Emile Zola Germinal (Oxford)" PART VII Last

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

PART VII 

CHAPTER I 

The shots fired in Montsou had rung out with a formidable 

echo that was heard as far away as Paris. For four days all the 

opposition newspapers had been indignant, spreading the story 

of the atrocities all over their front pages: twenty-five wounded, 

fourteen killed including two children and three women; and 

there were prisoners as well: Levaque had become a sort of 

hero, he was reputed to have answered the examining magis¬ 

trate with classical wisdom. The Emperor’s government, struck 

to the heart by these few bullets, showed the superficial calm 

of a great power, without being properly aware how seriously 

it had been wounded. It was simply a regrettable clash, an 

isolated incident out there in the black country, far away from 

the Parisian street corners where public opinion was moulded. 

People would soon forget, the Company had been ordered 

unofficially to hush up the affair and to get the strike over 

with, for its persistence was irritating and threatened to disturb 

the social peace. 

Thus on the Wednesday morning Montsou witnessed the 

arrival of three members of the Board. The little town, sick at 

heart, and hardly daring till then to rejoice in its massacre, 

now breathed freely and at last tasted the joys of salvation. 

That very day the weather had turned fine, and the sun shone 

bright; it was one of those sunny early February days whose 

warmth turns the tips of the lilac trees green. They opened up 

all the shutters of the offices of the Board, and the vast 

building seemed to spring to life again; the most encouraging 

rumours circulated; it appeared that the gentlemen were very 

affected by the catastrophe, and had rushed to open their 

paternal arms to the lost sheep of the mining villages. Now 

that the blow had been struck, doubtless more cruelly than 

they would have wished, they were lavish in their task as 

saviours, and decreed a series of excellent albeit tardy measures. 

First, they banished the Belgians, surrounding this extreme 

concession to the miners with a great deal of publicity. Then 

they put an end to the military occupation of the pits, which 

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were no longer threatened by the crushed miners. They also 

ensured that nothing should be said about the sentry who had 

disappeared from Le Voreux: they had searched high and low 

without finding either the rifle or the corpse, and they decided 

to record the soldier as a deserter, although they suspected 

foul play. In everything they attempted to soften the blow of 

the events, trembling with fear for the morrow and judging it 

unwise to do anything that might encourage the implacable 

savagery of the people, who were capable of trampling the 

whole rickety framework of their ageing world into the dust. 

And besides, this work of reconciliation did not prevent them 

from carrying out purely administrative tasks; for Deneulin 

had been seen calling on the Board, where he met Monsieur 

Hennebeau. The negotiations for the purchase of Vandame 

continued, and people were certain that he would accept what 

these gentlemen offered him. 

But what particularly stirred up the countryside were the 

large yellow posters* that the members of the Board had had 

pasted up all over the walls. They stated in a few lines of very 

large print: ‘Workers of Montsou, we do not want the errors 

whose sad consequences you have witnessed over the past few 

days to deprive decent and well-disposed workmen of their 

livelihood. We shall therefore open all pits on Monday morn¬ 

ing, and as soon as work has resumed we shall examine 

carefully and conscientiously any problems that we may be 

able to resolve. In short we will do everything in our power to 

ensure that justice is done.’ In one morning all 10,000 colliers 

filed past these notices. No one spoke, many shook their heads, 

and others walked away wearily, showing no trace of reaction 

in their expressionless faces. 

Until then village Two Hundred and Forty had persisted in 

its fierce resistance. It was as if the blood of the comrades that 

had reddened the mud at the pit blocked the way for the 

others. Fewer than ten had gone back down. The men watched 

balefully as Pierron and other like-minded creeps came and 

went, but without offering any threatening words or actions. 

They greeted the poster pasted on to the church wall with 

sullen suspicion. There was no mention in it of the booklets 

that had been returned: was the Company refusing to accept 

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them back again? The fear of reprisals, and the fraternal spirit 

of protest against the dismissal of the people most compro¬ 

mised, made them even more obstinate. It was suspicious, 

they’d have to wait and see, they’d go back to the pit when 

those gentlemen were prepared to speak out plainly. The low 

houses were slumped in silence, even their hunger made no 

impression on them now, they all felt they might as well die, 

now that violent death had swooped down over their rooftops. 

But one house, the Maheus’, remained even more dark and 

silent than the others, crushed under the weight of its mourn¬ 

ing. Since she had accompanied her man to the cemetery. La 

Maheude hadn’t relaxed for a moment. After the battle, she 

had let Etienne bring Catherine back home, covered in mud 

and half-dead; and, as she was undressing her for bed in front 

of the young man, she thought for a second that her daughter 

too had come home with a bullet in her stomach, for her shirt 

was covered in large bloodstains. But she soon understood, it 

was her menstrual flow that had broken out at last under the 

shock of this dreadful day. Oh yes, what good fortune that 

wound would bring, what a rich reward it was, to be able to 

spawn children that the gendarmes would immediately gun 

down! And she wasn’t on speaking terms with Catherine any 

more than with Etienne. He was sleeping alongside Jeanlin 

now, at the risk of being arrested, for he was gripped with 

such repulsion at the idea of returning to the darkness of 

Requillart that he preferred prison: he was shaken by a shud¬ 

der, a fear of the dark, after ail those deaths, a suppressed fear 

of the young soldier who lay sleeping under the rock back 

there. Besides, he dreamed of prison as a refuge amid the 

torment of his defeat; in fact no one even tried to find him, 

and he felt the hours drag by wretchedly, not knowing what to 

do to tire his body out. Only occasionally did La Maheude 

look at the two of them, Etienne and her daughter, with a 

resentful air, as if to ask them what they were doing in her 

house. 

Once again they snored away en masse^ old Bonnemort using 

the former bed of the two kids, who slept with Catherine now 

that poor little Alzire no longer dug her hump into her big 

sister’s ribs. It was when she went to bed that the mother felt 

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how empty the house was, for her bed was cold and had 

become too big for her. In vain she took Estelle to bed with 

her to hli the gap, but that couldn't make up for her man; and 

she wept soundlessly for hours on end. Then the days started 

to flow by as before: still bringing no bread, and not even the 

good fortune to let them die once and for all; the poor 

wretches were sufficiently unlucky to pick up enough scraps 

here and there to keep body and soul together. Nothing had 

changed in their lives, except that her man had gone. 

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Etienne, who was in 

despair at the sight of this silent woman, left the room and 

walked slowly down the cobbled street of the village. The 

enforced idleness which weighed heavily on him spurred him 

to take endless walks, swinging his arms, looking at the ground, 

tortured by the same thought. He had been tramping around 

like this for half an hour when he sensed from his increasing 

unease that his comrades were standing in their doorways 

watching him. The scant popularity that he had left had gone 

up in the smoke of the shooting, he couldn’t walk by a house 

without feeling hostile stares following him as he passed. 

When he raised his head, he saw the men standing there 

threateningly, and the women holding their net curtains open 

to took out of their windows at him; and, under this as yet 

silent accusation, under the restrained anger of these staring 

eyes, gaping with hunger and tears, he became ill at ease, and 

almost forgot how to walk. And all the time, behind his back, 

these sullen reproaches were growing. He became seized with 

such a fear of hearing the whole village coming out screaming 

their poverty at him that he went back home, trembling. 

But at the Maheus’ house the scene which awaited him 

made him even more distressed. Old Bonnemort had remained 

near the fireless chimney, stuck to his chair, since the day of 

the slaughter, when two neighbours had found him alongside 

his broken walking stick, lying on the ground like an old tree 

struck by lightning. And while Lenore and Henri tried to 

cheat their hunger by scraping away deafeningly at an old 

saucepan which had had some boiled cabbage in it the day 

before. La Maheude had placed Estelle on the table, stood 

stiffly upright, and was threatening Catherine with her fist. 

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‘Just let me hear you say that again, so help me God, just 

you dare!’ 

Catherine had announced her intention of returning to Le 

Voreux. The thought of not earning her living, of being barely 

tolerated by her mother, like a useless animal that did nothing 

but get under her feet, became daily more unbearable to her; 

and if she hadn’t feared being badly beaten by Chaval, she 

would have returned on the Tuesday morning. She repeated, 

stammeringly: 

‘What do you expect us to do.'^ We can’t stay alive if we 

don’t do anything. At least that way we’d have some bread.’ 

La Maheude interrupted her. 

‘You listen to me ... the first one of you lot that goes back 

to work I shall strangle in person ... Oh, no, that would be 

too much, killing the father and then going on to exploit the 

children! We’ve had enough. I’d rather see you all six feet 

under, like the one they’ve already taken.’ 

And her long silence exploded in a flood of words. A fine 

help it would be to have the bare thirty sous that Catherine 

would bring home, even added to the twenty sous that scoun¬ 

drel Jeanlin could earn if the bosses wanted to find him 

something to do. Fifty sous to feed seven mouths! All the kids 

were able to do was sit around knocking back soup. 

As for the grandfather, something must have given out in 

his brain when he fell, for he appeared to have become an 

imbecile, unless he had had his stomach turned over at seeing 

his comrades shot at by the soldiers. 

‘Isn’t that so, old man, they’ve finished you off? It’s true 

you’ve still got some strength in your arms, but you’ve had it, 

haven’t you?’ 

Bonnemort looked at her uncomprehendingly with his dead 

eyes. He spent hours staring into space, he only had wit 

enough left to spit into the basin filled with ashes that they put 

down by his side for the sake of cleanliness. 

‘And they haven’t agreed to his pension,’ she went on, ‘and 

I’m sure they’ll refuse to, because of our ideas ... No, I tell 

you, we’ve had enough of these cursed people!’ 

‘Yes, but’, Catherine said hopefully, ‘on the poster they 

promise...’ 

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‘Will you shut up with your poster! ,.. It’s written on 

flypaper to trap us and kill us. It’s easy enough for them to act 

friendly now they’ve cut us to ribbons.’ 

‘But Mum, in that case, where can we go? They won’t let us 

stay in the village, surely.’ 

La Maheude made a vague but terrible gesture. Where 

could they go to? How should she know, she preferred not to 

think about it, it drove her crazy. They would go somewhere, 

somewhere else. And as the noise of the saucepan was becoming 

unbearable she flew at Lenore and Henri and smacked them. 

And Estelle, who had been crawling around on all fours, fell 

over and added to the chaos. Her mother shut her up with a 

good hiding: what a bit of luck it would have been if she had 

killed herself while she was about it! Then she started talking 

about Alzire, wishing that the others might have the same 

good luck. Then suddenly she burst out into a fit of sobbing, 

leaning her head against the wall. 

Etienne simply stood there without daring to intervene. He 

no longer had any influence in the house, even the children 

shrank away from him suspiciously. But the tears of this 

unhappy woman broke his heart, and he murmured: 

‘Come on, bear up, you’ll see, we’ll try and get by.’ 

She didn’t seem to hear what he said, and she carried on 

complaining in one endless, monotonous lament. 

‘Oh, misery, how can it be true? Even with all these horrors 

we kept going. We only had dry bread to eat but at least we 

were all together ... And now what’s happened, God only 

knows! Whatever have we done to be in such sorrow, .some in 

their graves and the rest of us only wanting to follow them? 

. .. It’s true enough that they hitched us like horses to the 

plough, and there was no justice in it, we just got beaten for 

our trouble while we made the rich get richer and we never 

had a hope of tasting any of the good things in life. There’s no 

pleasure in life when you’ve lost your hope. Yes, it couldn’t go 

on any longer, we needed to breathe ... And yet if we’d 

known! How can it be true, how can we have made ourselves 

so unhappy when we were only looking for justice!’ 

Her breast heaved with sighs and her voice choked with 

immense sadness. 

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‘Then there’s always some bright spark promising you things 

will improve if you only try harder , .. You get all excited, you 

suffer so much from what you’ve got that you ask for what you 

can’t have. I was already daydreaming like a beast in a field, I 

saw a life where everyone lived in friendship, and believe me, I 

was floating on air, my head in the clouds. Then you fail down 

in the mud and you break your neck ... It wasn’t true. There 

weren’t any of those things we dreamed of out there at all. All 

that there was was more suffering, oh yes, all the suffering you 

could ever wish for, and gunfire into the bargain!’ 

As Etienne listened to this lament each tear stung him with 

remorse. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would 

soothe La Maheude, who was shattered by her terrible fall 

from the heights of her ideal. She had come back into the 

middle of the room; she looked into his eyes and, abandoning 

all pretence of politeness, directed one last cry of rage at him: 

‘And you, Etienne, my friend, are you so keen on going 

back to the pit, too, now you’ve thrown us all into the shit.^, .. 

I’ve got no quarrel with you. But if I was you, I’d have died of 

sorrow already from doing so much harm to my comrades.’ 

He wanted to answer her, then he shrugged his shoulders in 

despair: what was the point of giving her' reasons that she 

wouldn’t understand because of her suffering? And his heart 

ached too much, he walked away, and went outside to wander 

helplessly around again. 

There again he found himself plunged in a village which 

seemed to be on the look-out for him, the men at the doors, 

the women at the windows. As soon as he appeared, a crowd 

gathered, and started muttering, A storm of gossip had been 

brewing for four days, and now it burst in a hail of curses. 

Fists were raised at him, mothers pointed him out to their 

children with spiteful fingers, and old men spat when they saw 

him pass. It was the backlash following their bitter defeat, an 

inevitable reaction to his previous popularity, a contempt 

exacerbated by all the fruitless suffering they had endured. He 

was paying for their hunger and their deaths, 

Zacharie, who had just arrived with Philomene, bumped 

into Etienne as he came out of the house. And he sneered 

unpleasantly. 

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444 Germinal 

‘Look who’s putting on weight, and getting fat on other 

people’s carcasses!’ 

La Levaque had already come out on to her doorstep 

accompanied by Bouteloup. Referring to her own kid, Bebert, 

who had been gunned down by the troops, she shouted: 

‘Yes, there are cowards who have children killed in their 

place. Why don’t they go and dig mine up out of the ground 

for me if they want to give him back to me?’ 

She had forgotten that her man was a prisoner, for there 

was no gap in the family since Bouteloup was still there. 

However, the memory suddenly returned, and she continued 

in a shrill tone: 

‘Get away with you! There are thugs walking around free as 

the air while the honest men are locked up in the dark!’ 

Etienne avoided her but in so doing came across La 

Pierronne, who had run across the gardens to catch him. She 

had welcomed her mother’s death as a liberation, since her 

violence had threatened to get them hanged; and she was no 

more upset by the death of Pierron’s little girl, that stupid 

goose Lydie, she was well rid of her. But she took her 

neighbours’ side in the hope of being reconciled with them. 

‘And how about my mother, then? And my little girl? We 

saw you hiding behind them when they were mopping up 

bullets in your place!’ 

What could he do? Strangle La Pierronne and the rest of the 

women? Fight the whole village? Etienne was tempted for a 

moment. His blood boiled in his head, he felt now that his 

comrades were brutes, he was exasperated to find them so 

unintelligent and barbarous that they blamed him for the blind 

course of events. How stupid! But he felt disgusted at his own 

inability to bring them back under his sway; and all he could 

do was quicken his stride as if he were deaf to their insults. 

Soon he was in full flight, as every household booed him on 

his way, snapping at his heels, the whole population cursing 

him with voices that gradually grew thunderously loud, as 

their hatred overflowed. He was the exploiter, the assassin, the 

single cause of all their misfortunes. He left the village, pale 

and distraught, racing off with the mob screaming behind him. 

When he finally got out on to the open road, a lot of them gave 

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445 

up the chase; but one or two persisted, until, at the bottom of 

the slope, in front of the Avantage, he met another group, 

leaving Le Voreux. 

Old Mouque and Chaval were there. Since the death of his 

daughter La Mouquette and his son Mouquet, the old man 

had carried on his duties as stableman without a word of regret 

or complaint. But suddenly, when he caught sight of Etienne, 

he shook with fury, tears streamed from his eyes, and a jumble 

of foul words spilled out of his mouth, blackened and bleeding 

from constantly chewing tobacco. 

‘You bastard! You sod! You rotten bugger! ... Just you 

wait, you’ll pay for my bloody children, you will, you won’t 

get away with it!’ 

He picked up a brick, broke it in half, and threw both pieces 

at Etienne. 

‘Yes, you’re right, let’s get rid of him!’ cried Chaval, sneering 

delightedly, working himself into a frenzy at the idea of getting 

his revenge. ‘It’s about your turn ... Now you’ve got your 

back to the wall, you filthy slob!’ 

And he too rushed at Etienne, throwing stones at him. A 

wild clamour arose, everyone took up bricks, broke them, and 

threw the pieces, trying to tear him apart as they would have 

liked to tear the soldiers apart. He was so dazed that he gave up 

trying to escape, and turned to face them, trying to calm them 

down by reasoning with them. His former speeches, which had 

been welcomed so warmly in the past, sprang to his lips. He 

repeated the words that he had used to intoxicate them in 

earlier days, when he held them in the palm of his hand like an 

obedient flock; but the spell failed to work, and the only 

response he elicited was a hail of stones; he instantly received a 

bruising blow to the left arm, and was retreating, in mortal 

danger, when he found that he was hemmed in against the wall 

of the Avantage. 

Rasseneur had been standing in his doorway for the last few 

moments. 

‘Come in,’ he said simply. 

Etienne hesitated, for he felt depressed at the idea of having 

to take refuge there. 

‘Come on in, and I’ll go and talk to them.’ 

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446 

He resigned himself, and went to take shelter at the back of 

the room, while the landlord filled the doorway with his broad 

shoulders. 

‘Now look, my friends, let’s be reasonable ... You know 

perfectly well that I’ve never led you up the garden path, don’t 

you.^ I’ve always been for taking things calmly, and if you’d 

listened to me you certainly wouldn’t be in the mess you’re in 

now.’ 

Expressing himself with animated movements of his shoul¬ 

ders and his stomach, he let his natural eloquence carry all 

before it, flowing over his audience as soothingly as warm 

water. And he achieved the same success that he had in former 

times, regaining his old popularity effortlessly, spontaneously, 

as if his comrades had never booed him and called him a 

coward a month earlier. Voices were raised in approval: right! 

They agreed! That was how to talk! A thunder of applause 

broke out. 

At the back of the room Etienne felt quite faint, his heart 

steeped in bitterness. He remembered Rasseneur’s prediction 

in the forest, when he had warned him of the ingratitude of 

the crowd. What stupid brutality! What disgraceful contempt 

for the services he had rendered! It was a blind force which 

constantly bit the hand that fed it. And in his anger at seeing 

these brutes spoil their own cause, there was also despair at his 

own collapse, the tragic end of his own ambitions. Well, then! 

Was it all over already.^ He remembered how under the beech 

trees he had heard 3,000 hearts beating in time to his own. 

That day he had felt the power of his popularity, the people 

belonged to him, he had felt that he was their master. At that 

time he had been intoxicated with the wildest dreams: Montsou 

at his feet, Paris just over the horizon. Member of Parliament 

perhaps, crushing the bourgeoisie with his eloquence, the first 

speech made to Parliament by a working man. And it was all 

over! He awoke to find himself wretched and hated, his own 

people had just banished him under a hail of bricks. 

Rasseneur raised his voice. 

‘Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world 

in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you 

all at once is either a fool or a rogue!’ 

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447 

‘Bravo! Bravo!’ cried the crowd. 

So who was the guilty party, then.^ And as Etienne asked 

himself this question he felt completely overwhelmed. Was he 

truly to blame for this misfortune, which made his heart bleed 

too, some dying of hunger, others slaughtered by the troops, 

all these women and children, reduced to skin and bone, with 

not a scrap to eat? 

He had had this dreadful vision one night 

earlier on, before disaster had struck. But at that time he had 

felt buoyed up by some superior power, which carried both 

him and his comrades away. Besides, he had never dictated to 

them, it was they who had taken him along with them, who 

forced him to do things he wouldn’t have done without the 

drive of that powerful mob behind him. With each outbreak of 

violence, he remained dazed by the turn events had taken, for 

he hadn’t foreseen or wanted it at all. For instance, how could 

he have imagined that his faithful disciples from his own 

village would one day want to stone him? These fanatics were 

lying when they accused him of having promised them a life of 

banqueting and idleness. And behind this justification, in the 

very terms that he used to try to overcome his own remorse, 

there flickered the vague anxiety of having lacked the qualities 

necessary to carry out his task, a doubt that constantly assailed 

him as a self-taught student. But he felt that he was running 

out of courage, that he no longer even had any fellow feeling 

for his comrades, he was afraid of them, of their enormous 

numbers, of the blind, irresistible force of the people, sweeping 

onwards like some natural disaster, ignoring all rules and 

theories. He had started feeling repelled by them, and had 

grown away from them; his refined tastes made him feel 

uncomfortable, as he gradually moved into a higher class with 

every fibre of his being. 

At that moment Rasseneur’s voice was drowned out by 

enthusiastic cheers. 

‘Long live Rasseneur! He’s the greatest, bravo, bravo!’ 

The publican closed the door behind him while the crowd 

dispersed, and the two men looked at each other silently. Both 

shrugged their shoulders. In the end, they drank a pint 

together. 

