their knees and elbows, unable 

to turn round without bruising their shoulders. In order to get 

at the coal, they had to stay stretched out on one side, with 

their necks twisted, so that they could swing their arms far 

enough back to wield their short-handled picks at an angle. 

First of all there was Zacharie, at the bottom; Levaque and 

Chaval were on the next two shelves up; and then right at the 

top came Maheu, Each one hewed away at the shale bedrock, 

hollowing it out with his pick; then he made two vertical cuts 

in the seam, and levered the block out by forcing an iron 

wedge into the top. The coal was soft, so the blocks broke up 

into little pieces which rolled down their stomachs and thighs. 

As these pieces were caught by the boards and piled up 

beneath the hewers, the latter gradually disappeared from 

view, and became walled into their narrow crevices. 

It was Maheu who suffered most from this. At the top the 

temperature reached thirty-five degrees, and there was no air, 

so in time you could die of suffocation. In order to see what he 

was doing, he had had to fix his lamp on to a nail over his head, 

which in the end made his blood run hot. But his torment was 

aggravated by the wetness. The rock above him was only a few 

centimetres away from his face and large drops of water 

streamed from it rapidly and relentlessly, falling with an 

apparently obstinate rhythm, always hitting the same spot. 

However much he twisted and turned his neck backwards and 

sideways, the drops kept splashing his face, spattering and 

slapping him remorselessly. After a quarter of an hour, he was 

soaked, covered in his own sweat as well, giving off a stream of 

dirty, warm vapour. That morning a persistent dripping in one 

of his eyes made him swear. He didn't want to stop cutting, 

and hacked away so furiously that he shook with the vibrations, 

wedged between his two levels of rock, like a greenfly caught 

between the pages of a book which threatened to slam suddenly 

shut. 

Not a word was exchanged. They were all hacking away, 

their irregular blows setting up a dull, distant-sounding, but 

40 

Germinal 

pervasive barrage of noise. The sound had a harsh timbre in 

the thick air, which stifled any echo at birth. And the darkness 

seemed to be coloured an unnatural black, with swirling waves 

of coal-dust, and vapours which hung heavy on the eyelids. 

The wicks of the lamps, beneath their gauze chimneys, failed 

to penetrate the gloom with their small red glow. Hardly 

anything could be seen at the coal-face, whose wide mouth led 

diagonally upwards like a wide but shallow chimney, where the 

soot had been gathering for a decade of winters to form an 

impenetrable blackness. Ghostly figures could be seen gesticu¬ 

lating, as a stray gleam revealed at random an arched hip, a 

muscular arm, or a grim face, camouflaged as if for some 

crime. Sometimes, as a block of coal was dislodged, its surface 

or corners would suddenly sparkle like crystal. Then everything 

would be plunged into darkness again, the picks battering 

away with their heavy, dull blows, and nothing was audible 

but chesty breathing, and tired or painful grunts and groans, 

muffled by the heavy air and the sound of running water. 

Zacharie, whose arms felt limp after a hard night of fun, 

soon gave up his work, on the pretext of needing to timber the 

passage, which allowed him to relax enough to start whistling 

quietly and let his eyes roam dreamily among the shadows. 

Behind them, the hewers had left nearly three metres of the 

seam hollowed out, without yet taking the trouble to shore up 

the rock. They were in too much of a hurry to bother about 

the danger. 

‘Hey, you there, your lordship!’ the young man shouted at 

Etienne. ‘Pass me some wood.’ 

Etienne had to leave off learning from Catherine how to use 

his shovel, and take the wood up to the coal-face. There were a 

few pieces left over from the day before. Every day they were 

supposed to bring down a fresh supply, cut to fit the size of 

the seam. 

‘Move it, you bloody slowcoach!’ added Zacharie, as he 

watched the new trammer clambering awkwardly up into the 

coal, his arms entangled with four lengths of oak. 

With his pick he cut out one set of notches in the roof and 

another set along the wall, and he jammed the ends of the 

pieces of wood into these notches so that they propped up the 

Part I 

41 

rock. In the afternoon the stonemen cleared away the rubble 

left at the end of the gallery by the hewers, and filled in the 

used trenches, props and all, leaving only the upper and lower 

tunnels free, in order to roll the tubs along. 

Maheu stopped groaning. He had finally cut his block out. 

He wiped his streaming face on his sleeve, and started wonder¬ 

ing what Zacharie had come up behind him to do. 

‘Leave that be,’ he said. ‘We’ll worry about that after lunch 

... We need to stick at the cutting if we want to have our tally 

of tubs.’ 

‘Yes, but it’s coming down,’ his son replied. ‘Look, there’s a 

fault. Pm afraid it’s going to cave in.’ 

But his father shrugged his shoulders. All right, so it might 

cave in! It wouldn’t be the first time, after all, and they’d get 

away with it all the same. He grew impatient, and sent his son 

back to hewing at the coal-face. 

But the others were getting restless, too. Levaque lay on his 

back, swearing away, studying his left thumb, whose skin had 

been cut by a falling rock. Chaval was angrily ripping off his 

shirt, to bare his chest and feel cooler. They were all blackened 

with coal already, swathed in a fine dust dissolved in sweat, 

running in rivulets and collecting in pools. And Maheu was 

the first to take up his pick again, striking lower down, with 

his head touching the fl(K)r of the rock. Now the drops of 

water rained on his forehead so persistently that he felt as if 

they were boring a hole in his skull. 

‘Don’t take any notice,’ Catherine explained to Etienne. 

‘They’re always moaning about something.’ 

And she dutifully resumed her instruction from where she 

had left off. 

Each loaded tub sent up from the coal-face arrived at the 

surface in exactly the same state as when it left, marked with a 

special token for the clerk to record it as part of the tally of the 

team that sent it. So they had to take great care to fill it right 

up, and to put in only clean coal: otherwise it would be 

rejected by the recording clerk. 

Etienne, whose eyes were getting used to the darkness, 

looked at Catherine, whose young skin was still white, but 

anaemic, and he could hardly guess her age; he would have put 

42 

Germinal 

it at twelve, she looked so frail. Yet he could sense that she was 

older, from her open, boyish manner and her naive lack of 

shame, which he found rather embarrassing: he wasn’t attracted 

to her; with her pale face under her tight cap she looked like a 

childish Pierrot. Yet he was amazed by the strength and speed 

of the child, which was based more on skill than on muscle. 

She filled her tub quicker than he could, with short, quick, 

regular thrusts of her shovel; then she pushed it up to the 

incline, with one long, slow, smooth movement, slipping effort¬ 

lessly under the overhanging rocks. Whereas he kept banging 

and scraping himself, crashing his tub, and grinding to a halt. 

To tell the truth, it certainly wasn’t an easy trip. The 

distance from the coal-face to the incline was fifty or sixty 

metres; and the passage, which the stonemen had not yet 

widened, was hardly more than a gully, whose very uneven 

roof bulged and buckled all over the place: in some places, 

there was only just enough room to get the loaded tub through; 

the trammers had to crouch and push on hands and knees to 

avoid splitting their heads open. Besides, the props had already 

started to bend and split. You could see long, pale cracks 

running right up the middle of them, making them look like 

broken crutches. You had to watch out not to rip your skin on 

these splinters; and under the relentless pressure, which was 

slowly crushing these oak posts even though they were as thick 

as a man’s thigh, you had to slip along on your belly, with the 

secret fear of suddenly hearing your back snap in two. 

‘Not again!’ said Catherine, laughing. 

Etienne’s tub had derailed once more, at the most difficult 

part of the passage. He couldn’t manage to push it straight 

along the rails, since they constantly failed to run true, in their 

passage over the muddy ground; and he lost his temper and 

swore, wrestling furiously with the wheels, but despite his 

titanic efforts he was unable to get them back on the track. 

‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘if you get mad you’ll never manage.’ 

Already she had deftly slipped her backside underneath the 

tub; and taking its weight on the small of her back, she raised 

it off the ground and swivelled it back into place. It weighed 

700 kilograms. He was surprised and ashamed, and stammered 

his apologies. 

