Emile Zola Germinal (Oxford) PART III

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PART III 

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CHAPTER I 

The next day, and the following days, Etienne went back to 

his work at the pit. He got used to it, and his life became 

attuned to the rhythms of the new tasks and habits which he 

had found so hard at first. Only one incident interrupted the 

monotony of the first fortnight, a passing attack of fever which 

kept him in bed for forty-eight hours, with his limbs aching 

and his head burning, daydreaming in a state of near delirium 

that he was pushing his tub down a passage too narrow for his 

body to pass. But it was merely beginner's cramp, an excess of 

fatigue which he soon shook off. 

And one day started to feel like the next, and weeks, and 

then months, went by. Now, like his mates, he rose at three in 

the morning, drank his coffee, and picked up the sandwich 

that Madame Rasseneur had prepared for him the night before. 

On his way to the pit he regularly met old Bonnemort on his 

way home to bed, and when he came back out again in the 

afternoon, he passed Bouteloup going the other way to clock 

on for his shift. Dressed in his cap, his breeches, and his 

cotton jacket, he was shivering when he arrived at the shed, 

and went to warm his back at the great open fire. Then he had 

to wait barefoot in the entrance hall, with all its icy draughts. 

But the engine, whose great steel limbs in their copper casing 

gleamed high above him in the shadows, had lost its fascination 

for him, as had the cables, swooping silently past like the black 

wings of some nocturnal bird of prey, and the cages rising and 

falling amid the chaos of signals ringing, orders shouted, and 

tubs shaking the iron flooring. His lamp was not burning 

properly, the damn lamp keeper must have forgotten to clean 

it; and he only started to unwind when Mouquet piled them 

all in, dealing great theatrical smacks to the girls' behinds. The 

cage was released, and it fell like a stone down a well, without 

Etienne even bothering to turn his head to watch the daylight 

disappear. He never dreamed of the likelihood of an accident, 

and the deeper he plunged down into the darkness and the 

driving spray the more he felt at home. At the pit bottom, at 

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the loading bay, when Pierron had let them out with his 

hypocritically submissive air, they would mill around like a 

herd of animals, as each team shuffled slowly off to its own 

coal-face. Now Etienne, too, knew the passages of the mine 

better than the streets of Montsou, knew that you had to turn 

here, duck down later on, avoid a puddle somewhere else. He 

had got so used to his two-kilometre walk underground that he 

could have done it in the dark with his hands in his pockets. 

And each time there were the same encounters, a deputy 

turning his lamp on the workmen’s faces as they went by, old 

Mouque bringing up a horse, Bebert driving Bataille snorting 

onwards, Jeanlin running along behind the train to close the 

ventilation doors, and fat Mouquette and skinny Lydie pushing 

their tubs. 

In the end, Etienne also found the dampness and the 

suffocating lack of air at the coal-face much less oppressive. 

The chimney seemed easy to climb, as if he had shrunk, and 

could pass through crannies where he wouldn’t have dared 

venture an arm earlier on. He breathed in the coal-dust 

without feeling sick, saw clearly in the dark, and sweated 

freely, now that he had got used to the feeling of having his 

body draped in soaking garments from morning to night. 

Besides, he no longer clumsily wasted his energy, now that he 

had acquired the necessary skills with a flair that astonished 

the whole team. After three weeks, he was mentioned as one of 

the pit’s really good trammers: no one rolled his tub up to the 

incline more quickly, nor loaded it afterwards more carefully. 

His slim build enabled him to get past any obstacle, and 

although his arms were as thin and white as a woman’s, they 

seemed to be made of iron beneath their delicate skin, so 

hardened were they to their task. He never complained even 

when dropping with fatigue, doubtless because he was too 

proud. The only fault they reproached him with was being 

unable to take a joke, and quick to lose his temper if someone 

tried to pick on him. All in all, he was accepted and considered 

as a real miner, as he yielded to the crushing force of habit 

which reduced him a little more each day to the status of a 

machine. 

It was Maheu in particular who felt drawn to Etienne, for 

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he respected a job well done. And also, just like the others, he 

sensed that the lad was better educated than he himself was: 

he saw him reading and writing, or sketching little plans, and 

heard him discussing things which he didn’t even know existed. 

He was not surprised at this, colliers are simple folk with 

bonier skulls than mechanics; but he was impressed by the 

guts of this little chap, with his plucky decision to have a bash 

at the coal rather than let himself die of hunger. Etienne was 

the first casual worker he had seen settle in so quickly. So 

when Maheu was behind with production and didn’t want to 

interrupt any of the hewers, he entrusted the young man with 

the timbering, certain that his work would be carefully and 

reliably accomplished. The bosses were still pestering him over 

the question of the props, and he was afraid at every moment 

that Negrel, the engineer, would appear, with Dansaert in tow, 

shouting, arguing, and ordering them to start all over again; 

and he had noticed that his new trammer’s timbering seemed 

to satisfy these gentlemen better, although they were careful 

never to show their approval, and kept repeating that one of 

these days the G)mpany was going to do something drastic 

about it. Things dragged on like this, breeding sullen resent¬ 

ment throughout the mine, to such an extent that even Maheu, 

despite his easygoing nature, felt that he was ready for a fight. 

At first there had been rivalry between Zacharie and Etienne. 

One evening they had threatened to come to blows. But 

Zacharie, who was an uncomplicated fellow, loath to cause 

himself unnecessary displeasure, was rapidly soothed by the 

friendly offer of a drink, and soon bowed to the newcomer’s 

superiority. Levaque had decided to make the best of things 

now, and he got to talking politics with the trammer, who 

knew his own mind, he said. And of all the men in his team, 

the only one that Etienne felt still harboured some secret 

resentment was big tall Chaval; not that they openly snubbed 

each other, on the contrary, they had become mates; but all 

the same, even when they were joking together, they couldn’t 

help exchanging hostile glances. Caught between the two of 

them, Catherine had relapsed into her routine, bending down 

to push her tub in a posture of tired and resigned female 

compliance, although she was always considerate towards her 

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new workmate, who helped her in his turn; but she was 

submissive to the will of her lover, and openly welcomed his 

caresses. It was an accepted situation, an official couple to 

which even her family turned a blind eye, so much so that 

every evening Chaval took the tram girl off to the slag-heap, 

then brought her back to her parents’ door, where he kissed 

her good-night in front of the whole village. 

Etienne, who thought he had come to terms with this, often 

teased her about these walks, joking in the same crude language 

that all the lads and girls use down the mine; and she would 

reply in the same vein, telling him brazenly what her lover had 

got up to with her; she faltered and turned pale, however, 

when her eyes met those of her young companion. Then they 

would both avert their gaze, and sometimes went for an hour 

without talking to each other, as if they hated each other for 

reasons confused and untold. 

Spring came. One day as he left the pit Etienne felt a 

sudden gust of April warmth, the wholesome scent of new 

growth, green shoots, and draughts of fresh air; and now each 

time he left the pit spring felt warmer and smelled sweeter, 

after his ten hours’ work in the eternal winter of the pit 

bottom, surrounded by clouds of darkness that no summer 

ever dispersed. The days grew steadily longer, and by May 

when he went down in the morning the sun was starting to 

rise, as the ruby-red sky bathed Le Voreux in its dusty, dawn 

light, which made all the white steam rising from the pumping 

machines turn pink. He no longer shivered, now that warm 

breezes wafted in from the far reaches of the plain, and high 

over his head skylarks sang. Then at three o’clock he was 

dazzled by the blazing sunshine, which set the horizon alight 

and turned the bricks flaming red beneath their thick layer of 

soot. By June the wheat was already high, its blue-green tones 

contrasting with the blacker green of the beet. It was an 

uncharted sea, which rippled with every breeze, and seemed to 

rise and spread more each day; sometimes he found to his 

surprise that it had apparently grown fuller and greener be¬ 

tween the morning and the evening of a single day. The 

poplars along the canal grew plumes of leaves. Weeds invaded 

the slag-heap, flowers carpeted the meadows, in short, life was 

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on the move, sprouting out of the same earth that weighed him 

down with fatigue and suffering as he toiled beneath it. 

When Etienne went out for his evening stroll now, he no 

longer disturbed any lovers behind the slag-heap. He followed 

their tracks through the wheatfields, and guessed where the 

love-birds had made their nests from the movements of the tall 

red poppies and the ears of wheat, which were starting to turn 

yellow. Zacharie and Philomene went there as part of their 

long-familiar marital routine; old Ma Brule was always on the 

war-path after Lydie, and was constantly starting her out of 

the hides where she was so deeply ensconced with Jeanlin that 

it was only if you tripped over them that they were forced to 

take flight; and as for La Mouquette, she made her bed left, 

right, and centre, you couldn’t cross a single field without 

seeing her take a header, as she threw herself down on the 

ground and lifted her legs up in the air. But they all had every 

right to do as they pleased, and Etienne only took offence on 

the evenings that he met Catherine and Chaval. 

Twice he saw them founder suddenly out of sight in the 

middle of a field as he approached, and the sea of stalks close 

over them, silent as the grave. Another time, as he was going 

down a narrow path, he saw Catherine’s crystal-clear eyes rise 

a moment above the level of the wheat, and quickly sink out of 

sight again. In the end the vast plain seemed too small for him, 

and he preferred to spend the evening with Rasseneur at the 

Avantage. 

‘Madame Rasseneur, give me a pint .. , no, I won’t go out 

tonight, my legs are like jelly.’ 

And he turned to talk to one of his mates, who was sitting in 

his usual place at a table at the back of the room, leaning his 

head against the wall. 

‘Souvarine,* won’t you have a pint.^’ 

‘No thanks, nothing at all.’ 

Etienne had got to know Souvarine from living alongside 

him. He was a mechanic from Le Voreux, who lived on the 

top floor in the furnished room next to his. He looked about 

thirty; he was slim and fair-skinned, with fine features framed 

by long hair and a slight beard. His sharp, white teeth, delicate 

nose and mouth, and pink complexion gave him a girlish air. 

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an appearance of unshakeable gentleness, although this could 

on occasion be turned fierce by a sudden flash from his steely 

grey eyes. In his poor working man’s room, he had no posses¬ 

sions except a box full of books and papers. He was Russian, 

but never spoke of himself, although he let people spread 

rumours about him. The colliers, who were very suspicious of 

foreigners, and guessed from his small, delicate hands that he 

was from a different class, had at first suspected some scandal, 

perhaps that he was a murderer on the run from justice. But 

when they saw how brotherly and warm and humble he was 

towards them, and how he turned out his pockets and gave all 

his change to the kids in the village, they came to accept him, 

and were further reassured by the rumour that he was a 

political refugee, a vague term that seemed to provide an 

excuse, even for committing a crime, and implied a fellowship 

of suffering. 

During the first few weeks Etienne had found him implacably 

reserved. Thus he only discovered his story later. Souvarine was 

the youngest son of a noble family from the province of Tula, At 

St Petersburg, where he went to study medicine, the passion for 

socialism that fired his whole generation had inspired him to 

learn a trade, that of mechanic, in order to be able to mix with 

the people, to be able to get to know them and help them like a 

brother. And now he was earning his living from this skill, 

having fled after an abortive attempt on the life of the Tsar:* for 

a month he had lived in a greengrocer’s cellar, digging a tunnel 

under the street, and priming his bombs, despite the constant 

risk of going up in smoke along with the whole building. Since 

being disinherited by his family, he had become penniless, and 

he had also been banned from joining any French workshops, 

because he was suspected of being a spy. In fact he was nearly 

dying of hunger when the Montsou Company had finally taken 

him on in a moment of labour shortage. For a year now he had 

been working there quietly and soberly, giving entire satisfaction, 

doing the day shift one week and the night shift the next, and he 

was so conscientious that the bosses held him up as an example. 

‘Don’t you ever get thirsty?’ Etienne asked him, laughing. 

And he answered in his soft voice, with hardly any trace of 

an accent: 

‘I get thirsty when I eat.’ 

His friend teased him about girls, swearing that he had seen 

him with a tram girl in the wheatfields near Silk Stockings. 

But he shrugged his shoulders, indifferent and unruffled. Why 

should he want to do that to a tram girl? As long as she had 

the fraternal spirit and courage of a man, a woman was, for 

him, no different from a man, merely a comrade. And if not, 

what was the point of burdening your heart with potential 

betrayal? He wanted no ties, neither with women nor with 

friends—he felt free to do what he liked with his own life, and 

he wanted no new family commitments. 

Every evening towards nine o’clock, when the bar started 

emptying, Etienne stayed on to talk to Souvarine like this. He 

sipped slowly at his beer, while the mechanic smoked cigarette 

after cigarette, staining his fine fingers the colour of tobacco. 

He mused on the spirals of smoke with his dreamy, mystical 

eyes, while he waved his left hand around nervously and 

incoherently, just for something to do; and in general he ended 

up sitting a pet rabbit on his knee, a fat mother rabbit who was 

always pregnant, and who had the run of the house. This 

rabbit, whom he had taken to calling ‘Poland’,* had started to 

love him, and she would come and sniff at his trousers, then 

stand up and beg, and scratch at him with her paws, until he 

picked her up like a child. Then she would nestle down in his 

lap, flatten her ears, and close her eyes; while absent-mindedly 

but tirelessly he stroked her silky grey fur, as if the soft 

warmth of this living creature brought him solace. 

‘You know,’ said Etienne one evening, ‘I had a letter from 

Pluchart.’* 

Rasseneur was the only other person left. The last customer 

had gone back to the village, where everyone was going to bed. 

‘Oh, really?’ the landlord exclaimed, walking up to his two 

lodgers. ‘ What’s he up to these days?’ 

For two months Etienne had been corresponding regularly 

with the mechanic from Lille, wanting to tell him all about his 

job at Montsou; but Pluchart was using the correspondence to 

indoctrinate him, now that he saw a chance of spreading his 

propaganda among the mining community. 

‘He’s doing everything he can to make sure that his 

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association is a great success. He’s recruiting people on all 

fronts, so it seems.’ 

‘And what do you think of their society?’ Rasseneur asked 

Souvarine. 

The latter, who was gently stroking Poland’s head, blew out 

a stream of .smoke, and murmured dispassionately: 

‘Another load of rubbish!’ 

But Etienne waxed lyrical. His whole rebellious temperament 

tempted him to embrace the struggle of labour against capital, in 

the first flush of his ignorant enthusiasm. It was the Workers’ 

International Association,* the famous ‘International’, that had 

just been founded in London. Wasn’t it a superb achievement, to 

have launched this campaign through which justice would at last 

triumph? With no more frontiers, the workers of the whole world 

would rise up and unite, to make sure that the worker kept the 

fruits of his labour. And what a simple but powerful organization: 

at the base was the section, which served the local community; 

then came the federation, linking the sections from within the 

same province; then the nation; and above it all, finally, was 

humanity itself, incarnated in a General Council, where each 

nation was represented by a corresponding secretary. In another 

six months they would have conquered the earth, and they would 

impose new laws on the bosses, if they tried to turn nasty. 