That same day there was a grand dinner at La Piolaine to 

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448 

celebrate the engagement of Negrel and Cecile. The Gregoires 

had started polishing the dining-room and dusting the sitting- 

room the day before. Melanie reigned in the kitchen, supervis¬ 

ing the roasts and stirring the sauces whose scent wafted right 

up to the attic. They had decided that Francis, the coachman, 

would help Honorine to serve at table. The gardener’s wife 

was going to wash up while her husband would also act as 

doorkeeper. This patriarchal household, usually so staid and 

comfortable, had never had such exciting festivities. 

Everything went off perfectly. Madame Hennebeau was 

charming to Cecile, and she smiled at Negrel, when the 

Montsou notary gallantly proposed to drink to the future 

happiness of the young couple. Monsieur Hennebeau too was 

absolutely charming. The guests were struck by his cheerful 

manner; the rumour had got around that he was back in favour 

with the Board, and that he would soon be appointed an 

officer of the Legion d’honneur on account of his vigorous 

suppression of the strike. They avoided mentioning the recent 

events, but there was a triumphal note in their universal joy, 

with the dinner turning into an unofficial victory ceremony. At 

last they had been delivered, they could start to live and eat in 

peace again! Someone made a discreet allusion to the dead, 

whose blood had hardly dried in the mud of Le Voreux: it was 

a necessary lesson, and everyone felt sad about it, when the 

Gregoires added that now it was the duty of everyone to go 

out and heal the wounds in the villages. Having resumed their 

placid benevolence, they had now excused their good miners, 

already seeing them back down the mine giving a good example 

of age-old resignation. The Montsou establishment, now that 

they no longer trembled for their lives, agreed that the question 

of the men’s wages should be prudently investigated. By the 

time they reached the roast, the victory was complete, when 

Monsieur Hennebeau read out a letter from the Archbishop, 

who announced that Father Ranvier was to be transferred to 

another parish. All the bourgeoisie of the province commented 

furiously on the affair of this priest who was calling the 

soldiers murderers. And the notary, as the dessert was served, 

firmly declared his free-thinking opinions. 

Deneulin was there with his two daughters. Amid all this 

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449 

light-heartedness he tried to hide the melancholy caused by his 

ruin. That very morning he had signed the sale of his Vandame 

concession to the Montsou Company. With his back to the 

wall and his throat slit^ he had accepted all the demands of the 

Board, at last leaving them the prize that they had coveted for 

so long, and receiving in exchange hardly enough money to 

pay his creditors. And at the last moment he had even accepted 

as a stroke of good luck their wish to keep him on as divisional 

engineer, thus resigning himself to earning his living super¬ 

vising the pit that had engulfed his fortune. This sounded the 

death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by 

the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up 

one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and 

drowned by the rising tide of large companies. He alone was 

paying for the strike, and he realized well enough that they 

were toasting his downfall in toasting Monsieur Hennebeau’s 

decoration; and he only felt slightly consoled at the brave front 

put up by Lucie and Jeanne, looking charming in their mended 

clothes, laughing in the face of disaster, as if their feminine 

charms and boyish courage made them indifferent to money. 

When they went into the lounge to take coffee. Monsieur 

Gregoire took his cousin to one side and congratulated him on 

his courageous decision. 

‘What can you do about it.^ Your great mistake was to 

gamble away the million you got from your share of Montsou 

by spending it on Vandame. You had to work yourself to the 

bone, and then it all disappeared in this rotten business, while 

my share just slept in a drawer and still keeps me fed and 

clothed in idleness, and will continue to do so for my children 

and grandchildren,’ 

CHAPTER 11 

On Sunday Etienne escaped from the village as soon as night 

had fallen. A very bright, star-spangled sky lit the earth with a 

dusky blue glow. He went down towards the canal and walked 

slowly, following the bank up towards Marchiennes. It was his 

450 

Germinal 

favourite walk, a grassy tow-path two leagues long in a straight 

line along this geometrically neat waterway which unfurled like 

an endless strip of molten silver. 

He never met anyone there. But that day he was annoyed to 

see a man coming towards him. And beneath the pale light of 

the stars the two lone walkers didn’t recognize each other until 

they came face to face. 

‘Oh, it’s you,’ murmured Etienne. 

Souvarine nodded his head without answering. For a 

moment they stopped still; then side by side they set off for 

Marchiennes again. Each of them seemed to continue with his 

own train of thought as if they were a long way apart. 

‘Did you see in the paper the success Pluchart had in Paris?’ 

Etienne asked at last. ‘They came out on the pavements to 

wait for him and they gave him a standing ovation at the end 

of that meeting in Belleville ... Oh, his career is made now, 

despite his cold. He can do what he likes from now on.’ 

The mechanic shrugged his shoulders. He despised smooth 

talkers who were really just layabouts who took up politics as 

people take up the law, to make a good living out of making 

speeches. 

Etienne had now got up to Darwin.* He had read some 

fragments summarized and popularized in a five-sou volume; 

and from this half-digested reading, he formed a revolutionary 

idea of the fight for existence, the lean swallowing the fat, the 

strong people devouring the sickly bourgeoisie. But Souvarine 

got angry and held forth about the stupidity of the socialists 

who accepted Darwin, that apostle of scientific inequality, 

whose famous natural selection was only fit for aristocratic 

philosophers. However, his comrade persisted, and wanted to 

argue about it, so he expressed his doubts as hypotheses: say 

the old society no longer existed, and every last crumb had 

been swept away; well then, wouldn’t there be a danger that 

the new world might grow up gradually spoiled by the same 

injustices, some people sick and others healthy, some more 

skilful and intelligent, succeeding in every venture, others 

stupid and lazy, becoming slaves again? And then, faced with 

this vision of eternal misery, the mechanic cried out in a 

ferocious voice that if justice was impossible in a world of 

Part VII 

451 

men, then mankind would have to disappear. For every corrupt 

society there should be another massacre, until the last human 

being had been exterminated. And they fell silent again. 

For a long time, Souvarine walked over the soft grass, with 

his head lowered, and so lost in his thoughts that he followed 

the very edge of the water with the tranquil certitude of a 

sleepwalker wandering along the gutter. Then he shuddered 

for no apparent reason, as if he had met a ghost. He raised his 

eyes, and his face showed up very pale; then he said quietly to 

his companion: 

‘Did I tell you how she died.^’ 

‘Who do you mean.^’ 

‘My wife, back there in Russia.’ 

Etienne looked puzzled, astonished to hear this usually 

impassive fellow speaking with a quaver in his voice and 

feeling a sudden need to confide, for he was usually so stoically 

detached from others and himself. He only knew that the wife 

was a mistress, and that she had been hanged in Moscow. 

‘Our plans hadn’t worked out,’ Souvarine recounted, his 

eyes gazing out at the long white canal, stretching out endlessly 

between the bluish colonnades of the tall trees. ‘We had spent 

fourteen days at the bottom of a hole, mining the railway line; 

and instead of the Imperial train it was a passenger train that 

we blew up . . . Then they arrested Anoushka. She used to 

bring us our bread every evening, disguised as a peasant girl. 

And she was the one who lit the fuse, too, because a man 

might have got himself noticed ... 1 followed the trial, hidden 

in the crowd, for six long days . ..’ 

His voice faltered, and he was seized with a fit of coughing 

as if he were going to choke. 

‘Twice I wanted to cry out and leap over the heads of the 

crowd to get to her. But what was the point.^ Each man we lost 

was one soldier less; and I could tell that she was telling me 

not to with her great staring eyes when she looked into mine.’ 

He coughed again. 

‘The last day, 1 was there, in the square ... It was raining, 

and the clumsy oafs lost their nerve, they were upset by the 

pouring rain. It took them twenty minutes to hang the other 

four: the rope broke, they couldn’t finish off the fourth man 

452 

Germinal 

... Anoushka was standing there waiting. She couldn’t see me, 

though she was looking for me in the crowd, I got up on to a 

milestone and she saw me, and we kept our eyes locked on 

each other. Even when she was dead she kept looking at me 

... I took off my hat, and waved goodbye, then I went away.’ 

There was another silence. The white route of the canal 

stretched away to infinity, they both walked on with the same 

soft tread, as if each had fallen back into his private world 

again. Over on the horizon the pale water seemed to pierce the 

sky with a thin sliver of light. 

‘It’s our punishment,’ Souvarine continued harshly. ‘We 

were guilty of loving each other ... Yes, it’s a good thing she’s 

dead, a new race of heroes will spring up from her spilled 

blood, while I’ve lost all trace of cowardice in my heart .., 

Oh, nothing, no family, no wife, no friends! None of the things 

that make your hand waver the day you have to take someone 

else’s life or lay down your own!’ 

Etienne had stopped still, shivering in the cool night air. He 

didn’t argue, he simply said: 

‘We’re a long way out, shall we go back now.^’ 

They slowly returned towards Le Voreux, and he added, 

after a few more paces: 

‘Have you seen the new posters.^’ 

The Company had had another lot of large yellow placards 

pasted up during the morning. They looked clearer and more 

conciliatory, seeming to promise to take back the booklets of 

any miners who went down the next morning. Everything 

would be forgotten, and even those who had most compromised 

themselves would be offered a pardon. 

‘Yes, I’ve seen them,’ the mechanic replied. 

‘Well then, what do you think.?’ 

‘I think that it’s all over ... They’ll all go flocking back 

down there. You’re all too cowardly.’ 

Etienne argued urgently to excuse his comrades: a man can 

be brave but a crowd that is dying of hunger has no strength. 

Gradually they had got back to Le Voreux; and as they 

reached the dark mass of the pit, he continued, he swore he 

would never go below again; but he forgave those who did 

decide to. Then, as there was a rumour that the carpenters 

Part VII 

453 

hadn’t had time to repair the lining, he wanted to find out. 

Was it true? Had the timber framework which formed the 

lining of the shaft become so swollen by the sheer weight of 

the earth pushing in on it that in one place the cage was 

scraping against the side of the shaft for at least five metres? 

Souvarine had fallen silent again, but he replied briefly. He 

had just been working there the night before, and the cage was 

indeed scraping against the side of the shaft; the mechanics 

had even had to double its speed to get it past that spot. But 

all the bosses greeted such observations with the same irritated 

phrase: it was the coal they wanted, they would reinforce the 

lining of the shaft later. 

‘Imagine if it burst!’ Etienne murmured. ‘Then we’d really 

be in it up to our necks!’ 

-With his eyes staring at the pit, which was dimly visible in 

the shadows, Souvarine concluded calmly: 

‘If it bursts our comrades will know all about it, since you’re 

advising them to go below.’ 

The Montsou clock tower was just striking nine o’clock; and 

as his companion said he was going home to bed, Souvarine 

added, without even shaking hands: 

‘Well then, farewell. I’m leaving.’ 

‘What do you mean, you’re leaving?’ 

‘Yes, I’ve asked for my booklet. I’m going somewhere else.’ 

Etienne looked at him, stupefied and shocked. They had 

been out walking for two hours and now suddenly Souvarine 

told him this, and in such calm tones, whereas the mere 

statement of this sudden separation made his own heart sink. 

They had got to know each other, they had worked together 

and shared their problems; it always makes you feel sad when 

you think that you’ll never see someone again. 

‘So, if you’re going, where are you going to?’ 

‘Out there somewhere, I don’t know where.’ 

‘But shan’t I ever see you again?’ 

‘No, I don’t think so.’ 

They fell silent, and remained face to face for a moment 

without finding anything else to say to each other. 

‘So, farewell.’ 

‘Farewell.’ 

Germinal 

454 

While Etienne walked back up to the village, Souvarine 

turned round in the other direction and went back along the 

canal bank; and there, alone at last, he started walking on 

endlessly again, looking down at the ground, so plunged in 

darkness that he seemed to be no more than one of the moving 

shadows of the night himself From time to time he stopped, 

counting the chimes of a distant clock. When midnight struck, 

he left the canal bank and went off towards Le Voreux. 

At that hour the pit was deserted, and the only person he 

met was a deputy, rubbing his eyes with sleep. They weren’t 

going to start stoking up until two o’clock, to prepare the start 

of work. First of all Souvarine went up to get a jacket that he 

said he had left in the back of a cupboard. Rolled up in this 

jacket were some tools, a brace fitted with a bit, a small, strong 

saw, a hammer and chisel. Then he left. But instead of going 

out through the entrance shed, he went down the narrow 

corridor which led to the ladder well. And with his jacket 

tucked under his arm, he went slowly down without a lamp, 

measuring the depth by counting the ladders. He knew that 

the cage was scraping against the fifth section of the lower part 

of the lining of the shaft at a depth of three hundred and 

seventy-four metres. When he had counted fifty-four ladders, 

he reached out and felt with his hand. He felt the swollen 

pieces of timber. That was the spot. 

Then, with the skill and resolve of a good workman who has 

carefully prepared his plan of campaign, he set to work. He 

started immediately by sawing a panel out of the partition 

wall, so that he could reach through from the ladder well to 

the winding shaft. And using a series of matches, which died 

out almost as quickly as they flared up, he was able to assess 

the state of the timber lining and the recent repairs that had 

been carried out. 

Between Valenciennes and Calais it was exceptionally diffi¬ 

cult to sink a mine-shaft, because of the need to cross great 

masses of underground water lying in vast tables at the level of 

the lowest valleys. It was only by constructing these shaft 

linings, and dovetailing the panels into each other like the 

staves of a cask, that they managed to contain the gushing 

springs, and insulate the shafts from the surrounding lakes. 

Part VII 

455 

whose dark unseen waters lapped up against their walls. When 

they had sunk Le Voreux, they had had to build two linings: 

one for the upper levels in the shifting sand and white clay 

which lay next to the cretaceous rock, fissured on all sides, 

swollen with water like a sponge; then another for the lower 

level, directly above the coal measures, in a yellow sand as fine 

as flour, flowing like a liquid. That was where they had 

encountered the Torrent, an underground sea, the terror of the 

coalfields in the Nord Department, a sea with its storms and 

shipwrecks, an unknown, unfathomable sea, whose black waves 

broke more than 300 metres underground. Normally the linings 

held up under the enormous pressure. The only real threat to 

them was from the subsidence of the neighbouring rock if it 

was undermined by the continuing movement of the disused 

tunnels as they collapsed and filled up. During this process of 

slippage, sometimes the rock would develop a fault, which 

would spread gradually to the framework, so that it eventually 

became warped and bulged out into the shaft; and there lay 

the great danger, the threat of a rock fall, followed by flooding, 

which would fill the pit with an avalanche of earth and a 

deluge of water. 

Souvarine, sitting astride the opening he had made, noted 

that the fifth section of the lining was very badly warped. The 

planks had started to belly out beyond their frames; some had 

even come away from their grooves. There were a great many 

leaks, which the miners called ‘pichoux’, spurting from the 

joints, having broken through the tow and pitch lagging which 

sealed them. And the carpenters, who were pushed for time, 

had merely fixed iron brackets across the corners, so negligently 

that they hadn’t even fitted all the screws. There was obviously 

a lot of movement in the sands of the Torrent behind. 

Then with his brace he undid the screws in the brackets, so 

that a last blow would tear them all off. It was a task of 

appalling rashness, and a dozen times he nearly toppled over 

and fell 180 metres down to the bottom of the pit. He had to 

hang on to the oak beams, which served as guides for the 

cages; and hanging out over the void, he moved along the 

cross-pieces which joined them at regular intervals, he slid 

along, sat down, leant over backwards, propped himself up on 

Germinal 

456 

a single elbow or knee, coolly defying death. A breath of wind 

would have knocked him over; three times he only just stopped 

himself from failing, but didn’t bat an eyelash. First he felt 

around with his hands, then he got to work, only lighting a 

match when he lost his way amid the greasy beams. When he 

had undone the screws, he started on the panels themselves; 

and the danger increased. He had been looking for the linchpin, 

the panel that held the others; he attacked it fiercely, pierced 

it, sawed it, whittling it down to weaken its resistance; while 

through the holes and the cracks the water which spurted 

through in fine jets blinded him, and drenched him in icy 

spray. Two matches went out. The whole boxful had got 

soaked, and he was plunged into the bottomless darkness of 

the subterranean night. 

From then on he was carried away in a frenzy. He was 

intoxicated by the breath of the invisible; the stark horror he 

felt in this hole lashed with streams of water threw him into a 

fury of destruction. He tore haphazardly at the lining, striking 

where he could, hitting out indiscriminately with his saw or 

his brace and bit, seized with an urge to tear it to shreds and 

pull it down on top of him without delay. And he put as much 

ferocity into it as if he had been slashing away with a knife at 

the skin of some hated living being. He would kill it at last, 

this evil beast of Le Voreux, with its ever-open jaws which had 

swallowed up so much human flesh! The sound of his tools 

rang out as he hacked away; he arched his back, he crawled, he 

climbed up and down, keeping his grip by some miracle amid 

this perpetual flurry of movement, like some night bird flitting 

among the beams of a belfry. 

But then he calmed down, annoyed with himself. Couldn’t 

he do things carefully? Slowly he regained his breath, then 

climbed back into the ladder well and blocked up the hole he 

had made, replacing the panel that he had cut away. That was 

enough, he didn’t want to alert people by causing too much 

damage, which they would have immediately tried to repair. 

The beast had been cut to the heart, time would tell if it would 

still be alive that evening; and he had carved his initials in its 

flesh, the world would learn to its horror that it had not died a 

natural death. He took the time to wrap up his tools method- 

Part VII 

457 

ically in his jacket, and he climbed slowly back up the ladders. 

Then, when he had emerged unseen from the pit, he didn’t 

even think of changing his clothes. Three o’clock struck. He 

stood in the road, rooted to the spot, waiting. 

At the same time, Etienne, who was lying in bed awake, was 

disturbed by something stirring in the deep darkness of the 

room. He made out the soft breathing of the children, the 

snores of Bonnemort and La Maheude; while next to him 

Jeanlin was whistling one long note like a flute. He must have 

been dreaming, and he curled up to try to go back to sleep, 

when he heard the noise again. It was a mattress creaking, the 

surreptitious sounds of someone getting out of bed. He thought 

Catherine must be unwell. 

‘Hey, is that you.^ What’s the matter.?’ he asked under his 

breath. 

No one replied, the others just kept on snoring. For five 

minutes nothing moved. Then there was another creak. And 

this time he was certain that he wasn’t mistaken, and he 

crossed the room, stretching out his arms in the darkness to 

feel for the bed opposite him. He was greatly surprised to find 

the girl sitting on the bed holding her breath, wide awake and 

on the look-out. 

‘Well then, why didn’t you answer.? Whatever are you 

doing?’ 

At last she answered: 

‘I’m getting up.’ 

‘You’re getting up, at this time of night!’ 

‘Yes, I’m going back to work at the pit.’ 

Etienne was quite shaken, and he had to sit on the edge of 

the mattress, while Catherine explained her reasons to him. 

She suffered too much living in idleness like this, feeling 

reproachful gazes weighing on her all the time; she preferred 

to run the risk of going back there and being pushed around 

by Chaval; and, if her mother refused her money when she 

brought it home to her, well, she was old enough to sit it out 

and make her own soup! 

‘Go away. I’m going to get dressed. And don’t say anything, 

will you, if you want to help.’ 

But he stayed close to her, he had taken her by the waist in 

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458 

a caress of sorrow mingled with pity. They were sitting 

pressed close up against each other on the edge of the bed, 

which was still warm with the night’s sleep, and they could 

feel the heat of each other’s bare skin through their nightshirts. 

Her first reaction had been to try to struggle free, then she had 

started crying very quietly, and putting her own arms round 

his neck now, to keep him close to her, in a desperate embrace. 

And they remained like that, without desiring to go further, 

haunted by all the unhappiness of their past, unconsummated 

love. Was it over for ever.^ Would they never dare to love each 

other one day, now that they were free.^ It would only have 

taken a little happiness to dispel their shame, the embarrass¬ 

ment that prevented them from getting together, because of all 

the thoughts they had that they couldn’t even interpret them¬ 

selves. 

‘Go back to bed,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t want to put the 

light on, it would only wake Mum up ... Leave me alone, it’s 

time I went.’ 

He wouldn’t listen to her, and he clasped her desperately, 

his heart drowning in an immense sadness. A need for peace 

and an uncontrollable need for happiness invaded him; and he 

pictured himself married, in a nice clean little house, with no 

other ambition than for the two of them to live and die 

together inside it. They would only need a little bread to eat; 

and even if there was only enough for one of them, he would 

give her the whole piece. What was the point of wanting 

anything else.^ Was there anything in life worth more than 

that.^ 

But she disentangled her bare arms. 

‘Leave me alone, please.’ 

Then, with a spontaneous surge of affection, he whispered 

in her ear: 

‘Wait, I’m coming with you.’ 

And he himself was astonished at what he had said. He had 

sworn not to go below again, how had he come to this sudden 

decision, which he had blurted out without arguing about it or 

even dreaming about it for a second? Now he felt such a deep 

calm within him, such a complete healing of his doubts, that 

he persisted, like a man saved by chance when he has stumbled 

Part VII 

459 

into the only door leading out of the labyrinth. And so he 

refused to listen to her, but she took fright, realizing that he 

was sacrificing himself for her, fearing the insults that would 

greet his arrival at the pit. He took no notice of all that, the 

posters promised a pardon, and that was good enough for him. 