Part / 

43 

She had to show him how to walk with his legs apart, 

bracing his feet against the timbers on either side of the tunnel 

in order to get some solid leverage. His body should be bent 

forward, and his arms stretched out straight in front of him so 

as to use all his muscles, including those of his shoulders and 

hips. He spent one whole trip following her, watching her run, 

with her behind up in the air and her hands placed so low 

down that she seemed to be trotting on all fours, like some 

small circus animal. She sweated and panted, and her joints 

were creaking, but she didn’t complain, displaying the dull 

acceptance acquired by habit, as if it were mankind’s common 

lot to live in this wretched, prostrate condition. But he was 

unable to follow her example, for his shoes hurt, and his body 

ached, from walking in that position with his head bent down. 

After a few minutes the position became sheer torture, an in¬ 

tolerable anguish so painful that he had to stop and kneel down 

for a moment so as to straighten his back and breathe freely. 

Then when he got to the ramp there was a new trial. She 

showed him how to load his tub quickly. There was a pit boy 

at the top and another at the bottom of this incline, which 

served all the coal-faces between two levels, a brake operator 

above and a collector below. These were urchins aged from 

twelve to fifteen who communicated in a series of vile oaths; 

thus in order to catch their attention you had to shout even 

louder. So, as soon as there was an empty tub to take up, the 

collector gave the signal, the tram girl loaded her full tub, and 

its weight sent the empty one upwards, when the operator 

released his brake. Down at the bottom, in the lower passage, 

the tubs were made up into trains for the horses to draw off to 

the shaft. 

‘Hey there, you bastards!’ Catherine shouted at the incline, 

and her voice echoed along the whole hundred-metre length of 

the timber-lined structure, which acted like a gigantic loud 

hailer. 

The pit boys must have been resting, since neither of them 

replied. The tubs stopped rolling on every level. Finally they 

heard a shrill, girlish voice call out: 

‘One of them’s at work on La Mouquette, you might have 

guessed!’ 

44 

Germinal 

There was an outbreak of laughter on all sides, and all the 

tram girls working on the seam split their sides. 

‘Who said that.^’ Etienne asked Catherine. 

She told him that it was young Lydie, a saucy kid who knew 

a thing or two and could push a tub as fast as a grown woman 

despite her arms, which looked as if they belonged to a doll. 

And as for La Mouquette, she was as likely to be busy with 

both the pit boys at once as with just one of them. 

But the collector’s voice floated up, calling on them to load 

their tub. Doubtless there was a deputy in the offing down 

below. On each of the nine levels the trucks started moving 

again, and nothing could be heard but the regular calls of the 

pit boys and the coughing and spluttering of the girls as they 

brought their tubs up to the incline, sweating like overladen 

mares; and the atmosphere that reigned in the pit was bestial 

enough, with sudden violent outbursts of animal desire when a 

miner came across one of these girls bending over with her 

bottom up in the air and her round hips straining at the seams 

of her little boy’s breeches. 

And on every trip Etienne found himself faced once again 

with the suffocating heat of the coal-face, the irregular rhythm 

of the muffled pick strokes, the loud, painful groans of the 

hewers, straining at their task. All four had stripped to the 

waist, and had grown indistinguishable from the coal as they 

became covered all over in black mud right up to their caps. 

Once they had to pull Maheu out when he started groaning in 

agony, trapped under a pile of coal, which they had to spill out 

over the tracks by dislodging his boards for him. Zacharie and 

Levaque raged at the seam, which they said was getting too 

hard and would ruin the return on their contract. Chaval 

turned round, and rested on his back for a moment, insulting 

Etienne, whose presence it was obvious he couldn’t abide. 

‘What a worm! Weaker than a girl! ... Too tired to fill our 

tub, are we? Mustn’t wear out our poor little arms, must we 

.. . God almighty! I’ll fine you ten sous for every sou you 

make us lose!’ 

The young man refrained from answering, since he was still 

satisfied with having found this forced labour, and accepted 

the crude hierarchy subordinating the unskilled labourer to the 

Part I 

45 

trained team-leader. But he had simply stopped moving, his 

feet bleeding, his limbs racked with agonizing cramp, his chest 

and back clamped in an iron vice of pain. Fortunately it was 

ten o’clock, and the team decided to have lunch. 

Maheu had a watch with him but he didn’t even look at it. 

In the depths of this starless night, he was never more than 

five minutes out. They all put their shirts and jackets back on. 

Then they climbed down from the coal-face and squatted 

down on their heels, with their elbows against their thighs, a 

posture which miners get so used to that they adopt it even 

when they are not down the mine, feeling no need for a rock or 

a beam to sit on. And each man took out his slab and got down 

to the serious business of biting into the thick slices of bread, 

exchanging only the odd word about the morning’s work. 

Catherine had remained standing, but after a moment or two 

she went to join Etienne, who had found a more or less dry 

place to lie down on, some distance away, where he could lean 

up against a pit-prop and stretch his legs out over the track. 

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ she asked, with her mouth full, holding 

her sandwich in her hand. 

Then she remembered that the young man had been wander¬ 

ing around all night with no money, and perhaps even with 

nothing to eat, 

‘Do you want to share mine?’ 

And when he refused, swearing that he wasn’t hungry, 

although his voice was trembling from the cramp in his 

stomach, she chattered on brightly: 

‘Oh, is it because I’ve had it in my mouth? ... Look, I've 

only chewed on this side, so you can have the other half.’ 

And she had already broken her slab into two pieces. Etienne 

took his half, and had to restrain himself to avoid wolfing it 

down in a single mouthful; and he rested his arms against his 

thighs so that she wouldn’t see them shivering. With her calm, 

friendly air she came and lay down alongside him on her 

stomach, with her chin propped up in one hand, using the 

other to eat with, slowly. They were lit by each other’s lamps. 

Catherine watched him silently for a moment. She must 

have found him handsome, with his fine features and his dark 

moustache. She smiled with an ill-defined pleasure. 

46 Germinal 

‘So you’re a mechanic^ and you got sent off the railway . . . 

Why?’ 

‘Because I hit my boss.’ 

She was dumbfounded, shocked to the depths of her heredi¬ 

tary notions of submission and passive obedience. 

‘I have to admit that I’d had too much to drink,’ he went 

on, ‘and when I drink, I lose control, I could kill myself or kill 

someone else ... Yes, I can’t drink more than a glass or two 

without feeling the need to kill someone ... Then it makes me 

sick as a dog for a day or two.’ 

‘You shouldn’t drink,’ she said solemnly. 

‘Oh, don’t worry, I know my limits.’ 

And he shook his head. He had a hatred of spirits, the sort 

of hatred inspired in the last child of a long line of alcoholics,* 

who suffered in his very flesh from all this heredity soaked and 

warped by alcohol, to such an extent that the slightest drop 

had become poison to him. 

‘It’s because of my mum that I’m sad I was thrown out,’ he 

said, after swallowing a mouthful. ‘Mum is unhappy, and I 

send her a hundred sous from time to time.’ 

‘Where does your mother live, then?’ 

‘In Paris .. . she’s a laundress, in the rue de la Goutte 

d’Or.’* 

He fell silent. When he thought of those things, his black 

eyes swam and went pale, for he was stricken with sudden 

anxiety at the thought of the hereditary flaw which festered 

unpredictably somewhere in the depths of his youthful vigour. 

For a moment he lay motionless with his eyes lost dreamily in 

the darkness of the mine; and, deep underground, feeling 

oppressed and suffocated by the earth itself, he conjured up 

his childhood, his mother still resourceful and good-looking 

when she was abandoned by his father, then taken back again 

by him after she had married someone else, living between 

these two men who devoured her, rolling with them into the 

gutter, swimming in cheap wine and wallowing in filth. He 

was transported back to Paris; he remembered the street, and 

other details came to mind: the dirty linen in the middle of the 

laundry, the smell of drunkenness stinking out the house, and 

the jaw-breaking blows. 

Part / 

47 

He started talking again, slowly: ‘Now my thirty sous I’ll 

get here won’t leave anything over to send her presents with 

. .. She’s going to die of hunger, for sure.’ 

He shrugged his shoulders in misery, and took another bite 

of his sandwich. 