‘Rubbish!’ Souvarine repeated. ‘Your Karl Marx still be¬ 

lieves in letting natural forces take their course. No politics, no 

conspiracies, am I right? Everything out in the open, and 

nothing to fight for but wage rises ... To hell with you and 

your gradual evolution! Set fire to every town and city, cut the 

populace to shreds, raze everything to the ground, and when 

there’s nothing left of this whole, vile world, maybe a better 

one will grow up in its place.’ 

Etienne started laughing. He didn’t always listen to his 

workmate’s arguments, he took this theory of destruction to be 

a pose. Rasseneur, who was even more down to earth than 

Etienne, and had that fund of good sense which comes with 

experience, didn’t even bother to take offence. He just wanted 

Etienne to spell out the details. 

‘Well, then? Are you going to try to set up a section in 

Montsou?’ 

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143 

That was what Pluchart wanted, since he was secretary of 

the federation of the Nord Department. He was careful to 

point out the services which the Association could render the 

miners if they were to go on strike one day. And it just so 

happened that Etienne thought that a strike was imminent: the 

argument over timbering would turn sour, and it would only 

need one more demand from the Company to drive all the pits 

to revolt. 

‘The real nuisance is the subscriptions,’ Rasseneur declared 

judiciously. ‘Fifty centimes a year for the general fund, two 

francs for the section— it may not sound much, but I bet that 

a lot of people will refuse to pay up.’ 

‘Especially’, said Etienne, ‘since we ought first of all to set 

up a provident fund here, which could become a fighting fund 

if necessary ... Be that as it may, it’s time we started thinking 

about these things. I’m ready, if the others are.’ 

There was a silence. The oil lamp was smoking on the 

counter. Through the wide open doorway, you could distinctly 

hear the sound of a boilerman’s shovel at Le Voreux loading 

one of the engine’s furnaces. 

‘Everything is so expensive!’ Madame Rasseneur chimed in. 

She had come in and had been listening disapprovingly, loom¬ 

ing imposingly over them in her eternal black dress. ‘When 

you think that I’ve just had to pay twenty-two sous for the 

eggs. Something’s got to give.’ 

This time all three men were of one opinion. One by one 

they spoke, each adding his tale of misery to the ever-growing 

list of complaints. The workman could no longer survive, the 

Revolution had only added to his misery, it was the bourgeoisie 

who had grown fat since 1789, and they had become so greedy 

that they didn’t even leave anything on their plates for the 

workers to lick clean. Could anyone claim that the workers had 

had a fair share of the extraordinary growth of wealth and 

comfort that had taken place over the last hundred years.? In 

declaring them free, the bourgeoisie had clearly taken them for 

a ride: yes, they were free to die of hunger, and they made 

liberal use of this right. But it brought home no bacon to vote 

for lads who then proceeded to live the life of Riley without 

giving any more thought to the poor than they would to their 

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old boots. No, one way or another, it had to stop, either 

peacefully, with an amicable arrangement to change the law, or 

violently, by burning everything to the ground and everyone 

destroying his neighbour. Their children would certainly live 

to see it happen, if their parents didn’t, for the century 

couldn’t finish without another revolution, and this time it was 

the workers’ turn, and they would upset the apple cart and 

turn society upside down, and rebuild it more decently and 

more justly, 

Tt’s got to be blown away,’ xMadame Rasseneur repeated, 

vigorously. 

And all three of them cried together, ‘Yes, blow it all away!’ 

Souvarine was stroking Poland’s ears now, and the rabbit’s 

nose wrinkled with pleasure. His eyes took on a glazed look, 

and he spoke under his breath, as if he were talking to himself: 

‘As for raising wages, how can they? It is graven in tablets 

of bronze* that wages should be fixed at the absolute minimum, 

just the barest sum necessary for the workers to eat a crust of 

bread and have children ... If wages fall too low, the workers 

die, and the demand for new workmen makes them rise again. 

If they rise too high, the surplus offer makes them drop again 

... It’s the balanced budget of empty bellies, a life sentence 

condemning the workers to the prison camp of poverty,’ 

When he let himself go in this way, debating topics as an 

intellectual socialist, Etienne and Rasseneur felt uneasy; they 

were disturbed by his depressing allegations, but had no 

answer to them. 

‘Make no mistake!’ he went on, in the same peaceful tone of 

voice, as he looked at them, ‘we must destroy everything, or 

hunger will spring up again. Yes! Anarchy,* an end to every¬ 

thing, the earth bathed in blood and purified by fire ... Then 

we’ll have another think.’ 

‘Monsieur Souvarine is quite right,’ declared Madame Rasse¬ 

neur, who was always most polite even when seized by revolu¬ 

tionary fervour. 

Etienne, in despair at his ignorance, refused to prolong the 

discussion. He rose, saying: 

‘Let’s go to bed. All this doesn’t stop me having to get up at 

three o’clock.’ 

Souvarine, who had already stubbed out the cigarette end 

that had been stuck to the corner of his lips, placed a hand 

gently under the fat rabbit’s stomach and lifted her on to the 

floor. Rasseneur locked up. They went to bed without exchang¬ 

ing a word, their ears humming and their heads reeling with 

the grave questions that they had been debating. 

And every evening there were similar conversations, in the 

bare room, around the single pint mug that Etienne took an 

hour to empty. A crowd of confused ideas which had been 

lying dormant within him started to wake, and gradually took 

on substance. He was devoured above all by the need to learn, 

but he had long hesitated to borrow books from his neighbour, 

who unfortunately owned hardly anything that wasn’t written 

in German or Russian. Finally he got him to lend him a 

French book on co-operative societies,* another load of rub¬ 

bish, according to Souvarine; and he also regularly read a 

journal that Souvarine subscribed to, Le Combat^ an anarchist 

paper published in Geneva. Besides, despite their daily meet¬ 

ings, he found Souvarine still just as difficult to draw out, with 

his semblance of just passing through life, with no interests or 

emotions or possessions of any kind. 

It was towards the beginning of July that Etienne’s situation 

improved. The monotonous life of the mine, eternally recom¬ 

mencing each morning, had been interrupted by an accident: 

the teams working on the Guillaume seam had just encountered 

an obstacle, a major disturbance in the stratum, which doubt¬ 

less announced the proximity of a fault; and sure enough they 

soon ran into the fault, which the engineers, despite their 

detailed knowledge of the terrain, had been unaware of. This 

upset the life of the pit, and the miners talked of nothing but 

the missing seam, which must have fallen and continued at a 

lower level on the other side of the fault. The old miners were 

already sniffing it out with nostrils flaring, chasing after the 

scent of coal like well-trained hounds. But meanwhile the 

teams couldn’t down tools and sit back and do nothing, and 

notices appeared announcing that the Company would put 

some new concessions up for auction. 

One day after work Maheu followed Etienne on his way- 

home from the mine and offered him a place as a hewer in his 

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146 

concession instead of Levaque, who had gone over to a different 

team. The deal had already been approved by the overman 

and the engineer, who both said they were very pleased with 

the young man. So it was easy for Etienne to accept this rapid 

promotion, and he was pleased with the increasing esteem that 

Maheu had shown him. 

That very evening, they returned together to the pit to see 

what the notices said. 7 ’he sections put up for auction were 

situated at the end of the Filonniere seam, in the northern 

section of Le Voreux. They didn’t sound very promising, and 

the miner shook his head when the young man read the 

conditions out to him. And in fact the next day, when they had 

gone down so that Maheu could show him the seam, he 

pointed out how far it was from the loading bay, how unstable 

the rock was, and how thin and hard the coal was. And yet if 

they wanted to eat, they had to work. So the next Sunday they 

went to the auction, which was held in the changing shed and 

was presided over by the pit engineer, assisted by the overman, 

in the absence of the divisional engineer. Five or six hundred 

coal workers were there, facing the small platform which had 

been set up in the corner of the room; and the lots were 

adjudicated at such a speed that you could hear nothing but a 

confused babbie of voices, as figures were shouted out only to 

be immediately drowned by more figures. 

For a moment, Maheu was afraid that he would not be able 

to obtain any of the forty concessions offered by the Company. 

All his competitors lowered their offers, worried by rumours of 

a slump, and terrified by the prospect of unemployment. 

Negrel, the engineer, was in no hurry to stem this savage 

competition, for he wanted the bids to drop as low as possible, 

while Dansaert, who was hoping to speed things up, lied about 

the qualities of the bargains offered. In order to win a patch of 

coal fifty metres nearer the shaft, Maheu had to struggle 

against a comrade who was just as determined; they took it in 

turns to drive down the price of a tub-load of coal, centime by 

centime; and even though he emerged victorious from the 

contest, it was only by lowering their income so much that 

Richomme, the deputy, who was standing behind him, mut¬ 

tered between his teeth and nudged him with his elbow. 

growling angrily that he would never make a go of it at that 

price. 

When they emerged, Etienne was swearing. And he lost his 

temper when he saw Chaval wandering casually back from the 

wheatfields accompanied by Catherine, while his father-in-law 

had been doing all the urgent business. 

‘In heaven’s name!’ he cried, ‘it’s a massacre! . . . Now 

they’re setting the workers at each other’s throats!’ 

Chaval was furious; he would never have lowered his price, 

himself! And Zacharie, who had only turned up out of sheer 

curiosity, declared that it was disgusting. But Etienne silenced 

them with an expression of contained violence. 

‘It’s got to stop. We’ll be the masters, one day!’ 

Maheu, who had remained silent since the end of the 

auction, seemed to come to life again. He repeated: 

‘The masters! God almighty, and about bloody time, too!’ 

CHAPTER II 

It was the last Sunday in July, the day of the Montsou fair, 

the Ducasse.* By Saturday evening, the good village house¬ 

wives had sluiced their living-rooms down with floods of 

water, throwing whole bucketfuls over the flags and down the 

walls; and their floors weren’t yet dry, although they had been 

strewn with fine white sand, which was an extravagant expense 

for a pauper’s budget. Meanwhile, it looked as if it was going 

to be a sweltering day, with the sort of stormy summer sky 

that seems to stifle the flat, bare, endless expanses of the Nord 

countryside. 

Sundays always upset the Maheu family’s morning routine. 

While Father was bored to tears with staying in bed by five 

o’clock, and impatiently rose and dressed, the children lay in 

until nine o’clock. Today Maheu went to smoke a pipe in the 

garden, and then eventually came in to eat some bread and 

butter on his own, to kill time. Thus he whiled away the 

morning, doing nothing in particular: he repaired a leak in the 

basin, then he pinned up under the cuckoo clock a portrait of 

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148 

the Imperial Prince,* which had been given to the children. 

Meanwhile, the others came downstairs one by one; old Bonne- 

mort took a chair out to sit in the sunshine. Mother and Alzire 

had settled down in the kitchen straight away. Catherine 

appeared, with Lenore and Henri in tow, when she had 

finished dressing them: and it was striking eleven o’clock, and 

the smell of stewed rabbit and boiled potatoes was already 

pervading the house, when Zacharie and Jeanlin came down 

last, still yawning, their eyes puffy with sleep. 

The whole village was all agog, excited by the festivities, 

impatient for dinner, which had been brought forward so that 

they could go off in groups to Montsou. Hordes of children 

hopped and skipped along, while the men slouched around in 

their shirt sleeves, dragging their feet lazily as they always did 

on holidays. The windows and doors were wide open because 

of the fine weather, showing off a whole row of sitting-rooms, 

all full to overflowing with the assembled families, gesticulating 

and shouting. And all the way down the terraces, there was a 

rich, rabbity smell of cooking, which for once overcame the 

persistent smell of fried onion. 

The Maheus dined at twelve noon exactly. They didn’t 

make very much noise compared to the door-to-door gossip 

and promiscuous congregation of the village women, with their 

continual toing and froing of questions, answers, and borrow¬ 

ings, of brats shooed away or called back with a smack. 

Besides, they had been on cool terms for three weeks with 

their neighbours, the Levaques, over the issue of Zacharie and 

Philomene’s marriage. The men were still talking to each 

other, but the women acted as if they were strangers. This 

feud had strengthened their ties with La Pierronne. The only 

problem was that La Pierronne, leaving Pierron and Lydie 

with her mother, had gone out half-way through the morning to 

spend the day with a cousin, at Marchiennes; and they were 

much amused, because they knew the identity of the lady in 

question, who had a moustache, for she was in fact none other 

than the overman of Le Voreux. La Maheude said that it was 

hardly decent to leave your family on a holiday Sunday. 

Apart from the potatoes, and the rabbit that they had been 

fattening up in the hutch for the past month, the Maheus had 

Pari III 

149 

a rich soup and some beef, for their fortnight’s pay had arrived 

the day before. They couldn’t remember when they had last 

had such a feast. Even last St Barbe’s day, on the miners’ 

three-day holiday, the rabbit had not been so fat and tender. 

So from little Estelle, whose teeth were only just starting to 

come through, right up to old Bonnemort, who was losing all 

of his, ten pairs of jaws were working flat out, crunching up 

even the bones. It was lovely to have meat, of course, but it 

was not easy to digest, since they had it so rarely. Everything 

disappeared, there was only a bit of boiled beef left over for 

the evening. They would finish it up with some bread and 

butter, if they were still hungry. 

Jeanlin was the first to slip off. Bebert was waiting for him 

behind the school. And they had to hang around for some time 

before they managed to enlist Lydie, who was trapped in the 

house with old Ma Brule, who didn’t want to go out herself. 

When she realized that the child had done a bunk, she 

screamed and waved her skinny arms around, while Pierron, 

who found that the din got on his nerves, wandered off for a 

relaxing walk, basking in the role of a husband unashamedly 

enjoying himself knowing that his wife too is taking her 

pleasure. 

Old Bonnemort was the next to go, then Maheu decided to 

stretch his legs, after asking La Maheude if she wanted to join 

him out there. No, how could she, it was a real drag with the 

kids; or perhaps she might after ail, she’d think about it, 

they’d meet up somewhere or other. Once he was outside he 

hesitated, then he went next door, to see if Levaque was ready. 

But he bumped into Zacharie, who was waiting for Philomene; 

and La Levaque had just launched into her pet topic, their 

marriage, shouting that nobody took her seriously, that she 

would have it all out with La Maheude once and for all. What 

sort of a life was it to look after her daughter’s fatherless kids 

while the daughter herself was screwing around with her lover? 

When Philomene had quietly finished adjusting her bonnet, 

Zacharie went off with her, repeating that he had no objection 

as long as his mother agreed. Meanwhile Levaque had made 

his getaway, and Maheu advised his lady neighbour to consult 

his wife, and hurried off. Bouteloup, who was sitting with his 

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150 

elbows firmly planted on the table^ polishing off his piece of 

cheese, doggedly resisted his invitation to come out for a pint. 

He was staying at home, just like a good husband. 