‘I want to work, it’s my own decision ... Let’s get dressed, 

and don’t make any noise.’ 

They dressed in the darkness, taking every possible precau¬ 

tion. She had secretly prepared her mining clothes the night 

before; he took a jacket and a pair of breeches out of the 

cupboard; and they didn’t wash, for fear of making a noise 

with the basin. Everyone else was still asleep, but they had to 

cross the narrow corridor where her mother slept. Unfortu¬ 

nately, as they were leaving they bumped into a chair. La 

Maheude awoke, and asked, still dazed with sleep: 

‘Hey, what’s up?’ 

Catherine had stopped still, trembling, and squeezed 

Etienne’s hand violently. 

‘It’s me, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I can’t breathe, I’m going 

outside for a bit of air.’ 

‘Oh, all right.’ 

And La Maheude went back to sleep. Catherine hardly 

dared to move. But at last she went down into the living-room, 

divided up a slice of bread that she had set aside for herself 

from a loaf that a lady from Montsou had given them. Then 

quietly they went out and closed the door. 

Souvarine had been standing waiting near the Avantage at 

the corner of the road. For the last half-hour he had been 

watching the miners going back to work, vague shapes in the 

shadows, moving past him with the heavy tramping of a herd of 

cattle. He stood there like a butcher counting them in through 

the slaughterhouse door; and he was surprised to see how many 

of them there were, for even in his most pessimistic moments 

he hadn’t guessed that there would be so many cowards. The 

queue grew longer, and he grew stiff with cold, but he clenched 

his teeth and kept on watching, his eyes gleaming. 

Then he shivered. Among this file of men, whose faces he 

couldn’t make out, he had none the less recognized one of 

them from his gait. He walked up to him and stopped him. 

Germinal 

460 

‘Where are you going?’ 

Etienne was taken by surprise and, instead of answering 

him, stammered: 

‘Hey! Why haven’t you left yet?’ 

Then he admitted that he was going back to the pit. Well, 

yes, he had sworn he wouldn’t, but that was no life for a man, 

to wait with his arms folded for something which might not 

happen for another hundred years; and besides, he had other 

reasons, too. 

Souvarine had listened to him, trembling. He seized him by 

the shoulder, and pushed him back towards the village. 

‘Go back home, I want you to, do you hear?’ 

But Catherine had arrived and he recognized her too. 

Etienne protested, declaring that he wouldn’t let anyone judge 

his actions. And the mechanic’s eyes went from the girl to his 

comrade and back again; while he took a step backwards and 

suddenly threw up his hands in despair. When a man had a 

woman in his heart, the man was finished, he might as well 

die. Perhaps in a fleeting vision he saw himself miles away in 

Moscow, his mistress hanged, severing his last fleshly bond, 

and freeing him from all responsibility for his own life or 

anyone else’s. He merely said: 

‘Go.’ 

Etienne waited awkwardly, trying to find the words to 

express his friendship, so that they would not be lost to each 

other for ever, 

‘So you’re going for good, then?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘Well then, let’s shake hands, my friend. Bon voyage, and no 

hard feelings.’ 

Souvarine held out an icy hand. Never would a friend, nor a 

woman ... 

‘Farewell for good, this time.’ 

‘Yes, farewell.’ 

And Souvarine stood motionless in the dark, following 

Etienne and Catherine with his eyes as they entered Le 

Voreux. 

CHAPTER III 

At four o’clock they started to go down. Dansaert, who was 

presiding in person at the controller’s desk in the lamp depot, 

registered the name of each workman who presented himself 

and had him given a lamp. He accepted everyone, making no 

comment, keeping the promise announced on the posters. 

None the less, when he saw Etienne and Catherine at the 

window, he started, and turned very red, opening his mouth 

ready to refuse to register them, but then contented himself 

with expressing his triumph sarcastically: Aha, so the mighty 

were fallen? So the Company had its good points after all, if 

the great giant-killer from Montsou was coming back asking 

for bread? Etienne remained silent and took his lamp up to the 

pit-head, followed by his tram girl. 

But it was there at the landing-stage that Catherine feared 

the worst insults from their workmates. And sure enough as 

they walked in she recognized Chaval in the midst of a score of 

miners, waiting for an empty cage. He came up to her in a 

fury, when the sight of fitienne brought him to a halt. Then he 

decided to laugh it off, shrugging his shoulders ostentatiously. 

Very well, he didn’t give a damn, as long as the other bloke 

had taken his place in bed, it was a bargain! It was up to the 

other man to decide if he was happy with left-overs; yet, as he 

made this display of disdain, he was trembling with a jealousy 

that made his eyes burn. Meanwhile his comrades stayed 

where they were, and lowered their eyes in silence. They 

merely looked askance at the newcomers; then, feeling de¬ 

pressed but without anger, they went back to staring at the 

mouth of the shaft, holding their lamps, shivering beneath the 

thin cotton fabric of their jackets, in the perpetual draughts of 

the great hall. 

At last the cage was anchored into its keeps and the call to 

embark was given. Catherine and Etienne squeezed into a tub 

where Pierron and two hewers had already settled. Beside 

them, in another tub, Chaval was telling old Mouque at the 

top of his voice that the management had been wrong not to 

take advantage of the situation to get rid of the worms that 

Germinal 

462 

were gnawing away at the foundations of the pits; but the old 

stableman, who had already assumed his usual dogged resigna¬ 

tion and was no longer angry about the death of his children, 

merely replied with a conciliatory gesture. 

The cage was unhitched and they sped down into the night. 

Nobody spoke. Suddenly, when they were two-thirds of the 

way down, there was a terrible scraping. The iron creaked and 

groaned, and the men were thrown against each other. 

‘My God!' Etienne muttered. ‘Are they trying to flatten us? 

We'll all end up down below at this rate, with their damn 

lining. And they said they had mended it!' 

However, the cage got past the obstacle. But now it was 

going down through a stormy deluge so violent that the 

workmen couldn’t help listening anxiously to the sound of the 

water crashing down. There must be an awful lot of new leaks 

in the caulking? 

They asked Pierron about it, because he had been working 

for some days now, but he refused to show his fear, in case it 

might be interpreted as an attack on the management; and he 

replied: 

‘Oh, there’s no danger, it’s always like that. I suppose they 

haven’t had time to plug all the leaks.’ 

With the torrent still roaring down over their heads they 

arrived at the pit bottom, at the last loading bay, to find 

themselves greeted by a veritable whirlpool. None of the 

deputies had thought of going up by the ladders to check what 

was happening. The pump would do the trick, and the caulkers 

would see to the joints the following night. The reorganization 

of work in the tunnels was difficult enough already. Before 

letting the hewers return to their coal-faces the engineer had 

decided that for the first five days all the men would carry out 

some extremely urgent repair work. They were threatened 

with rock falls on all sides; the floors of the tunnels had been 

so affected that there were whole stretches, hundreds of metres 

long, where they had had to reinforce the props. So as soon as 

they arrived at the bottom of the shaft they formed teams of 

ten men, each led by a deputy; then they were sent to work at 

the places where there was the most damage. When everyone 

had disembarked they calculated that 322 miners had come 

Part VH 463 

below, about half the number that would be at work if the 

mine was functioning at full capacity. 

It transpired that Chaval was a member of the team that 

Catherine and Etienne had joined; and it was no coincidence, 

for he had first hidden behind a group of comrades, then 

forced the deputy’s hand. Their team went off to the end of 

the northern sector nearly three kilometres away to clear a rock 

fall which was blocking one of the routes along this ‘Eighteen- 

Inch’ seam. They hacked away at the fallen rocks with picks 

and shovels. Etienne, Chaval, and five others cleared the 

rubble, while Catherine and two pit boys pushed the tubs full 

of rock up to the incline. They hardly exchanged a word, for 

the deputy stayed close by. However, the two rivals for the 

tram girl’s favours reached the point where they were ready to 

exchange blows. Although he grumbled all the while that he 

didn’t want to have anything more to do with the slut, her 

former lover kept after her, jostling her on the sly, until her 

new pretender threatened to make him see stars if he didn’t 

leave her alone. They were eyeball to eyeball, and had to be 

separated. 

Towards eight o’clock Dansaert came round to see how the 

work was getting on. He seemed to be in a foul mood, and he 

lost his temper with the deputy: nothing was going right, each 

prop should have been replaced as they came to it, what a 

bloody awful job they were doing, as far as he could see! And 

off he went, announcing that he would return with the engin¬ 

eer. He had been waiting all morning for Negrel, and couldn’t 

think why he was so late. 

Another hour went by. The deputy had stopped them 

clearing the rocks to get his whole team to work at propping 

up the roof Even the tram girl and the two pit boys had 

stopped pushing, so as to prepare the pieces of timber and 

bring them up to the men. At the far end of their gallery the 

team was in the front line, so to speak, manning a border post 

at the last frontier of the mine, without being able to communi¬ 

cate with the other coal-faces any longer. Three or four times 

strange noises like people stampeding in the distance made the 

workmen turn their heads: what was up, then? It sounded as if 

the tunnels were emptying, as if their comrades were going 

Germinal 

464 

back up already and wasting no time about it. But the noise 

died away into a deep silence; they went back to wedging in 

the props, their heads ringing with the sound of the great 

hammer blows. At last they were able to begin clearing the 

rocks again, and the tubs started rolling. 

As soon as she had made her first trip Catherine returned in 

a fright saying that there was nobody at the incline. 

‘I called but nobody answered. They’ve all buggered off.’ 

They were so struck with fear that all ten men threw their 

tools away and bolted. The idea that they could have been 

abandoned at the bottom of the pit so far from the loading bay 

made them panic. They ran off in single file, the men, pit 

boys, and then the tram girl, taking nothing but their lamps; 

and even the deputy lost his head, crying out for help, as he 

became more and more terrified by the silence of the deserted 

tunnels which stretched endlessly before them. What could 

have happened, for them not to meet a living soul? What 

accident could have carried off all their comrades like that? 

Their terror was increased by their ignorance of the nature of 

the danger, feeling themselves in the presence of a close but 

unknown peril. 

Finally, as they reached the pit bottom their route was 

blocked by a torrent. They immediately had water up to their 

knees; and they could no longer run, they waded laboriously 

through the flood, thinking that every minute’s delay could 

cost them their lives. 

‘God almighty! The lining’s burst,’ cried Etienne. ‘I told 

you we’d never make it!’ 

Since the shift had gone down Pierron had been very 

worried to see how the deluge pouring down the shaft had 

increased. While he was loading tubs with two other men, he 

looked up; his face was drenched with great drops of water, 

and his ears drummed with the roaring of the tempest above 

him. But he trembled even more when he looked downwards 

and noticed that the ‘bog’, the ten-metre-deep sump, was 

filling up: the water was already spurting up from underneath 

and spilling over the iron plates on the floor, proving that the 

pump wasn’t powerful enough to soak up the leaks. He heard 

it straining, coughing, and spluttering with the effort. So he 

Part VII 

465 

alerted Dansaert, who swore furiously, replying that they must 

wait for the engineer* Twice Pierron went back to Dansaert, 

without getting any reaction from him other than an exasper¬ 

ated shrug of the shoulders. All right, so the water was rising, 

what could he do about it? 

Mouque arrived with Bataille, leading him to work, but he 

had to hold him steady with both hands, for the sleepy old 

horse had suddenly reared up, straining his head towards the 

shaft, neighing for his life. 

‘What’s up then, my fine philosophical fellow? What’s upset 

you? .,. Oh, it’s raining, is it? Come on then, it’s nothing to 

do with you.’ 

But the animal was shivering from head to tail, and had to 

be dragged away to pull the tubs. 

Almost at the same instant that Mouque and Bataille disap¬ 

peared down the end of a tunnel, they heard a cracking sound 

up above them, followed by a prolonged clattering as something 

came crashing downwards. It was a piece of the lining which 

had come away, falling a hundred and eighty metres, bouncing 

off the sides of the shaft as it came down. Pierron and the 

other loaders managed to move out of the way as the oak plank 

ploughed into an empty tub. At the same time a wall of water 

flooded down, surging like the tide released by a burst dyke. 

Dansaert wanted to go up and take a look; but while he was 

still debating, a second piece came hurtling down. Faced with 

the threat of catastrophe he stopped wavering, gave the order 

to go back up, and sent the deputies running off to warn the 

men at their workings. 

Then there was a terrible stampede. From every tunnel 

queues of workmen rushed up and besieged the cages. They 

crushed each other underfoot, prepared to kill in order to get 

up first. One or two who had thought of going up the ladder 

well came back down again crying that the way was already 

blocked. There was a wave of general panic as each cage left: 

that one had made it, but who could tell if the next would get 

through the wreckage that was starting to block the shaft? Up 

above, the destruction must be continuing, for they could hear 

a series of muffled detonations, as the timber split and burst 

amid the ever-increasing roar of the deluge. One of the cages 

Germinal 

466 

was soon out of action, shattered and no longer held by the 

guides, which must have broken. The other was scraping so 

badly that the cable was surely bound to break. And there 

were still a hundred or so men to get out; they were all 

groaning, bleeding, and drowning, as they strained to hang on. 

Two men were killed by falling planks, A third, who had leapt 

on to the outside of the cage, fell from fifty metres up and 

disappeared into the sump. 

However, Dansaert tried to keep things under control. 

Armed with a pick, he threatened to split the skull of the first 

man to disobey; and he tried to order them into a queue, 

shouting out that the loaders should be the last to leave, when 

they had sent up their comrades. But they wouldn’t listen to 

him and he had to stop Pierron, who had turned deathly pale, 

from rushing off in cowardly fashion to be one of the first to 

escape. He had to hit him away from each cage that left. But 

he found that his own teeth were chattering, too; in another 

minute he would be engulfed: everything was falling apart up 

above, and pieces of timber rained murderously down, as if a 

river had burst its banks.^here were still a few more workmen 

arriving when he jumped into a tub, crazed with fear, letting 

Pierron jump in behind him. The cage ascended. 

At that moment Etienne’s and Chaval’s team arrived at the 

loading bay. They saw the cage disappear, and rushed forward; 

but they had to draw back as the lining finally collapsed: the 

shaft was blocked, the lift would not descend again. Catherine 

was sobbing, and Chaval was choking with the oaths he was 

shouting. There were nearly twenty of them, would the bloody 

bosses just leave them to die? Old Mouque had walked slowly 

up bringing Bataille with him, still holding him by the bridle, 

and now both the old man and the animal stood looking in 

stupefaction at the rapid rise of the flood. The water was 

already up to thigh level. Etienne said nothing, but clenched 

his teeth, and picked Catherine up in his arms. And all twenty 

of them stood dumbfounded, screaming desperately and staring 

up at the shaft, a gaping hole that was spewing forth a torrent 

of water, and which could deliver them no succour. 

Once he had disembarked and regained terra firma, Dansaert 

noticed Negrel running to meet him. As ill luck would have it, 

Part VII 

467 

Madame Hennebeau had kept him at home that morning after 

breakfast looking through catalogues to help him choose his 

wedding presents for Cecile. It was ten o’clock, 

‘Why^ whatever’s happening?’ he cried out from afar. 

^The pit’s been destroyed,’ replied the overman. 

And he explained the catastrophe, stammering, while the 

engineer shrugged his shoulders incredulously: come now, 

could a lining just disintegrate like that? They must be exagger¬ 

ating, they’d have to go and see. 

‘There’s nobody left below, is there?’ 

Dansaert lost his composure. No, nobody. At least he hoped 

so. Although there might be some workmen who were still on 

their way. 

‘But for Christ’s sake!’ said N%rel. ‘Why did you leave 

then? You can’t leave your men like that!' 

He immediately gave orders to count the lamps. That 

morning they had issued 322; and only 255 had been returned; 

however, several workmen admitted that they had left theirs 

behind in the chaos and panic. They tried to call a roll, but it 

was impossible to arrive at an accurate estimate: some miners 

had run off, others didn’t hear their names. Nobody could 

agree how many comrades were missing. Perhaps there were 

twenty of them, perhaps forty. And there was only one thing 

that seemed certain to the engineer: there were men left below; 

if you leant over the mouth of the shaft, you could hear them 

screaming amid the sound of the water rushing through the 

shattered woodwork. 

Negrel’s first concern was to send for Monsieur Hennebeau 

and try to get the pit-head shut off. But it was too late now, 

the colliers who had stampeded over to village Two Hundred 

and Forty, as if the collapsing lining were still raining down at 

their heels, had already spread terror through every household, 

and bands of women, old men, and children came running 

down screaming and sobbing. They had to be repulsed, and a 

team of supervisors was detailed to hold them back, for they 

would have interfered with the rescue operation. A lot of the 

workmen who had just come up from the pit remained there, 

dazed, without thinking of changing their clothes, held by a 

kind of fearful fascination for this terrifying hole that had 

Germinal 

468 

nearly cost them their lives. The women milled desperately 

round them, pleading with them, grilling them, asking them 

for names. Was so and so with them.^ And this man.^ And that.? 

They didn’t know, they stammered, they shivered violently 

and made incoherent signs, gesticulating madly as if to ward 

off an abominable vision that was still haunting them. The 

crowd grew rapidly, and a sound of lamentation came up from 

all the roads nearby. And high above them, on the floor of 

Bonnemort’s hut on top of the slag-heap, was Souvarine, who 

had never left the scene, and still sat looking on. 

‘Names, tell us their names!’ cried the women, their voices 

choking with tears. 

Negrel appeared for a moment, and said a few quick words: 

‘As soon as we know the names we’ll tell you. But don’t give 

up hope, we’ll save them all... I’m going down.’ 

Then mute with anguish the crowd waited. And indeed 

with calm bravery the engineer prepared to go down. He had 

had the cage disconnected and ordered a bucket seat to be 

hooked on to the end of the cable instead; and, as he guessed 

that the water would affect his lamp, he got them to fix 

another under the seat to keep it dry. 

Some white-faced deputies, openly trembling and disturbed, 

helped get things ready. 

‘You’ll come down with me, Dansaert,’ said Negrel 

curtly. 

Then when he saw that nobody dared, and noticed the 

overman tottering, drunk with terror, he pushed him aside 

with a contemptuous gesture. 

‘No, you’d only get in my way ... I’d rather go alone.’ 

He immediately climbed into the narrow seat which was 

swinging at the end of the cable; then, holding his lamp in one 

hand and clutching the signal rope in the other, he himself 

called out to the mechanic: 

‘Easy does it!’ 

The engine started the drums turning, and Negrel disap¬ 

peared into the abyss from which the screaming of the lost 

wretches still rose. 

At the top of the shaft, nothing was out of place. He noted 

that the upper lining was in good condition. As he hung in the 

Part Vll 

469 

middle of the shaft, he swivelled round, shining his light on 

the walls: the leaks between the joints were few enough not to 

endanger his lamp. But 300 metres further down, when he 

reached the lower section, it went out as he had foreseen, and 

his seat was inundated by a surge of water. From then on he 

had to rely on the lamp hooked underneath which preceded 

him, lighting the darkness. And despite his temerity he paled 

and shivered as he discovered the horror of the disaster. There 

were odd pieces of wood still in place, while others had 

collapsed along with their frames; enormous caves could be 

glimpsed through the broken lining; considerable masses of 

yellow sand, which was as fine as flour, flowed through the 

gaps; while the waters of the Torrent, that underground sea 

with its uncharted tempests and shipwrecks, spilled forth as if 

a sluice had been opened. He went further down, lost in the 

midst of greater and greater gulfs, battered and spun by a 

maelstrom of springs, so weakly lit by the little red star that 

flew downwards beneath him that he thought he saw the 

streets and the crossroads of a ruined city far off in the 

patterns made by the great moving shadows. It was no longer 

humanly possible to do anything about it. He had one last 

hope, to try to save the men whose lives were in danger. As he 

got further down, he heard the screams increase; but he had to 

stop, for the shaft was blocked by a mass of frames, the broken 

beams of the guides, the split partitions of the ladder wells, all 

tangled up with the levers that had been ripped away from the 

pump, which created an impassable obstacle. As he slowly 

contemplated the scene, with heavy heart, the screaming sud¬ 

denly stopped. The wretches must have just fled into the 

tunnels to avoid the rapidly rising waters, unless the water had 

already reached their mouths. 

N^rel had to resign himself and pull on the signal rope to 

have himself hauled back up. Then he had himself stopped 

again. He remained stupefied by the suddenness of the acci¬ 

dent, and couldn’t comprehend its cause. He wanted to find 

out, and examined the few pieces of the lining which were still 

in place. From a distance he had been surprised by the scores 

and notches in the wood. His lamp was thoroughly soaked, 

and the flame was dying out, so he reached out with his fingers 

470 

Germinal 

to touch, and felt quite clearly the cuts made by the saw and 

the holes gouged out by the brace and bit, the whole abomina¬ 

ble work of destruction. It was obvious that the catastrophe 

had been deliberately engineered. As he looked on transfixed, 

the planks cracked and crashed down complete with their 

frames in a last collapse which nearly swept him away with 

them. His bravery vanished, and the thought of the man who 

had done the deed made his hair stand on end and filled him 

with the sort of religious awe that the presence of pure evil 

inspires, as if, mingled with the shadows, the man had loomed 

up again like some giant to commit his gargantuan crime once 

more. He cried out, and shook the signal with a feverish hand; 

and it was in any case high time, for he noticed that lOO 

metres higher up the upper lining in its turn had started to 

move: the joints were opening, losing their tow caulking, and 

letting the water stream through. Now it would only be a 

matter of hours before the shaft lost all its lining and col¬ 

lapsed. 

