Emile Zola Germinal (Oxford) PART V

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

PART V

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CHAPTER I 

By four o’clock, the moon had set and the night was pitch- 

black. Everyone was asleep at the Deneulins’ old brick house, 

which stood dark and silent, with its doors and windows 

closed, at the end of a large, unkempt garden which separated 

it from the Jean-Bart pit. On the other side of the house you 

could see the deserted road to Vandame, a large country town 

about three kilometres away. 

Deneulin, who was tired from spending part of the previous 

day down underground, was snoring, with his face pressed up 

against the wall, and dreaming that someone was calling him. 

He finally woke up, heard a real voice, and ran to open the 

window. It was one of his deputies, standing in the garden. 

‘What is it,^’ he asked. 

‘Sir, it’s a rebellion;* half the men don’t want to work any 

more and are stopping the others from going down.’ 

He didn’t quite take it in, for his head was heavy and 

buzzing with sleep, and the freezing air shocked him like a 

cold shower. 

‘Make them go down, for Christ’s sake!’ he stammered. 

‘It’s been going on for an hour now,’ the deputy went on. 

‘So we thought we ought to fetch you. You’re the only person 

who could get them to see sense.’ 

‘All right, I’m coming.’ 

He got dressed quickly, with his mind clear now, but very 

worried. They could have looted the house, for neither the 

cook nor the manservant had moved. But on the other side of 

the landing there was a whispering of anxious voices; and as he 

emerged, he saw his daughters’ door open, and they both 

appeared in their white dressing-gowns, which they had hastily 

put on. 

‘What’s happening. Father?’ 

The elder sister, Lucie, was already twenty-two, and she 

was tall, dark, and distinguished-looking; while Jeanne, the 

younger, just nineteen, was small, with golden hair, and a 

gentle, gracious air. ‘Nothing serious,’ he replied, to reassure 

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them. ‘It seems that there’s some disturbance from trouble¬ 

makers over there. I’m going to have a look.’ 

But they protested; they wouldn't let him leave without 

having something warm to eat. Otherwise he’d come home ill, 

with a chill on his stomach, as usual. He struggled to evade 

them, and gave his word of honour that he was in too much of 

a hurry. 

‘Listen,’ said Jeanne finally, wrapping her arms round his 

neck, ‘at least drink a glass of rum and eat a couple of biscuits; 

or I’ll stay like this and you’ll have to carry me along with you.’ 

He had to resign himself to it, swearing that the biscuits 

would choke him. But they were already half-way downstairs, 

each carrying her candle. Down in the dining-room they 

hurried to serve him, one pouring out the rum, the other 

running to the study to fetch a packet of biscuits. Having lost 

their mother very young, they had been brought up on their 

own rather laxly by their father, who spoiled them, the elder 

haunted by her dream of singing on stage, the younger crazy 

about painting, where she showed a singular boldness of taste. 

But when they had to reduce their standard of living, after 

some major business difficulties, these extravagant-looking girls 

had suddenly turned into wise and shrewd housewives, whose 

eyes could detect a single centime missing from the accounts. 

And now, despite their boyish, artistic style, they held the 

purse strings, counted the pennies, argued with tradesmen, 

mended the same dresses several times over, and all in all 

managed to survive with dignity the increasing pressures on 

the household finances. 

‘Eat up, Daddy,’ repeated Lucie. 

Then, noticing that he was plunged in his thoughts again, 

looking silent and sombre, she was seized by another attack of 

anxiety. 

‘It must be serious, mustn’t it, if you’re making such a face,^ 

. . . Look, we’ll go with you, they can do without us for lunch.’ 

She was referring to a party planned for that morning. 

Madame Hennebeau was to go in her carriage to fetch Cecile 

at the Gregoires’ first; then she would come and collect them, 

and they were going to Marchiennes, to Les Forges, where the 

manager’s wife had invited them to lunch. It was an opportu- 

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nity to visit the workshops, the blast-furnaces, and the coke 

ovens. 

‘Of course we’ll come,’ declared Jeanne in turn. 

But he became angry. 

‘What an idea! I’ve already told you it’s nothing ... Be so 

kind as to snuggle back down under the bedclothes, and get 

dressed again for nine o’clock, as you were meant to.’ 

He kissed them goodbye, and hastened to leave. They could 

hear the noise of his boots fading away as he walked across the 

frozen soil of the garden. 

Jeanne replaced the cork carefully in the rum bottle, while 

Lucie locked the biscuits up in the cupboard. 