‘Do you want a drink.^’ asked Catherine, taking the cap off 

her bottle. ‘Oh, it’s only coffee, it won’t do you any harm .. . 

It makes you choke swallowing all that dry bread.’ 

But he refused: it was bad enough to have taken half her 

bread. Yet she offered the coffee again with a sincere expres¬ 

sion, and finally said: 

‘Oh well, if you’re going to be such a gentleman, I agree to 

go first, but don’t you be rude and turn it down now.’ 

And she held out the flask. She had got up on to her knees, 

and he saw her close up, lit by their two lamps. Why had he 

thought her ugly.? Now that she was black, with a fine film of 

coal-dust all over her face, he found a strange charm in her. 

Her face was eaten by the shadows, and her mouth was too 

wide, but it showed off her sparkling white teeth; her eyes 

were wide open, flickering with a greenish light, like the eyes 

of a cat. A lock of red hair which had escaped from her cap 

was tickling her ear, and made her laugh. She didn’t look as 

young as he had thought, she might even be about fourteen. 

‘Just for you,’ he said, taking a drink and giving the flask 

back to her. 

She took another swig, then forced him to take another, too, 

to share and share alike, she said; and they started to laugh as 

they kept passing the narrow neck of the flask back and forth 

between their two mouths. He suddenly wondered whether he 

wasn’t going to grab her in his arms and kiss her on the lips. 

She had thick, pale pink lips, glittering with coal-dust, and he 

felt a painful surge of desire tug him towards them. But he 

didn’t dare, feeling intimidated, because he’d only ever gone 

with the lowest kind of whores in Lille, and he didn’t know 

how to go about it with a respectable working girl who was 

still living at home. 

‘So you’d be about fourteen, then?’ he asked, after another 

bite of his bread. 

She was surprised, annoyed even. 

48 

Germinal 

‘What do you mean, fourteen! Pm fifteen, Pll have you 

know! It’s true Pm not very plump, but girls don’t grow up 

very quickly round here.’ 

He asked her more questions, and she answered everything 

openly, without a trace of embarrassment or provocation. Yet 

it was clear that she knew everything there was to know about 

men and women, although he sensed that she was physically a 

virgin, and not yet out of puberty, her sexual maturity stunted 

by the exhausting and airless environment she lived in. He got 

back on to the subject of La Mouquette, hoping to embarrass 

her, but she told him the most awful stories, with a calm, 

cheerful voice: ‘Oh, she’s done a thing or two!’ And since he 

wanted to know whether she’d ever been in love herself, she 

replied jokingly that she didn’t want to upset her mother, but 

it was bound to happen one day. She hunched her shoulders, 

shivering a little in her sweat-soaked clothes, and her expression 

was gently submissive, as if she were getting ready to submit 

to the ways of the world and its menfolk. 

‘Because it’s easy enough to find a sweetheart, when you’re 

all living together, isn’t it?’ 

‘Of course.’ 

‘And then, it doesn’t do anyone any harm ... No need to 

tell the vicar.’ 

‘Oh, I don’t care a stuff about the vicar! ... But there’s the 

Black Man.’ 

‘What Black Man?’ 

‘The old miner’s ghost that haunts the pit and strangles 

naughty girls.’ 

He looked at her, for he was afraid that she was making fun 

of him. 

‘You don’t believe that nonsense, do you? Hasn’t anyone 

taught you anything sensible?’ 

‘Yes they have, I can read and write, I can . .. It’s useful at 

home, because in Mum and Dad’s time they never learnt.’ 

She was really very nice. As soon as she’d finished her 

sandwich he’d take her in his arms and kiss her thick, pink 

lips. His shy, young man’s voice shook with the decision that 

he had imposed on himself, his thoughts pressing violently 

upon him. The boyish jacket and breeches that clung to the 

Part I 

49 

girlish body both excited and inhibited him. He had finished 

his last mouthful. He took a drink from the flask, and handed 

it to her to let her drain the last drops. Now the moment for 

action had arrived, and he glanced worriedly towards the 

miners at the other end of the tunnel, when a shadow fell over 

the passageway, 

Chaval had been standing watching them for a moment. He 

came closer, made sure that Maheu couldn’t see them; and, 

while Catherine was still sitting down on the ground, he 

grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her head back and 

crushed her mouth with a brutal kiss, quite coldly, pretending 

not to notice Etienne. There was, in the kiss, a sort of claim to 

ownership, a kind of jealous bid for power. 

However, the girl rebelled. 

‘Will you let go!’ 

He kept hold of her head, and looked deep into her eyes. 

His red moustache and pointed beard made his black face look 

as if it was on fire behind his large, aquiline nose. And then, at 

last, he let go, and went off, without saying a word, 

Etienne felt a cold shudder go through him. What a fool to 

have waited. Obviously, he wasn’t going to kiss her now, 

because she might think he was just copying the other man. In 

his wounded vanity he felt genuine despair. 

‘Why did you lie to me.^’ he asked, quietly. ‘He’s your sweet¬ 

heart.’ 

‘No he isn’t, I swear he isn’t!’ she shouted. ‘There’s nothing 

like that between us. He just likes to fool around a bit 

sometimes ... He’s not even local, you know, he only came 

here from the Pas-de-Calais six months ago.’ 

They had both stood up, it was time to go back to work. When 

she saw how cold he had turned, she seemed upset. She thought 

he was really rather better looking than the other man, and 

maybe she might have preferred him, if she’d had a chance. The 

thought of making it up to him with a friendly word or deed 

nagged away at her; and when Etienne saw in astonishment that 

the flame of his lamp had turned blue^ and acquired a large, pale 

halo, she thought she might at least try to distract him. 

‘Come and look at something,’ she murmured, in a good- 

natured, friendly tone. 

50 

Germinal 

When she had led him to the end of the coal-face, she 

pointed at a fissure in the seam. He heard a slight bubbling, 

and a faint noise, like a little bird singing. 

‘Hold out your hand, and you’ll feel the breeze . .. It’s 

firedamp.’* 

He was surprised. Was that all it was, that awful thing that 

blew things sky high? She laughed, and said that there was a 

lot of it about that morning, to turn the flames of the lamps so 

blue. 

‘When you’ve quite finished chattering, you idle buggers!’ 

shouted Maheu, roughly. 

Catherine and Etienne hurried to fill their tubs and push 

them up to the ramp, with stiff backs, crawling along the 

passage under the bumpy roof. By their second trip they were 

drenched in sweat and their bones were creaking again. 

At the coal-face the hewers had started work once more. 

Often they cut short their lunch break to avoid catching cold; 

and their slabs, which they had wolfed down silently in the 

damp, dark air, lay like lead on their stomachs. Stretched out 

on their sides, they hacked away harder than ever, obsessed 

with the idea of filling as many tubs as possible. Everything 

else was swallowed up by this furious urge to hack out their 

hard-earned profit. They didn’t even feel the dripping water 

which soaked into their limbs, making them swell, they were 

oblivious to the cramp brought on by their awkward postures, 

and they took no notice of the stifling darkness where they 

turned pale, like plants growing in a cellar. And yet, as the day 

drew on, the air got gradually fouler and warmer from the 

fumes of the lamps, their fetid breath, and the suffocating 

firedamp; the fug drifted irritatingly into their eyes like cob¬ 

webs, and only a night of ventilation would clear the air. For 

the men themselves, lying at the bottom of their molehill with 

the earth pressing down on top of them, had no breath of air 

of their own left in their burning lungs. And still they kept 

hacking away. 

Part I 

51 

CHAPTER V 

Without looking at his watch, which he had left in his jacket, 

Maheu stopped, and said: 

‘Nearly one o’clock .. . Zacharie, have you finished?’ 

His son had been putting up props for a while. But he had 

stopped in the middle of the job and, lying flat out on his 

back, was staring blindly into the distance, daydreaming over 

the game of ‘cross’ he had been playing the day before. He 

woke up, and answered: 

‘Yes, that’ll do, for today at least.’ 

And he went back to man his post at the cutting face. 

Levaque and Chaval, too, put their picks down. They rested a 

moment. They all wiped their faces on their bare arms, 

looking at the surface of the roof, where the blocks of shale 

were cracking up. They rarely spoke of anything but work. 