Back in daylight. Monsieur Hennebeau was anxiously wait¬ 

ing for Negrel. 

‘Well, how is it?’ he asked. 

But the engineer couldn’t utter a word, he was choking and 

feeling faint. 

‘I can’t believe it, it’s never happened before .:. did you 

examine it?’ 

Negrel nodded, but looked around cautiously. He refused to 

explain in the presence of the handful of deputies who were 

listening, and took his uncle ten metres away, but decided it 

wasn’t far enough and went further still, then whispering very 

quietly in his ear he told him of the sabotage, how the planks 

had been sawn through and perforated, cutting the throat of 

the pit and condemning it to death. The manager turned white 

and lowered his voice too in an instinctive need to keep silent 

about the monstrous nature of any great crime or obscenity. 

There was no point in being seen to tremble by the ten 

thousand miners of Montsou: later they would see. And both 

of them continued to whisper, shattered by the thought that a 

man had had the courage to go down and hang in the middle 

of the abyss, risking his life ten times over, to commit this 

Part VI! 

471 

dastardly act. They couldn’t begin to comprehend this mixture 

of bravado and destructive frenzy, they refused to believe the 

evidence as one is led to doubt the truth of some famous 

escapes made by prisoners who have flown from their prison 

cells thirty metres up. 

When Monsieur Hennebeau approached the deputies his 

face was affected by a nervous twitch. He made a despairing 

gesture, and gave the order to evacuate the mine immediately. 

The exodus was as lugubrious as a funeral procession; the men 

glanced behind them in silence as they abandoned the great 

brick structures, which were still standing, but deserted and 

doomed. 

And as the manager and the engineer came down last from 

the landing-stage the crowd met them with an obstinately 

repeated clamour. 

‘Names! Names! We want names!’ 

Now La Maheude was there with the other women. She 

remembered the sound she had heard in the night, her daughter 

and the lodger must have gone off together, they must surely 

have been left below; and after crying that it served them right, 

that they deserved to die down there, the heartless cowards, she 

had run to the mine, shivering with anguish. Moreover she dared 

doubt no longer, as she was soon informed by her neighbours’ 

discussion of the names. Yes, it was true, Catherine was there, 

Etienne too, a comrade had seen them. But as for the others there 

was no agreement. No not him, but perhaps the other man was, 

maybe Chaval, yet a pit boy swore he had come up with him. 

Although La Levaque and La Pierronne had no one missing 

from their families, they agitated as fiercely as the others, and 

lamented as loudly, Zacharie had been one of the first to emerge, 

and despite his air of unconcern he had wept as he embraced his 

wife and his mother; and keeping close to the latter’s side he 

shivered as much as she did, displaying an unexpected upsurge 

of tender feelings for his sister, refusing to believe she was down 

there until it was officially confirmed by the bosses. 

‘Names! Names! The names, for God’s sake!’ 

Negrel said loudly and nervously to the supervisors: 

‘For heaven’s sake get them to shut up! It’s tragic enough as 

it is. We don’t know any names.’ 

472 

Germinal 

Two hours had already gone by. In the first wave of panic 

nobody had thought of the other shaft, the old shaft at 

Requillart. Monsieur Hennebeau announced that they would 

make a rescue attempt over there, when a rumour went round: 

five workmen had in fact just escaped from the flooded mine 

by climbing up the rickety ladders of the old, disused ladder 

well; they said old Mouque was one of them, which caused a 

surprise because nobody thought he had gone below. But what 

the five escapees had to tell increased everyone’s sorrow: 

fifteen comrades had been unable to follow them, having lost 

their way and been walled up by a rock fall, and it was 

impossible to save them for Requillart was already under ten 

metres of water. They knew all the names, and the air was 

thick with the wailing of a slaughtered people. 

‘Do shut them up!’ Negrel repeated. ‘And get them to move 

away! Yes, I mean it, a hundred metres away! It’s dangerous, 

push them back, push them back.’ 

They had to struggle to get the poor wretches to move. 

They thought that they were being sent away to hide the 

number of deaths or that there were other dark secrets; and 

the deputies had to explain that the shaft would swallow up 

the whole mine as it collapsed. They were transfixed and fell 

silent at this news and they finally allowed the deputies to 

push them back step by step; but the number of guards 

keeping them at bay had to be doubled; for people were 

fascinated in spite of themselves and kept trying to come back. 

A thousand people were milling around on the road, and more 

were running up from every village, even from Montsou itself 

And up there on top of the slag-heap the fair-haired man with 

the girlish face kept smoking cigarettes to calm his nerves, but 

never once turned his pale eyes away from the pit. 

Then the long wait started. It was midday and nobody had 

eaten but nobody would leave. Rust-coloured clouds drifted 

slowly over the misty, dirty grey sky. Behind Rasseneur’s 

hedge a big dog was barking furiously and incessantly, upset 

by the almost animal agitation of the crowd. And this crowd 

had gradually spread on to the neighbouring land and created 

a circle around the pit a hundred metres away. Le Voreux 

seemed to rise up from the centre of this great hole, uninhab- 

Part Vfl 

473 

ited, soundless, barren; the windows and doors still hung open, 

revealing the abandoned interior; a ginger cat which had been 

left behind, scenting disaster in the solitude, jumped off a 

staircase and disappeared. The generator furnaces must still be 

hot, for some small puffs of smoke still drifted out of the tall 

brick chimney up towards the sombre clouds; while the weather¬ 

cock on the headgear, squeaking in the wind with a piercing 

little shriek, was the only melancholy voice to emerge from 

these great buildings which had just been sentenced to death. 

By two o’clock still nothing had moved; Monsieur Henne- 

beau, Negrel, and other engineers who had rushed to the 

site formed a group of frock coats and black hats in front of 

the crowd, and they weren’t going to leave either, though their 

legs were shaking with fatigue, and they were sick and feverish 

at the thought of standing helplessly by in the face of such a 

disaster, whispering only the occasional word, as if they were 

at the bedside of a dying man. The last pieces of the upper 

lining must be collapsing now, for they could hear the echo of 

a series of violent crashes, and the erratic sound of objects 

tumbling endlessly downwards, followed by long periods of 

silence. The wound was gaping wider and wider: the avalanche 

had started down below and was rising up ever nearer to the 

surface. Negrel was seized with a fit of nervous impatience, he 

wanted to see what was happening, and he was moving in 

alone towards the terrifying void when someone grabbed him 

by the shoulders. What was the use? He couldn’t do anything 

useful. And yet someone else, an old miner, got past the 

guards, and rushed over to the pit-head; but then he reappeared 

quite calmly, he had gone to fetch his clogs. 

Three o’clock struck. Still nothing. The crowd had been 

soaked by a shower but didn’t budge an inch. Rasseneur’s dog 

had started barking again. And it was not until twenty minutes 

past three that the earth was shaken by a first tremor. Le 

Voreux shook, but stood its ground solidly, and nothing fell. 

But a second tremor followed, and a long cry burst from every 

mouth: the pitch-roofed screening shed tottered twice, then 

came tumbling down with a mighty crash. Under the enormous 

pressure the iron struts split and splintered so violently that 

they sent out showers of sparks. From then on the earth shook 

474 

Germinal 

continuously, and the shock waves followed each other in 

quick succession, as the mine started subsiding below them 

with a roaring noise like a volcano erupting. In the distance 

the dog had stopped barking, and had started whining plain¬ 

tively, as if announcing the tremors to come, and not only the 

women and children, but the whole community of onlookers, 

were unable to repress a clamour of distress as each wave 

rocked them on their feet. In less than ten minutes the slate 

roof of the headgear collapsed, and the entrance hall and the 

engine-room were split asunder, opening up a great, yawning 

chasm. Then the noise died down, the collapse was halted, and 

there was another long silence. 

For an hour Le Voreux stayed like this, as if it had been 

sacked by an army of barbarians. Nobody cried; the spectators 

had widened their circle, but remained looking on. Under the 

pile of beams from the screening shed could be seen the 

shattered tipplers and the crushed and mangled hoppers. But it 

was above all at the landing-stage that the most debris had 

accumulated amid the shower of bricks and surrounded by 

whole stretches of wall that had disintegrated into rubble. The 

iron framework that had carried the pulleys had fallen half-way 

down the shaft; one cage was still hanging from it, with a length 

of torn cable dangling, then there was a whole scrap-heap of 

tubs, iron plates, and ladders. By chance the lamp depot had 

remained intact and its bright rows of little lamps could be seen 

over to the left. And at the back of its gutted chamber the 

engine could be made out, still set squarely on its massive block 

of masonry: its copper surface gleamed, its great steel limbs 

looked like invincible muscles, and the enormous crank rod, 

bent upwards in the air, looked like the knee of some powerful 

giant, lying back tranquilly enjoying his display of strength. 

After this hour’s respite Monsieur Hennebeau felt his hopes 

rise again. The ground must have finished moving, so there 

was a chance of saving the machine and the rest of the 

buildings. But he still forbade anyone to approach, for he 

wanted to wait another half-hour. The waiting became unbear¬ 

able, the hope made the anguish more acute, everyone’s hearts 

were racing. A dark cloud growing on the horizon hastened the 

end of the day, and a gloomy twilight started to cover the 

Part VII 

475 

wreckage left by this terrestrial hurricane. They had been 

there for seven hours without moving and without eating. 

And suddenly, just as the engineers were cautiously advanc¬ 

ing, a final convulsion racked the ground and put them to 

flight. Underground detonations rang out, like a monstrous 

artillery barrage raking the abyss. On the surface the last 

buildings toppled over and collapsed. First a sort of whirlwind 

swept away the remains of the screening shed and the landing- 

stage. Next the boiler-house burst and disappeared. Then it 

was the turn of the square tower, where the drainage pump 

gave a death-rattle and fell flat on its face, like a man mown 

down by a bullet. And then there was a terrifying scene; they 

watched as the engine was wrenched from its base, fighting for 

its life as its limbs were splayed: it straightened out its crank 

rod like a giant knee, as if attempting to rise to its feet; but 

then it was crushed and smothered to death. Only the great thirty- 

metre-high chimney remained standing, battered like a ship’s 

mast in a hurricane. It looked as if it was about to crumble to 

pieces and disappear in a cloud of dust, when it suddenly 

plunged straight downwards, swallowed up by the earth, melting 

like a giant candle; and nothing was left showing above ground 

level, not even the tip of the lightning conductor. It was finished. 

The evil beast crouching in its underground cave was sated 

with human flesh and its harsh wheezing had at last died away. 

The whole of Le Voreux had now fallen down into the abyss.* 

The crowd ran for their lives, screaming as they went. 

Women covered their eyes as they ran. Men were swept 

onwards by a gust of panic like a pile of dead leaves. They 

didn’t want to scream, but scream they did, their throats 

swollen and their arms waving at the sight of the vast hole that 

had opened up in front of them. It was like the crater of an 

extinct volcano, gaping fifteen metres deep and at least forty 

metres wide, and reaching from the road to the canal. The 

whole surface of the pit-head followed the buildings, the 

gigantic trestles, the overhead tracks, a complete train of tubs, 

and three railway wagons: not to mention the whole supply of 

timber, a forest of freshly cut poles, all swallowed up like 

pieces of straw. Down in the depths all that could be seen was 

a tangled mess of beams and bricks, iron and piaster, horribly 

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476 

crushed remains, mangled and defiled by the fury of the 

catastrophe. The hole grew still rounder and wider, and cracks 

started forming around the edges, then spread right across the 

fields. One fissure reached Rasseneur’s bar, and cracked its 

front wall. Would the village itself be the next victim.? How far 

did they have to flee to be safe, on this tragic night, piled high 

with leaden clouds, which looked as if they too were about to 

come crashing down on top of the crowd? 

But Negrel gave a cry of despair. And Monsieur Hennebeau, 

who had stepped back to survey the scene, broke into tears. For 

there was worse to come. One of the banks burst and the canal 

suddenly poured in a foaming tide along one of the cracks. It 

disappeared down inside, falling like a waterfall into a deep 

valley. The mine drank up its waters; the flood would now 

drown the galleries for many years. The crater soon filled, and 

a lake of muddy water took the place where Le Voreux used to 

be, like a lake beneath which slept some haunted city. A 

terrifying silence had settled, and nothing could be heard but 

the falling water, thundering down into the bowels of the earth. 

Then Souvarine stood up, on top of the shaken slag-heap. He 

had recognized La Maheude and Zacharie sobbing at the debacle, 

with this enormous mass weighing so heavily on the heads of the 

wretches who were dying down below. And he threw away his last 

cigarette, and walked off into the deepening darkness without a 

backward glance. His shadowy figure diminished in the distance 

and disappeared into the shades of night. He was heading for the 

unknown, however far. He went away calmly like an exterminating 

angel, headed for anywhere that he could find dynamite to blow 

up cities and the men who live in them. He will doubtless be to 

blame when the bourgeoisie in its death throes finds the cobbles 

starting to split open under its feet with every step that it takes. 

CHAPTER IV 

The night after the collapse of Le Voreux Monsieur Henne¬ 

beau had left for Paris, wanting to inform the Board in 

person before the newspapers had had time to report the 

events. And when he arrived back the next day, he appeared to 

be very calm, the very model of managerial decorum. He had 

apparently disowned any personal responsibility, and he 

seemed not to have fallen from favour; on the contrary, the 

decree which appointed him an officer of the Legion d’honneur 

was signed twenty-four hours later. 

But although its manager had saved his skin, the Company 

itself was left reeling from the terrible blow. It wasn’t so much 

the few millions it had lost as the body blow of the secret but 

unceasing fear for the morrow, now that one of its pits had 

been slaughtered. The Company was so afflicted that once 

again it felt bound to keep silent. What was the point of 

digging any deeper into this abominable affair.^ And why 

should it make a martyr of the criminal, if it did discover his 

identity.? For his terrifying heroism could turn other heads, 

and breed a whole line of arsonists and assassins. 

Besides, the Company had no idea who the real guilty party 

was; it came to suppose that there was a whole army of 

accomplices, since it seemed unbelievable that one lone man 

could have had the audacity and the strength to execute such a 

deed; and that in fact was the thought which obsessed the 

Company, this notion of a gradually growing threat to all of its 

pits. The manager had received instructions to organize a vast 

system of espionage, then to sack the dangerous men discreetly 

one by one as soon as any one of them was suspected of having 

had something to do with the crime. The Company’s policy 

was to limit itself to a highly cautious purge. 

There was only one immediate sacking, that of Dansaert, 

the overman. Since the scandal at La Pierronne’s he had 

become a liability. And they used as a pretext his behaviour 

when confronted with danger, the cowardice of a captain who 

abandons ship before his men. And besides, it was a covert 

concession to the other miners, who detested him. 

Meanwhile rumours had started to surface in public, and 

the management was obliged to send a disclaimer to one 

newspaper, to deny its version of events, according to which 

the strikers had lit a barrel of gunpowder. Already after a rapid 

inquiry the report by the government engineer concluded that 

the lining had burst from natural causes, under the pressure of 

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478 

local subsidence; and the Company had preferred to keep 

silent and take the blame for inadequate supervision. In the 

Parisian press only three days after the event the catastrophe 

had become one of the most topical news items: no conversation 

was complete without mention of the workmen dying at the 

bottom of the mine, and the public was avid to read each 

morning’s new dispatches. In Montsou itself the bourgeoisie 

turned pale and speechless at the very sound of the name of 

Le Voreux, and a legend grew up which even the boldest 

trembled to repeat under their breath. The whole region 

showed its great sympathy for the victims, organizing excur¬ 

sions to the stricken pit, whole families rushing to take in the 

awesome sight of the wreckage that hung over the heads of the 

buried wretches. 

Deneulin, who had been appointed divisional engineer, had 

taken up his new functions at the height of the disaster; his 

first concern was to redirect the course of the canal into its 

bed, for this torrent of water was aggravating the damage by 

the hour. Major works were necessary, and he immediately 

sent a hundred workmen to construct a dyke. The force of the 

torrent carried away the first two dams that they built, but 

then they installed pumps and struggled feverishly to win back 

the lost land step by step. 

But the rescue of the buried miners roused even more 

passion. Negrel was asked to mount a last attempt, and there 

was no lack of willing hands; all the miners rushed to offer 

their services in a surge of fraternal feeling. They forgot the 

strike, they stopped worrying about their wages; they didn’t 

mind if they weren’t paid, they asked nothing better than to 

risk their lives now that their comrades were in mortal danger. 

They all arrived with their tools, trembling in anticipation, 

waiting urgently to be told where to start digging into the 

rock. Many of them who had fallen ill with shock after the 

accident, and had been afflicted with nervous tics, drenched in 

cold sweat, or haunted by obsessional nightmares, left their 

sick-beds despite their suffering, and these men proved to be 

the most desperate to fight their way through the earth, as if 

they wanted to take their revenge. Unfortunately, as soon as 

they tried to decide what was the best course of action. 

Part VII 

479 

confusion ensued: what could they do? How should they get 

below? Which way into the rock should they choose? 

Negrel’s opinion was that none of the unfortunate wretches 

could have survived, all fifteen must surely have perished, 

drowned or suffocated; but in mining catastrophes it is the 

rule always to assume that men who are walled in down below 

are still alive; and he acted on this presumption. The first 

problem to tackle was calculating in which direction they 

would have fled. The deputies and the old miners whom he 

consulted were all agreed on one point: faced with the rising 

flood their comrades would certainly have climbed up from 

gallery to gallery into the highest coal-faces, so that they must 

be trapped at the end of one of the higher tunnels. Moreover, 

that tallied with the information given by old Mouque, whose 

confused story even made it sound as if the panic-stricken 

flight had separated the team into small groups, leaving escap¬ 

ers behind at every level along the way. But then the opinions 

of the deputies were divided as soon as they came to discuss 

practical solutions. Since even the tunnels that were nearest to 

the surface were 150 metres underground, there was no ques¬ 

tion of sinking a shaft. There remained Requillart as the only 

point of access, the only way they might reach them. The 

worst thing was that this old pit, which was also flooded, no 

longer communicated with Le Voreux, and the only parts of it 

that remained above water were some stretches of gallery 

leading to the first loading bay. It would take years to drain 

the pit, so their best hope was to check these galleries to see if 

any of them might lie close to the submerged tunnels where 

they suspected that the distressed miners might be lying. But 

before they arrived at this logical conclusion they had had 

long arguments in order to eliminate a host of impractical 

suggestions. 

When they had made up their minds, Negrel burrowed into 

all the dusty archives, and when he had found the old plans of 

both pits, he identified the points where they should direct 

their search. Gradually this pursuit excited him, and in his 

turn he was seized with a self-sacrificing urge, despite his 

usual ironic lack of concern for people and things. There were 

some immediate obstacles to going down Requillart: they had 

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480 

to clear out the mouth of the shaft, cut down the mountain 

ash, hack away the hawthorn and the sloe bushes, and then 

they still had to repair the ladders. After that they mounted an 

exploratory search. The engineer, who had taken ten workmen 

down with him, had them tap with the metal of their tools 

against certain parts of the seam that he indicated; and then in 

complete silence each pressed his ear to the coal-seam, listening 

out in case some distant tap might come in reply. But they 

went the whole length of every accessible tunnel, and not a 

single echo came in reply. Their confusion increased: where 

should they cut into the rock.? Whose call for help could they 

answer, since there seemed to be nobody there.? Yet they 

persisted, they kept looking, becoming increasingly nervous 

and anxious. 

From the very first day La Maheude came to Requillart 

every morning. She sat down on a beam facing the shaft, and 

didn’t move again till the evening. When one of the men 

emerged, she jumped up and questioned him with her eyes: 

nothing.? no, nothing! and she sat down again and kept waiting, 

without saying a word, her face hard and closed. Jeanlin, too, 

seeing that his lair was being invaded, had come to prowl 

around with the fearful air of a beast of prey whose den will 

reveal his pillage: he also thought of the young soldier lying 

under the rocks and was afraid that his peaceful slumber 

would be disrupted; but this side of the mine was flooded, 

and, besides, the search party was working further over to the 

left, in the western sector. At first Philomene had come 

regularly, to accompany Zacharie, who was a member of one 

of the search parties; then she had enough of needlessly 

exposing herself to the cold, with nothing to show for it: she 

stayed in the village, mooching around lethargically all day, 

losing interest in everything, and spending her time coughing 

from morning to evening. Zacharie on the other hand had 

suspended all normal living, and would have eaten his way 

through the earth if it could help him get through to his sister. 

He cried at night, he saw her wasting away with hunger, and 

he heard her voice, hoarse from her efforts to call for help. 

Twice he had wanted to start digging without authorization, 

saying that he knew the spot, that he could feel she was there. 

Part VII 

481 

The engineer wouldn’t let him go down any more, but he 

refused to leave the pit that he was banished from; he wouldn’t 

even sit down and wait with his mother, he paced restlessly up 

and down, tormented by the need to act. 