Gradually, however, the village became empty, as all the 

men went off one after the other, while the girls, who had been 

keeping watch in the doorways, went off in the opposite 

direction, on the arms of their sweethearts. As her father 

disappeared behind the church, Catherine caught sight of 

Chaval and hastened to join up with him, and walk down the 

road to Montsou with him. And Mother was left on her own, 

surrounded by the children, who had been left to their own 

devices, and she felt she hadn’t the energy to leave her chair, 

so she poured herself another glass of piping hot coffee, which 

she sipped slowly. Only the women were still left in the 

village, inviting each other round to drain the dregs of the 

coffee-pots, and sitting at their tables, which were still warm 

and sticky from dinner, 

Maheu guessed that Levaque would be at the Avantage, and 

he stopped off at Rasseneur’s, without bothering to hurry. And 

sure enough, Levaque was having a game of skittles with some 

friends in the narrow garden behind the bar, under the shadow 

of the hedge. Old Bonnemort and old Mouque were standing 

beside them, but not playing, both of them so absorbed in the 

game that they even forgot to nudge each other. The hot sun 

beat straight down on them, there was only a single shaft of 

shadow down the middle of the tavern; Etienne was there, 

sitting over a pint, disappointed that Souvarine had left him 

and gone upstairs to his room. Nearly every Sunday, the 

mechanic shut himself in his room to read or write. 

‘Are you playing.?’ Levaque asked Maheu. 

But the latter refused. It was too hot, he was already dying 

of thirst. 

‘Rasseneur!’ Etienne called, ‘Bring him a pint.’ 

And, turning to Maheu, he said: 

‘This is my round, you know.’ 

By now, Etienne was on familiar terms with all of them. 

Rasseneur was in no hurry, and they had to call out three 

times running; until finally it was Madame Rasseneur who 

brought them their lukewarm beer. The young man had 

lowered his voice to complain about the house: they were good 

people all rights with all the right ideas; but the beer was 

hopeless and the soup disgusting! He would have changed 

lodgings ten times already, if it hadn’t meant such a long walk 

from Montsou. Sooner or later he’d go and find himself a 

family in the village. 

‘Of course,’ repeated Maheu with his slow voice, ‘of course 

you’d be better off in a family.’ 

But there was an outburst of shouting, Levaque had knocked 

over all the skittles at one go. Mouque and Bonnemort were 

staring at the ground, marking their dignified and silent ap¬ 

proval amid all the tumult. And the men’s pleasure at this 

lucky strike overflowed into a series of jokes, especially when 

the players saw La Mouquette’s cheerful face peeping over the 

top of the hedge. She had been prowling around for an hour, 

and had plucked up courage to approach them when she heard 

the laughter. 

‘Whatever are you doing all alone?’ cried Levaque. ‘What 

have you done with all your lovers?’ 

‘My lovers? I’ve pensioned them all off,’ she replied with 

cheerful impudence, ‘and I’m looking for a new one.’ 

They all offered their services, and excited her with ribald 

suggestions. She shook her head, but laughed even louder, 

good-naturedly sharing the fun. Her father also took in the 

performance without taking his eyes off the scattered skittles. 

‘Get along with you!’ Levaque went on, casting a glance at 

Etienne. ‘We can guess who you fancy, my girl! . .. But you’ll 

have to use force on him.’ 

This made Etienne laugh. And he was indeed the tram girl’s 

target. Although he was amused, he declined the invitation, for 

he had not the slightest desire for the girl. 

She hung around behind the hedge a few minutes longer, 

standing and gazing at him with her big eyes; then she went 

away slowly, her face abruptly grown serious, as if suddenly 

oppressed by the hot sun. 

Lowering his voice, Etienne had once again started rehears¬ 

ing for Maheu’s benefit his long explanations of the necessity 

for the Montsou miners to set up a provident fund.* 

‘Since the Company claims that we are free,’ he repeated. 

152 

Germinal 

‘what have we got to fear? We only have their pensions, and 

they give them out however they see fit, because they don’t 

dock our wages for contributions. Well then, it makes sense to 

set up a mutual assistance society, to add to their grace and 

favour, so that we at least have something to fall back on in an 

emergency.’ 

And he went on to give details, discussing the organization, 

promising to do all the work himself. 

‘I’m willing,’ said Maheu at last, convinced by Etienne’s 

arguments^ ‘But what about the others ... Try and persuade 

the others.’ 

Levaque had won, and they abandoned the skittles in favour 

of draining their glasses. But Maheu refused to drink a second 

pint: there was plenty of time, the day was still young. He had 

just remembered Pierron. Wherever could he be? Probably at 

the Lenfant bar. And he persuaded Etienne and Levaque to go 

off with him to Montsou, just as a new gang of skittlers came 

into the Avantage. 

On their way down the cobbled street they were obliged to 

go into Casimir’s bar, and then the Progres Inn, Some of their 

mates hailed them through the open doorway: so there was no 

way they could refuse. Each time that meant another pint, or 

two, if they were kind enough to reciprocate. They stayed for 

ten minutes, and exchanged a few words, and then moved off 

again for a drink next door, quite abstemiously, for they knew 

their beer, and could fill their boots with it quite harmlessly, 

apart from the nuisance of having to keep on pissing out jets of 

clear water, to lower the level. At the Lenfant they bumped 

right into Pierron, who was emptying his second pint, and who 

then downed a third, so as not to refuse to drink their health. 

And they of course followed suit. Now there were four of them, 

as they set out with the idea of trying to see whether Zacharie 

might be at the Tison.* The room was empty, so they called 

for a pint to help them wait for a moment. Then they thought 

of trying the Saint~Eloi, accepted a round from Richomme, the 

deputy, when they got there, and from then on wandered from 

bar to bar without any excuse other than going for a walk. 

‘We must go to the Volcan!’ said Levaque, who had suddenly 

woken up and shown an interest. 

Pan Ill 

153 

The others laughed rather hesitantly at first, but then 

followed their comrade, along with the growing crowd on their 

way to the fair. In the long narrow room at the Volcan, five 

chorus girls paraded about on a trestle stage erected at the 

back of the hall, the dregs of the low life of Lille, gesticulating 

grotesquely and flaunting their cleavages; it cost the punters 

ten sous if they wanted to have one of them behind the trestle 

stage. There were mostly trammers and labourers, and even 

fourteen-year-old pit boys, all the young men from the pits, 

drinking more gin than beer. One or two old miners slipped in 

too, the randy husbands from the villages, those whose mar¬ 

riages were going down the drain. 

As soon as their group had sat down at a little table, Etienne 

latched on to Levaque, to explain his idea of a provident fund. 

He was driven by the missionary zeal of the new believer, 

seeking an audience to convert. 

‘Every member’, he said, ‘could pay in, say, four francs a 

month. As these four francs accumulate, in four or five years 

you’d have quite a pile; and when you’ve got money behind 

you, you’re strong, aren’t you.^ Ready for anything . . . Hey, 

what do you think,^’ 

‘I’ve got nothing against it myself,’ answered Levaque 

absent-mindedly. ‘We must talk about it some time.’ 

He was excited by the sight of an enormous blonde; and 

even when Maheu and Pierron had finished their pint, and 

wanted to leave without waiting for the next performance, he 

was determined to stay. 

No sooner had Etienne followed them outside than he found 

himself face to face with La Mouquette again, as if she had 

been following them. She was still there, looking at him with 

her great, staring eyes, laughing cheerfully and innocently, as 

if to say: ‘Don’t you want me.?’ The young man made a joke 

and shrugged his shoulders. Then she flung off angrily and 

disappeared into the crowd. 

‘Where the hell has Chaval got to.?’ asked Pierron. 

‘That’s a point,’ said Maheu. ‘He’s bound to be at 

Piquette’s . .. let’s go to Piquette’s.’ 

But as the three of them arrived at Piquette’s, they were 

brought up short by the sound of a fight in the doorway. 

154 

Germinal 

Zacharie was brandishing his fist at a stocky and phlegmatic 

Walloon* nailsmith; while Chaval stood looking on with his 

hands in his pockets, 

‘Look, there’s Chaval/ Maheu went on calmly. ‘He’s with 

Catherine.’ 

For a good five hours the tram girl and her sweetheart had 

been walking around the fair. All the way from Montsou there 

was a stream of people, pouring down the wide street with its 

brightly painted houses, filing out into the sunshine and down 

the winding road, forming one long crocodile, like a colony of 

ants that had lost its way crossing the flat, bare plain. The 

inevitable black mud had dried, giving off a black dust, 

floating around like a storm cloud. On both pavements the 

pubs were bursting at the seams, and had set out their tables 

right up to the edge of the road, where the stallholders were 

two deep with their open-air displays, with scarves and mirrors 

for the girls and knives and caps for the lads, not to mention 

the sweetmeats like biscuits and sugared almonds. In front of 

the church there was an archery contest, and a bowls match 

opposite the Company yards. At the corner of the road to 

Joiselle, opposite the Board, people were rushing up to see a 

cock-fight in a wooden ring, where two big red cocks, armed 

with steel spurs, were hacking blood out of each other’s 

throats. Further on, at Maigrat’s, you could win an apron or a 

pair of breeches at billiards. And there were long silences 

while the mob drank and stuffed itself soundlessly, stoking up 

an indigestible mixture of beer and chips in their stomachs, 

festering in the great heat which was aggravated by the frying 

pans blazing away in the open air. 

Chaval bought a nineteen-sou mirror and a three-franc scarf 

for Catherine. At every turn in the road they met old Mouque and 

Bonnemort who had come to the fair, and who were determined 

to see everything there was to see, in a spirit of systematic 

reflection, despite their shaky legs. But their next encounter made 

them feel indignant, for they chanced on Jeanlin in the process of 

inciting Bebert and Lydie to steal bottles of gin from a makeshift 

stall set up on a piece of waste land. Catherine only had time to 

smack her brother, for the little girl had already taken to her heels 

with a bottle. Those damned children w^ould finish up in gaol. 

Part III 

*55 

Then, when they arrived at the Tete-Coupee* bar, Chaval 

wanted to take his beloved in to see the finch contest* that had 

been advertised on a notice on the door for the last week. 

Fifteen nailsmiths from the Marchiennes nailworks answered 

the call, each bringing a dozen cages; and the tiny, dark cages, 

where the finches remained, sightless and motionless, had 

already been hung up on a fence in the courtyard of the pub. 

You had to count which bird sang its song the most times 

during the course of an hour. Every nailsmith took a slate and 

stood behind the cages, marking his own score and noting his 

neighbours’, who kept an eye on him too. Then the finches 

started, both the ‘warblers’ with their throaty song and the 

‘chirrupers’ with their shriller tones, timid at first, chancing a 

few random notes, then egging each other on, accelerating 

their rhythm, and finally carried away by such a spirit of 

emulation that some of them even fell off their perches, dead 

from exhaustion. The nailsmiths spurred them on fiercely with 

their voices, calling out to them in Walloon to keep singing, 

again, come on, just one more time, while a good hundred 

spectators looked on silently, fascinated by this infernal music 

of i8o finches all reproducing the same refrain in dispersed 

order. It was one of the ‘chirrupers’ that won the first prize, 

which was a wrought-iron coffee-pot. 

Catherine and Chaval were there when Zacharie and Philomene 

entered. They shook hands and stayed together. But suddenly 

Zacharie became angry, when he caught a nailsmith, who had 

come over with his comrades out of curiosity, pinching his sister’s 

thighs; and she went very red, but told him to keep quiet, fearing 

a massacre, if Chaval was determined to stop her from being 

pinched and all the nailsmiths were to throw themselves at him. 

She had felt what the man was doing, but preferred to play safe 

and pretend not to notice, and indeed, her sweetheart’s only 

reaction was to sneer at the man, so the four of them left, the affair 

seemingly settled. But hardly had they gone into the Piquette to 

have a drink, when the nailsmith showed up again to make fun of 

them, laughing in their faces with an air of defiance. Zacharie, 

whose family feelings were outraged, rushed at the man. 

‘That’s my sister, you bastard! ... Just you wait, God damn 

you, and I’ll learn you some respect!’ 

Germinal 

156 

People rushed to keep the two men apart, while Chaval, 

remaining quite calm, repeated: 

‘Leave off, it’s my business . *. and I tell you he’s not worth 

the trouble!’ 

Maheu and his group arrived, and he consoled Catherine 

and Philomene, who were already in tears. Soon the whole 

group of them were laughing, and the nailsmith had disap¬ 

peared. To drown the whole problem in alcohol, Chaval, who 

felt quite at home in Piquette’s, offered to buy a round, 

Etienne had to clink glasses with Catherine, as they all drank 

together, the father, the daughter and her sweetheart, the son 

and his mistress, politely wishing each other: ‘Health and 

happiness!’ Pierron then insisted on paying for another round. 

And harmony reigned, until Zacharie was suddenly goaded 

into a new fit of rage on the arrival of his friend Mouquet. He 

called him over to go and settle the nailsmith’s hash, as he put 

it. 

T’ve got to do him in! ... look, Chaval, hang on to 

Philomene and Catherine. I’ll be back.’ 

Then it was Maheu’s turn to pay for the pints. After all, if 

the lad wanted to avenge his sister, it wasn’t such a bad 

example to set. But as soon as she had seen Mouquet arrive, 

Philomene had stopped worrying, and shaken her head: you 

could bet that the two bastards had run off to the Volcan. 

In the evening the whole fair always finished up in the 

dance hall at the Bon-Joyeux.* Widow Desir ran the ball. She 

was a stout matron in her fifties, round as a barrel, but so 

sprightly that she still had six lovers, one for each day of the 

week, she said, and all six together on Sundays. She called all 

the colliers her children, and waxed sentimental over the 

oceans of beer that she had poured down their throats over the 

last three decades; and she prided herself too on the fact that 

not a single tram girl had become pregnant without first 

having learnt how to two-step at the back of her dance hall. 

There were two rooms at the Bon-Joyeux; the bar, with the 

counter and some tables; then immediately adjoining through a 

wide archway was the dance hall, a vast room with a wooden 

floor laid only in the middle, with a brick surround. It had 

been decorated for the event with two streamers of paper 

Part III 

157 

flowers which ran from the corners of the hall and were tied 

up in the middle in a garland made of the same flowers, while 

all round the walls were gilded crests, bearing saints’ names: 

St Eloi, the patron saint of iron workers, St Crispin, the 

patron saint of cobblers, St Barbe, the patron saint of the 

miners, the whole calendar of the guilds. The ceiling was so 

low that when the three musicians mounted the stage, which 

was as high off the floor as a preacher’s lectern, they bumped 

their heads. To light up the room at night there were four oil 

lamps, one hung in each corner of the room. 

That Sunday they started dancing at five o’clock, while the 

sunlight was still streaming through the windows. But it was 

nearly seven o’clock before the hall really got crowded. Outside 

a stormy wind had risen, blowing up great clouds of black 

dust, which got in your eyes and made the frying pans spit. 