‘We’re in luck again!’ muttered Chaval, ‘we’ve hit another 

patch of soft rock ,, , They don’t add that to our expenses.’ 

‘They’re bloody crooks!’ complained Levaque. ‘They hope 

we’ll get buried alive,’ 

Zacharie started to laugh. He didn’t give a damn about the 

work, or about anything else, but he liked to hear them knock 

the Company. With his calm air Maheu explained that the 

state of the terrain changed every twenty metres. You had to 

be fair, you couldn’t guess in advance. Then, as the other two 

kept on slagging off the bosses, he started to look anxiously 

over his shoulder. 

‘Shh! That’s enough,’ 

‘You’re right,’ said Levaque, and he too lowered his voice. 

‘It’s not healthy.’ 

He was obsessed with the idea that he was being spied on, 

even at that depth, as if the very coal-seam could listen, and 

tell the shareholders. 

‘All the same,’ said Chaval, loudly and defiantly, ‘if that 

swine Dansaert talks to me like he did the other day, he’ll be 

asking for a brick in the guts from me ... I don’t stop him 

screwing all his lily-skinned blondes, do I?’ 

This time it was Zacharie who burst out laughing. The 

52 

Germinal 

overman’s affair with Pierron’s wife was a standing joke in the 

pit. Even Catherine leant on her spade, shaking with laughter, 

and passed the word on to Etienne; meanwhile Maheu got 

angry, prey to a fear he didn’t try to disguise. 

‘Will you shut up, you fool.'^ . . . Wait till we’ve gone if you 

want to get into trouble.’ 

While he was still talking they heard the sound of approach¬ 

ing footsteps coming from the tunnel overhead. Almost immedi¬ 

ately the pit engineer, young Negrel, as the workmen called 

him among themselves, appeared at the top of the cutting face, 

accompanied by Dansaert, the overman. 

‘Talk of the devil!’ murmured Maheu. ‘They pop up all 

over the place.’ 

Paul Negrel, Monsieur Hennebeau’s nephew, was a twenty- 

six-year-old lad, slim and handsome, with curly hair and a 

brown moustache. His sharp nose and bright eyes made him 

look like a friendly ferret. He w^as intelligent and suspicious, 

and easily became authoritarian and intolerant when dealing 

with the workmen. He dressed as they did, and was smeared 

with coal just like them; and in order to gain their respect, he 

showed a daredevil bravery, going into the most difficult 

places, and was always first on the scene after a rock fall or a 

firedamp explosion, 

‘This is it, isn’t it, Dansaert?’ he asked. 

The overman, a fat-faced Belgian with a wide, sensual nose, 

replied with exaggerated politeness: 

‘Yes, Monsieur Negrel .. , There’s the man we took on this 

morning.’ 

They both slid down to the middle of the coal-face, and 

asked for Etienne to be sent up. The engineer raised his lamp 

and looked at him, without asking him anything. 

‘All right this once,’ he said after a while. ‘I’m not keen on 

picking people up off the streets ... Better not do it again.’ 

And he paid no attention to the explanations he was offered, 

the requirements of the job, the desire to replace the women on 

the tubs with men. He had started to study the roof, while the 

hewers took up their picks again. Suddenly, he shouted out: 

‘Hey there, Maheu, what do you take me for? ... You’re 

going to do yourselves in, you stupid buggers.’ 

Part / 

53 

‘Oh, it’s safe enough,’ the workman replied calmly. 

‘What do you mean, safe? ... The rock’s started to shift, 

and you’re leaving it for two metres at a stretch before you 

bother to stick a prop in! Oh, you’re all the same, you’d rather 

have your heads squashed flat than leave off hewing and get 

timbering like you’re meant to! ... Be so kind as to timber 

that lot, and look smart about it. Twice as many props, do you 

hear!’ 

And, faced with the resistance of the miners, who started 

arguing, saying that they were the best judges of their own 

safety, he got mad. 

‘Look here! When you’ve had your heads bashed in, are you 

going to pay for the damage? Not on your life! It’ll be the 

Company who’ll have to cough up to pay your pensions or 

support your wives ... Listen to me, we know what you’re up 

to: you’d cut off your arms to fill up a couple of extra tubs a day.’ 

Despite the anger that was gradually rising within him, 

Maheu replied calmly enough: 

‘If we were properly paid we’d put up more props.’ 

The engineer shrugged his shoulders, and made no reply 

while he was making his way down the coal-face, and only 

when he had reached the bottom did he conclude: 

‘You’ve got an hour left, get back to work, the lot of you; 

and I’m telling you now, this team’s being fined three francs.’ 

These words were greeted by muttered grumblings. They 

were only restrained by the force of hierarchical authority, that 

military command structure which ran from the lads at the 

incline right up to the overman, keeping everyone subservient 

to the person above him. Chaval and Levaque, however, shook 

their fists in fury, while Maheu frowned at them to keep them 

under control and Zacharie shrugged his shoulders obstreper¬ 

ously. But Etienne was perhaps the most upset. From the 

moment he had reached the bottom of this hell-hole, rebellion 

had been slowly simmering within him. He looked at Catherine, 

who had lowered her head submissively. How could they 

possibly drive themselves to death at such hard labour, in this 

mortal darkness, earning a pittance too small even to afford to 

buy their daily bread? 

But by now Negrel was moving off with Dansaert, who had 

54 

Germinal 

merely stood by all the time nodding his head in approval. 

And then they raised their voices again: they had just come to 

a halt again^ and were examining the timbering in the tunnel 

which the hewers were supposed to look after over a distance 

of ten metres back from the cutting face. 

‘Didn’t 1 tell you they were a load of layabouts!’ shouted the 

engineer. ‘And what about you, damn it, don’t you check up 

on them.^’ 

‘Of course I do,’ stammered the overman. ‘But you get fed 

up with telling them the same thing time after time.’ 

Negrel shouted out violently: 

‘Maheu! Maheul’ 

They all came down. He continued: 

‘Look at that. You think that’ll stay up.^ ... It looks like a 

pig’s breakfast. The joints come away in your hand, they’re so 

shoddily made ... Heavens! Now I know why we spend so 

much on repairs. Am I right? As long as you can get away with 

it, you think it’s none of our business! And then the whole lot 

falls down, and the Company has to take on an army of repair 

men . .. Look over there, what a bloody mess.’ 

Chaval wanted to say something, but Negrel shut him up. 

‘No point, I know what you’re going to say. We need to pay 

you more, don’t we? Well, let me tell you something. You’re 

forcing the management to take steps, aren’t you? So, all right, 

we’ll pay you separately for the timbering, and we’ll take the 

difference off the price of a tub-load of coal. We’ll soon see 

who wins at that game . .. Meanwhile, get moving and put 

that timber straight right away. I’ll be back tomorrow.’ 

And while the miners remained dumbfounded by this out¬ 

burst, he moved off, Dansaert, who had been so meek in his 

presence, stayed behind a few moments, to say bluntly to the 

workmen: 

‘You’ve got me into trouble, you have ... There’ll be more 

than a three-franc fine to pay as far as I’m concerned, mark 

my word!’ 

Then, when he too had gone, it was Maheu’s turn to ex¬ 

plode. 

‘God almighty! That’s not fair and anyone can see it’s not 

fair. You know I like to keep my cool, because it’s the only 

Part I 

55 

way to get any sense out of them; but in the end they drive 

you mad . .. Did you hear what he said? Pay us less for a tub¬ 

load, and count the timbering separately! Just another way of 

paying us less!. .. Good God almighty!’ 

He needed someone to shout at, and he noticed Catherine 

and Etienne standing idly by. 

‘Will you get a move on and pass me the timber! Who wants 

your opinion?.. . You’ll get my boot up your . . 

Etienne went off to load up, with no bitterness at this 

outburst, for he was so enraged with the bosses that he found 

the miners too meek. 

Moreover, Levaque and Chaval had let off steam with a 

volley of oaths. All of them, even Zacharie, set to work 

furiously at the timbering. For nearly half an hour, nothing 

could be heard but the creaking of the posts as they were 

wedged into place with sledgehammer blows. No one opened 

his mouth. Gasping for air, they fought so desperately to force 

back the rock face, that they would have shifted it out of the 

way with their bare backs if they could. 