It was the third day. Negrel was in depair and had resolved 

to give up entirely that evening. At noon, after lunch, when he 

returned with his men to make one last attempt, he was 

surprised to see Zacharie emerge from the pit, his face bright 

red, gesticulating and shouting: 

‘She’s there! She answered me! Come on, hurry up!’ 

He had slipped past the guard on the ladders and he swore 

that he had heard tapping down there in the first tunnel of the 

Guillaume seam, 

‘But we’ve already gone past the place you’re talking about 

twice,’ Negrel pointed out incredulously. ‘All right, we’ll go 

and take a look.’ 

La Maheude had got to her feet; and they had to stop her 

going down. She stood waiting at the edge of the shaft, staring 

down into the darkness of the hole. 

Down below, Negrel himself gave three well-spaced knocks; 

then he pressed his ear up against the coal, urging the workmen 

to keep absolutely quiet. Not a sound came in reply, and he 

shook his head: obviously the poor boy had been dreaming. 

Zacharie took it upon himself to start knocking again, in a 

frenzy; he heard it again, and his eyes gleamed, his limbs 

trembled with joy. Then the other workmen tried the same 

experiment, one after the other; and they all became excited as 

they detected the distant response quite clearly. The engineer 

was astonished, he pressed his ear to the rock again, and at last 

he perceived a faint, ethereal sound, a hardly perceptible 

rhythmical drumming, the familiar cadence of the miners’ 

signal to retreat which they hammer out against the coal-seam 

when in danger. Coal transmits sound over great distances 

with the clarity of crystal. 

A deputy who was there estimated that the block separating 

them from their comrades was at least fifty metres thick. But 

they felt as if they could already reach out and touch them, 

and they exploded with joy. Negrel had to undertake the 

preliminary cutting immediately. 

482 Germinal 

When Zacharie saw La Maheude again back above ground 

they embraced each other. 

‘Don’t let it go to your heads,’ La Pierronne was cruel 

enough to say. She had come out to look that day out of 

sheer curiosity, ‘if Catherine wasn’t there, you’d be too upset 

afterwards.’ 

It was true, Catherine might be somewhere else. 

‘Bugger off, why don’t you!’ Zacharie cried furiously. ‘She 

is there, I know she is!’ 

La Maheude had returned to her place, mute and expression¬ 

less. And she settled down to wait again. 

As soon as the news had reached Montsou, a new crowd of 

people arrived. There was nothing to see, yet they stayed there 

just the same, and the curious onlookers had to be kept at bay. 

Down below they were working day and night. In case they 

met some obstacle, the engineer had got the men to cut out 

three tunnels sloping down through the coal, converging to¬ 

wards the point where they presumed that the miners were 

trapped. Only one hewer at a time could cut the coal at the 

cramped face of each narrow tunnel; he was relieved every two 

hours; and the coal was loaded into baskets and passed from 

hand to hand back along a human chain which became ever 

longer as the tunnel progressed. At first the job progressed 

very rapidly; they covered six metres in one day. 

Zacharie had been allowed to take his place among the elite 

workers who were sent to do the cutting. It was a place of 

honour which was jealously fought for. And he got angry when 

they tried to relieve him after his two hours of regulation hard 

labour. He pinched his comrades’ turns, he refused to drop his 

pick. His tunnel soon moved ahead of the others, and he tore 

into the coal with such furious energy that you could hear him 

puffing and panting deep down in the tunnel, sounding like 

the roaring of some subterranean forge. When he emerged, 

black and muddy, drunk with fatigue, he fell down and had to 

be wrapped in a blanket. When he went down again he was 

still tottering, and the struggle recommenced, with great 

muffled blows and muttered curses, as he fought for success 

in a frenzy of destruction. The worst thing of it was that the 

coal was getting harder, and he broke his pick twice, in his 

Part VII 

483 

impatience at not progressing fast enough. He also suffered 

from the heat, a heat which increased with every metre gained, 

and became unbearable in the depths of this narrow gully 

where there was no fresh air. They set up a hand-operated 

ventilator, but the ventilation was sluggish, and on three 

occasions they had to drag out a hewer who had fainted, 

choking with asphyxia. 

Negrel took up residence underground with the workmen. 

He had his meals sent down to him, and sometimes he caught 

a couple of hours’ sleep on a bale of straw, rolled up in a coat. 

What kept their courage up was the call from the abandoned 

wretches in the distance, the tattoo that they drummed out to 

hasten the rescue. It became more and more distinct, ringing 

out quite clearly now with a musical sonority as if it were 

being struck on the keys of a xylophone. It was guiding them 

in the right direction; they burrowed towards its crystalline 

sound as soldiers walk towards the sound of gunfire in battle. 

Each time that one of the hewers was relieved, Negrel went 

down, tapped, then pressed his ear to the rock; and each time, 

so far, the answer had come, swiftly and urgently. He had no 

doubt now, they were progressing in the right direction, but 

with what fatal slowness! They would never arrive in time. At 

first they had managed to get through thirteen metres in two 

days; but the third day they had fallen to five; then to three on 

the fourth. The coal was getting harder, so solid that they had 

great difficulty in getting through two metres a day. By the 

ninth day after a superhuman effort they had covered thirty- 

two metres, and they calculated that they had another score to 

go. For the prisoners the twelfth day commenced, twelve 

periods of twenty-four hours without food or heat in the icy 

darkness! This appalling thought brought tears to their eyes 

and strengthened their arms as they fought on. It seemed 

impossible for one of God’s creatures to live any longer; the 

distant tapping had already become feebler the day before, and 

they feared at every moment that they would hear it stop. 

La Maheude still came regularly to sit at the mouth of the 

shaft. She brought Estelle in her arms, as she couldn’t leave 

her alone all day long. She followed their progress hour by 

hour, sharing their hopes and disappointments. There was a 

Germinal 

484 

feverish sense of expectation, accompanied by endless specula¬ 

tion, among the groups who stood waiting at the pit, and even 

back in Montsou. Throughout the region, every man’s heart 

beat with those down below. 

On the ninth day, at lunch-time, Zacharie didn’t answer 

when they called him to be replaced. He seemed half-crazed, 

and continued in a frenzy, swearing all the while. Negrel, who 

had left for a moment, couldn’t get him to obey; and in fact 

there were only a deputy and three miners down there. Zach¬ 

arie, who couldn’t see what he was doing, and was furious with 

the failing light that held up his progress, must have been rash 

enough to light his lamp. Yet they had been given the strictest 

orders, for they had detected escapes of firedamp, and the gas 

had collected in vast pockets in the narrow, badly ventilated 

corridors. Suddenly there was a thunderclap, and a jet of flame 

burst out of the gully, like grapeshot exploding from the 

muzzle of a gun. Everything was on fire, the air was burning 

like gunpowder down the whole length of the galleries. This 

torrent of fire swept the deputy and the three workmen aside, 

flew up the shaft, and erupted explosively into the open air, 

spewing forth rocks and fragments of timber framework. The 

onlookers fled, and La Maheude leapt to her feet, clutching 

the terrified Estelle to her breast. 

When Negrel and the workmen returned, they were shaken 

by a terrible anger. They kicked the earth brutally with their 

heels, as though it were a wicked stepmother who had killed 

her children at random in a state of crazed and wanton cruelty. 

They were sacrificing so much already in the effort to go to 

their comrades’ assistance, and now there was an even higher 

price to pay! After three long hours of effort and danger, when 

they finally got through to the galleries, they had the lugubrious 

task of bringing up the victims. Neither the deputy nor the 

workmen were dead, but they were covered with terrible 

wounds, and gave off a scent of charred flesh; they had 

breathed in the flames, and had burns deep down inside their 

throats; they screamed continuously, begging to be put out of 

their misery. One of the three miners was the man who during 

the strike had burst the pump at Gaston-Marie with a last 

blow of his pick; the two others had their hands covered in 

Part VII 

485 

scars and their fingers skinned and cut from throwing bricks at 

the soldiers. The crowd, all pale and trembling, uncovered 

their heads as they passed. 

La Maheude stood and waited. At last Zacharie’s body 

appeared. The clothes were burnt off, the body was no more 

than a black mass of coal, charred and unrecognizable. There 

was no head, it had been blown to smithereens by the explo¬ 

sion. And when they had placed these ghastly remains on a 

stretcher. La Maheude followed them with mechanical steps, 

her eyes burning, but shedding no tears. She held Estelle, who 

had fallen asleep, in her arms, and she walked off like a tragic 

heroine, her hair dishevelled by the wind. At the village 

Philomene was stupefied, cried buckets of tears, and immedi¬ 

ately felt relieved. But Zacharie’s mother had already returned 

with the same tread to Requillart: she had accompanied her 

son on his last journey, now she was returning to wait for her 

daughter. 

Three more days went by in like fashion. The rescue 

attempt had started again amid unexpected difficulties. Luckily 

the approach tunnels had not collapsed after the firedamp 

explosion; but the air was still burning, and it was so heavy 

and polluted that they had to have more ventilators installed. 

The hewers were now relieved every twenty minutes. They 

kept going, and they were hardly more than two metres away 

from their comrades. But now they were working with heavy 

hearts, hacking away fiercely in a simple spirit of revenge; for 

the sounds had died away, the tattoo no longer sounded with 

its bright little rhythm. They had been working for twelve 

days, and it was fifteen days since the disaster; and, since that 

morning, the place had been as silent as the grave. 

The new accident had renewed the curiosity of the inhabit¬ 

ants of Montsou, and the local bourgeois organized excursions 

so enthusiastically that the Gregoires decided to follow the 

fashion. They arranged a party, and it was agreed that they 

would travel to Le Voreux in their carriage while Madame 

Hennebeau would bring Lucie and Jeanne in hers. Deneulin 

would show them round his site, then they would return via 

Requillart, where Negrel would give them the latest news on 

how the tunnels were progressing, and whether there was any 

486 Germinal 

hope left. And then in the evening they would all have dinner 

together. 

When the Gregoires and their daughter Cecile went down 

towards the flooded pit, they found that Madame Hennebeau 

had arrived there first, dressed in navy blue, and using a 

parasol to protect her complexion from the pale February 

sunshine. The sky was beautifully clear, and there was a 

springlike warmth in the air. Monsieur Hennebeau happened 

to be there with Deneulin; and she listened absent-mindedly to 

the explanations given by the latter about the work they had 

had to undertake to dam the canal. Jeanne, who always took a 

sketch-book with her, had started drawing, excited by the 

horror of the subject; while Lucie, sitting beside her on the 

remains of a wagon, also heaved sighs of satisfaction, finding it 

‘fantastic’. The dyke, which wasn’t finished yet, was riven with 

leaks, whose tumbling, foaming streams cascaded fiercely down¬ 

wards into the vast abyss of the buried pit. And yet this crater 

was emptying, as the waters that had soaked into the earth 

receded, revealing the dreadful chaos that lay on its bed. 

Beneath the soft azure sky of the spring morning there lay a 

veritable cesspool, the ruins of a city lying smashed and 

melting in the mud. 

‘Is that what we’ve come all this way to see!’ cried Monsieur 

Gregoire, very disappointed. 

Cecile, who was pink with health and happy to breathe such 

fresh air, became lively and playful, while Madame Hennebeau 

pulled a face to show her revulsion, murmuring: 

‘The truth is that it’s not at all a pretty sight.’ 

The two engineers started to laugh. They tried to capture 

the interest of their visitors, taking them everywhere, explain¬ 

ing how the pumps worked and how the pile-driver drove in 

the stakes. But the ladies were starting to fret. They shivered 

when they learned that the pumps would have to work for 

years, perhaps six or seven, before the pit was rebuilt and all 

the water drained. No, they preferred to think of something 

else, all this turmoil would only give them bad dreams. 

‘Let’s go,’ said Madame Hennebeau, walking away to her 

carriage. 

Jeanne and Lucie protested. What, so soon! And her drawing 

Part VII 487 

wasn’t finished! They wanted to stay, for their father could 

bring them round to dinner later that evening. 

Monsieur Hennebeau took his place alone beside his wife in 

the carriage, for he too wanted to question Negrel. 

‘Well then, you go on ahead,’ said Monsieur Gregoire. 

‘We’ll follow on, we’ve got to pay a quick visit in the village 

... Go on then, it’ll only take five minutes, we’ll be at 

Requillart at the same time as you.’ 

He got back up behind Madame Gregoire and Cecile; and, 

while the other carriage sped along the canal side, theirs slowly 

climbed the hill. 

Their excursion was to finish with a charitable gesture. 

Zacharie’s death had filled them with pity for the tragedy 

which had struck the Maheu family, which everyone was 

talking about. They weren’t worried about the father, a bandit 

who killed soldiers and who had had to be put down like a 

mad dog. But they were touched by the mother, that poor 

woman who had just lost her son after losing her husband, and 

whose daughter was perhaps already lying dead underground; 

not to mention what people said about the invalid grandfather, 

the child who walked with a limp after a rock fall, and a little 

girl who had died of starvation during the strike. So although 

this family deserved its share of misfortune because of its 

reprehensible attitude, they had resolved to display the generos¬ 

ity of their charitable spirit, their desire to forgive and forget, 

by taking them alms in person. Two carefully wrapped parcels 

lay under one of the seats of the carriage. 

An old woman told the coachman where the Maheus’ house 

was, number sixteen in the second block. But when the 

Gregoires had alighted, holding their parcels, they knocked in 

vain, and even when they banged on the door with their fists 

they still got no answer: the house remained lugubriously 

quiet, lying frozen and bleak, like a house emptied by death 

and abandoned for years. 

‘There’s nobody here,’ said Cecile, disappointed. ‘What a 

nuisance! What are we going to do with all this.^’ 

Suddenly the door of the next house opened, and La 

Levaque appeared. 

‘Oh Sir, oh Ma’am, I beg your pardon. I’m sure! Excuse me 

488 Germinal 

Miss! . .. It’s the neighbour you want. She’s not there, she’s at 

Requillart.,.’ 

She told them the story in a flood of words, emphasizing 

how everyone had to help each other, and how she was looking 

after Lenore and Henri so that their mother could go over 

there and wait. Her eyes, gleaming eagerly, had lit on the 

parcels, and she brought the conversation to bear on her 

daughter, who had just become a widow, in order to point out 

her own deprivation. Then, with a hesitant air, she murmured: 

‘I’ve got the key. If Sir and Ma’am really insist .. . The 

grandfather is there.’ 

The Gregoires watched her, stupefied. How could the grand¬ 

father be there.^ Nobody had answered! Was he asleep, then.^ 

But when La Levaque had made up her mind to open the 

door, what they saw brought them to a halt on the threshold. 

Bonnemort was there, all on his own, rooted to his chair, 

staring with wide eyes at the cold hearth. Around him the 

room appeared bigger, without the cuckoo clock, and without 

the varnished pine furniture which had previously livened it 

up; and all that was left on the crude greenish walls were the 

portraits of the Emperor and the Empress, whose pink lips 

smiled with ceremonial goodwill. The old man didn’t move, 

nor did he bat an eyelid when the door let the light in; he 

looked like an imbecile, as if he hadn’t even seen the crowd of 

visitors come in. At his feet was his ash-filled dish, like a litter 

tray for a cat. 

‘Don’t take any notice of him if he isn’t very polite,’ said La 

Levaque, obligingly. ‘People say he’s got a screw loose. That’s 

all he’s had to say for himself for the last fortnight.’ 

But just then Bonnemort was shaken by a deep croaking 

which seemed to rise up from his stomach; and he spat a thick 

gobbet of black phlegm into his dish. The ash was soaked, and 

it looked like muddy coal, as if he were now dredging back up 

all the coal from the mine that had gone down his throat. 

Then he immediately fell motionless again. He only ever 

moved when he needed to spit, every now and again. 

The Gregoires were upset, and their stomachs queasy with 

disgust, but they tried to utter a few friendly, encouraging 

words. 

Part VII 489 

‘Well, my good fellow,’ said the father, ‘have you caught a 

cold?’ 

The old man kept looking at the wall without turning his 

head. And a heavy silence fell once again. 

‘We should make you some tea,’ said the mother. 

He remained rigid and mute. 

‘Oh dear. Daddy,’ said Cecile, ‘they did tel! us he was 

poorly; but we forgot all about it...’ 

She broke off, in great embarrassment. After she had placed 

on the table some stew and two bottles of wine, she undid the 

second parcel, and took out a huge pair of shoes. This was the 

present for the grandfather, and she held one shoe in each 

hand, inhibited by the sight of the swollen feet of the poor 

man, who would never walk again. 

‘Hey, they’ve come a bit late in the day, haven’t they, old 

fellow?’ Monsieur Gregoire went on, to cheer him up. ‘Never 

mind, who knows when they might come in useful.’ 

Bonnemort neither heard them nor replied, and his face 

remained terrifying, cold and hard as stone. 

Then Cecile put the shoes down furtively beside the wall. 

But although she took every possible precaution, the nails rang 

out on the floor; and the huge shoes stood out ostentatiously in 

the room. 

‘Go on, he’s not going to say thank you, is he!’ cried La 

Levaque, who had cast deeply envious eyes on the shoes. ‘You 

might as well give a duck a pair of glasses, begging your 

pardon.’ 

She kept up her patter in order to entice the Gregoires into 

her house, counting on moving them to pity her. Finally she 

found the pretext, praising Henri and Lenore, who were so 

nice and sweet; and so intelligent, answering any questions you 

asked them like angels! They would tell Sir and Ma’am 

everything they wanted to know. 

‘Will you come along with us for a moment, my dear 

daughter?’ asked Monsieur Gregoire, pleased to be able to 

leave. 

‘Yes, I’ll be round in a minute,’ replied Cecile. 

Cecile remained alone with Bonnemort. What kept her 

there, trembling and fascinated, was that she seemed to 

490 

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recognize this old man: where had she come across that 

square, livid face, tattooed with coal? And suddenly she remem¬ 

bered; she saw a tide of screaming people surrounding her, 

and felt the cold hands squeezing her neck. It was him, she 

had found the man who did it; she looked at his hands, which 

lay in his lap, the hands of a workman who had spent his life 

on his knees and whose whole strength was now concentrated 

in his wrists, still powerful despite his age. Gradually Bonne- 

mort seemed to have woken up, and he noticed her, and he 

scrutinized her now, with his vacant air. A fire rose in his 

cheeks, and a nervous twitch twisted his mouth, from which a 

thin sliver of black saliva trickled. Each felt drawn to look at 

the other, the girl blooming, plump and fresh from her life of 

leisure and generations of comfortable luxury, the man swollen 

with water, showing the deplorable ugliness of a race of worn- 

out beasts, destroyed from father to son by a hundred years of 

toil and starvation. 

Ten minutes later, when the Gregoires, who were surprised 

not to see Cecile, went back into the Maheus’ house, they let 

out a dreadful scream. Their daughter lay strangled on the 

floor, and her face was blue. Bonnemort’s fingers had marked 

her neck with the red imprint of his giant’s hand. His dead 

legs had given way, and sent him crashing down beside her, 

and he couldn’t get up again. His hands were still clenched, 

and he lay there looking up at them with his imbecile features 

and wide, staring eyes. As he fell he had broken his dish, 

spilling the ash and splashing the room with his muddy black 

spittle; but the large pair of shoes stood neatly side by side, 

safe out of harm’s way against the wall. 

Nobody ever managed to ascertain exactly what had hap¬ 

pened. Why had Cecile gone so close to him? How had 

Bonnemort, despite being stuck to his chair, managed to seize 

her by the throat? It was clear that once he had her in his grip 

he must have been possessed, squeezing tighter and tighter, 

stifling her cries, tumbling and tossing in time to her dying 

spasms. Not a murmur, not a whimper had traversed the thin 

party wall dividing them from the neighbouring house. Pre¬ 

sumably he had succumbed to a sudden fit of madness, an 

inexplicable temptation to murder, when faced with the sight 

Part VII 

491 

of the girl’s white neck. Such savagery was incomprehensible 

in a sick old man who had always lived an honest life, showing 

blind obedience, and resisting new ideas. What resentment had 

slowly poisoned him, without his knowing, creeping up from 

his bowels to his brain.^ The horror of it made people conclude 

that it was unconscious, a crime committed by an idiot. 

Meanwhile the Gregoires had fallen on their knees, weeping, 

and choking with grief The daughter that they had. wor¬ 

shipped, that they had waited so long for, and then showered 

with all their wealth, that they had tiptoed to watch as she 

slept in her bedroom, that they had always found undernour- 

i.shed and never plump enough! And their whole life collapsed 

in front of their eyes; what was there left to live for, now that 

they would have to live without her.^ 

La Levaque cried out wildly: 

‘Oh, the old devil, whatever has he done? How could 

anyone have guessed such a thing! . . . And La Maheude won’t 

be back till this evening! How about it, shall I run and fetch 

her?’ 

The father and the mother were both too shattered to 

answer. 

‘Hey, don’t you think I’d better ... I’ll go, then.’ 

But before she left La Levaque considered the shoes again. 

The whole village was in a turmoil, a crowd was jostling for 

position already. Someone might even steal them. And besides, 

there wasn’t a man left at the Maheus’ to wear them. She 

walked off with them, discreetly. They ought to be just the 

right size for Bouteloup. 