Maheu, Etienne, and Pierron, who had come in to find a seat, 

had just met Chaval at the Bon-Joyeux, where he was dancing 

with Catherine, while Philomene stood on her own watching 

them. Neither Levaque nor Zacharie had reappeared. As there 

were no benches round the hall, Catherine went to sit down at 

her father’s table after each dance. They called Philomene 

over, but she preferred to stand. Night was falling, the three 

musicians were in full swing, and the whole hall was seething 

with hips and bosoms swaying amid a turmoil of limbs. The 

sudden lighting of the lamps was greeted with a loud clamour, 

as all at once everything was illuminated, the red faces, the 

dishevelled hairstyles straggling down the girls’ faces, the 

flying .skirts fanning the air with the heavy scent of sweating 

couples. Maheu pointed out La Mouquette to Etienne: she 

looked as round and firm as a suet dumpling, as she spun 

wildly around on the arm of a tall, thin labourer: she had 

obviously lost hope of seducing Etienne and was consoling 

herself with another man. 

It was eight o’clock by the time La Maheude finally ap¬ 

peared, carrying Estelle at her breast and followed by her 

ramshackle army—Alzire, Henri, and Lenore. She had come 

straight over to find her man, certain she would find him 

there. They’d have supper later, nobody was hungry yet, their 

stomachs were lined with coffee and bloated with beer. Other 

Germinal 

158 

women arrived, and La Levaque created a stir of whispers as she 

came in after La Maheude, accompanied by Bouteloup, who was 

holding Philomene’s children, Achille and Desiree, by the hand. 

The two mothers seemed to be in good humour, turning and 

chatting to each other. They had talked the whole thing over on 

the way, and La Maheude had resigned herself to Zacharie’s 

marriage, disappointed at losing her eldest son’s earnings, but 

forced to agree that she couldn’t hold him back any longer 

without being unfair. So she did her best to put a brave face on 

it, although, like any careful housewife, her heart sank as she 

wondered how she would manage to make ends meet, now that 

the main contributor to the housekeeping was leaving. 

‘Sit yourself there, neighbour,’ she said, pointing out a table 

close to the one where Maheu was drinking with Etienne and 

Pierron. 

‘Isn’t my husband with you.?’ asked La Levaque. 

His comrades told her that he would be back soon. Everyone 

moved up to make room for the women, as well as for 

Bouteloup and the kids, although they were so tightly pressed 

in the crush of drinkers that the two parties merged into one. 

They ordered some beer. When she saw her mother and the 

children, Philomene decided to come over and join them. She 

accepted a seat, and seemed pleased at the news that her 

marriage had at last been agreed; then, when they asked after 

Zacharie, she replied in her toneless voice: 

‘I’m expecting him any moment, he’s not far away.’ 

Maheu exchanged glances with his wife. So she had given 

her consent.? He became serious, and smoked in silence. He 

too was seized with doubts about the future, faced with the 

ingratitude of these children who were getting married one 

after the other, leaving their parents in poverty. 

The dancing progressed. As the quadrille came to an end, 

drowning the hall in clouds of red dust, the walls shook, and a 

cornet shrieked its whistle-shrill blasts, like a train sounding 

the alarm. When the dancers finally stopped, they were steam¬ 

ing like horses. 

‘Do you remember,’ said La Levaque, bending over to talk 

into La Maheude’s ear, ‘that you said you’d strangle Catherine, 

if she did anything silly?’ 

Part III 

159 

Chaval brought Catherine round to the family table, and 

both of them stood behind her father and finished their beer. 

‘Well!’ murmured La Maheude resignedly, ‘you say these 

things ... But what relieves me is that she can’t have a baby 

yet, and Fm certain of that! ... Just imagine if she went and 

had a baby, too, and I was forced to marry her offl What 

would we live on then.^^’ 

Now the cornet was piping out a polka; and as the room was 

filled with noise again, Maheu slipped a word under his breath 

to his wife. Why didn’t they take a lodger, Etienne for instance, 

who was looking for digs.? They would have room, since 

Zacharie was leaving them, and that way they would get back 

some of the money he was making them lose. La Maheude’s 

face lit up: of course, what a good idea, they must see to it. 

She seemed saved from starvation once again, and her good 

humour revived so vigorously that she ordered another round 

of beer. 

Meanwhile Etienne was trying to indoctrinate Pierron, ex¬ 

plaining his idea of a provident fund to him. He had got him 

to promise to join, when he unwisely revealed his true aim. 

‘And if we come out on strike, you can see how useful the 

fund will be. We won’t have to give a damn what the Company 

thinks, we’ll have our own funds to call on once we start to 

resist... Well, what do you say to that?’ 

Pierron had lowered his eyes and gone pale. He stammered: 

‘Fll have to think about it ... The best insurance policy is 

really just to behave ourselves properly,’ 

Then Maheu took Etienne to one side and offered right 

away, man to man, to take him in as a lodger. Etienne accepted 

outright, since he was very keen to live in the village, so that 

he could spend more time with his workmates. The affair was 

settled in a couple of moments, although La Maheude said 

they would have to wait for the children’s marriage first. 

And just then Zacharie returned, with Mouquet and Le- 

vaque. All three of them smelled of the Volcan, breathing out 

gin and a musky scent of loose women. They were extremely 

drunk, and looked very pleased with themselves, nudging each 

other and sniggering. When he heard that he was at last to be 

married, Zacharie laughed .so loud that he nearly choked. 

i6o Germinal 

Unperturbed, Philomene declared that she’d rather see him 

laugh than cry. As there were no chairs left, Bouteloup moved 

over to leave half of his to Levaque. And the latter, who was 

suddenly overcome with emotion at seeing them all together as 

one happy family, asked for yet another round of beer. 

‘God almighty! We don’t often have so much fun, do we?’ 

he bellowed. 

They stayed there until ten o’clock. Women kept arriving, 

to meet up with their menfolk and take them home; hordes of 

children trailed after them; and their mothers felt no shame in 

heaving out their breasts as if they were long, pale sacks of 

oats, and pumping up the chubby cheeks of their nurselings 

with a dose or two of milk, while the kids that were already 

toddling were full of beer, and crawled around under the 

tables pissing happily whenever the spirit moved them. The 

evening swam past on a rising tide of beer, with all Widow 

Desir’s barrels being sucked dry, their contents pouring into 

people’s bellies and then streaming out again, through their 

noses, eyes, and elsewhere. They swelled visibly, until everyone 

was sticking his shoulder or knee into his neighbour, and they 

all wallowed warmly and cheerfully in the closeness of the 

contact, A continuous laugh went the rounds, with mouths 

perpetually split from ear to ear. It was so hot that they felt 

they were roasting in an oven, and they let themselves go, not 

minding if their flesh spilled out of their clothes, glowing with 

a golden tint in the smoky light of the men’s pipes; and the 

only problem was the nuisance of having to get up and pee; 

every now and then a girl got up, went down to the back of the 

hall near the pump, lifted her skirts, and then returned. Under 

the fancy paper streamers, the dancers could hardly see each 

other any more for sweat; and this encouraged the pit boys to 

send the tram girls flying flat on their arses, when they were 

able to catch a nice pair of hips off balance. But when a lass 

fell back with a man on top of her, the cornet covered their 

fall with its furious piping, and the trampling feet flowed 

over and round them, as if the ball were a landslide burying 

them alive. 

Someone came up to Pierron and told him that his daughter 

Lydie was lying outside the door on the pavement, where she 

had fallen asleep. She had imbibed her share of the stolen bottle 

and got drunk, so he had to hoist her on to his shoulders, while 

Jeanlin and Bebert, who had held their drink better, followed at 

a distance, finding it all very funny. This gave the cue for the 

families to leave the Bon-Joyeux, and the Maheus and the 

Levaques decided to go back to the village. At that moment old 

Bonnemort and old Mouque were also leaving Montsou, with 

the same sleepwalking gait, lost in the stubborn silence of their 

memories. Thus they all went home together, walking back 

through the fair for the last time, as the fat congealed in ^he 

frying pans, and the inns poured their last pints out into the 

middle of the road. The storm was still brewing up, but they 

were surrounded by louder echoes of laughter, as they left the 

brightly lit buildings and struck out into the darkness of the 

countryside. Torrid gusts of passion wafted through the fields 

of ripened wheat, and many a child must have been conceived 

in the heat of that night. I'hey straggled into the village. 

Neither the Levaques nor the Maheus had much appetite for 

supper, and the latter fell asleep in the process of finishing off 

what was left of the morning’s boiled beef. 

Etienne had invited Chaval to come round to Rasseneur’s 

for another drink. 

‘Count me in!’ said Chaval, when his comrade explained his 

idea about the mutual provident fund. ‘Let’s shake on it. I’m 

your man!’ 

Etienne’s eyes were starting to glimmer with the first signs 

of drunkenness. He cried out: 

‘Yes, let’s agree . .. You see, as far as I’m concerned you can 

keep it all, drink as well as women, as long as you can have 

justice. There’s only one thing that warms my heart, and that’s 

the thought of knocking the bourgeoisie flat on their backs.’ 

CHAPTER III 

Towards the middle of August, Etienne moved in with the 

Maheus, after Zacharie had married and was able to obtain an 

empty house in the village from the Company for Philomene 

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162 

and her two children; and, at first, the young man felt embar¬ 

rassed in the presence of Catherine. 

They were forced into intimate proximity at every moment, 

for he took the elder brother’s place at every turn, sharing 

Jeanlin’s bed beside his big sister’s. When he got up in the 

morning and went to bed at night he had to get dressed and 

undressed alongside her, and watch her while she put on and 

took off her own clothes. When the underskirt came off she 

looked very pale, with the transparent, snowy whiteness typical 

of anaemic blondes; and he felt moved anew every time he saw 

this whiteness against the prematurely worn texture of her 

hands and face, as if she had been dipped in milk from her 

heels to her neck, whose strip of weathered skin stood out 

sharply like an amber necklace. He went through the motions 

of turning away; but he gradually got to know her: first her 

feet, which caught his lowered eyes; then a glimpse of a knee, 

when she slipped under the blanket; then her bosom, with her 

tiny, pointed breasts, when she bent over the wash-basin in 

the morning. And although she didn’t look at him, she hurried 

as fast as she could, so that it took her only ten seconds to get 

undressed and slip into bed beside Alzire, with a swift, slippery 

motion like a grass snake, so that he had hardly got his shoes 

off before she had disappeared, turning her back and leaving 

nothing visible but her hair, tied up into a thick bun. 

Besides, she never had cause for complaint. Although a kind 

of obsession drove him in spite of himself to watch out for the 

moment when she went to bed, he never tried to tease her and 

never allowed his hands to wander. The parents were close at 

hand, and besides, he looked on her with mixed feelings of 

tenderness and resentment, which prevented him from treating 

her as a girl to be desired, amid all the promiscuity of their 

new life in common, washing, eating, resting, and working 

together, with nothing between them ever remaining private, 

even their most intimate needs. The last remaining shreds of 

family modesty were preserved in the ritual of the daily bath, 

which the girl conducted alone in the upstairs room, while the 

men took it in turns to bathe downstairs. 

And in fact by the end of the first month Etienne and 

Catherine already seemed not to notice each other any more at 

bedtime, and they went about the room in a state of undress 

before snuffing out the candle. She had given up trying to 

hurry, and had adopted her previous habit of sitting on the 

edge of her bed to tie up her hair, raising her arms, which 

lifted her shirt up over her thighs; and even if he had no 

trousers on, he would sometimes help her to look for a lost 

hairpin. Habit dulled the shame of being naked, and they 

found it natural, for they were doing nothing wrong and it was 

hardly their fault if there was only one bedroom for all of 

them. Yet suddenly they would feel disturbed, at moments 

when they were thinking of nothing indecent. Sometimes, 

when he had paid no attention to her pale body for several 

nights in a row, he would suddenly notice her nakedness, 

glowing with a whiteness that started him trembling, obliging 

him to turn away, for fear of yielding to the desire to take her. 

And there were other evenings when she herself, for no 

apparent reason, fell prey to an attack of nervous modesty, 

trying to avoid the young man, and slipping between the 

sheets as if she had felt his hands starting to grope her. Then, 

when the candle was out, each realized that the other couldn’t 

sleep and that they couldn’t stop thinking about each other 

despite their fatigue. This left them feeling disturbed and 

withdrawn all the next day, for they preferred the peaceful 

nights when they were able to relax and just be good friends. 

Etienne had only one cause for complaint, which was that 

Jeanlin slept curled up like a gundog. Alzire breathed almost 

imperceptibly while she slept, and Lenore and Henri were to 

be found every morning lying in each other’s arms just as they 

had been put to bed. Nothing could be heard throughout the 

darkened house apart from the snores of Maheu and his wife, 

rising and falling at regular intervals like the bellows of a 

forge. All in all, Etienne found himself better off than at 

Rasseneur’s; the bed was quite good, and they changed the 

sheets once a month. The soup was better too; the only 

problem was that they didn’t eat meat so often. But everyone 

was in the same boat, he could hardly expect to have rabbit at 

every meal for forty-five francs’ rent. These forty-five francs 

helped the family, and they were able to make ends meet, 

although they were always dogged by the odd little debt; and 

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164 

the Maheus showed their gratitude to their lodger, by washing 

and darning his linen, sewing on his buttons, and keeping 

things tidy for him; so that at last he felt himself surrounded 

by the cleanliness and care that a woman brings to the home. 

It was at this time that Etienne started to listen to the ideas 

that were swarming around in his head. Until then he had felt 

only an instinctive rebellion, amid the inarticulate discontent 

of his comrades. He asked himself all sorts of confused ques¬ 

tions: why should some people be so wretched and others so 

rich? Why should the former be trampled underfoot by the 

latter, with no hope of ever taking their places? And the first 

progress he made was to understand how ignorant he was. 

From then on he was devoured by a secret feeling of shame 

and sorrow; since he knew nothing, he didn’t dare talk of the 

things which most moved him, that all men should be equal, 

and that the principle of equity required fair shares for all in 

the wealth of the world. So he found himself seized with the 

uncritical taste for study that strikes the ignorant who are 

hungry for knowledge. By now he was in regular correspond¬ 

ence with Pluchart, who was more learned than he, and deeply 

committed to the socialist movement. He sent away for books, 

and his imagination was inflamed by his hasty reading: espe¬ 

cially a medical work. Miners* Hygiene* where a Belgian doctor 

made a survey of the mortal ailments that afflicted the mining 

community; not to mention the treatises on political economy 

which were full of arid and incomprehensible technical detail, 

the anarchist pamphlets which moved him to tears, copies of 

old newspaper articles which he collected, hoping that they 

would provide him with incontestable proof in some future 

argument. In addition, Souvarine lent him books, and a work 

on co-operative societies had made him dream for a whole 

month of a society built on universal exchange, abolishing 

money and basing the whole of social life on the value of 

labour. His shame at his ignorance diminished, and he grew in 

pride as he came to feel himself capable of thinking. 