‘Enough is enough!’ said Maheu at last, drained with anger 

and fatigue. ‘Half-past one . .. Oh! What a right old day, we 

won’t have made fifty sous!... I’m off, I’m sick of it.’ 

Although there was still half an hour of working time left, 

he put his jacket back on. The others followed suit. Just to 

look at the coal-face made them wild with anger. As the tram 

girl had started pushing again they called her back, and 

scolded her: if God had wanted coal to move so fast, he would 

have given it legs. Then all six of them put their kit under 

their arms and set off, with two kilometres to cover to get back 

to the shaft by the route they had travelled that morning. 

In the chimney, Catherine and Etienne hung back, while 

the hewers slid down. They had met up with young Lydie, 

who had stopped in the middle of one of the roads to let them 

past, and who told them that La Mouquette had disappeared, 

she’d had such a nosebleed that she’d gone off an hour ago to 

bathe her face, but nobody knew where. Then, when they left 

the little girl, she went back to pushing her tub, covered in 

mud and racked with pain, straining with all the force of her 

matchstick arms and legs, like a skinny little black ant 

Germinal 

56 

struggling with too large a burden. Etienne and Catherine slid 

down on their backs, pressing their heads and shoulders back¬ 

wards, to avoid scraping the skin off their foreheads; and they 

slid so swiftly down the slippery rock, which had been polished 

by the behinds of all the miners from all the coal-faces, that 

from time to time they had to catch hold of the props to slow 

themselves down so that they didn’t burn holes in their bums, 

as they said, with a laugh. 

When they got to the bottom, they found that they were 

alone. They saw some red sparks disappearing round a bend in 

the tunnel in the distance. Their high spirits subsided, and 

they started to walk on with their legs heavy with fatigue, 

Catherine in front and Etienne following her. Their lamps 

were smoking, and he could hardly see her, for she was 

surrounded by a sort of sooty halo; and the idea that she was 

a girl disturbed him, because he felt he was a fool not to try to 

kiss her, but the memory of the other man held him back. 

Clearly she had lied to him: the other man was her lover, they 

made love on every slag-heap, for she already swung her hips 

like a little tramp. He sulked, irrationally, as if she had been 

cheating on him. And yet she was constantly turning round, 

warning him about some obstacle, and seemed to be encourag¬ 

ing him to be friendly. They were so lost, they could have had 

a bit of harmless fun together! At last they emerged into the 

haulage road, and this relieved him of his agony of indecision; 

but the girl shot him one last, sad glance, mourning the 

happiness they would not find again. 

Now the hubbub of underground life was rumbling all 

around them, with deputies continually walking past, and 

trains hauled back and forth by trotting horses. The darkness 

twinkled everywhere with the gleam of dancing lamps. They 

had to flatten themselves back against the rock to let the 

shadowy men and horses go past, and even felt their breath 

against their faces. Jeanlin, running barefoot behind his train, 

shouted out some insult which they couldn’t hear because of 

the rumbling of the wheels. They kept moving forward, but 

she had fallen silent now, and he didn’t recognize the pathways 

or the turnings which they had taken that morning, imagining 

that she was plunging him deeper and deeper underground; 

Part I 

SI 

and what he suffered from most was the cold, a growing cold 

which had gripped him as they left the coal-face, and was 

making him shiver more and more as they approached the 

shaft. Between the narrow walls, a rushing wind whistled 

stormily past. He had given up all hope of ever arriving, when 

suddenly, they found themselves in the loading bay at the pit 

bottom. 

Chaval looked askance at them, grimacing in suspicion. The 

others were there, sweating in the icy draught, equally silent, 

choking back their angry mutterings. They had arrived too 

early, they weren’t allowed to go up for another half-hour, 

especially as there was a complicated operation in progress to 

let a horse down. The onsetters were still packing the tubs in, 

with a deafening rattle of clattering ironmongery, and the 

cages flew up out of sight into the driving rain which was 

showering down the black hole. Down below, a drainage sump 

ten metres deep, which they called the ‘bog’, collected this 

streaming liquid, and gave off a peculiar dank, murky stench. 

There were men milling around the shaft all the time, pulling 

on signal ropes, and pushing levers down, amid this spray of 

water which soaked their clothes. The reddish light of the 

three open lamps marked out great moving shadows, and gave 

this underground room the appearance of a bandits’ cave, or 

some clandestine forge by a mountain stream. 

Maheu made one last attempt. He went up to Pierron, who 

had started his shift at six o’clock. 

‘Look, you could easily let us go up.’ 

But the onsetter, a handsome lad with strong limbs and a 

friendly look, refused with a frightened gesture. 

‘Out of the question, ask the deputy ... I’d get fined.’ 

They muttered furiously under their breath again. Catherine 

leant over and whispered into Etienne’s ear: 

‘Come and have a look at the stable. That’s where it’s 

warmest!’ 

They had to slip off without being seen, because it was 

forbidden to go there. It was on the left, at the other end of a 

short tunnel. The chamber, which had been cut out of the 

rock, was twenty-five metres long and four metres high. It had 

a brick-lined roof, and it could take twenty horses. And it 

Germinal 

58 

really was warm in there, with the radiant heat given off by the 

animals, and the fine smell of fresh, regularly changed hay. A 

single lamp burnt with a peaceful glow like a nightlight. The 

resting horses turned their staring, childish eyes towards them, 

then got back to slowly chewing their oats. They were well- 

fed, healthy beasts, the workers that everyone liked. 

But as Catherine read out their names from the zinc name¬ 

plates above their mangers, she let out a little cry, as a body 

suddenly rose up in front of her. It was La Mouquette, 

jumping up in a fright from a bale of straw where she had 

been sleeping. On Mondays, when she was too tired from 

Sunday^s carousing, she gave herself a violent punch on the 

nose, and left the coal-face on the pretext of going to get some 

water, and she went to hide there, with the animals, in their 

warm bedding. 

Her father, who was very indulgent towards her, let her get 

away with it, although it could have got him into trouble. 

And at that very moment old Mouque himself came in. He 

was a short, bald, careworn man, but still stout, which was 

rare in a fifty-year-old ex-miner. Since he had been put in 

charge of the horses, he had taken to chewing so much tobacco 

that his gums bled and his mouth was all black. When he saw 

the other couple with his daughter he got angry: 

‘What do you think you’re doing, you silly bitches? Come 

on, piss off, fancy bringing a man in here! . .. What a filthy 

trick to come and arse around on my nice clean straw.’ 

La Mouquette thought that was funny, and shook with 

laughter, but Etienne was embarrassed, and moved off, while 

Catherine smiled at him. As the three of them arrived back at 

the loading bay, Bebert and Jeanlin turned up with a trainload 

of tubs. During the pause while the cages were being prepared, 

the girl went up to their horse and stroked him, and told her 

companion all about him. He was Bataille, the oldest horse in 

the mine, a white horse who had spent ten years underground. 

For ten years he had lived in this hole, staying in the same 

corner of the stable, doing the same job, trotting up and down 

the dark haulage roads without ever going back up to see 

daylight. He was very fat, with a sleek coat and a benevolent 

air, and seemed to pass his time living the good life, protected 

Part I 

59 

from the misfortunes of the world above. Moreover, he had 

grown accustomed to the dark, and extremely clever. The 

passage he plied had finally become so familiar that he knew 

how to push open the ventilation doors with his head, and he 

remembered to stoop down to avoid bumping his head where 

the roof was too low. And he must have been able to count, for 

when he had done the regulation number of trips, he refused 

to start another, and insisted on being taken back to his 

manger. Now, with old age, his cat’s eyes would sometimes 

cloud over with melancholy. Perhaps he had a vague vision, in 

the dim light of his dreams, of the mill where he was born, 

near Marchiennes, a mill set on the banks of the Scarpe, 

surrounded by broad meadows and swept by a constant breeze. 

There was something bright and burning in the air, a sort of 

huge lamp, but the creature could not recall it exactly. And he 

lowered his head, trembling on his aged legs in his futile 

attempts to remember what the sun was like. 