At Requiliart the Hennebeaus had been waiting for the 

Gregoires for ages, in Negrel’s company. He had come up 

from the pit and gave them the latest information: they hoped 

to be able to get through to the captives that very evening; but 

they would certainly not bring them out alive, for there was 

still a deathly silence down there. Behind the engineer. La 

Maheude was sitting on her beam, and listening white-faced, 

when La Levaque arrived to tell her what the old man had 

been getting up to. She merely made a sweeping gesture of 

impatience and irritation. But she followed her home. 

Madame Hennebeau felt faint. What an abomination! That 

492 

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poor Cecile, who had been so cheerful that day, so lively an 

hour earlier! Hennebeau had to take his wife inside old 

Mouque’s hovel for a moment. With his awkward hands he 

unbuttoned her corsage, disturbed by the scent of musk that 

this open garment revealed. And as she wept floods of tears 

she embraced Negrel, horrified by this death which put an end 

to his marriage, while, released from at least one of his worries, 

her husband watched them commiserate. This misfortune 

would settle everything, he preferred to keep the nephew, 

since he feared he might well have been succeeded by the 

coachman. 

CHAPTER V 

At the bottom of the pit, the wretched men who had been left 

stranded were screaming with terror. Now the water was up to 

their stomachs. They were deafened by the noise of the 

torrent, and the final collapse of the lining sounded to them 

like the world exploding as it came to an end; and what made 

them even more panic-stricken was the neighing of the horses 

shut in the stables, the terrifying, unforgettable death-rattle of 

slaughtered beasts. 

Mouque had unharnessed Bataille. The old horse was there, 

trembling, his eyes dilated and staring at the water which was 

still rising relentlessly. The loading bay was filling up rapidly, 

and the great green tide could be seen swelling beneath the 

reddish glow of the three lamps which were still burning 

beneath the vaulted roof And suddenly, when he felt this icy 

mass soaking his coat, he stretched his legs and took off at a 

full and furious gallop, and disappeared into the depths of one 

of the haulage galleries. 

Then there was a general free-for-all, as the men ran off, 

following the animal. 

‘Sod all here!’ shouted Mouque. ‘Off to Requillart.’ 

The idea that they might be able to get out through the old 

pit nearby, if they could get there before the passage was 

blocked, swept them along now. All twenty of them bunched 

Part VII 

493 

up in a close line, holding their lamps up high, so that the 

water didn’t put them out. Luckily the gallery sloped impercep¬ 

tibly upwards, and they went forward for 200 metres, strug¬ 

gling against the current, without the water rising higher. 

Long-buried superstitions stirred anew in the depths of their 

lost souls, and they called out to the earth, for it was the earth 

that was taking its revenge, which was shedding the blood of 

its veins because its artery had been cut. One old man stam¬ 

mered some half-forgotten prayers, pointing his thumbs 

outwards to calm the evil spirits of the mine. 

But at the first turning an argument broke out. The stable¬ 

man wanted to go left, some of the others swore that it would 

save time to take the right turn. They lost a minute deciding. 

‘Hey, why not sit down here and drop dead, I don’t care!’ 

Chaval shouted crudely. ‘I’m going this way.’ 

He took the right fork, followed by two comrades. The 

others stuck to old Mouque and charged off behind him, 

because he had grown up underground at Requillart. Yet even 

he hesitated, not knowing which way to turn. Their heads 

were spinning, and even the old-timers couldn’t recognize the 

route any more, as if its plans had been rubbed out as they 

looked at them. At each fork, they hung back and hesitated, 

yet they had to decide. Etienne brought up the rear, running 

slowly because Catherine, who was paralysed with fatigue and 

fear, was holding him back. He would have taken the right 

fork, like Chaval, for he believed he was heading in the right 

direction; but he let him go, even if it meant he would be left 

down below. In any case, the rout continued, for another 

group of comrades had gone off on their own, and there were 

only seven of them left following old Mouque. 

‘Hang on to my neck, and I’ll carry you,’ Etienne said to 

her, as he saw that she was weakening. 

‘No, don’t bother,’ she murmured, ‘I’ve had enough, I’d 

rather die straight away.’ 

They were losing time, they were fifty metres behind the 

others, and he was about to lift her up despite her reluctance, 

when the gallery was suddenly blocked: an enormous slab of 

rock collapsed and cut them off from the others. The flood 

was already soaking into the rocks, which were crumbling and 

494 

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collapsing on all sides. They had to beat a retreat. Then they 

didn’t know which way they were heading. That was it, they 

had to abandon the idea of getting back up through Requillart. 

Their only hope was to reach the upper seams, where they 

could perhaps be rescued if the waters subsided. 

At last Etienne recognized the Guillaume seam. 

‘Right!’ he said. ‘Now I know where we are. For heaven’s 

sake, we were going in the right direction; but what the hell 

difference does that make now ? . . . Listen, why don’t we just 

go on straight ahead, and we’ll climb up the chimney.’ 

The water was lapping up against their chests, and they 

could only walk very slowjy. As long as there was some light 

left, there was hope; and they blew out one of the lamps, to 

save the oil, thinking that they would pour it into the other 

lamp. As they reached the chimney, a noise behind them made 

them turn found again. Was it their comrades? Had they too 

been cut off and decided to return? They heard a distant 

panting, an incomprehensible, tempestuous sound as something 

drew near them, thrashing and churning the water. And they 

screamed as they saw a giant whitish mass emerge from the 

shadows and struggle to squeeze a way between the pit-props, 

which were too close together, in order to join them. 

It was Bataille. He had set out from the loading bay, and 

galloped frantically along the dark tunnels. He seemed to know 

his way around this subterranean city where he had lived for 

eleven years; and he saw quite clearly through the endless 

night that had always surrounded him. He galloped and gal¬ 

loped, lowering his head and lifting his feet, slipping through 

the narrow bowels of the earth, filling them with his great 

body. Road followed road, crossroads offered their options, but 

he never hesitated. Where was he heading for? Maybe for that 

far-off vision of his youth, at the mill where he was born, on 

the banks of the Scarpe, driven by vague memories of sunshine, 

burning in the sky like a great lamp. He wanted to live, his 

memories of animal life revived, the urge to breathe the air of 

the plains once more drove him onward, hoping to discover the 

hole, the way out into the warm air and the light. And his age- 

old resignation was swept aside by a wave of revolt, now that 

he was dying in this pit, after being merely blinded by it. 

Part VII 

495 

The water which rushed along after him whipped at his 

hind legs and bit icily into his rump. But as he plunged 

onward, the galleries became narrower, the roof sloped down¬ 

wards, and the walls swelled inwards. He kept on galloping 

regardless, tearing the skin off his legs as he scraped past the 

pit-props. The mine seemed to close in on him from all sides, 

to seize hold of him and suffocate him. 

Then as Etienne and Catherine were watching him approach 

he got stuck, and started choking. He had crashed into the 

rock face and broken his two front legs. He made a last effort 

and dragged himself forward a few metres; but his flanks were 

too wide to get through, and he remained buried and strangled 

by the earth. And he stretched out his bleeding head, still 

looking for a crack to slip through, with his great bleary eyes. 

The water was covering him rapidly, and he started to neigh 

with the same hideous long-drawn-out death-rattle that the 

other horses in the stable had uttered as they died. This old 

creature’s agony was atrocious, as he struggled, shattered and 

pinioned, so far down below the light of day. His distressed 

screams went on and on, the waters swept through his mane 

and seemed to curdle the sound emerging from his desperately 

gaping mouth. He made one last snort, sounding like the last 

gurgle of a barrel filling with water. Then there was a deep 

silence. 

^Oh, dear God, take me away!’ sobbed Catherine. ‘Oh, dear 

God, Fm afraid, I don’t want to die . .. Take me away! Take 

me away!’ 

She had looked death in the face. Neither the collapse of the 

shaft nor the flooding of the pit had struck her with such 

terror as the clamour of the dying Bataiile. And she could still 

hear it ringing in her ears, setting her whole body quivering. 

‘Take me away, take me away!’ 

Etienne took hold of her and carried her away. And only 

just in time, for they were soaked up to the shoulders as they 

pushed on higher up the chimney. He had to help her up 

because she no longer had the strength to hold on to the 

timbers. Three times, he thought that he was going to lose her 

and see her slip back into the dark sea whose tide was rolling 

threateningly beneath them. However, they managed to catch 

Germinal 

496 

their breath for a few moments when they came out into the 

first level, which was still free. Then the water rose, and they 

had to haul themselves higher up again. And for hours they 

kept climbing, as the rising tide chased them from level to 

level, forcing them to keep climbing higher. At the sixth level, 

a momentary lull in the rising tide made them burn with 

sudden hope; it looked as if the water might settle at that 

height. But then it surged upwards even more strongly, and 

they had to climb up to the seventh level, and then the eighth. 

There was only one more left, and when they had reached it, 

they watched anxiously as the water continued to rise centi¬ 

metre by centimetre. And if it didn’t stop, would they die there, 

like the old horse, crushed against the roof, their throats 

choking with water.? 

At every moment another rock fall rang out. The whole 

mine was shaken, its frail entrails were bursting under the 

strain of the great flood that was pouring into it. The air 

trapped at the end of the tunnels became so compressed that it 

set off a series of formidable explosions, which echoed through 

the splitting rocks and buckling passages. There was a terrify¬ 

ing din from these deep catastrophes, echoing dimly with the 

age-old conflict when the waters had covered the earth and 

buried the mountains beneath the plains. 

And Catherine, who was shaken and dazed by this endless 

avalanche, clasped her hands and kept ceaselessly stammering 

out the same phrase: 

‘I don’t want to die ... I don’t want to die.’ 

In order to reassure her, Etienne swore that the water would 

rise no higher. They had been fleeing for six hours, someone 

would be down to rescue them soon. And he said six hours 

without knowing, for they had lost all sense of time. In fact a 

whole day had gone by while they had been climbing up 

through the Guillaume seam. 

Soaking and shivering, they settled down. She stripped off 

to wring out her clothes with no sense of shame; then she put 

her breeches and jacket back on to let them dry on her. As she 

was barefoot, he handed her his clogs and forced her to put 

them on. Now they had time to sit back and wait; they had 

lowered the wick of the lamp, keeping just the faint glow of 

Part VII 

497 

the pilot light. But their stomachs were racked with hunger 

pangs, and they both realized that they were dying of starva¬ 

tion. Until then they had hardly felt any living sensation. 

When disaster had struck they hadn’t had lunch. Now they 

found their sandwiches were bloated with water and changed 

into gruel. She had to insist and force him to eat his share. As 

soon as she had eaten, she fell asleep on the cold ground from 

sheer fatigue. Although he was burnt out with lack of sleep, he 

watched over her, staring at her with his forehead propped up 

on his hands. 

How many hours passed like this? He couldn’t have said. 

What he did know was that in front of him at the mouth of the 

chimney he had seen the swirling black flood reappear, like a 

beast whose back was swelling and swelling until it could reach 

them. At first there was just a thin line, a sinuous serpent 

growing gradually longer, then it grew into the heaving spine 

of some rampant beast; and soon it had reached them, soaking 

the feet of the sleeping girl. He hesitated to wake her, wonder¬ 

ing anxiously whether it wasn’t too cruel to shake her out of 

her restful and oblivious ignorance, where perhaps she was 

cradled in dreams of life out in the fresh air and the sunshine. 

Besides, where could they flee to? And as he racked his brains, 

he remembered that the incline which had been built in this 

part of the seam ran end on into the incline that served the 

loading bay on the next level up. That was a way out. But he 

let her sleep on as long as possible, watching the tide rising, 

waiting until it drove them away. At last he lifted her gently, 

and she shuddered violently. 

‘Oh, dear God, it’s true ... It’s starting again, dear God!’ 

She screamed as she remembered that death was staring her 

in the face. 

‘No, calm down,’ he murmured. ‘We can get through, I 

swear we can.’ 

To get to the incline, they had to walk bent double, and 

once again they were soaked right up to their shoulders. And 

the climb began again, but more dangerous this time, up the 

tunnel which was totally lined with wood along its whole 

hundred-metre length. At first they tried to pull on the cable, 

in order to secure one of the trucks down below; for if the 

Germinal 

498 

other fell down while they were climbing up it would crush 

them. But nothing moved, some obstacle was blocking the 

mechanism. They took the risk of going ahead, but didn’t dare 

use the cable, although it got in their way and they tore their 

nails on the slippery woodwork. Etienne brought up the rear, 

using his head to take her weight when she fell back with 

bleeding hands. Suddenly they butted into some broken beams 

which were blocking the incline. There had been a rock fall, 

and a mound of earth prevented them from going any higher. 

Luckily there was a door there which led out into a passage. 

They were stunned to see a lamp glowing in front of them. 

A man shouted at them furiously: 

‘Another bunch of fools who had the same bright idea as me!’ 

They recognized Chaval, who had been cut off by the same 

rock fall that had covered the ramp in earth; and the two 

comrades who had been with him had succumbed, their skulls 

stove in. He had been wounded in the elbow but had sum¬ 

moned up the courage to crawl back on hands and knees to 

search them and steal their sandwiches. Just as he was getting 

away a last rock fall had cut off the gallery behind him. 

He immediately swore that he wouldn’t share his provisions 

with these jokers who had suddenly sprung up out of the 

ground. He felt more tempted to kill them. Then he too 

recognized them, and his anger died away, he started laughing, 

with malicious pleasure, 

‘Oh, it’s you, Catherine! You came a cropper, so you’ve 

come running back to your man. Well, that’s fine, now we’re 

in this together, we might as well enjoy it.’ 

He pretended not to notice Etienne. The latter was shaken 

by the encounter, and had moved to protect the tram girl, who 

huddled up closer to him. But there was no way out of the 

situation. He merely asked his workmate, as if they had parted 

on good terms an hour earlier: 

‘Have you looked down the bottom.'^ Can’t we get through 

by the coal-face.?’ 

Chaval sneered. 

‘Oh, right, the coal-face! That’s all collapsed too, we’re 

caught between two walls like rats in a trap ... But you can 

always go back down the incline, if you’re a good diver.’ 

Part VI! 

499 

And in fact the water was still rising, they could hear it 

lapping. Their retreat was already cut off. And he was right, it 

was a trap, a dead end because the gallery had been blocked 

fore and aft by heavy rock falls. There was no way out. They 

were all three walled in. 

‘So you’ve decided to stay.^’ asked Chaval sarcastically. 

‘Okay, that’s the best thing to do, and if you leave me alone I 

won’t even talk to you. There’s still room for two men in here 

. . . We’ll soon see who dies first, unless they manage to find 

us, and that’s hardly likely.’ 

Etienne persisted: 

‘If we tapped on the wall perhaps they might hear us.’ 

'I’m sick of tapping ... Go on, try it yourself, there’s a 

stone.’ 

Etienne picked up the piece of sandstone, which had already 

become chipped from Chaval’s efforts, and he struck out the 

miners’ tattoo against the floor of the seam, the long drum roll 

used by workmen in peril to signal their presence. Then he 

pressed his ear to the rock to listen. Twenty times he tried, 

and tried again. Not a sound came in answer. 

AH the while Chaval made a show of proceeding methodi¬ 

cally with his own affairs. First he tidied his three lamps away 

against the wall: only one was lit, the others would come in 

handy later. Then he placed his two remaining sandwiches on 

a loose piece of timber. That was his larder, and it would last 

him two days if he was careful. Then he turned round and 

said: 

‘You know that half of it’s for you, Catherine, if you get 

hungry.’ 

The girl remained silent. Her suffering was complete, now 

that she found herself caught between these two men again. 

And so the terrible existence began. Neither Chaval nor 

Etienne opened his mouth, although they were both sitting on 

the ground only a few steps apart. Chaval advised Etienne to 

extinguish his lamp, and he agreed, it was a pointless waste of 

light; then they relapsed into silence again. Catherine had lain 

down on the ground near Etienne, worried by the looks she 

was getting from her former lover. The hours passed, and they 

could hear the quiet splashing of the water as it kept on rising; 

500 

Germinal 

while from time to time deep shocks and distant reverberations 

announced the final collapse of the mine. When the lamp went 

out and they needed to light another^ they hesitated briefly a 

moment, for fear of igniting the firedamp; but they preferred 

to be blown up in one go rather than survive in the darkness; 

however there was no explosion, there couldn’t have been any 

firedamp. They lay back again, and the hours started to pass 

once more. 

Etienne and Catherine were surprised by a noise, and raised 

their heads. Chaval had decided to eat, and had cut a sandwich 

in two. He was eating slowly, so as to avoid the temptation of 

swallowing the lot. The other two watched him, racked with 

hunger. 

‘So you really don’t want any.?’ he asked the tram girl, 

provocatively. ‘That’s a mistake.’ 

She lowered her eyes, fearful of yielding, for her stomach 

was racked with such hunger pangs that her eyes were swollen 

with tears. But she understood what he wanted; already that 

morning he had breathed down her neck; he had been seized 

by one of his familiar attacks of frenzied desire on seeing her 

with the other man. The looks he darted at her burnt with a 

flame she knew well, the flame of his attacks of jealousy, when 

he fell upon her with fists flying, accusing her of vile doings 

with her mother’s lodger. But she didn’t want to, she trembled 

at the consequences of returning to Chaval and throwing these 

two men at each other’s throats, in this tiny cell where they 

were already at their last gasp. Dear God! Could they not end 

their lives as good friends! 

Etienne would rather have let himself die of hunger than 

beg the tiniest morsel of bread from Chaval. The silence 

deepened, and it seemed to last an eternity, as the minutes 

ticked by one by one, monotonously and hopelessly. They had 

been trapped together for a day. The second lamp burnt itself 

out, and they started on the third. 

Chaval bit into his second sandwich, and he grunted: 

‘Come on, stupid!’ 

Catherine shivered. To leave her free, Etienne had turned 

his face away. Then, as she didn’t move, he said to her under 

his breath: 

‘Go on, my child.’ 

Now the tears that she had been choking back overflowed. 

She wept for a long time, without even the strength to get to 

her feet, not even sure whether she was hungry any more, 

suffering from pains all over her body. Etienne stood up and 

walked back and forth, hopelessly tapping out the miners’ 

tattoo, furious at having to spend the last few hours of his life 

stuck up against his hated rival. There wasn’t even room to die 

apart! As soon as he had walked ten paces he had to retrace his 

steps and bump into the other man. And the girl, that poor 

girl, they were still fighting over her even now that they were 

almost dead and buried! She would belong to the last man to 

die, this man would steal her from him again if he died first. 

There was no end to it, hour after hour, their revolting 

promiscuity increased, aggravated by their foul breath and 

their need to relieve themselves in front of each other. Twice 

he stormed up against the rock face as if he intended to break 

it open with his fists. 

Another day drew to a close, and Chaval had sat down next 

to Catherine, sharing his last half-sandwich with her. She had 

trouble chewing each mouthful, as he made her pay for every 

one with a caress, persisting in his jealous desire not to die 

before having had her once more in front of his rival. She was 

exhausted, and let herself go. But when he tried to take her, 

she complained, 

‘Oh, leave me alone, you’re breaking my bones.’ 

Trembling, Etienne had pressed his forehead against the 

timber so as not to see. He came rushing back, beside himself. 

‘Leave her alone, for Christ’s sake!’ 

‘What’s it got to do with you.^’ asked Chaval ‘She’s my 

woman, she belongs to me, doesn’t .she!’ 

He grasped her again, squeezed her in his arms with bravado, 

crushing his red moustache up against her mouth, and 

continued: 

‘Leave us in peace, damn you! Do us a favour and look over 

there to see how things are getting on.’ 

But Etienne, whose lips had turned white, shouted: 

‘If you don’t let go of her, I’ll strangle you!’ 

Chaval stood up quickly, for he had understood from 

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502 

Etienne’s strained voice that he meant to force a show-down. 

Death seemed to be taking too long to arrive, they needed one 

of them to give way to the other straight away. Their old battle 

had recommenced, in the earth where they would soon be 

sleeping side by side; and they had so little room that they 

couldn’t even shake their fists without grazing them. 

‘Look out,’ thundered Chaval. ‘This time I’ll have your 

guts.’ 

At that moment Etienne went mad. His eyes swam in a 

reddish mist, and his throat swelled with a surge of blood. He 

was seized with an irresistible urge to kill, a physical need, as if 

his tonsils were swollen and choking his throat, forcing him to 

spew up or suffocate. It rose and burst within him beyond the 

control of his will, under the impulse of his hereditary flaw. 

He grabbed hold of a slab of shale projecting from the wall, 

shook it loose, and ripped it out in one great heavy lump. 

Then raising it in both hands with superhuman force, he 

brought it crashing down on Chaval’s skull. 

Chaval had no time to leap back. He fell, with his face 

smashed in and his skull split open. His brains spattered the 

tunnel roof, and a purple stream flowed from the wound like a 

fountain bubbling from a spring. In no time there was a pool 

of blood, reflecting the smoky starlight shed by the lamp. 

Darkness invaded their sealed tomb, and his body lay slumped 

on the ground like a black heap of slag. 

And Etienne looked at him, his eyes staring. So it was done. 