During these early months, Etienne enjoyed the ecstasy of 

the convert, his heart overflowing with generous indignation 

against the oppressor, yearning hopefully for the imminent 

triumph of the oppressed. He hadn’t yet got round to creating 

a system out of his mass of reading. Rasseneur’s practical 

claims were mixed up inside him with Souvarine’s destructive 

violence; and every time he left the Avantage, where he joined 

them every day to relieve in public his feelings against the 

Company, he walked away in a kind of dream, where he 

imagined the ]X)puIations of the earth being totally transformed 

without a single window being broken or a drop of blood being 

spilled. In fact, he was vague about how to achieve this, and 

preferred to think that things would proceed smoothly all by 

themselves, for he lost track of the argument as soon as he 

tried to form any specific plans for the rebuilding of society. 

He tended to preach moderation and fail to push his arguments 

to their logical conclusion, even repeating on occasions that 

politics should be banned from the social debate, which was a 

phrase that he had read and which sounded as if it would go 

down well with the phlegmatic colliers that he lived among. 

Now every evening at the Maheus^ they stayed downstairs 

for half an hour before they went upstairs to bed. Etienne kept 

returning to the same topic. Since he had become more 

sophisticated, he found himself more and more offended by 

the promiscuity of village life. Were they animals, to be herded 

together like cattle in the fields, and crammed in so tightly on 

top of one another that they couldn’t change their shirts 

without showing their behinds to their neighbours! And it was 

hardly very good for anyone’s health; and the boys and girls 

were so thrown together that they were bound to go to rack 

and ruin! 

‘Good Lord,’ said Maheu, ‘if we had more money, we’d be 

more comfortable ... All the same, it’s true enough that it 

doesn’t do anyone any good to live on top of each other. It 

always ends up with the men blind drunk and the girls in 

trouble.’ 

And this got the family going, everyone wanting to get his 

word in, while the oil lamp added its fumes to the stale air of 

the room, already reeking with fried onion. No, you had to 

agree life wasn’t much fun. You already had to work like 

beasts of burden at a job which would have been a punishment 

for convicts in olden days, and more often than not you didn’t 

get out alive, and you still didn’t make enough out of it to have 

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166 

meat on the table for dinner. Of course, you got your daily 

bread, you did eat, but so little that it was only just enough to 

keep you alive so you could enjoy being half-starved, piling up 

debts and hounded remorselessly as if you had stolen every 

mouthful you ate. When Sunday came round you were so tired 

that you slept all day. Life’s only pleasures were getting drunk 

or giving your wife a baby; and even then the booze gave you a 

beer belly and the baby would grow up and wouldn’t give a 

damn for you. No, too true, life was not a bowl of cherries. 

Then La Maheude had her say. 

‘The worst of it, I think, is when you realize that nothing 

can change ... When you’re young you think that you’re 

going to be happy later on, there are things you look forward 

to; and then you keep finding you’re as hard up as ever, you 

stay bogged down in poverty ... I don’t blame anyone for it, 

but there are times when I feel sick at the injustice of it all.’ 

There was a moment of silence, as they caught their breath 

for a moment, at the thought of this locked horizon. Only old 

Bonnemort, if he was there, would open his eyes wide in 

surprise, for in his day nobody bothered themselves with that 

kind of question: you were born in the coal, you hacked away 

at the seam, and you asked no questions; whereas nowadays, 

there was something in the air which gave the miners ideas. 

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he would murmur. ‘A pint in 

the hand is a pint indeed ... The bosses are often a load of 

bastards; but there’ll always be bosses, won’t there.? No point 

in getting het up over that.’ 

That set Etienne going. What did he mean? Couldn’t a 

worker think for himself? In fact that was just why things 

would change one day soon, because nowadays the workers 

were starting to think. In the old man’s time, the miners lived 

out their life down the mine like dumb brutes, as if they were 

just machines for excavating coal, always underground, with 

their ears and their eyes blocked to anything happening in the 

outside world. So the rich who ran the country found it easy 

enough to get together and buy and sell the workers and live 

off their very flesh; while the workers didn’t even realize what 

was happening. But now the miners were waking from their 

slumbers in the depths of the earth and starting to germinate 

Part in 

167 

like seeds sown in the soil; and one morning you would see how 

they would spring up from the earth in the middle of the fields 

in broad daylight: yes, they would grow up to be real men, an 

army of men fighting to restore justice. Hadn’t all citizens been 

equal since the Revolution.? Since they all voted in the same 

elections, why should the worker stay the slave of the boss who 

employed him.? The big companies and their machines crushed 

everything in their path and against them you couldn’t even use 

the safeguards you would have had in olden days, when people 

in the same trade joined the same guild and were able to defend 

themselves. For God’s sake, that, and more besides, was why 

everything would have to go up in smoke one day, it was 

education that would do it. You didn’t have to look further than 

your own village: while the grandfathers couldn’t have signed 

their names, the fathers were able to write now, and as for the 

sons, they could read and write like professors. Oh, things were 

moving, sure enough, there was a right little harvest of men 

growing up and ripening in the sunshine! As soon as each man 

wasn’t stuck in the same place all his life long, and you could 

hanker after taking your neighbour’s place, why ever shouldn’t 

you flex your muscles a bit and see if you couldn’t be stronger? 

Maheu was shaken, but he remained deeply suspicious. 

‘As soon as you make a move they hand you your booklet,’* 

he said. ‘The old man’s right, it’s always going to be the miner 

who does the work, and he’s never going to be paid for his 

pains with a leg of roast lamb.’ 

La Maheude had been silent for a moment, but now she 

awoke as if from a dream, 

‘And if only what the vicar said was true, if only the people 

who are poor in this world were rich in the next!’ 

She was interrupted by hoots of laughter, and even the 

children shrugged their shoulders, for none of them believed 

these things out in the open air, and although they hid in their 

hearts a secret fear of the ghosts that haunted the pit, they 

laughed at the empty heavens. 

‘Oh my gawd, yes, the vicar!’ cried Maheu. ‘If they really 

believed that, they’d eat less and work harder, to try at least to 

keep a place warm for them up there later on . .. oh, no, once 

you’re dead, you’re good and damn well dead.’ 

Germinal 

168 

La Maheude sighed deeply. 

‘Oh dear God, oh dear God!' 

Then letting her hands fall to her knees, she said with an air 

of profound weariness: 

‘Well then, there’s no answer, we've had it, the lot of us.' 

They all looked at each other. Old Bonnemort spat out into 

his handkerchief, while Maheu forgot to take his pipe out of 

his mouth although it had gone out. Alzire was listening, 

sitting between Lenore and Henri, who had fallen asleep at the 

table. But it was Catherine above all who sat there with her 

chin in her hands, and kept her crystal-clear eyes fixed on 

Etienne, whenever he cried out in protest, proclaimed his 

faith, and revealed his vision of the enchanted society of the 

future. All around them the village was putting out the lights, 

and nothing could be heard but the stray wails of the odd child 

or the ramblings of some drunkard late home. Inside the room 

the cuckoo clock ticked slowly away, and a cool and humid air 

arose from the sand-covered flagstones, despite the muggy 

atmosphere. 

‘What a crazy idea!' said the young man. ‘Do you need a 

damn God and his paradise to make you happy.? Can't you 

make your own happiness on earth all by yourselves.?’ 

He talked on endlessly, in increasingly passionate tones. 

And suddenly, the bolts locking the horizon burst open to let a 

gleam of light break through and illuminate the grim lives of 

these poor people. The endless chain of poverty, the brutish 

labour, the doomed and bestial life they led, first shorn of their 

fleeces and then led to the slaughter, all this suffering disap¬ 

peared, as if a great blaze of sunshine had swept it away; and 

in a dazzling, magical vision, justice descended from heaven. 

Since God himself was dead, it would be justice which would 

now ensure the happiness of men, by opening up a kingdom of 

equality and fraternity. Just like in fairy-tales, a new society 

would grow up overnight, a great city, shimmering like a 

mirage, where each citizen would fulfil his appointed duties 

and take his part in the community of joy. The rotten old 

world would crumble to dust, a new young breed of humanity 

purged of its crimes would form a single, united race of 

workers, who would have for their motto: to each according to 

Part III 

169 

his worth, and each one's worth to be judged according to his 

efforts. And the dream grew continually vaster and finer, all 

the more seductive for riding higher and higher into the 

realms of impossible fantasy. 

At first La Maheude refused to listen, for she was seized 

with a vague feeling of panic. No, really, it was too fantastic, 

you shouldn’t get carried away by such ideas, for they made 

life even more revolting afterwards, and then you would kill 

anyone who got in your way, just to be happy. When she 

noticed the anxious gleam in Maheu’s eyes, she grew worried, 

seeing him so carried away, and cried out, interrupting 

Etienne: 

‘Don’t you listen, my dear! Can’t you see he’s telling us 

fairy-tales.'^ .. . D’you think the bourgeoisie will ever agree to 

work as hard as we do.^’ 

But little by little the charm started to work on her too. She 

finally started to smile as her imagination was aroused, tempt¬ 

ing her to enter this marvellous world of hope. It was so sweet 

to forget the pain of reality, if only for an hour! When you live 

like an animal, with your nose to the grindstone, you need at 

least a little pocket of lies, so that you can enjoy gloating over 

things you can never possess. And what really excited her, 

what made her agree with the young man, was the idea of 

justice. 

‘You’re right there!’ she cried. ‘For me, once something’s 

just. I’ll go to hell for it . . . And it’s true, it would be only 

justice for us to have fun for a change.’ 

Then Maheu felt able to let himself go. 

‘In the name of all that’s holy! I’m not a rich man, but I’d 

certainly give a hundred sous not to die before I’ve seen ail 

that . .. What an upset, eh.^ Will it happen soon, and how are 

we going to do it.^^’ 

Etienne started talking again. The old society was falling 

apart, for, he affirmed outright, it couldn’t last more than a 

few months longer. As for the means of putting it into practice, 

he seemed to be less sure of himself, confusing his sources 

and, given the ignorance of his audience, feeling no scruples at 

launching into explanations where he himself was out of his 

depth. All the systems he knew of went into his maw, smoothed 

170 Germinal 

over by his certainty of an easy triumph, of a universal 

embrace which would put an end to the misunderstandings 

between the classes; apart from the ill will of one or two 

individual bosses or bourgeois who might perhaps have to be 

made to see reason. And the Maheus appeared to understand 

and approve, accepting his miraculous solutions with the blind 

faith of converts, like the early Christians at the beginnings of 

the Church who awaited the emergence of a perfect society out 

of the very compost of the ancient world. Little Alzire hung on 

every word, imagining happiness as a vision of a very warm 

house where the children would play all the time and eat as 

much as they wanted to. Catherine sat transfixed, still holding 

her chin in her hands, staring at Etienne, and when he fell 

silent, she shivered slightly, as if she suddenly felt cold. 

But La Maheude looked at the cuckoo clock. 

‘Past nine o^clock, what are we thinking ofl We’ll never get 

up in the morning.’ 

And the Maheus left the table, feeling sick at heart, and 

near to despair. They had suddenly felt as if they were going 

to be rich, and now they fell back with a crash into the mire. 

Old Bonnemort, who was leaving for the pit, complained that 

that sort of story didn’t make the soup taste any better; while 

the others went upstairs one by one, suddenly noticing the 

damp on the walls and the foul, fetid air. Upstairs, once 

Catherine, who was last into bed, had blown out the candle, 

Etienne heard her tossing and turning feverishly in the midst 

of the silent and slumbering village before she was able to 

sleep. 

Often there were neighbours who wanted to sit in on their 

conversations; Levaque, who was enthusiastic about the idea of 

fair shares, and Pierron, who felt that prudence commended he 

should leave when they got round to attacking the Company. 

Every now and again Zacharie came in for a moment; but 

politics bored him to tears, he preferred to go out to the 

Avantage to down a pint. As for Chaval, he egged them on, 

calling for blood. Almost every evening he spent an hour at the 

Maheus’; although some of his assiduity might be attributed to 

secret jealousy, the fear that he might lose Catherine. He had 

already started to find her boring, but he felt all the more 

drawn to her, now that she was sleeping alongside another 

man who might be able to take her during the night. 

Etienne’s influence increased; he gradually revolutionized 

the village. It was not an official campaign, which made it all 

the more effective in helping him to grow in everyone’s 

esteem. Despite the suspicion she felt, like any cautious house¬ 

wife, La Maheude treated him considerately, since the young 

man paid his rent on the dot, neither drank nor gambled, and 

always had his nose in a book; when she talked of him to the 

neighbours she vaunted his reputation as an educated lad, and 

they took advantage of this by getting him to write their 

letters. He became a kind of business adviser, who looked after 

their correspondence and was consulted by households on 

delicate issues. In this way, by September he had set up his 

much-vaunted provident fund, which was very insecure at 

first, since the only members were the residents of his village; 

but he hoped soon to enrol colliers from all the pits, especially 

if the Company continued to remain passive, and didn’t raise 

any particular objection. He had just been appointed secretary 

of the association, and even had a small income from the fees 

he charged for his writing. That almost made him seem rich. 

Although a married miner might have trouble making ends 

meet, a clean-living young man with no dependants might 

actually manage to put some savings aside. 

From this moment on Etienne underwent a gradual transfor¬ 

mation. An instinctive pride in his appearance and love of 

comfort, which had been buried beneath his poverty, were 

awakened, and he yielded to the temptation to buy himself 

some woollen clothes and a pair of soft leather boots, and this 

immediately marked him out as a leader, with the whole 

village ready to follow him. This fed his ego with the most 

delicious satisfaction, and the first thrill of popularity went to 

his head: finding himself leading a group of people and giving 

orders, despite being so young and until just recently only an 

unskilled labourer, filled him with pride, and fuelled his dream 

of an imminent revolution with a role for him in it. His very 

features changed, as he took on a reflective air and studied the 

sound of his own voice; while his nascent ambition inflamed 

his theories and whipped up his taste for confrontation. 

172 

Germinal 

However, autumn was drawing to a close and the October 

frosts had turned the little village gardens a rusty colour. 

Behind the straggling lilac trees, the pit boys had stopped 

laying the tram girls flat on their arses on the hutch; and all 

that was left were the winter vegetables, the cabbages iced 

with diamonds of frost, the leeks, and any greens they had 

managed to pickle. Once again the showers whipped across the 

red rooftops and crashed noisily down the gutters into the 

rain-butts. In every house the fires were kept piled high with 

coal burning day and night, poisoning the airless rooms with 

their fumes. Another season of wretched poverty had begun. 