Meanwhile, however, operations were proceeding in the 

shaft, the rapper had sounded four times, the horse was being 

lowered. It was always a worrying moment, for it sometimes 

happened that the animal was so seized with terror that it was 

dead by the time it arrived. At the top, trussed in a net, it 

struggled desperately; then, as soon as it felt the earth disappear¬ 

ing beneath it, it remained petrified, and as it vanished out of 

sight, with its great eyes staring, it didn’t move a muscle. 

Today, the horse was too large to fit between the guides, and, 

once they had strung him below the cage, they had had to 

bend his head round and tie it back against his flanks. 

It took nearly three minutes to winch the horse down, for 

they were careful to run the engine at low speed. So, down 

below, people started to get worried. What was up.^ Were they 

going to leave it half-way down, hanging up there in the 

darkness.'^ At last it came into sight, rigid as a statue, with its 

staring, terrified eyes. It was a bay, only three years old, called 

Trompette.* 

‘Watch out!’ shouted old Mouque, whose job it was to 

collect the horse. ‘Bring it over here, but don’t untie it yet.’ 

Soon Trompette was laid out on the iron slabs, a motionless 

mass, lost in the nightmare of the dark and bottomless pit, and 

6 o 

Germinal 

the long, deafening hall. They were starting to untie him, 

when Bataille, who had been unharnessed a little earlier, came 

up and stretched out his neck to sniff at the new companion 

who had fallen from earth to meet him. The workmen formed 

a wide circle round them, and laughed. What was it that 

smelled so good? But Bataille was deaf to their mockery. He 

was excited by the good smell of fresh air, the forgotten scent 

of sunshine in the meadows. And he suddenly let out a 

resounding whinny, whose happy music seemed muted with a 

sorrowful sigh. It was a welcoming shout, and a cry of pleasure 

at the arrival of a sudden whiff of the past, but also a sigh of 

pity for the latest prisoner, who would never be sent back 

alive. 

‘Oh, Bataille, you old wag!^ shouted the workmen, amused 

by their old comrade’s antics. ‘He’s saying hello to his new 

friend.’ 

Trompette was untied, but still didn’t move. He lay on his 

side as if he could still feel the netting tied around him, 

strangled with fear. At last, with a crack of the whip, they got 

him to stand up. He was still numb, and his legs were shaken 

by violent tremors. The two animals made friends with each 

other, as old Mouque led them away. 

‘Right, are we ready now, then?’ asked Maheu. 

They had to prepare the cages, and anyway, there were still 

ten minutes left until the official time for the return trip. 

Gradually the coal-faces were emptying and the workmen 

returning from all die tunnels. There were about fifty men 

there, wet and shivering, with chesty coughs flying around. 

Pierron, despite his good-natured expression, slapped his daugh¬ 

ter Lydie, because she had left the face before time was up. 

Zacharie gave La Mouquette an underhand pinch, to warm 

himself up a bit. But they were all getting more and more 

annoyed. Chaval and Levaque spread the news of the engineer’s 

threat to lower the price of the tub-load and pay for the 

timbering separately; and this prospect was greeted with excla¬ 

mations of protest, as the seeds of rebellion started to grow in 

this narrow hole, nearly 600 metres below ground. Soon they 

forgot to restrain their voices, and these men, filthy with coal 

and frozen with waiting, accused the Company of killing off 

Part I 6i 

half the workmen down the mine and letting the other half die 

of hunger. Etienne listened, trembling with rage. 

‘Hurry along there, hurry along!’ Richomme, the deputy 

repeated to the onsetters. 

He hurried through the procedure for the ascent, and, not 

wanting to have to use his authority, pretended not to hear 

them. But the grumbling became so loud that he was obliged 

to intervene. Behind him someone shouted that it couldn’t go 

on for ever and one fine day they’d blow the roof off. 

‘You’re a sensible chap,’ he said to Maheu; ‘tell them to 

shut up. Better safe than sorry.’ 

But Maheu, who had calmed down, and was starting to get 

worried, didn’t need to intervene. Suddenly their voices tailed 

off. Negrel and Dansaert had returned from their tour of 

inspection, and emerged from one of the tunnels, sweating as 

much as the workmen. Their ingrained obedience made the 

men move aside, while the engineer made his way through the 

group without a word. He got into one of the tubs, and the 

overman got into another; they pulled five times on the signal 

rope, main course coming up, as they said for the bosses; and 

the cage flew up into the air amid a melancholy silence. 

CHAPTER VI 

As the cage brought Etienne back up, squashed in with four 

other people, he resolved to continue his hungry search along 

the roads. He’d as soon drop dead on the spot as go back down 

again into that hell-hole, where you didn’t even earn enough to 

live on. Catherine, who had been stacked higher up, was no 

longer there beside him, to soothe him with her warm body. 

Anyway it was better not to think in such stupid terms; he 

ought to get away from there; for, with his superior education, 

he didn’t feel the same resignation as the rest of the herd, so 

he’d only end up strangling one of the bosses. 

Suddenly, he was blinded. The ascent had been so swift that 

he felt stunned by the broad daylight, his eyelids trembling at 

the brightness, to which he had already grown unaccustomed. 

62 

Germinal 

None the less, he was relieved when he felt the cage lock back 

into the keep. A labourer opened the door and the flood of 

miners jumped out of the tubs. 

‘Hey, Mouquet,’ Zacharie whispered in the workman’s ear, 

‘fancy slipping off to the Volcan^ tonight?’ 

The Volcan was a pub in Montsou. Mouquet winked slyly, 

and a silent laugh spread over his face. He was short and stout 

like his father, with the hard-nosed air of a lad greedy for life 

and careless of what the morrow might bring. And, as La 

Mouquette got out, he dealt her a mighty slap on the behind, 

as a sign of brotherly affection. 

Etienne hardly recognized the high vault of the entrance 

hall, which, in the eerie, flickering light of the lanterns, had 

seemed unnerving to him. Now it was merely bare and dirty. 

A grimy light filtered through the dusty windows. The only 

source of brightness was the copper body of the engine, 

gleaming in the distance; the greasy steel cables flew past like 

inky ribbons; while the pulleys up above, with their enormous 

supporting framework, and the cages and the tubs, formed one 

vast, metallic mass, overshadowing the room like a great, grey 

heap of scrap iron. The ceaseless rumbling of the wheels made 

the cast-iron flooring shudder; while a fine dust rose from the 

coal being moved through the room, and threw a black veil all 

over the floor, the walls, and even the beams of the headgear. 

But Chaval, who had taken a look at the number of tokens 

recorded on the board in the recording clerk’s little glass- 

fronted office, had come back in a temper. He had noticed that 

two of their tubs had been rejected, one because it didn’t 

contain the regulation amount, the other because it included 

some dirty coal. 

‘The perfect end to a perfect day,’ he shouted. ‘Another 

twenty sous down the drain ... Serves us right for taking on 

layabouts with arms no more use than a pig’s tail!’ 

And he looked sideways at Etienne to underline his point. 

Etienne was tempted to reply with a punch on the nose. But 

then he thought there was no point, if he was leaving. Now his 

mind was really made up. 

‘You can’t learn it all in just one day,’ said Maheu to keep 

the peace. ‘He’ll do better tomorrow.’ 

Part / 

63 

But they all felt just as bitter, and were spoiling for a 

quarrel. As they went past the lamp depot to hand in their 

lamps, Levaque had a run-in with the storekeeper, accusing 

him of not cleaning his lamp. They only started to unwind 

when they got to the shed, where the fire was still burning. 

They had even stoked it up too much, for the stove was red- 

hot, and the great windowless room seemed ablaze, with 

reflections from the brazier appearing to run molten down the 

walls. Then they let themselves go with voluptuous grunts, 

toasting their backs as near the fire as they dared until they 

were steaming like soup. When their backs started to burn, 

they turned round to cook their stomachs. La Mouquette had 

quite shamelessly rolled down her breeches to let her shirt dry. 

One or two lads essayed their wit; then the laugh was on them, 

as she suddenly flashed her backside at them, which, in her 

eyes, was the ultimate insult. 

'Pm off,’ said Chaval, who had already put his tools back in 

his locker. 