He had killed him. In confusion all his struggles returned to 

his memory, his useless struggle against the poison that slum¬ 

bered in his muscles, against the alcohol that his people had 

slowly accumulated. Yet he was drunk only with hunger, the 

drunkenness of his parents years before had been enough. His 

hair stood on end at the horror of this murder, and yet despite 

the revulsion he felt as a civilized man, his heart fluttered with 

a kind of animal joy from a physical appetite satisfied. And 

then there came pride, the pride of the victor. He recalled the 

little soldier, his throat slit by the knife of the child who had 

killed him. Now he too had killed. 

But Catherine stood bolt upright and screamed out loud. 

‘My God! He’s dead!’ 

Part VIJ 

503 

‘Do you wish he wasn’t?’ 

She choked and stuttered. Then she swayed and threw 

herself into his arms. 

‘Oh, kill me too, oh, let’s both of us die!’ 

She clung to his shoulders in a close embrace, and he 

embraced her too, and they wished they might die. But death 

was in no hurry, and they disengaged their arms. Then, while 

she covered her eyes, he dragged the wretched body over to 

the incline, where he dumped it, to remove it from the 

cramped space that they still had to live in. Life would have 

been impossible with a corpse under their feet. And they felt 

terrified when they heard it plunge down amid a great surge of 

spray. So the water had already filled that hole? They realized 

that it was now overflowing into the tunnel. 

Then the struggle began again. They had lit the last lamp, 

but it guttered as it lit the swelling flood, whose regular, 

persistent rise never flagged. First the water reached their 

ankles, then it wet their knees. The passage sloped upwards, 

and they took refuge at the top, which gave them a few hours 

of respite. But the waters caught up with them again, and they 

were in it up to their waists. They stood upright with their 

spines flattened against the rock and watched it growing 

deeper and deeper. When it reached their mouths it would all 

be over. The lamp, which they had hung up on the wall, tinted 

the surging flood of little waves with its yellow light; but as it 

grew paler, they could see no more than an ever-diminishing 

semicircle, as if the light were being swallowed up by the 

darkness which seemed to grow with the flood; then suddenly 

they were covered in darkness; the lamp had just gone out, 

after spitting out its last drop of oil. Then absolute darkness 

fell, it was dead of night in the middle of the earth where they 

would soon fall asleep and never open their eyes again to see 

the sunlight. 

‘God almighty!’ Etienne swore softly. 

As if she could feel the darkness grab hold of her, Catherine 

clung to him for shelter. She repeated under her breath the 

miners’ proverb: 

‘Death blows out the lamp.’ 

And yet, faced with this new threat, their instincts rebelled. 

and a rage for life revived them. He started to dig into the 

shale violently with the hook of the lamp, while she helped 

him with her nails. They gouged out a kind of shelf half-way 

up the wall, and when they had hauled themselves up on to it, 

they managed to get seated, with their backs bent, for the 

sloping roof forced them to lower their heads. Now only their 

heels were frozen by the icy water. But soon enough they felt 

the cold eating into their ankles, then their calves, then their 

knees, in an irresistible and unrelenting movement. Their seat 

was uneven, and so soaked and slippery that they had to hang 

on tight to avoid falling off. This was the end, for how long 

could they hold out, imprisoned in their niche, exhausted and 

famished, with no bread and no light, and terrified of making 

the slightest move? And they suffered above ail from the 

darkness, which prevented them from seeing death when it 

came. A great silence reigned, the mine overflowing with water 

lay still at last. Now all they could sense was this sea beneath 

them, its silent tide swelling up from the tunnels below. 

Hour followed hour, each as black as the next, without them 

being able to measure their exact duration, as they increasingly 

lost all sense of time. Their torment, which should have made 

the time seem longer, made the minutes pass more swiftly. 

They thought they had only been trapped for two days and a 

night, when in fact the third day was already drawing to an 

end. All hope of salvation had vanished, nobody knew they 

were there, nobody would be able to get down to them, and 

they would die of hunger if they were spared by the flood. 

They decided to tap out the tattoo one last time; but their 

stone had disappeared under water. And besides, who would 

hear them? 

Catherine had given up hope, and was resting her throbbing 

head against the seam, when she suddenly sat upright, trem¬ 

bling. 

'Listen!’ she said. 

At first Etienne thought she was referring to the gentle 

sound of the water as it kept rising. He lied, hoping to reassure 

her. 

‘It was me you heard. I moved my legs.’ 

‘No, that’s not what I meant... Over there, listen!’ 

Part VII 

505 

And she pressed her ear up against the coal. He understood, 

and did the same. They waited in breathless agony for a few 

seconds. Then, far away, they heard three very faint blows, 

clearly spaced out. But they still wondered if it was true; 

perhaps their ears were ringing, or it might be merely the seam 

creaking. And they couldn’t think what to use to tap back in 

reply. 

Etienne suddenly thought of something. 

‘You’ve got my clogs. Lift your feet up and bang with your 

heels.’ 

She knocked, beating out the miners’ tattoo; and they 

listened, and again they heard the three blows, far away. 

Twenty times they tried again, and twenty times the blows 

came in answer. They wept, and they embraced, despite the 

danger of losing their balance. At last their comrades had 

come, they were on their way. They burst with joy and love 

which swept away the anguish of waiting and the panic of their 

previous vain appeals, as if their saviours had only to point at 

the rock with their fingers in order to split it asunder and 

deliver them. 

‘Hey!’ she cried gaily. ‘Wasn’t it lucky I leant my head on 

the wall!’ 

‘Ah, you’ve got an ear for it!’ he replied. ‘I didn’t hear a 

thing.’ 

From that moment on they took it in turns for one of them 

to be constantly listening, ready to respond to the slightest 

signal. Soon they could hear the sound of the picks: they were 

starting the approach works, opening up a gallery. They didn’t 

miss a single sound. But their joy diminished. Although they 

kept laughing, in order to deceive each other, they were 

gradually seized with despair again. At first they thought of all 

sorts of explanations: they must be coming in from Requillart, 

the tunnel had to go down through the coal-seam, and perhaps 

they were opening up more than one gallery simultaneously, 

for they heard three different men at work. But then they 

spoke less, and finally lapsed into silence, when they started to 

calculate the enormous mass of rock that separated them from 

their comrades. They continued their reflections in silence, 

counting the long number of days it would take a workman to 

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506 

cut through such a mass. They would never get there in time, 

they would have died ten times over. And as their anxiety 

increased they became sullen and unwilling to risk conversa¬ 

tion, they answered every signal with a volley of blows with 

the clogs, but with no hope, merely reacting with an automatic 

instinct to tell the others that they were still alive. 

A day passed, and another day. They had been underground 

for six days. The water had reached their knees. It rose no 

further, but neither did it go down; their legs seemed to 

dissolve in this icy bath. They could pull them out of the 

water for an hour, but the position was so uncomfortable that 

they got dreadful attacks of cramp, and they had to let their 

feet fall back down again. Every ten minutes they' had to 

wriggle their backs up again, as they kept sliding down the 

wall. Fragments of coal dug into their spines, and their necks 

ached with a sharp and relentless pain from being constantly 

bent in order to avoid hitting their heads on the roof. And the 

atmosphere became more and more suffocating, as the air was 

compressed by the mass of water and packed into the kind of 

diving bell where they lay enclosed. Their muffled voices 

seemed to come from miles away. They had fits of buzzing in 

the ears, they heard sudden peals of bells tolling madly and 

herds of horses galloping endlessly through hailstorms. 

At first Catherine suffered horribly from hunger. She 

clutched at her throat with her poor tense hands, she breathed 

in great hollow wheezing gasps, moaning continuously and 

piteously as if her stomach were being torn by pincers. Etienne, 

who was choked with the same torment, felt feverishly around 

him in the darkness until his fingers encountered a piece of 

half-rotten wood beside him. He broke it up with his nails and 

gave Catherine a portion, which she greedily swallowed. They 

survived for two days on this worm-eaten wood, and they ate 

the whole plank, until they found to their despair that they 

had finished it, and scraped their skin trying to break up other 

planks, which were still intact, and resisted their efforts to 

splinter them. Their torment then increased, and they were 

furious when they found that they were unable to chew the 

material of their clothes. Etienne’s leather belt satisfied them 

briefly. He cut it into little pieces with his teeth, and she 

Part VII 

507 

chewed at them and forced herself to swallow them. It kept 

their jaws busy, and gave them the impression that they were 

eating. Then, when the belt was finished, they started on the 

cotton fabric of their clothes, sucking it for hours on end. 

But soon the violent attacks passed, their hunger became 

only a deep, muffled pain, as their strength gradually ebbed 

away. They would have died soon enough, without a doubt, if 

they hadn’t had the water, as much water as they wanted. 

They only had to lean forward and drink out of their hands; 

and they did so time and time again, burning with such thirst 

that no water could quench it. 

On the seventh day Catherine leant forward to drink, when 

her hand felt something floating alongside. 

‘Hey, look .. . What’s that.^’ 

Etienne felt around in the darkness. 

‘I don’t understand, it feels like the cover of a ventilation 

door,’ 

She drank, but as she bent down to take a second draught, 

the thing floated back and bumped into her hand. And she 

released a terrible scream. 

‘God almighty! It’s him!’ 

‘Who’s that.?’ 

‘You know who ... I felt his moustache.’ 

It was Chaval’s corpse, which had been floated up to the top 

of the ramp by the rising tide. Etienne stretched out his arm, 

and he too felt the moustache and the crushed nose; and he 

shuddered with fear and revulsion. Seized with a ghastly wave 

of nausea, Catherine had spat out the water that was left in her 

mouth. She thought that she had just drunk some blood, and 

that the whole mass of liquid lying before her was now that 

man’s blood. 

‘Hang on,’ Etienne stuttered, ‘I’ll push him back.’ 

He gave the corpse a kick, which sent it away. But soon they 

felt it butting up against their legs again. 

‘In the name of God, will you go away!’ 

But the third time Etienne had to leave it. Some current 

kept bringing him back. Chaval refused to leave, he wanted to 

stay with them, wanted to touch them. He was a dreadful 

companion, and made the air even more foul. For a whole day 

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508 

they fought their thirst and stopped drinking, preferring to 

die; and only the following morning did they yield to their 

suffering: they pushed the corpse away before each draught, 

but they did drink none the less. There had been no point in 

smashing his skull, it hadn’t stopped him coming back to lie 

between them, driven by his unquenchable jealousy. Even 

dead, he would remain there till the bitter end, to prevent 

them coming together. 

Another day, and another. With every ripple of the water, 

Etienne received a slight blow from the man he had killed, as 

if he were nudging him with his elbow to remind him of his 

neighbourly presence. And every time, he shuddered. He saw 

him continuously, swollen and greenish, with his red mous¬ 

tache and smashed face. Then he forgot that he had killed 

him; his rival was swimming towards him and trying to bite 

him. Now Catherine was shaken with long, interminable bouts 

of weeping, which left her drained and depressed. She finally 

slipped into a state of unshakeable somnolence. Etienne woke 

her, and she stammered a few words, but went straight back to 

sleep again without even raising her eyelids; so he slipped one 

of his arms round her waist, for fear that she might drown. 

Now it was up to him to reply to their comrades. The blows of 

the pick were getting nearer, he could hear them, behind his 

back. But at the same time his strength was ebbing, he had lost 

all desire to tap. They knew they were there, so what was the 

point in tiring themselves out.^ It was of no interest. Let them 

come. In his state of expectant stupor, he sometimes forgot for 

hours on end what he was waiting for. 

One thing came to bring them some relief and comfort. The 

waters fell back, and Chaval’s corpse floated away from them. 

They had been waiting for their rescuers for nine days, and 

just as they were able to take a few steps down the tunnel for 

the first time, they were thrown to the ground by a dreadful 

commotion. They felt for each other in the dark, and held each 

other in their arms, not understanding what had happened, but 

crazed with fear at the thought that disaster had struck once 

more. But nothing stirred. The sound of the picks had ceased. 

In the corner where they were sitting side by side, Catherine 

laughed quietly. 

Part VII 

509 

‘It must be fine outside ,.. Come on, let’s go out.’ 

At first Etienne resisted this madness. But although his 

mind was firmer, he found it contagious, losing his sense of 

reality. All their senses were distorted, especially Catherine’s, 

as she was tossing with fever now, and tormented with a need 

for words and gestures. The drumming in her ears had become 

babbling brooks and singing birds; she smelled a vivid scent of 

trampled grass, and she clearly saw great yellow shapes swim¬ 

ming in front of her eyes, so large that she thought she was 

outside by the canal in a wheatfield, on a bright, sunny day. 

‘Hey, isn’t it warm! . .. Take me, why don’t you, let’s stay 

together for ever and ever!’ 

He held her tight, and she rubbed up against him for a long 

time, chattering on in a happy, girlish way: 

‘Haven’t we been silly to wait so long! I wanted to accept 

you straight away, but you didn’t understand, and you sulked 

. . . Then, do you remember, at home at night, when we lay on 

our backs wide awake looking at the ceiling, listening to each 

other breathing, and wanting each other so badly. 

Etienne was won over by her good humour, and joked about 

the memories of their silent passion. 

‘You hit me once, you did! You slapped me on both cheeks!’ 

‘That was because I was in love with you,’ she murmured. 

‘You see, I refused to let myself think about you, I told myself 

it was all over; and deep down I knew that one day sooner or 

later we would be bound to get together . .. We only needed 

an opportunity, just one lucky break, didn’t we.^’ 

Etienne felt an icy shiver run down his back; he wanted to 

shake her out of this dream, but then he replied slowly: 

‘Nothing is ever final, you only need a bit of happiness to be 

able to start all over again.’ 

‘So this time it’s all right, isn’t it, you’ll keep me for good.?’ 

And she swooned, and slipped. She was so weak that her 

tiny voice died away altogether. He clasped her to his heart in 

a state of panic. 

‘Does it hurt.?’ 

She sat up in astonishment. 

‘No, not a bit.. . Why?’ 

But the question had shaken her out of her dream. She 

510 

Germinal 

peered desperately into the darkness, wrung her hands, and 

was shaken by a renewed fit of sobbing. 

‘Oh God, oh dear God, how dark it is!’ 

There was neither wheat nor the scent of grass nor the song 

of the skylarks nor the great yellow sun; just the flooded and 

destroyed mine, the stinking darkness, and the macabre sound 

of dripping inside this tomb where they had been living out 

their death agony for so many days. Her warped senses now 

increased her horror, she was seized by the superstitions of her 

childhood, and she saw the Black Man, the old dead miner 

who came back to the pit to strangle naughty girls. 

‘Listen, did you hear that?’ 

‘No, I didn’t hear anything.’ 

‘But there was . . . that Man, you know the one? ... Look! 

There he is .. . The earth is soaking us in blood from all her 

veins to punish us for cutting one of her arteries; and there he 

is, you can see him, look! He’s black as night ... Oh I’m 

afraid, so afraid!’ 

Shivering still, she fell silent. Then, in a very small voice, 

she went on: 

‘No, it’s just the other man.’ 

‘What other man?’ 

‘The one that’s in here with us, the one who’s passed on.’ 

She was haunted by the vision of Chaval, and she spoke 

ramblingly of their rotten life together, of the one day when he 

had been nice to her, at Jean-Bart, and the other days when he 

was stupid and hit her, when he beat her black and blue and 

then crushed her half to death in his embrace. 

‘I tell you he’s come back to stop us being together! ... 

He’s got one of his old fits of jealousy . .. Oh, send him away 

again, oh, take me and keep me all for yourself!’ 

She threw herself energetically on to him, seeking out his 

mouth and thrusting hers passionately against it. The darkness 

cleared, she saw the sun again, and she laughed once more, 

happily and tenderly. Etienne trembled to feel his body touch 

her half-naked flesh through the tattered shreds of her jacket 

and breeches, and in a sudden surge of revived virility he took 

her. And they had their honeymoon at last, in the depths of 

this tomb, on a bed of mud, caught by the urge not to die 

before they had had their moment of happiness, by the obsti¬ 

nate urge to live, to make themselves come alive for one last 

time. They loved each other desperately, knowing that all was 

lost, knowing that they were dying. 

Then there was nothing. Etienne was sitting on the ground 

in the same corner, with Catherine lying motionless in his lap. 

Hours went by, and more hours. For a long time he thought 

that she was sleeping; then he touched her; she was very cold. 

She was dead. And yet he refused to move in case he woke 

her. The idea that he was the first to enjoy her as a grown 

woman, and that she might be pregnant, moved him. Other 

thoughts, the urge to go away with her, the joy of imagining 

what they would do together later on, came to him at times, 

but they were so insubstantial that they hardly seemed to skim 

his brow, like the breath of sleep itself. He grew weaker, and 

had only the strength to make a slight movement with his 

hand to check that she was still lying there stiff and cold, 

sleeping like a child. Everything disappeared, the darkness 

itself dissolved, he was nowhere, out of space, out of time. Yet 

something was beating near his head, violent blows which were 

coming closer and closer; but first he had felt too lazy to go 

and answer, numbed with an enormous fatigue; and now he 

was no longer aware what was happening, he was dreaming 

that she was walking in front of him and that he could hear the 

gentle tapping of her clogs. Two days went by without her 

moving, but he touched her mechanically, and was reassured 

to feel how peacefully she lay there. 

Etienne felt a shock. Voices rumbled, rocks rolled down 

towards his feet. He saw a lamp, and sobbed. His eyes blinked 

as he followed the light, he couldn’t stop looking in ecstasy at 

the tiny reddish glow which hardly made any inroads into the 

darkness. But he was carried away by his comrades, and he let 

them push some spoonfuls of soup between his clenched teeth. 

It was only when they were in the Requillart tunnel that he 

recognized somebody, Negrel, the engineer, standing in front 

of him; and these two men who despised each other, the 

rebellious workman and the sceptical boss, fell on each other’s 

necks, heaving great sobs, as they felt a common humanity 

well up deep within them. They were filled with great sadness. 

512 

Germinal 

with generations of misery, with that overflowing of suffering 

that life sometimes leads to. 

Up in the open air, La Maheude had collapsed beside the 

body of her daughter. She .screamed, and screamed again, and 

then again, in a long series of endless, long-drawn-out wails. 

Several bodies had already been brought to the surface and 

laid out on the ground; Chaval, whom they assumed had been 

crushed by a landslide, a pit boy and two hewers whose brains 

had also been dashed out and their bellies swollen with water. 

Some of the women in the crowd lost their heads, tearing their 

skirts, and scratching their faces. 

When Etienne had been given time to grow gradually accus¬ 

tomed to the lamps and taken a little food, he was finally 

brought out. He looked all skin and bones, and his hair had 

turned white; the crowd drew apart and trembled at the sight 

of this old man. La Maheude stopped crying and looked at 

him in stupefaction, staring with gaping eyes. 

CHAPTER VI 

It was four o’clock in the morning. The cool April night 

warmed gradually as day drew nearer. The stars started fading 

in the limpid sky as the first lighf of dawn tinged the orient 

with purple. And the black countryside, still sunk in slumber, 

stirred ever so gently with the faint murmuring that precedes 

awakening. 

Etienne strode out down the road to Vandame. He had just 

spent six weeks at Montsou, in a hospital bed. He was still 

very pale and thin, but he felt strong enough to leave, and so 

he left. The Company, which still feared for its pits, and had 

already laid off several waves of men, had warned him that 

they couldn’t keep him on. However, they offered him a lump 

sum of a hundred francs, as well as their paternal advice to 

give up coal-mining, which was now too strenuous for him. 

But he had turned down the hundred francs, for he had 

already been called to Paris by Pluchart, who had enclosed the 

money for the fare in his letter. This meant that his old dream 

was about to come true. The previous night on leaving the 

hospital he had slept at the Bon-Joyeux, Widow Desir’s inn. 

And when he had got up early that morning he had only one 

last wish, which was to say goodbye to his comrades before he 

went to Marchiennes to catch the eight o’clock train. 

Etienne stopped for a moment on the road, which was 

tinged pink. It was so good to breathe in the pure air of this 

precocious springtime. It looked like being a magnificent morn¬ 

ing. Gradually the light spread, and the sun started to draw 

life up from the earth. And he began to walk again, striking 

the ground firmly with his dogwood stick, and watching the 

distant plain emerge from the mists of night. He hadn’t met 

any of his acquaintances; La Maheude had come once to the 

hospital, but had no doubt been unable to return. But he did 

know that all the inhabitants of village Two Hundred and 

Forty would be going down at Jean-Bart now, and that she 

herself had gone back to work. 

Gradually the deserted roads filled with people, and Etienne 

kept passing colliers with pale, silent faces. The Company, so 

people said, was exploiting its victory. When the workmen had 

succumbed to hunger and returned to the pits after two and a half 

months out on strike, they had had to accept the timbering tariff, 

that disguised cut in wages, which was even more repugnant now 

for being stained with the blood of their comrades. They were 

being robbed of the fruits of an hour of their labour, they were 

being made to renege on their oath not to submit, and this 

perjury stuck in their throats, as bitter as gall. Work started up 

again everywhere, at Mirou, Madeleine, Crevecceur, and La 

Victoire. Everywhere in the morning mist the human herd was 

trampling down the shadowy roads, lines of men plodding 

onward with their noses to the ground, like cattle being led to the 

slaughterhouse. They were shivering in their thin cotton clothes; 

they crossed their arms, arched their backs, and hunched up their 

shoulders, which, with their sandwiches stashed between their 

shirt and their jacket, made them look like hunchbacks. And, 

from this mass of dark, silent forms on the march back to work, 

looking neither left nor right and refusing to laugh, you could 

guess at the teeth clenched in anger, the hearts brimming with 

hatred, and the resignation due only to the needs of the stomach. 