In October, during one of these freezing nights, Etienne, 

who was carried away from talking downstairs, found he 

couldn’t get to sleep. He had watched Catherine slip under the 

covers and blow out the candle. She too seemed quite upset, 

tormented by one of the fits of modesty that still occasionally 

made her hurry her toilet awkwardly and actually show even 

more of her body. She lay still in the darkness like a dead 

creature; but he could tell that she was not asleep; and he 

could feel that she was thinking of him just as he was thinking 

of her: this silent exchange of their innermost feelings had 

never before filled them with such a disturbing sensation. The 

minutes passed, but neither of them moved, and only their 

breathing betrayed their emotion, despite their efforts to con¬ 

trol it. Twice he was on the point of going over to take her. It 

was so stupid for both of them to be wanting each other so 

badly and depriving themselves of the satisfaction. Why should 

they keep fighting their natural desires? The children were 

asleep, and she wanted him urgently, he was sure she was 

waiting for him, choking with frustration, and that she would 

wrap her arms around him silently and keep her mouth tightly 

shut. Almost an hour passed, but he didn’t go over to take her, 

and she didn’t turn round, for fear of calling out to him. The 

longer they lived side by side, the more their friendship placed 

between them a kind of barrier of shame, reluctance, and tact, 

which they could hardly have explained themselves. 

Partin 

173 

CHAPTER IV 

‘Look/ said La Maheude to her man^ ‘if you’re going to 

Montsou for your pay, will you bring me back a pound of 

coffee and a kilo of sugar?’ 

He was stitching one of his shoes himself, to save on the 

repair. 

‘All right!’ he muttered, without stopping work. 

‘Can you go to the butcher’s too? . .. Get a bit of veal, will 

you? It’s so long since we saw any.’ 

This time he looked up at her. 

‘Sounds as if you think I’m going to be paid ten times over 

... The fortnight’s wages are slim pickings with their bloody 

mania for stopping work.’ 

They both fell silent. It was after lunch on a Saturday at the 

end of October. On the pretext that pay-day disrupted work, 

the Company had once again called a halt to production in all 

the pits for the day. Seized with panic at the galloping indus¬ 

trial slump, and reluctant to increase its oversized stockpile of 

coal, it seized on the slightest excuse to stop its 10,000 workers 

from working. 

‘You know that Etienne is waiting for you at Rasseneur’s,’ 

went on La Maheude. ‘Take him with you. He’ll be cleverer 

than you at working it out if they don’t count all of your 

hours.’ 

Maheu nodded in approval. 

‘And talk to those gentlemen about your father’s problem. 

The doctor’s been paid to agree with the management , .. 

That’s right, isn’t it, old man, the doctor’s wrong, you can still 

work, can’t you?’ 

For the last ten days old Bonnemort, whose pins were 

numb, as he put it, had been sitting rooted to his chair. She 

had to repeat the question, and he replied gruffly: 

‘Of course I can go back to work. You’re not done for just 

because your legs hurt. The whole thing’s a plot so they don’t 

have to give me my hundred-and-eighty-franc pension.’ 

La Maheude thought of the old man’s forty sous, which he 

might never bring home to her again, and she cried out in anguish. 

174 Germinal 

‘My God! We’ll all be dead soon if this goes on much 

longer.’ 

‘When you’re dead,’ said Maheu, ‘you don’t feel hungry any 

more.’ 

He finished mending his shoes by knocking in a few nails 

and then decided to leave, ^^llage Two Hundred and Forty 

wasn’t due to be paid until four o’clock. So the men hung about 

and took their time, leaving in ones and twos, pursued by their 

wives, who pleaded with them to come back home straight 

away afterwards, A lot of them gave them errands to run so that 

they wouldn’t go off and get blind drunk in the pubs. 

Etienne was at Rasseneur’s catching up with the news. 

There were worrying rumours abroad, to the effect that the 

Company was getting more and more dissatisfied with the 

timbering. It kept piling on the fines, and a battle looked 

certain. Besides, this dispute was merely a superficial symptom, 

which hid a whole network of more secret and serious issues. 

And just as Etienne arrived, one workmate who had stopped 

for a pint on his way back from Montsou told them that there 

was a notice posted up at the cashier’s; but he wasn’t sure 

what it said. Another man came in and then a third; and each 

of them had a different story to tell. It seemed certain, at ail 

events, that the Company had decided to take action. 

‘What do you think, then?’ Etienne asked Souvarine as he 

sat down at his table, where there was only a packet of tobacco 

to be seen, and nothing to drink. 

The mechanic finished rolling his cigarette, as if they had all 

the time in the world, 

‘I think anyone could have seen it coming. They’re going to 

push you to the brink!’ 

He was the only one who had a lively enough intelligence to 

analyse the situation. He explained it all with a tranquil air. 

The Company had been badly affected by the slump, and was 

obviously forced to cut its expenses to avoid going under; and 

naturally enough it was the workers who were supposed to 

tighten their belts, for the Company needed to save on their 

wages, using any pretext that came to hand. For two months 

now, the coal had been piling up at the pit heads, and nearly 

all the factories had ground to a halt. 

Part III 

ns 

As the Company wanted to avoid a total shut-down, because 

it was terrified at the prospect of the disastrous effect it would 

have on the plant, it was casting around for a compromise 

solution, perhaps a strike, from which its whole work-force of 

miners would emerge cowed, and settle for lower wages. And, 

finally, the new provident fund worried the Company, for it 

posed a threat for the future, whereas a strike would get rid of 

it by emptying it before it was fully funded. 

Rasseneur had sat down beside Etienne, and they both 

listened in consternation. As there was nobody else there 

except Madame Rasseneur, sitting behind the counter, they 

were able to talk openly. 

‘What an idea!’ muttered the landlord. ‘Why take so much 

trouble.^ The Company has nothing to gain from a strike, any 

more than the workers. It’d be better to come to an agreement 

together.’ 

This was the sensible thing to do. He was always in favour 

of making sensible claims. And since his former lodger had 

become so popular, he waxed even more lyrical in defence of 

the politics of what was possible, declaring that if you tried to 

get everything all at once you would end up with nothing at 

all. But behind his plump, jovial, beery exterior he fostered a 

secret jealousy, aggravated by the scarcity of customers, for the 

workers from Le Voreux had started coming in less often to 

drink at the bar and listen to him; and he sometimes even 

ended up defending the Company, forgetting his grudge for 

having been sacked from his job at the mine. 

‘You mean you’re against a strike?’ cried Madame Rasseneur, 

without leaving the bar. 

And when he vigorously replied that he was, she ordered 

him to be quiet. 

‘Well, you’ve got no heart, so let these other gents talk!’ 

Etienne was musing, his eyes riveted to the mug of beer she 

had served him. Finally he looked up. 

‘Everything our friend’s been telling us is perfectly possible, 

and we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the strike, if we’re 

forced into it ... It just so happens that Pluchart has written 

me something very good on that subject. He’s against the 

strike too, for the workers suffer as much as the bosses. 

Germinal 

176 

without getting any useful result. Except that he sees it as an 

excellent opportunity to persuade our men to join his great 

enterprise ... Anyway, here’s his letter.* 

And in fact Pluchart, who was dismayed at the Montsou 

miners’ reluctance to join the International, hoped to see them 

join up en masse if a struggle forced them to pit their strength 

against the Company. Despite his efforts, Etienne hadn’t been 

able to recruit a single member, even if he had put most of his 

effort into the relief fund, which went down much better. But 

this fund was still so meagre that it would run out in no time, 

as Souvarine said, and then the strikers would surely rush to 

join the Workers’ Association so that their brothers from 

countries all over the world would come to their assistance. 

‘How much have you got in the fund?’ asked Rasseneur. 

‘Barely three thousand francs,’ replied Etienne. ‘And you 

know that the management called me to see them the day 

before yesterday. Oh, they were very polite, and they confirmed 

that they wouldn’t prevent their workmen building up a 

reserve fund. But I understood perfectly well that they want to 

control it themselves ... In any case, we’ll have to fight for it.’ 

The publican had started to walk up and down, whistling 

contemptuously. Three thousand francs! What the hell did you 

expect to be able to do with that? You wouldn’t get six days’ 

bread out of it, and if you relied on foreigners, people living in 

England, you might as well take to your bed and give up the 

ghost straight away. Really, this strike was a damn silly idea! 

Then, for the first time, bitter words were exchanged between 

these two men who normally ended up united by their mutual 

hatred of capitalism. 

‘Well, then, and how about you?’ Etienne asked again, 

turning to Souvarine. 

But the latter replied in his usual dismissive tones: 

‘Strikes? A load of rubbish!’ 

Then, amid the angry silence that had fallen, he added gently: 

‘Well, actually, I don’t entirely object, if it makes you 

happy: it ruins some and kills off others, that’s a start, at least 

. . . The only problem is that it would take a thousand years to 

renew the world at that rate. Why don’t you start by blowing 

up the prison that you’re all dying in!’ 

Partin 

177 

With his slim hand he gestured towards Le Voreux, whose 

buildings were visible through the open door. Then he was 

interrupted by an unexpected drama: Poland, the fat pet 

rabbit, who had ventured outside, came bounding inside fleeing 

a hail of stones thrown by a band of pit boys; and in her terror, 

her ears laid back and her tail raised in alarm, she came to seek 

shelter between Souvarine’s legs, scratching at him piteously 

for him to pick her up. When he had placed her on his knees, 

he covered her with his hands, and as he stroked her soft warm 

fur he fell into a familiar state of drowsy reverie. 

Almost immediately, Maheu entered. He didn’t want any¬ 

thing to drink, despite the gracious insistence of Madame 

Rasseneur, who offered her beer for sale as if it were a gift. 

Etienne got to his feet and they both left for Montsou. 

On pay days, Montsou seemed to flock to the Company 

yards, as if celebrating a public holiday on a fine Sunday at the 

fair. Crowds of miners came from all the villages in the 

neighbourhood. The cashier’s office was very small, so they 

preferred to wait outside the door, and congregated in groups 

in the yard, blocking the way with an endlessly renewed queue 

of people. There were hawkers who cashed in on the situation, 

setting up their mobile stalls selling everything including crock¬ 

ery and cooked meats. But it was the pubs above all that made 

a killing, for the miners went for a drink for something to do 

while they were waiting to be paid, and then went back again 

to celebrate being paid as soon as they had the money in their 

pockets. And that was if they were on their best behaviour, 

and not going on to blow the rest of it at the Volcan. 

As Maheu and Etienne moved forward through the groups 

of men that day, they felt a tide of exasperation rising among 

them. There wasn’t the usual carefree attitude to the money 

they pocketed and then started to squander in the pubs. There 

were clenched fists, and angry words flying from mouth to 

mouth. 

‘Is it true, then?’ Maheu asked Chaval, whom he met 

outside Piquette’s. ‘Have the bastards really done it?’ 

But Chaval’s only answer was to spit furiously, looking 

sideways at Etienne, Since the last round of contracts, he had 

signed on again with a different team, but was increasingly 

Germinal 

178 

consumed with envy for this new workmate who set himself 

up as a master, and whose boots the whole village was queueing 

up to lick, so he said. It was further aggravated by a lovers’ 

quarrel, for every time he took Catherine off to Requillart or 

behind the slag-heap, he accused her in the vilest terms of 

sleeping with her mother’s lodger; then, seized with an upsurge 

of brutal desire, he would crush her in his embrace. 

Maheu put another question to him. 

‘Have they got to Le Voreux yet.^’ 

And as Chaval just shook his head and turned his back on 

him, the two men decided to go into the Company yards. 

The cashier’s office was a small rectangular room, divided 

in two by a grille. Five or six miners were sitting waiting on 

benches lined against the walls; while the cashier and his clerk 

were paying another miner who was standing at the window 

with his cap in his hand. Up above the left-hand bench 

someone had posted a yellow notice, which stood out bright 

and clear against the smoke-stained grey plaster walls; and 

there it was that the men had been filing by all day since 

morning. They came in two or three at a time, stood in front 

of it, then went off i without saying a word, with* just a 

twitching of the shoulders, as if their backs had been broken. 

There were two colliers looking at the notice as they went 

in, a young man with a square, brutish head and a very thin 

old man, his face dulled with age. Neither of them could read, 

but the young one spelled out the letters, moving his lips, 

while the old man merely looked on vacantly. Many of the 

men came in and reacted in the same way, since they didn’t 

understand a word of it. 

‘Read it out for us, then,’ said Maheu to his companion, for 

he was no great reader either. 

So Etienne set to reading out the notice. It was an address 

by the Company to each and every miner in all its pits. It drew 

their attention to the fact that, given the lack of care taken over 

timbering, and tired of levying ineffectual fines, the Company 

had resolved to introduce a new mode of payment for the 

cutting of coal. Henceforth, it would pay for the timbering 

separately, so much per cubic metre of wood taken below and 

used, basing the price on the quantity needed to accomplish 

Part III 

179 

the task satisfactorily. The price of a tub-load of coal would 

therefore be lowered to forty centimes in lieu of the fifty given 

previously, paying due regard, however, to the quality and 

accessibility of the coal-face of origin. And a fairly obscure 

calculation followed, attempting to prove that this reduction of 

ten centimes would be exactly compensated for by the payment 

for the timbering. The Company added finally that, in order 

to grant everyone time enough to appreciate the advantages of 

the new system, it would delay its application until Monday, 

I December. 

‘Couldn’t you read more quietly, over there!’ cried the 

cashier. ‘We can’t hear ourselves think.’ 

Etienne finished reading, taking no notice of this remark. 

But his voice was trembling, and when he had finished they all 

continued to stare at the notice. The old miner and his young 

companion seemed to be waiting for some further explanation; 

but then they left, with shoulders bowed. 

‘God in heaven!’ murmured Maheu. 

Both he and his friend had sat down. While the queue 

continued to file past the yellow notice, they sat with their 

heads in their hands, lost in their mental calculations. What 

did the Company take them for.'^ They would never make up 

on the timbering the ten centimes they lost on the tub-load. At 

best they would make eight centimes, .so the Company would 

be robbing them of two centimes, and even that was not 

allowing for the time that the work would take them if they 

did it properly. So that was how the Company was going to 

manage to lower their wages on the sly! It would be lining its 

pockets with money stolen from the miners. 

‘Good God almighty!’ repeated Maheu, looking up again. 

‘We’re a load of silly buggers if we fall for that one!’ 

But the window was free, and he went up to receive his pay. 

The team-leaders went up to the cash desk on their own, and then 

shared out the money between their men, in order to save time. 

‘Maheu and associates,’ said the clerk, ‘Filonniere seam, 

coal-face number seven.’ 

He looked down the lists which were compiled from the 

books in which the overmen at each site recorded each day’s 

tally of tubs filled. Then he repeated: 

i 8 o Germinal 

‘Maheu and associates, Fiionniere seam, coal-face number 

seven ... A hundred and thirty-five francs.’ 

The cashier handed over the money. 