Nobody moved except La Mouquette, who hurried off after 

him, on the pretext that they were both going the same way 

back to Montsou. But the banter continued, because everyone 

knew he had had enough of her. 

Meanwhile Catherine had been speaking quietly to her 

father in worried tones. At first he seemed surprised, but then 

he nodded in approval, and calling Etienne to come over and 

collect his bundle, he mumbled: 

‘Look here, if you’re out of cash, you’re not going to last out 

till the end of next week when we get paid ... Do you want 

me to try and find someone to allow you some credit.^’ 

The young man remained silent with embarrassment for a 

moment. In fact he had been about to claim his thirty sous and 

go, but he felt ashamed in front of the girl. She was staring at 

him, and might even be thinking he was work-shy. 

‘You know, I can’t promise it’ll work,’ Maheu went on, ‘but 

the worst they can do is refuse.’ 

So Etienne didn’t say no. They would surely refuse. And 

anyway, it was not a commitment, he could always move on, 

after he had had something to eat. A moment later he was 

annoyed with himself for not having said no, when he saw how 

Germinal 

64 

happy Catherine looked, as she laughed prettily with the 

pleasure of having been able to help him. What was the point 

of getting involved? 

When they had retrieved their clogs and closed their lockers, 

the Maheu family left the changing shed, following their 

workmates as they left one by one when they had warmed 

themselves up. Etienne went with them, and Levaque and his 

lad tagged along. But then, just as they were walking through 

the screening shed, they were brought to a halt by a violent 

incident. 

It was a huge shed, whose beams were blackened by the 

flying coal-dust, and whose open shutters let through a constant 

draught of air. The coal-tubs came straight in from receipt at 

the entrance hall, and then the tipplers emptied them out on to 

the screens, which were long chutes made of sheet-metal. 

Standing on steps on either side of the chutes were the sorting 

girls, who were armed with shovels and rakes to pick out the 

stones and push back the clean coal, which continued on its 

way down towards the railway wagons which were waiting at 

the sidings. 

Philomene Levaque was there. She was a pale, thin girl, 

whose consumptive pallor gave her a sheep-like face. Her head 

was protected by a flimsy scrap of blue woollen material, and 

her hands and arms had gone black right up to the elbows. 

There she stood sorting, just below an old witch. La 

Pierronne’s mother, old Ma Brule, as they called her, a fear¬ 

some creature with eyes like a screech-owl and lips clenched 

tighter than a miser’s purse. They had come to blows as the 

younger accused the elder of filching her stones, which meant 

it took her more than ten minutes to get a basketful. They 

were paid by the basket, which led to endless quarrels, with 

much tearing of hair and sooty fingermarks on red faces. 

'Give her a good poke!’ Zacharie shouted down to his mis¬ 

tress. 

All the sorting girls howled with laughter. But old Ma Brule 

flew bitterly at the young man. 

‘You can talk, you pig! You’d do better to own up to the 

two brats you stuffed her with! .., What a liberty, with an 

eighteen-year-old kid who’s weak on her pins!’ 

Part I 

65 

Maheu had to prevent his son from going down to sort out 

the old bag of bones in person, as he put it. But then the 

supervisor hove into view, and the rakes started rattling 

through the coal again. All that could be seen all along the 

sides of the hoppers were the rounded backs of the women 

fiercely fighting each other for the stones. 

Outside the wind had suddenly fallen and a cold, damp air 

fell from the grey sky. As they left in ones and twos, the 

colliers hunched their shoulders and hugged their chests tightly 

to keep warm, swaying lopsidedly as they walked, which made 

the shape of their bony hips show through the thin cotton of 

their garments. Out in the daylight they looked like a troupe of 

muddy negroes. Some of them hadn’t finished their sand¬ 

wiches; and the spare hunks of bread lodged between their 

shirts and their jackets made them look like hunchbacks. 

‘Look! There’s Bouteloup,’ said Zacharie, mockingly. 

Without stopping, Levaque swapped a few words with his 

lodger, a stout dark man of thirty-five, who wore a placid, 

honest expression. 

‘Is the soup ready, Louis.^’ 

‘I think so.’ 

‘Is the wife in a good mood today.?’ 

‘Yes, I think she’s all right.’ 

More miners arrived, fresh groups of stonemen, and one by 

one they were swallowed up by the pit. It was the three o’clock 

shift, another meal for the mine, as the teams went down to 

take over the concessions that the hewers had been working 

on, at the far end of the tunnels. The mine never slept; night 

and day these human insects burrowed into the rock, 600 

metres below the beetfields. 

Meanwhile the boys led the way back home. Jeanlin was 

explaining to Bebert his secret and complicated plan of cam¬ 

paign to get four sous’ worth of tobacco on tick; while Lydie 

hung around at a respectful distance, Catherine followed, 

accompanied by Zacharie and Etienne. Nobody spoke. And it 

was only when they got to the Avantage* bar that Maheu and 

Levaque caught up with them, 

‘Here we are,’ said Maheu to Etienne. ‘Do you want to 

come in?’ 

66 

Germinal 

They split up. Catherine had stopped for a moment, taking 

a last look at Etienne with her large, grey-green, crystal-clear 

eyes, which sparkled brighter than ever against her black skin. 

She smiled at him, then disappeared with the others, walking 

up along the steep path towards the miners’ village. 

The bar was located half-way between the village and the 

mine, at the crossroads. It was a two-storey brick building, 

whitewashed all over, with a sky-blue border painted gaily 

round the outline of the windows. On a square sign nailed up 

over the doorway was the following legend in yellow lettering: 

‘The A vantage, Premises licensed to Monsieur Rasseneur.’* 

Behind the building was a skittle alley, bordered by a privet 

hedge. And the Company, which had done its best to buy up 

this plot of land, was annoyed by the survival of this bar, 

planted in the fields in the middle of its vast estates and 

strategically placed at the very gates of Le Voreux. 

‘Come on in,’ Maheu invited Etienne again. 

The room was small and bare, but its white walls made it 

light; it was furnished with three tables, a dozen chairs, and a 

pine bar as big as a kitchen dresser. There were no more than 

a dozen mugs, three bottles of spirits, a carafe, a small zinc 

beer barrel with a tin tap; and nothing else, not a picture, not a 

shelf, not a game. In the glossily painted cast-iron stove a 

lump of coal burned softly. On the flagstones a fine layer of 

white sand soaked up the constant damp of this rainy country. 

Maheu ordered ‘a pint’ from a plump blonde girl, a neigh¬ 

bour’s daughter who sometimes minded the bar, and asked, ‘Is 

Rasseneur around?’ 

The girl turned the tap on, and answered that the boss 

would be back soon. The miner drank half of his glassful with 

one long slow draught, sluicing away the dust which was 

blocking his throat. He didn’t offer his workmate anything to 

drink. There was only one other client, another damp, messy 

miner, sitting at a table, drinking his beer in silence, with a 

profoundly meditative air. A third entered, was served on the 

nod, drank up, paid, and left without a word. 

But then a big, clean-shaven man of thirty-eight arrived, 

with a round face and a sociable smile. It was Rasseneur, a 

former hewer who had been sacked by the Company three years 

Part I 

67 

previously, after a strike. He had been a very good worker, 

and, because he expressed himself well, he had taken the lead 

in every protest, and finished up as the ringleader of the 

malcontents. His wife already ran a bar, as did quite a few 

miners’ wives; so, when he was thrown out, he set up as 

publican himself, raising enough money to establish his bar at 

the very gates of Le Voreux, as a challenge to the Company. 

Now business was flourishing, and he had become a centre of 

attraction, cashing in on the discontent which he had gradually 

nurtured in the hearts of his former workmates. 

‘This is the lad I took on this morning,’ Maheu explained 

straight away. ‘Is one of your two rooms free, and can you give 

him credit for a fortnight.^’ 

Rasseneur’s broad face suddenly took on an intensely sus¬ 

picious look. He looked Etienne over and replied without even 

making the effort to show any regret: 

‘Both of my rooms are taken. Nothing doing.’ 