The closer he came to the pit, the more Etienne saw their 

numbers grow. They were nearly all walking alone, and those 

who came in groups were walking in single file, already 

exhausted and sick of themselves as well as their workmates. 

He saw one very old man, whose eyes glowed like cinders in 

his livid face. Another man, a young one, was breathing 

heavily in a state of controlled fury. Many held their clogs in 

their hands; and you could hardly hear the soft sound of their 

thick woollen stockings on the ground. They passed by in a 

constant stream, like a routed army forced to march in retreat, 

moving ceaselessly onwards with their heads hung low, filled 

with a quiet but furious rage at the thought of needing to start 

struggling ail over again, and seek revenge. 

As Etienne arrived, Jean-Bart was just emerging from the 

shadows, and the lanterns hanging on the trestles were still 

burning in the nascent light of dawn. Above the dark buildings, 

a plume of white vapour rose like the crest of an eagle, 

delicately tinted with carmine. He went past the stairs of the 

screening shed to go to the landing-stage. 

The descent was starting, and workmen were coming up out 

of the shed. For an instant he remained motionless amid all 

the din and commotion. The tubs shook the iron plates on the 

floor as they rolled past, the drums span round as the cables 

unwound, while all around you could hear orders shouted 

down a loud hailer, bells ringing, rappers raining blows on the 

signal block; and he recognized the monster swallowing down 

its ration of human flesh, the cages emerging and then plunging 

back down out of sight, sinking with their load of men, 

without ever stopping, gulping them down effortlessly like a 

greedy giant. Since his accident he had felt a nervous horror at 

the thought of the mine. As the cages went down, they made 

his stomach heave. He had to turn and look away, the pit made 

him feel too upset. 

But in the vast hall still cloaked in shadows, which the 

guttering lamps lit with an eerie glow, he didn’t recognize a 

single friendly face. The miners who were waiting there, 

barefoot, holding their lamps in their hands, watched him 

wide-eyed and anxiously, then lowered their g:’ze and drew 

back with an air of shame. No doubt they recognized him, and 

felt no more bitterness towards him; on the contrary, they 

seemed to fear him, blushing at the idea that he might reproach 

them with cowardice. This attitude made his heart feel heavy, 

and he forgot that these wretches had stoned him, and he 

started to dream again of changing them into heroes, of 

leading the people, to save that force of nature from tearing 

itself apart. 

One cage embarked its load of men, the batch disappeared, 

and as others arrived he at last saw one of his lieutenants from 

the strike, an honest man who had sworn he was ready to die. 

‘You too,’ he murmured, heartbroken. 

The man went pale, his lips quivered, then he made a sign 

of apology, and said: 

‘What do you expect me to do? I’ve got a wife to look after.’ 

Now as the new crowd came up from the shed he recognized 

all of them. 

‘You too! And you! And you as well!’ 

And they all trembled, and stammered in stifled voices: 

‘I’ve got a mother to look after ,.. I’ve got children ., . 

We’ve got to eat.’ 

The cage hadn’t come back up again yet, they waited for it 

sullenly, suffering so acutely from their defeat that they avoided 

looking him in the eyes, and stared obstinately at the pit. 

‘And what about La Maheude?’ asked Etienne. 

Nobody answered. One of them made a sign that she was 

about to come. Others raised their arms, trembling with pity: 

oh, the poor woman, what a wretched state she was in! The 

silence continued, and when their comrade held out his hand 

to say farewell, they all shook it firmly, putting into this silent 

embrace all their fury at having yielded and their feverish 

hopes for revenge. The cage had arrived, and they embarked 

and disappeared, swallowed up by the abyss. 

Pierron had appeared, sporting the open lamp that the 

deputies used to fix on to their leather caps. It was now a week 

since he had been appointed deputy at the loading bay, and 

the workmen moved aside to let him pass, for he showed his 

pride in his new honour. He was embarrassed to see Etienne, 

but he went up to him, and was finally reassured to hear from 

the young man that he was leaving. They chatted. His wife 

G. - ?4 

Germinal 

516 

was now landlady of the Progr^ Inn, thanks to the support of 

a number of gentlemen who had been so kind to her. But he 

broke off, and shouted at old Mouque, accusing him of not 

having brought up his horse dung at the proper time. The old 

man listened, bowing his shoulders. Then before he went back 

down again, choking with surprise at this reprimand, he too 

took Etienne’s hand to shake it, with the same slow movement 

as the others, hot with suppressed anger, trembling with future 

rebellion. And Etienne was so deeply moved to feel this old 

hand shaking in his, and to realize this old man was forgiving 

him for the death of his children, that he watched him leave 

without being able to say a word. 

‘Isn’t La Maheude coming this morning, then.?’ he asked 

Pierron, after a moment. 

At first the latter pretended not to understand, for sometimes 

you can attract bad luck just by opening your mouth. Then, as 

he moved off on the pretext of having an order to give, he 

finally said: 

‘Who.? La Maheude .. . here she is.’ 

And there she was, in fact, emerging from the shed holding 

her lamp, dressed in her breeches and jacket, her cap pulled 

down over her head. And it had taken a charitable exception to 

the rules of the Company, who had taken pity on this cruelly 

stricken woman, to allow her to go back down underground at 

the age of forty; but as it seemed difficult to send her back to 

pushing tubs, they used her to work a little ventilator that they 

had just installed in the north gallery, in the infernal regions 

under Tartarus which suffered from lack of air. There she 

spent ten hours at a time turning the wheel, with her back 

breaking, and her flesh roasting in forty degrees of heat down 

at the end of a burning-hot gully. She earned thirty sous. 

When Etienne saw her, looking pathetic in her man’s clothes, 

her breasts and belly seeming still swollen from the dampness 

of the coal-face, he stammered in confusion, he couldn’t find 

the words to explain that he was leaving and that he had come 

to bid her farewell. 

She looked at him without listening, and finally said to him, 

calling him by his first name: 

‘So, you’re surprised to see me here, Etienne ... True 

Part VII 

517 

enough, I did threaten to strangle the first person in my family 

to go back down; and now here I am, and down I go, so I 

ought to strangle myself, didn’t I? ... Well, my friend, I 

would have done it already if I hadn’t had the old man and the 

children at home!’ 

And on she went in her tired, low voice. She didn’t make 

excuses, she told her story simply; they had nearly died of 

hunger, and she had decided to go back, so as not to be thrown 

out of the village. 

‘How is the old man.?’ asked Etienne. 

‘He’s still gentle, and he’s clean . . . But he’s completely off 

his head ... You know he didn’t get sentenced for that 

business, don’t you.? They said they’d send him to the mad¬ 

house, but I didn’t want them to, they would only have 

slipped something in his soup .. , But those goings on caused 

us no end of trouble, because he’ll never get his pension, one 

of the gentlemen told me it would be immoral if they gave him 

one.’ 

‘Is Jeanlin working.?’ 

‘Yes, the gentlemen found him a surface job. He earns 

twenty sous ... Oh, I can’t complain, the bosses have been 

very kind, as they explained to me themselves ... Twenty sous 

for the kid, and my thirty sous, that makes fifty. If there 

weren’t six of us, we’d have enough to eat. Estelle is really 

wolfing it down now, and the worst thing is that we’re going to 

have to wait four or five years until Lenore and Henri are old 

enough to go down the pit.’ 

Etienne couldn’t help remonstrating unhappily. 

‘Them tool’ 

A flush had come to the pale cheeks of La Maheude, while 

her eyes started to gleam. But her shoulders slumped as if they 

were unable to bear the weight of her fate, 

‘What do you expect.? First the others went, now it’s them 

. .. They’ve none of them come back, now it’s their turn.’ 

She fell silent, as the labourers pushing the trucks were 

disturbing her. Through the tall sooty windows the thin light of 

dawn entered, drowning the lamps in a greyish glow; and the 

vibrations of the engine started up anew every three minutes, the 

cables unwound, and the cages continued to swallow up the men. 

Germinal 

518 

‘Come on, you idle buggdrs, get a move on!’ cried Pierron. 

‘All aboard, we’ll never finish in time today.’ 

He looked at La Maheude, but she didn’t move. She had 

already let three cages go by. Then, as if she had fallen asleep 

on her feet, and, reawakening, remembered only Etienne’s 

opening words, she said: 

‘So you’re leaving, are you.?’ 

‘Yes, this morning.’ 

‘You’re right, you’re better off leaving, if you can . .. And 

I’m glad I’ve seen you, because at least you’ll know I’ve got no 

axe to grind with you. There was a time I wanted to kill you, 

after all that butchery. But then you think it over, don’t you.? 

You realize that in the end it’s not really anyone’s fault . . . 

No, it’s really not your fault, it’s everyone’s fault.’ 

Now she went on to talk tranquilly of her dead, her man, 

Zacharie, and Catherine; and the tears only came to her eyes 

when she mentioned the name of Alzire. She had resumed the 

calm demeanour of a reasonable woman, judging things with 

equanimity. It wouldn’t help the bourgeoisie at all to have 

killed so many poor people. Of course they’d be punished one 

day, you have to pay for everything. The workers shouldn’t 

even have got mixed up in it, the roof would cave in all by 

itself, the soldiers would open fire on the bosses just as they 

had gunned down the workers. And her age-old spirit of 

resignation, whose hereditary instinct was bending her once 

more to its discipline, was being gradually weakened, as her 

certainty grew that, even if there was no longer a Good Lord, 

another would spring up in his place, to avenge the needy. 

She was speaking under her breath, looking suspiciously about 

her. Then, as Pierron had come up to them, she added out loud: 

‘Well then, if you’re leaving, you’d better come back home 

to collect your belongings . .. There are still two shirts, three 

handkerchiefs and an old pair of breeches.’ 

Etienne raised his hand to brush aside her offer of these few 

old clothes that had escaped the pawnshop. 

‘No. it’s not worth the trouble, they’ll do for the children 

... I’ll get some more in Paris.’ 

Another two cages had gone down, and Pierron decided to 

call La Maheude directly. 

Part VII 

519 

‘Hey, you there, weVe waiting for you! How much longer 

are you going to go nattering on?’ 

But she turned her back on him. Why should that damn 

mercenary try to be so zealous? He wasn’t supposed to have 

anything to do with the descent. The men at his loading bay 

already hated him. So she stubbornly refused to move, holding 

her lamp between her fingers, and freezing in the draught, 

despite the mildness of the weather for the season. Neither she 

nor Etienne found anything further to add. They stood looking 

at each other, their hearts so heavy that they wished they could 

find something more to say. 

In the end she spoke for the sake of speaking. 

‘La Levaque is pregnant, Levaque is still in prison, and 

Bouteloup’s taking his place while he’s away.’ 

‘Oh yes, Bouteloup.’ 

‘Oh yes, wait a minute, did I tell you? ... Philomene has 

left.’ 

‘What do you mean, left?’ 

‘Yes, she walked out, she went off with a miner from the 

Pas-de-Calais, I was afraid she’d leave me the two brats. But 

not a bit of it, she took them with her ... How about that, not 

bad for a woman who coughs up blood and who always looks 

as if she’s about to choke to death!’ 

She dreamed for a moment, then went on, with her slow 

voice. 

‘You wouldn’t believe what people have said about me! ... 

You remember, they said I was sleeping with you. My God, 

after my man died it could easily have happened, if I’d been a 

bit younger, couldn’t it? But now I’m glad it didn’t, because 

I’m sure we’d regret it.’ 

‘Yes, we’d regret it,’ said Etienne. 

And that was all, they spoke no more. A cage was waiting 

for her, and the deputy called out to her angrily, threatening 

her with a fine. Then she made up her mind, and she shook 

his hand. Etienne was deeply moved, and kept looking at her, 

so ravaged and worn out, with her livid face, her greying hair 

slipping out from under her blue cap, her body beneath the 

breeches and the cotton jacket sagging from repeated confine¬ 

ments. And in this last handshake he recognized the same long 

520 

Germinal 

silent embrace that his comrades had offered, making a date 

for whenever they might be able to take up the struggle once 

again. He understood perfectly well, he saw her tranquil faith 

in the depths of her eyes. See you soon, and the next time it 

would be the real thing. 

‘What a godforsaken idle bitch!’ shouted Pierron. 

La Maheude was pushed and jostled as she crammed herself 

into a corner of a tub with four other people. They pulled on 

the rope to ring out that dinner was served, the cage swung 

free and plunged down into the darkness, until all that could 

be seen was the swift flight of the cable. 

Then Etienne left the pit. Down below, beneath the screen¬ 

ing shed, he noticed someone sitting on the ground, in the 

middle of a great sheet of coal, with his legs stretched out 

wide. It was Jeanlin, employed as ‘rough sorter’. He was 

holding a block of coal between his thighs, and hitting it with a 

hammer to knock out the fragments of shale; and he was 

drowned by such a fine, powdery cloud of soot that Etienne 

would never have recognized him, if the child hadn’t lifted his 

monkey-like snout, revealing his prominent ears and his tiny 

blue-green eyes. He gave a farcical laugh, broke the block with 

a last blow of the hammer, and disappeared behind the cloud 

of black dust he had created. 

Once outside, Etienne followed the road for a while, lost in 

thought. All sorts of ideas were milling around in his head. 

But he felt that he was at last out in the fresh air, under the 

open skies, and he breathed in greedily. The sun appeared 

majestically on the horizon, the whole countryside was experi¬ 

encing a joyous awakening. A wave of gold light flowed from 

east to west across the vast plain. This life-giving warmth 

spread wider and wider, vibrating with youthfulness, throbbing 

with all the sighs of the earth, with birdsong, and with all the 

murmurs of the rivers and forests. It was good to be alive, the 

old world wanted to live for another springtime. 

And, filled with this hope, Etienne started walking more 

slowly, looking distractedly all about him, drinking in the 

cheerful signs of the new season. He thought about himself, 

and felt strong and mature after his experience down the 

bottom of the mine. His education was finished, he was 

Part VII 

521 

leaving with a new suit of armour, as a philosophical soldier of 

the revolution having declared war on society as he saw it, and 

condemned it. His joy at joining Pluchart, at the thought of 

becoming a respected leader like Pluchart, moved him to write 

speeches in his mind, which he kept revising. He considered 

extending the scope of his policies, for the bourgeois refinement 

that had lifted him out of his class gave him an ever-greater 

hatred of the bourgeoisie. As for the workers, whose stench of 

poverty now offended him, he still felt the need to cover them 

in glory, and he pictured them as the only heroes, the only 

saints, the only nobility, and the only force which could 

redeem humanity. He already saw himself on the rostrum 

leading the people to triumph, if the people didn’t eat him 

alive before he got there. 

He looked upwards towards a skylark he heard singing in 

the highest heavens. Tiny red clouds, the last vapours of night, 

dissolved in the limpid azure; and the faces of Souvarine and 

Rasseneur seemed to be vaguely figured there. To be sure, 

everything always went downhill as soon as each individual 

tried to seize power for himself. Thus, this famous Inter¬ 

national which should have remade the world had aborted, 

proving itself powerless to prevent its formidable army splitting 

up and falling to pieces in interminable bickering. Was Darwin 

right, then, was the world nothing but a battlefield where the 

strong ate the weak, for the beauty and the survival of the 

species.^ He found this question disturbing, although he was 

sure enough of his scientific knowledge to have his own 

answer. But one idea in particular dissipated his doubts and 

enchanted him, that of using his old explanation of the theory, 

as soon as he could make his first speech. If one class had to go 

under, wouldn’t the people, who were still fresh and vital, 

trample all over the bourgeoisie, who were debilitated by their 

endless pleasure-seeking.^ New blood would create a new soci¬ 

ety. And in his expectation of a barbarian invasion which 

would regenerate the decadent old nations, there reappeared 

his absolute faith in a forthcoming revolution, the real one, 

that of the workers, who would set fire to the dying century 

with the same purple blaze of the rising sun that he saw now 

bleeding across the heavens. 

He kept walking onward, daydreaming all the while, striking 

the stones on the road with his dogwood stick; but as he cast 

his eyes around him, he recognized bits of the countryside. It 

was just at La Fourche-aux-Bceufs, he remembered, that he 

had taken charge of the mob, the morning that they had 

sacked the pits. And today the brutal, lethal, underpaid work 

was starting all over again. Under the ground, far away, 700 

metres down below, it was as if he could hear the regular, 

relentless, muffled blows struck by the comrades he had just 

seen descending, who were hacking away in black and silent 

anger. Of course they had been beaten, they had lost money 

and lives; but Paris would not forget the shots fired at Le 

Voreux, and the blood of the Empire itself would drain out of 

this incurable wound; for even if this industrial slump was 

drawing to a close, and the factories were reopening one by 

one, a state of war had none the less been declared and peace 

was no longer possible. The colliers had stood up and been 

counted, they had flexed their muscles, and their call for 

justice had stirred the hearts of working men throughout 

France. Therefore their defeat brought no reassurance, and the 

bourgeois of Montsou, whose victory was tainted by the secret 

misgivings that always follow the end of a strike, were looking 

over their shoulders to see if the writing wasn’t in fact already 

on the wall, despite the deep silence that reigned. They 

realized that the revolution would always be able to rise again 

at a day’s notice, but now it would be accompanied by a 

general strike and agreements between all the workers with 

relief funds, enabling them to hold out for months without 

going short of food. Their crumbling society had received 

another body blow, they had heard the foundations cracking 

beneath their very feet, and had felt the first shock waves of 

tremors to come, which would grow in number until the whole 

rotten, tottering edifice would come crashing down and disap¬ 

pear into the abyss, like Le Voreux. 

Etienne turned left, down the road to Joiselle, He remembered, that was where he had prevented the mob from rushing 

to take Gaston-Marie by storm. In the bright sunlight he 

could see the headgear of several distant pits, Mirou to the 

right, and Madeleine and Crevecceur side by side. The sounds 

of labour rumbled all around him, and the picks that he 

thought he could hear tapping away in the depths of the earth 

were echoing now across the whole length and breadth of the 

plain. A single blow, then a second, and then more and more, 

hacking relentlessly away under the fields, roads, and villages 

which lay smiling in the sunshine: the whole dark labour of 

this underground penal colony was so successfully suppressed 

by the enormous mass of rock overhead that you had to know 

it was there underneath before you could detect its lingering, 

suffering sighs. And now he started to wonder whether violence 

really made things happen any faster. Cut cables, torn rails, 

broken lamps, what a waste of effort! What was the point of 

getting 3,000 men together just to stampede through the 

countryside causing death and destruction? He felt confusedly 

that legal measures might one day prove to be much more 

devastating. Now that he had sown his wild oats, and outgrown 

his immature resentment, his ideas were maturing. Yes, La 

Maheude was right when she said, with her usual good sense, 

next time it would be the real thing; they would form a 

peaceful army, make sure they knew and understood each 

other, form trade unions* as soon as the law allowed it; and 

the day would come when they would find themselves shoulder 

to shoulder, when they would be millions of workers, facing a 

mere handful of layabouts, able to seize power and become the 

masters. Ah, what a rebirth of justice and truth! Then the 

crouching, sated god, that monstrous idol who lay hidden in 

the depths of his tabernacle untold leagues away, bloated with 

the flesh of miserable wretches who never even saw him, 

would instantly give up the ghost. 

But Etienne was leaving the road to Vandame and came on 

to the main paved highway. To the right he made out Montsou 

sloping away into the distance. Opposite him were the ruins of 

Le Voreux, the cursed abyss that three pumps worked tirelessly 

to empty. Then over on the horizon there were other pits, La 

Victoire, Saint-Thomas, Feutry-Cantel; while towards the 

north, smoke from the high chimneys of the blast-furnaces and 

the batteries of coke ovens curled up through the clear morning 

air. If he wanted to catch the eight o’clock train he’d have to 

hurry up, for there were still six kilometres to go. 

And far below, beneath his feet, the stubborn tapping of the 

picks continued. His comrades were all down there, and he 

could hear them following his every step. Wasn’t that La 

Maheude under the beetfield, her back broken, and her raucous 

breathing rising up to the accompanying rumble of the ventila¬ 

tor? Further away, to the left and to the right, he thought he 

could recognize others, beneath the wheat, the green hedges, 

and the young saplings. High in the sky the April sun now 

shone down in its full glory, warming the bountiful earth and 

breathing life into her fertile bosom, as the buds burst into 

verdant leaf, and the fields quivered under the pressure of the 

rising grass. All around him seeds were swelling and shoots 

were growing, cracking the surface of the plain, driven upwards 

by their need for warmth and light. The sap flowed upwards 

and spilled over in soft whispers; the sound of germinating 

seeds rose and swelled to form a kiss. Again, and again, and 

ever more clearly, as if they too were rising towards the 

sunlight, his comrades kept tapping away. Beneath the blazing 

rays of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside 

rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging 

army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing 

upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon 

their ripening would burst open the earth itself 

EXPLANATORY NOTES