‘Excuse me, Sir,’ stammered the hewer in dismay, ‘are you 

sure there isn’t some mistake.^’ 

He looked at the small pile of coins without picking them 

up, and he felt a cold shiver chill him to the heart. He had 

certainly expected the pay packet to be disappointing, but it 

couldn’t have shrunk so low, unless he had made some mistake 

in his calculations. Once he had paid out their share to 

Zacharie, Etienne, and the other workmate who had taken over 

from Chaval, there would be no more than fifty francs left for 

him, his father, Catherine, and Jeanlin. 

‘No, no, there’s no mistake,’ the cashier replied. ‘You’ve got 

to take off two Sundays and four days laid off: so that makes 

nine days’ work.’ 

Maheu followed his calculation, working out the sum under 

his breath: nine days would make about thirty francs for him, 

eighteen for Catherine, nine for Jeanlin. As for old Bonnemort, 

he had earned only three days’ pay. But even so, by the time 

you added ninety francs for Zacharie and his two workmates, 

it should surely come to more than that. 

‘You’re forgetting the fines,’ the clerk added. ‘Twenty francs 

in fines on account of your shoddy timbering.’ 

The hewer made a gesture of despair. Twenty francs in 

fines and four days laid off! So the sum was correct. And to 

think that he had brought home as much as a hundred and 

fifty francs some fortnights, when old Bonnemort was working 

normally and Zacharie had not yet set up home! 

‘Are you going to take the money or not?’ cried the cashier 

impatiently. ‘You can see that there are people waiting ... If 

you don’t want it, say so.’ 

As Maheu made up his mind to pick up the money with his 

large shaking hand, the clerk asked him to wait. 

‘Wait a moment, I see your name’s on my list. It’s Toussaint 

Maheu, isn’t it? . . . The General Secretary wants to have a 

word with you. You can go in, he’s free.’ 

The surprised workman found himself in an office full of 

antique mahogany furniture, with walls draped in faded green 

Part III 

i8i 

fabric. He spent five minutes listening to the General Secretary^ 

a tall, pale gentleman, who talked at him from behind a pile of 

papers on his desk, without getting up. But the buzzing in his 

ears prevented him from taking in what was being said. He 

understood vaguely that it was about his father, whose retire¬ 

ment at the rate of 150 francs was under consideration, given 

that he was fifty-eight years old and had clocked up fifty years 

of service. Then it seemed to him that the Secretary’s voice 

hardened. It was a reprimand, he was accusing him of going in 

for politics, he was referring to the lodger and his provident 

fund; finally, he was advised not to compromise himself in 

such foolish undertakings, when he was one of the best work¬ 

men in the pit. He wanted to protest but could only come out 

with a jumble of disconnected words, twist his cap nervously 

in his fingers, and withdraw, stammering: 

‘Certainly, Mr Secretary, Sir ... I promise you. Sir .. 

Outside, when he had joined Etienne, who was waiting for 

him, he exploded. 

‘I’m a useless bugger, I should have answered him back! . .. 

We can hardly feed ourselves as it is, and now they’re making 

it worse! You realize it’s you they’re getting at.? He told me the 

village was poisoned .. , And what can we do, for God’s sake! 

Bow down and say thank you? He’s right, it’s the safest thing 

to do.’ 

Maheu fell silent, racked with mixed feelings of anger and 

fear. Etienne looked sombre and thoughtful. They walked back 

through the crowds who were still blocking the road. The 

exasperation of these peaceful people was mounting. There 

were no violent gestures, but you could feel a dark, silent, 

storm cloud gathering ominously over this great mass of 

people. One or two quick thinkers had done their mental 

arithmetic, and the two centimes that the Company would 

claw back on the propping went the rounds, exciting even the 

cooler heads among them. But their rage centred chiefly on 

this disastrous fortnight’s pay, their revolt was driven by 

hunger and by protest at the lay-offs and fines. Already they 

hadn’t enough to eat, what was to become of them if their 

wages fell still lower? In the pubs their anger broke out 

openly, and their throats were so heated with fury that the 

182 Germinal 

little money they had received went straight into the publicans’ 

tills. 

All the way back from Montsou to the village Maheu and 

Etienne didn’t exchange a single word. When Maheu got 

home, his wife, who was alone with the children, noticed 

immediately that he was empty-handed. 

‘Well, you’re a great help!’ she said. ‘What about my coffee 

and my sugar and my meat.^^ A bit of veal wouldn’t have ruined 

you.’ 

He couldn’t answer, choked with pent-up emotion. Then 

his rough face, hardened by years of labour down the mine, 

swelled up with despair, and great warm tear-drops poured 

down his cheeks. He collapsed on a chair, weeping like a child, 

and threw his fifty francs on the table. 

‘There you are!’ he stammered. ‘That’s what I’ve brought 

you . .. That’s our wages, for the lot of us.’ 

La Maheude looked at Etienne and saw that he was silent 

and crushed. So she cried too. How could you keep nine 

people alive for a fortnight on fifty francs.^ Her eldest had left 

them, the old man could no longer move a muscle: they would 

soon be dead. Alzire threw her arms round her mother’s neck, 

upset at hearing her cry. Estelle screamed, Lenore and Henri 

sobbed. 

And similar cries of distress rang out from every corner of 

the village. Now that the men had come home, every family 

lamented their disastrously meagre pay packet. Doors flew 

open, and women came out shouting aloud, as if their protests 

would have burst through the ceilings and walls if they had 

stayed indoors. A fine drizzle was falling, but they didn’t even 

notice it as they went out on to the pavement and called from 

house to house, holding out their hands to show each other 

how little money they had received. 

‘Look! That’s all they’ve given him, who do they think 

they’re kidding.?’ 

‘Look at us! I haven’t even got enough to pay for a fort¬ 

night’s bread.’ 

‘Well what about me! Just work it out, I’ll have to sell my 

shirts again.’ 

La Maheude had gone outside like everyone else. A group 

formed around La Levaque, who was shouting the loudest; for 

her drunken husband hadn’t even returned, she guessed that 

his pay packet, big or small, would be spirited away at the 

Volcan. Philomene was looking out for Maheu, to prevent 

Zacharie from making inroads into the money. And the only 

person who seemed relatively calm was La Pierronne, for that 

sly fox Pierron always managed to fix things, who knows how, 

in order to tot up more hours than his comrades in the 

deputy’s books. But old Ma Brule thought her son-in-law’s 

behaviour was cowardly, and she was at the heart of the angry 

crowd. Her skinny figure could be seen standing erect in the 

middle of the group, shaking her fist in the direction of Mont- 

sou. 

‘To think’, she cried, without naming the Hennebeaus, ‘that 

this morning I saw their maid go by in a carriage! . .. Yes, the 

cook swans off in a two-horse carriage, galloping away to 

Marchiennes to buy fish, you mark my words!’ 

A clamour arose, and the cries became more violent. That 

maid in her white apron who rode off in her masters’ carriage 

to go to market in town provoked their wrath. When the 

workers were dying of hunger, did their masters really need to 

eat fish? They might not eat fish for ever though: the turn of 

the poor would come one day. And the ideas that Etienne had 

sown grew and multiplied in their cries of revolt. They were 

impatient to discover the promised land, and hungered to taste 

their share of happiness, beyond the horizon of their misery, 

which seemed to seal them inside a tomb. The injustice had 

become too great, and it was time they claimed their due, now 

that they were having the bread taken out of their mouths. 

The women, especially, were ready to mount the attack straight 

away, to storm this ideal city of progress, where poverty would 

be outlawed. It was almost dark, and the rain fell harder than 

ever, but they still filled the village with their tearful cries, 

surrounded by hordes of yelping children. 

That evening at the Avantage they decided on the strike, 

Rasseneur resisted no longer, and Souvarine accepted it as a 

first step. Etienne summed up the situation in a word: if it was 

a strike that the Company wanted, then a strike they would 

get. 

184 

Germinal 

CHAPTER V 

A WEEK went by, and the miners carried on working as usual, 

but they were sullen and suspicious, as they prepared for the 

coming struggle. 

At the Maheus’, the fortnight’s pay looked likely to be even 

slimmer than before. And so La Maheude became bitter, 

despite her moderation and good sense. Hadn’t her daughter 

Catherine taken it into her head to spend a whole night out on 

the tiles? The next morning she had returned so tired and sick 

from her adventure that she hadn’t been able to go to the pit; 

and she cried, saying it wasn’t her fault, because it was Chaval 

who had forced her to stay, threatening to beat her if she ran 

away. He was going mad with jealousy, and wanted to stop her 

returning to Etienne’s bed, where he said he was sure that the 

family made her sleep. La Maheude was furious, and after she 

had forbidden her daughter ever to see that brute again, she 

said she would go to Montsou to thump him. But they had 

still lost a day’s work, and now that the girl had a sweetheart 

she preferred not to look for another one. 

Two days later there was another drama. On Monday and 

Tuesday Jeanlin, who was supposed to be at Le Voreux, 

quietly working, took off on a wild escapade across the marshes 

and the forest of Vandame with Bebert and Lydie. He had 

seduced them into God knows what precocious looting and 

tomfoolery together. He received stiff punishment, a thrashing 

administered by his mother outside in the street under the 

eyes of the terrified brats of the village. Would you believe it? 

Her own children, who had depended on her since the day 

they were born and who now ought to be bringing in some 

money of their own at last! And in her cry there was the 

memory of her own hard childhood, with inherited poverty 

making her family see each new baby as a future bread¬ 

winner. 

That morning, when the men and the girl left for the pit. La 

Maheude got out of bed to say to Jeanlin: 

Tou know if you ever do that again, you wicked little 

scoundrel, I’ll tan the skin right off your backside.’ 

At Maheu’s new workings, it was hard going. This part of 

the Filonniere seam was so narrow that the hewers were 

wedged between the walls and the roof, and scraped the skin 

off their elbows as they cut the coal. In addition, it started to 

get very wet, and they were afraid that at any moment there 

might be a sudden flood from one of those torrents that can 

burst through the rocks and even carry a man away. The 

previous day, as Etienne was pulling back his pick after having 

driven it in particularly hard, he had received a spurt of water 

in his face, from some spring; but it had appeared to be a false 

alarm, and had just made the coal-face a bit wetter and nastier. 

Besides, he hardly gave a thought to the likelihood of an 

accident, he quite forgot about the danger himself while he 

was there with his comrades. They lived surrounded by fire¬ 

damp, without even noticing how it weighed on their eyelids 

and span a spidery web over their eyelashes. Sometimes, when 

the flames of their lamps grew paler and bluer than usual, they 

remembered it, and one of the miners would press his head 

against the seam and hear the thin hiss of the gas as if there 

were bubbles of air breaking the surface at every crack in the 

rock. But the most constant menace was of rock falls: for, apart 

from the inadequate timbering, which had always been cobbled 

up in too much of a hurry, the earth was made unstable by the 

water soaking through it. 

Three times that day Maheu had had to get them to 

reinforce the timbering. It was half-past two, and the men 

were about to go back up. Etienne was lying on his side, and 

had just finished dislodging a block of coal, when a distant but 

thunderous roar shook the whole mine. 

‘Whatever’s that?’ he cried, dropping his pick to listen. 

He thought that the gallery had started collapsing behind 

him. 

But Maheu had already thrown himself down the sloping 

coal-face, saying: 

‘It’s a rock fall.. . Come on, quick!’ 

They all tumbled downwards as fast as they could, carried 

onward by an upsurge of fraternal anxiety. Their lamps seemed 

to dance in their hands, as they ran in single file along the 

railway track, surrounded by an eerie silence, with their backs 

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i86 

bent double as if they were galloping on all fours; and without 

slackening their pace, they exchanged a series of hurried 

questions and answers: where? maybe the coal-face? no, it 

sounded lower down! by the haulage, more like! When they 

reached the chimney, they flung themselves into it and were 

swept down on top of each other, not even caring if they got 

battered and bruised. 

Jeanlin, whose skin was still raw from his hiding the day 

before, hadn't dared play truant again. He trotted barefoot 

behind his train, closing the ventilation doors one by one; and 

he occasionally jumped up for a ride on the last tub when he 

thought he was safely out of sight of the deputy, although this 

was forbidden, because of the danger of falling asleep. But his 

greatest entertainment, which occurred every time the train 

drew into a siding to let another one pass, was to go up to the 

front to catch Bebert, who was holding the reins. He would 

slip up stealthily behind his comrade, without his lamp, and 

give him a savage pinch, or spring some other practical joke on 

him. He looked like a wicked monkey, with his yellow hair, big 

ears, and sharp snout, and his tiny green eyes gleaming in the 

darkness. He was unhealthily precocious, and seemed to have 

the obscure intelligence and lively skill of some mutant crea¬ 

ture, half human, half wild. 

That afternoon it was Bataille's turn to work, and Mouque 

had brought him over to the pit boys; and as the horse caught 

its breath in a siding, Jeanlin, who had sneaked up behind 

Bebert, asked him: 

‘What’s that bloody old nag stopped dead for?... He nearly 

broke my legs.’ 

Bebert was unable to reply; he had to hold Bataille back 

because he was getting excited at the approach of the other 

train. The horse had caught the scent of his comrade 

Trompette, still some way off; he had felt drawn to him since 

the day he had seen him delivered to the pit. He felt the tender 

sympathy of an old philosopher wanting to help a young friend 

by teaching him resignation and patience; for Trompette 

couldn’t seem to settle in, and hauled his trains listlessly, 

keeping his head down, blinded by the darkness and still 

yearning for the sunshine. So every time Bataille met him, he 

Part III 187 

stretched out his neck, snorted a greeting, and encouraged him 

with a great wet kiss. 

‘God almighty!’ Bebert swore; ‘there they go slobbering all 

over each other again!’ 

Then, when Trompette had passed, he answered the ques¬ 

tion about Bataille. 

‘Yes, he’s a really crafty bugger, that old nag! . . . when he 

stops like that it’s because he’s seen something in the way, like 

a stone or a hole; and he’s taking care of himself, he doesn’t 

want to do himself an injury . .. There’s something bugging 

him today, over there, behind that door. He pushes at it but 

then he won’t go past. . . Did you notice anything?’ 

‘No,’ said Jeanlin, ‘apart from the water; it’s up to my 

knees.’ 

The train set off again. And on the next trip, when he had 

pushed the ventilation door open with his head, Bataille once 

more refused to proceed, whinnying and trembling. At last he 

suddenly made up his mind, and lunged through the doorway. 

Jeanlin had stayed behind to close the door. He bent down 

and looked at the muddy pool that he was wading through; 

then, raising his lamp, he noticed that the props had bent 

under the constant dripping from the spring. Just then a 

hewer named Berloque, but called ‘Chicot’,* because of his 

habit of chewing and spitting tobacco, came past on his way 

up from his coal-face, hurrying back to see his wife, who was 

in labour. He too stopped to look at the props. And all of a 

sudden, just as the kid was going to run back to catch up with 

his train, they heard a tremendous crash, and a rock fall 

covered both man and child. 