The young man had been expecting this rejection; and yet 

he was upset by it, and he was surprised by the surge of 

disappointment he felt at the prospect of going away. Never 

mind, he’d go as soon as he’d got his thirty sous. The miner 

who had been drinking at the table had gone. Others had come 

in one by one to wash out their throats, then set off again with 

the same lopsided gait. They just rinsed their gullets, feeling 

no pleasure or emotion, silently satisfying a simple need. 

‘So, nothing’s happened, then.^’ Rasseneur asked with a 

meaningful tone, as Maheu was sipping at the last of his beer, 

Maheu turned round, and saw that only Etienne was left. 

‘Only that we had another row ... You know, about the 

timbering.’ 

He explained what had happened. The blood rose to the 

publican’s face, and his eyes and skin glowed with hot fury. 

Then he blurted out: 

‘Well! Right then! If they start to lower the price, they’re 

buggered!’ 

He felt uneasy in the presence of Etienne, and although he 

continued, he kept darting sidelong glances at him all the 

while, and what he said was veiled in hints and allusions. He 

discussed the manager, Monsieur Hennebeau, and his wife and 

68 

Germinal 

nephew, the young Negrei, without mentioning them by name, 

repeating that it couldn’t go on like this, that things would 

come to a head one of these fine days. The poverty was too 

awful, he told of factories closing down, and workers leaving. 

Over the last month he had distributed more than six pounds 

of bread a day. The day before someone had told him that 

Monsieur Deneulin, the owner of a local pit, was unable to 

make ends meet. And besides, he had received a letter from 

Lille which was full of worrying details. 

‘You know,’ he muttered, ‘it’s to do with the person you 

saw here the other night.’ 

But he was interrupted by the entrance of his wife, a tall, 

thin, passionate woman, with a long nose and ruddy cheeks. 

She held much more radical political opinions than her hus¬ 

band. 

‘Pluchart’s letter,’ she said. ‘Oh, he’s your man; if he was in 

charge, then things would improve fast enough!’ 

fitienne had been listening for only a moment, but it was 

long enough for him to feel deeply moved by the impact of 

this suffering and the idea of revenge. 

And the sudden mention of this name made him jump. He 

said aloud, as if in spite of himself: 

‘I know Pluchart, I do.’ 

As they turned and looked at him he had to add: 

‘Yes, I’m a mechanic, and he was my foreman, in Lille ... 

He’s a capable man, I’ve often talked to him.’ 

Rasseneur looked him over again; and his expression rapidly 

changed, reflecting a new-found sympathy. After a moment he 

said to his wife: 

‘Maheu’s brought us this young gentleman, he’s one of his 

trammers, in case there’s a room for him upstairs, and we 

could give him a fortnight’s credit.’ 

So the deal was done in the twinkling of an eye. There was a 

room free, for the lodger had left that morning. And the 

landlord got carried away and explained himself more fully, 

although he kept repeating that he only wanted the bosses to 

be reasonable, unlike so many other people, he didn’t want to 

demand the impossible. His wife shrugged her shoulders, she 

wanted to hold out for her rights, and settle for nothing less. 

Part I 

69 

‘Time to say good-night/ Maheu called out, interrupting 

them. ‘None of that will stop the miners going down the pit, 

and as long as anyone has to go down the pit, some of them 

will die of it ... Look how you’ve been thriving over the last 

three years, since you came back up.’ 

‘Yes, I’ve quite got my health back,’ said Rasseneur 

contentedly. 

fetienne walked over to the door, to thank the departing 

miner; but Maheu merely nodded his head, and said nothing, 

leaving fetienne to watch him tramp slowly up the path to the 

mining village. Madame Rasseneur, who was serving some 

customers, had just asked him if he would mind waiting a 

moment until she was free to take him up to his room so he 

could clean himself up. Ought he to stay.? He felt pangs of 

indecision again, a feeling of uneasiness and a wave of nostalgia 

for the freedom of the open road, where hunger was tempered 

with the pleasure of being his own master, living in the 

sunshine. He felt as if he had been living there for years 

already, since his arrival at the slag-heap in the middle of the 

storm, and the hours he had spent crawling along the black 

tunnel floors on his belly. And he felt sick at heart at the idea 

of starting again; it was too unfair, too hard, his human pride 

rebelled at the idea of becoming a blinded and crippled beast 

of burden. 

While Etienne thought through his dilemma, he let his eyes 

roam over the vast plain until they grew accustomed to its 

features. He was surprised, for he hadn’t imagined that the 

landscape looked like that, when old Bonnemort had pointed at 

what lay out there in the depths of the night. He recognized 

Le Voreux easily enough, lying right in front of him in a dip in 

the ground, with its mixture of wooden and brick buildings, its 

pitch-roofed screening shed and slate-covered headgear, its 

engine-room with its tall, pale red chimney, all squatting 

down there in the hollow, looking menacing. But around the 

buildings there was a wider expanse of paved yard than he had 

thought, transformed into a lake of ink by the rising waves of 

stockpiled coal, bobbing with the tall pylons carrying the 

overhead railway, swamped at one end by a deluge of wood, 

the result of felling a whole forest of trees. Over to the right. 

70 

Germinal 

the slag-heap blotted out the horizon, like a colossal barricade 

built by giants, already overgrown with grass on its earlier 

slopes, and burning at the other end with an inner fire which 

had been smouldering for a year, giving off a dense cloud of 

smoke and staining the ghastly grey surface of shale and 

sandstone with long streaks of blood-red rust. Then the fields 

unwound, endless fields of wheat and sugar-beet, still bare at 

this time of the year, and then marshes covered in rough 

scrubland, punctuated by a few stunted willows, then, far off, 

the meadows, divided by thin lines of poplars. Way off in the 

distance some tiny, white patches showed up the position of 

the towns, Marchiennes to the north and Montsou to the 

south; while over to the east the forest of Vandame framed the 

horizon with a dim violet line of bare-branched trees. And 

beneath the livid sky and fading light of this winter afternoon, 

it seemed as if all the blackness of Le Voreux, all the swirling 

dust, had swept down over the plain, powdering the trees, 

sanding the roads, impregnating the soil 

As Etienne kept looking, what surprised him the most was 

the sight of a canal, or rather the river Scarpe* turned into a 

canal, which he had not seen during the night. The canal ran 

in a straight line all the way from Le Voreux to Marchiennes, 

unwinding its dull silver ribbon for over two leagues, an 

avenue bordered with tall trees, raised higher than the low- 

lying land, drawing the gaze along its green banks, and its pale 

waters parted by the vermilion keels of barges, until they 

disappeared into infinity. Near to the pit was a landing-stage, 

where the boats lay moored, waiting to be filled directly from 

the tubs coming down the overhead railway. Then there was 

a bend in the canal, as it cut diagonally across the marshes; 

and the whole soul of this flat plain seemed to be subsumed 

into this geometrical stretch of water which cut across it like a 

great road, bearing its coal and iron away. 

Etienne raised his eyes from the canal to the mining village, 

which was built on the plateau. He could just make out the red 

tiles of the roofs. Then he looked back towards Le Voreux, 

and his gaze lingered on two enormous stacks of bricks lying at 

the bottom of the clay slope. They must have been made and 

baked on the premises. A branch of the Company’s railway 

Part I 

71 

line passed behind a fence on its way into the pit. The last 

stonemen must be going down. There was no sound except for 

the sharp screech of a wagon being pushed by a group of men. 

The scene had lost its nocturnal mystery, which had been 

charged with implausible thunder and the flaring of unfamiliar 

stars. In the distance the blast-furnaces and coke ovens had 

grown pale in the light of dawn. All that was left was the 

incessant exhaust of the pump, breathing out continually with 

the same long, heavy panting, like some insatiable ogre, whose 

grey fumes he could now see rising through the air. 

Then, suddenly, Etienne made up his mind. Perhaps he had 

imagined seeing Catherine’s bright eyes again, up there at the 

entrance to the mining village. Or perhaps it was a wind of 

rebellion blowing from Le Voreux. He wasn’t sure which it 

was, but he wanted to go back down into the mine to suffer 

and struggle, he felt furious at the thought of those people 

mentioned by Bonnemort, of this greedy, squatting god, who 

fed off the flesh of 10,000 hungry people who didn’t even 

know him. 

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PART II 

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CHAPTER I