There was a deep silence. The draught from the collapse 

sent a dense cloud of dust billowing along the tracks. And on 

all sides, even from the furthest workings, the miners de¬ 

scended, blinded and choking, with their lamps swinging as 

they ran, but shedding hardly any light on the galloping file of 

black figures scurrying along the bottom of this molehill. 

When the first arrivals bumped into the rock fall, they called 

out, to warn their comrades. A second group, arriving from 

the further coal-face, found themselves on the other side of the 

mass of earth, which had cut the tunnel in two. They quickly 

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188 

realized that the roof had only collapsed over a distance of 

about ten metres. The damage wasn’t particularly serious. But 

their hearts missed a beat when they heard a strangled moan 

from beneath the rubble. 

Bebert left his train and rushed up repeating: 

‘Jeanlin’s underneath it! Jeanlin’s underneath it!’ 

At that very moment Maheu tumbled down out of his 

chimney, accompanied by Zacharie and Etienne. He was seized 

with horror and despair, and could only keep swearing: 

‘God almighty! God almighty! God almighty!’ 

Catherine, Lydie, and La Mouquette, who had also rushed 

up, started sobbing and screaming with terror, at the sight of 

the terrifying chaos, made worse by the darkness. The men 

tried to shut them up, but they panicked and screamed louder 

at every moan they heard. 

Richomme, the deputy, had run up, and he was upset by 

the news that neither Negrel, the engineer, nor Dansaert was 

at the pit. He pressed his ear to the pile of rocks to listen; and 

he finally declared that it didn’t sound like a child, there must 

be a man under there. Maheu had already called Jeanlin’s 

name a dozen times. But not a whisper could be heard in 

reply. The kid must have been crushed. 

But still the monotonous moaning could be heard. They 

called to the dying man, asking who he was, but they heard 

only more groans in reply, 

‘Hurry up!’ repeated Richomme, who had already started to 

organize the rescue. ‘We’ll talk later,’ 

The miners were digging into the rock fall from both ends 

with picks and shovels. Chaval worked away silently alongside 

Maheu and Etienne; while Zacharie saw to the removal of the 

rubble. It was time for the end of their shift, and nobody had 

eaten, but no one was going home for his soup while his 

comrades’ lives were in danger. They did realize, however, 

that the whole village would be anxious if they didn’t see 

anyone return, so they proposed to send the women back up. 

But neither Catherine nor La Mouquette, nor even Lydie, 

wanted to go, for they were rooted to the spot by the need to 

know what was happening, and they were helping to clear the 

debris. So Levaque took it upon himself to go up there to 

announce the landslide, and describe it as a routine incident 

that they were in the process of clearing up. It was nearly four 

o’clock; in less than an hour the workmen had done the 

equivalent of a day’s work; and already half of the earth would 

have been removed if there hadn’t been a new fall of rocks 

from the roof. Maheu flung himself into the task with such 

fury that he dismissed a colleague with a savage gesture when 

the man came up and offered to take over for a while. 

‘Go easy!’ said Richomme at last. ‘We’re nearly there ... we 

mustn’t finish them off’ 

And the moaning was indeed getting louder and clearer. 

The workers had been guided by this continual moaning 

sound; and now they seemed to hear the man breathing at the 

very tips of their picks. But suddenly he stopped. 

They all looked at each other in silence, shivering as they 

felt the cold wing of death brush past them in the darkness. 

They dug away, bathed in sweat, their muscles stretched to 

breaking-point. They uncovered a foot, and from then on they 

pulled the earth away with their bare hands, freeing the limbs 

one by one. The head hadn’t been damaged. They shone the 

lamps on him, and murmured his name, Chicot. He was still 

warm, but his spine had been broken by a rock. 

‘Wrap him in a blanket, and put him on a tub,’ the deputy 

ordered. ‘Now for the kid, and let’s get a move on.’ 

Maheu struck a final blow with his pick and broke through 

to the men who were clearing the rock fall from the other side. 

They shouted out that they had just found Jeanlin unconscious, 

with both legs broken, but still breathing. His father picked 

him up in his arms, and all he could utter were repeated cries 

of ‘God almighty!’ through his clenched teeth; while Catherine 

and the other women had started screaming again. 

They hurriedly formed a procession. Bebert had brought 

Bataille back, and hitched him to two tubs: in the first lay the 

corpse of Chicot, supported by Etienne; and in the second was 

Maheu, squatting down holding the unconscious Jeanlin in his 

lap, covered by a piece of woollen cloth torn from one of the 

ventilation doors. And off they set, walking in step. On each 

tub they had hung a lamp, shining like a red star. Then behind 

came a line of miners, some fifty shadowy figures. By now 

Germinal 

190 

they were broken with fatigue, their feet caught and slipped in 

the mud, looking like a mournful herd of cattle decimated by 

an epidemic. It took them nearly half an hour to reach the 

loading bay. The subterranean convoy seemed never-ending, 

as it wound its way in thick darkness past the crossroads, 

round the bends, and down the tunnels. 

At the loading bay, Richomme had already gone on ahead 

and given the order to reserve an empty cage. Pierron loaded 

the two tubs immediately. In one of them Maheu held his 

wounded child on his knees, while in the other Etienne had to 

guard Chicot’s body, holding it in his arms to keep it still. 

When the workmen had piled into the other levels, the cage 

ascended. It took two minutes. An icy rain fell from the lining 

of the shaft, and the men kept looking impatiently upwards, 

eager to see daylight again. 

Luckily a pit boy who had been sent to fetch Dr Vander- 

haghen had found him in and brought him along. Jeanlin and 

the dead man were carried into the deputies’ room, where 

there was always a great fire blazing throughout the year. 

Someone put away the buckets of hot water which always 

stood ready for people to wash their feet in; and when they 

had spread out two mattresses on the flagstones they laid the 

man and the child down on them. Only Maheu and Etienne 

were allowed in. Outside there was a group of tram girls, 

miners, and youths who had come running up to see what was 

happening, and were talking in whispers. 

As soon as the doctor had glanced at Chicot, he murmured: 

‘Done for!... You can wash him now.’ 

Two supervisors undressed him, then sponged down his 

body, which was still black with coal-dust and smeared with 

the sweat of his labour. 

‘His head’s all right,’ the doctor remarked, kneeling on 

Jeanlin’s mattress. ‘So’s his chest .. . Ah! It’s his legs that 

caught it.’ 

He undressed the child himself, loosening his cap and 

slipping off his jacket and breeches with the skill of a nurse¬ 

maid. And the poor little body appeared, as thin as a stick- 

insect, smeared with black dust and yellow mud, mottled with 

bloodstains. You couldn’t tell what was what, so they had to 

wash him, too. As they passed the sponge over his body he 

appeared to become even thinner, for his flesh was so pale and 

transparent that you could see his bones. It was tragic to see 

this degenerate offshoot of a wretched breed, this insignificant, 

suffering creature, half-crushed by the collapse of the rocks. 

When he was clean, they discovered the bruises on the thighs, 

two red streaks on the white skin. 

Jeanlin regained consciousness, and groaned. Maheu stood 

at the foot of the mattress watching him, with great tears 

rolling down his cheeks. 

‘Are you the father, then.^’ asked the doctor, raising his 

head. ‘No need to cry, you can see he^s not dead ... Better 

come and help me.’ 

He noted that there were two simple fractures. But the right 

leg worried him: he’d probably have to lose it. 

At that moment Negrel, the engineer, and Dansaert, who 

had at last been informed, arrived with Richomme. Negrel 

listened to the deputy’s account with an air of exasperation. 

He exploded: still the same old story with those damn props! 

Hadn’t he repeated a hundred times that someone would lose 

his life! And those brutes dared to threaten to strike if they 

were forced to put up better props! And the worst thing was 

that the Company would have to pay for the damage now. 

What was Monsieur Hennebeau going to think? 

‘Who is it?’ he asked Dansaert, who was silently studying 

the body as they wrapped it in a sheet. 

‘It’s Chicot, one of our good workmen,’ the overman replied. 

‘He’s got three children . ., poor bastard!’ 

Dr Vanderhaghen asked for Jeanlin to be transported imme¬ 

diately to his parents’ house. Six o’clock struck and twilight 

was falling already, so they ought to move the corpse too; the 

engineer gave orders for horses to be harnessed to the hearse, 

and for a stretcher to be brought. The wounded child was put 

on the stretcher, while they loaded the dead man and his 

mattress on to the hearse. 

The tram girls were still waiting outside the door, chatting 

with the miners who had lingered on to see what would 

happen. When the deputies’ room opened again, silence de¬ 

scended on the group. A new procession formed, with the 

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192 

hearse in front and the stretcher behind, followed by the 

others, walking in line. They left the yard, and walked slowly 

up along the steep road to the village. The first November 

frosts had stripped the vast plain bare, and it seemed to be 

buried alive by the gathering darkness which fell like a shroud 

from the leaden sky. 

Then Etienne advised Maheu quietly to send Catherine to 

warn La Maheude, to soften the blow. Her father, who was 

following the stretcher looking distracted, nodded his agree¬ 

ment; and the girl ran off quickly, for they were nearly there 

now. But already the familiar black outlines of the hearse had 

been sighted. Women rushed crazily out on to the pavement, 

and three or four of them started running wildly around, 

bareheaded. Soon there were thirty of them, then fifty, all 

choking with the same terror. Someone was dead then? Who 

was it? Levaque’s story had reassured them all at first, but 

now it threw them into nightmarish fantasies: it wasn^t one 

man, but ten who had perished, and the hearse would bring 

them back one by one. 

Catherine had found her mother disturbed by a premonition: 

and as soon as she stammered out her first words, her mother 

cried out: 

‘Your father’s dead!’ 

Her daughter protested in vain, and tried to tell her about 

Jeanlin, but La Maheude didn’t stop to listen, she ran off 

straight away. And when she saw the hearse come past the 

front of the church she collapsed, looking deathly pale. Some 

of the women stayed rooted to their doorsteps, struck dumb 

with fear, turning their heads to follow the progress of the 

hearse, while others followed, trembling at the thought of 

discovering whose house the procession would stop at. 

The hearse went past; and behind it La Maheude noticed 

Maheu walking alongside the stretcher. Then, when they put 

the stretcher down at her door, when she saw Jeanlin alive, 

with his legs broken, her reaction was so violent that she 

choked with anger, stammering with dry eyes: 

‘Now we’ve seen everything! Now they’ve started hacking 

our children to pieces! ,.. Both his legs, my God! What am 1 

going to do with him?’ 

Part III 

193 

‘Just you be quiet.’ said Dr Vanderhaghen, who had come 

along to bandage up Jeaniin. ‘Would you prefer to see him 

dead and buried down there?’ 

But La Maheude flew into an ever fiercer rage, surrounded 

by the tears of Alzire, Lenore, and Henri. While helping the 

wounded boy and passing the doctor whatever he needed, she 

cursed her fate, asking where they expected her to find the 

money to look after her invalids. Wasn’t it enough to have the 

old man on her hands, without the kid losing his feet into the 

bargain? And she didn’t let up, while other cries, heart-rending 

laments, emerged from a neighbouring house: it was the wife 

and children of Chicot who were weeping over the body. 

It was pitch-dark now, and the exhausted miners were at 

last able to eat their soup, while the village was plunged in a 

gloomy silence, broken only by these piercing cries. 

Three weeks passed. They had managed to save both Jean- 

lin’s legs from amputation, but he would always walk with a 

limp. After an inquiry, the Company had reluctantly offered 

fifty francs in assistance. In addition, it had promised to find 

the young cripple a surface job as soon as he was fit. Their 

poverty would still be worse than before, however, for the 

father had been so shaken that he fell ill with a high fever. 

But by the Thursday, Maheu had returned to the pit. Sunday 

came. And that evening Etienne discussed the looming deadline 

of the first of December, wondering anxiously whether the 

Company would carry out its threat. They stayed up until ten 

o’clock waiting for Catherine, who must have stayed out late 

with Chaval. But she didn’t come home. La Maheude shut her 

door and bolted it furiously without saying a word. Etienne felt 

disturbed at the thought of the empty bed where Alzire took up 

so little room, and he found it very difficult to get to sleep. 

The next day there was still no sign of her; and only in the 

afternoon on their return from the pit did the Maheus learn 

that Chaval was keeping Catherine to live with him. He kept 

creating such terrible scenes that she had decided to stay. To 

avoid recriminations, he had abruptly walked out of Le Voreux 

and signed on at Jean-Bart, Monsieur Deneulin’s pit, where 

Catherine was joining him as a tram girl. But the young couple 

would continue to live in Montsou, at Piquette’s. 

194 

Germinal 

At first Maheu said he would go and hit the man and bring 

his daughter back with a few g(K)d kicks up the backside. Then 

he raised his arms in resignation: what was the point.? It was 

always happening, you couldn’t prevent girls getting shacked 

up when they’d made up their minds. It would be better to sit 

quietly and wait for them to get married. But La Maheude 

didn’t take things so well. 

‘Did I beat her, when she took up with this Chaval.?’ she 

shouted at Etienne, who sat listening, looking pale and very 

silent. ‘Come on, I want you to tell me, you’re a fair-minded 

man ... We left her free enough, didn’t we? Because they all 

go the same way in the end, for heaven’s sake. Look at me, I 

was expecting when her father married me. But that didn’t 

make me run off and leave my parents; I’d never have played a 

dirty trick like taking my wage packet when I was that young 

and giving it away to a man who didn’t need it . . . Oh, it’s 

disgusting, don’t you think? It’s enough to put you off having 

children!’ 

And as Etienne still made no reply apart from occasionally 

nodding his head, she persisted. 

‘A daughter who went out wherever she liked every evening! 

What’s got into her! Why couldn’t she wait and help us get 

through our bad patch and then let me get her married? It’s 

natural enough, isn’t it? You have a daughter so she can go out 

to work ... And there you are, we were too kind to her, we 

shouldn’t have let her go out and have fun with a man. You 

give them an inch and they take a mile.’ 

Alzire nodded her head in agreement. Lenore and Henri, 

who had been upset by this storm, sobbed quietly, while their 

mother launched into a catalogue of their sorrows: first they 

had had to marry off Zacharie; then old Bonnemort just sat 

there on his chair with his twisted feet; then there was Jeanlin 

who would have to spend another ten days in bed, with his 

bones still not stuck back in place; and now the last straw, that 

bitch Catherine gone off with a man! The whole family was 

falling apart. Only Father was left now to go down the mine. 

How could they live on Father’s three francs? There were 

seven of them, even if you didn’t count Estelle. You might as 

well throw the whole bloody lot of yourselves in the canal. 

Part III 

195 

‘It’s not going to get us anywhere if you sit around moping/ 

said Maheu in a low voice. ‘Who knows, there may be worse to 

come.’ 

Etienne, who had been staring at the stone floor, with his 

eyes lost in a vision of the future, raised his head and 

murmured: 

‘Ah! The time has come, the time has cornel’ 

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PART IV