The room had the cold cleanliness of a household where 

every meal has to be carefully calculated. And they both took 

advantage of their early rising to see if anything had been left 

lying around from the previous evening. There was a napkin 

unfolded, the manservant would be scolded. Then at last they 

went back upstairs again. 

While he walked briskly down a short cut along the narrow 

paths leading through his vegetable garden, Deneulin thought 

of the threat to his fortune, his share in Montsou, the million 

that he had made and had dreamed of multiplying tenfold, but 

which was so threatened today. He had had an uninterrupted 

run of bad luck, enormous and unforeseen repairs, ruinous 

rates of return, then the disaster of this industrial slump, just 

when they had started to make a profit. If the strike spread to 

his pit, he would be finished. He pushed open a little gate: 

amid the general darkness, he could just make out the buildings 

at the pit-head, from the darker shadows they cast, and the 

occasional flickering gleam of a lantern. 

Jean-Bart was smaller than Le Voreux, but its modern plant 

made it an attractive pit, according to the engineers. They had 

not only enlarged the shaft by one and a half metres, and dug 

down to a depth of 708 metres, they had renewed all the 

equipment and fittings, installed a new winding engine and 

new cages, everything being chosen for its up-to-date scientific 

perfection; and there was even a hint of elegance in the 

buildings; the screening shed had a carved frieze, the head- 

gear was adorned with a clock, the landing-stage and the 

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engine-house had the curved forms of a Renaissance chapel, 

adorned by a chimney whose black and red bricks were 

patterned with a spiral mosaic. The pump was situated at the 

other shaft owned by the concession, at the old Gaston-Marie 

pit, which was entirely reserved for drainage. Jean-Bart had 

only two wells, one on each side of the winding shaft, one for 

the steam-powered ventilator and one for the ladders. 

Chaval had been the first to arrive, at three in the morning, 

demobilizing his comrades, persuading them to follow the 

Montsou example and ask for a rise of five centimes per tub. 

Soon the four hundred underground workers had spilled over 

from the changing shed into the entrance hall, amid a tumult 

of gestures and cries. Those who wanted to work stood bare¬ 

foot, with a pick or a shovel under one arm; while the others, 

still wearing their clogs, with their coats over their shoulders 

because of the cold, were blocking the way to the shaft; and 

the deputies had shouted themselves hoarse trying to restore 

order, begging them to listen to reason, and not to get in the 

way of the men who had the sense and decency to go down to 

work. 

But Chaval lost his temper when he saw Catherine in her 

breeches and jacket, and her blue cap pulled down over her 

ears. When he had left home he had told her roughly to stay in 

bed. But she was in despair over this lost work and had 

followed him regardless, for he never gave her any money, and 

she often had to pay for both of them; so, what was to become 

of her if she couldn’t earn any more herself? She was haunted 

with the fear of ending up like many a starving and homeless 

tram girl, in the brothel* at Marchiennes. 

Tor God’s sake!’ shouted Chaval. ‘What the hell are you 

doing here.^’ 

She blurted out that she didn’t have a private income and 

needed to work. 

‘So you’d stand in my way, would you, you bitch! ... Go 

home straight away, or I’ll kick you back there personally with 

my boot up your backside!’ 

She shrank back in fear, but she didn’t leave, as she was 

determined to see how things would turn out. 

Deneulin arrived, making his entrance through the stairway 

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of the screening shed. Despite the dim light of the lanterns, he 

took in the whole scene with one swift glance, the crowd 

drowned in the darkness, but whose every face he knew, the 

hewers, the loaders, the labourers, the tram girls, even the pit 

boys. In the great hail, which was still clean and new, work 

had stopped and was waiting: the engine was under pressure, 

and released little jets of steam; cages hung motionless from 

the cables, tubs lay abandoned on the tracks, blocking the way 

across the iron floor. Only eighty or so lamps had been taken 

out, the others were still burning in the lamp depot. But a 

word from him would surely be enough, and the whole process 

of labour would spring to life again. 

‘Well then, my children, whatever is happening.?^’ he asked 

at the top of his voice. ‘What are you angry about.^ Explain 

what the matter is, and we 4 l sort it all out.’ 

He commonly adopted a paternal tone with the men, al¬ 

though he demanded hard work. He was brusque and authori¬ 

tarian, and tried at first to win them over with sudden blasts of 

brash bonhomie; he was often liked, and above all the workers 

respected his courage, for he would frequently go down to the 

coal-face with them, and he was the first to brave the danger 

when the pit was shaken by an accident. Twice he had had 

himself sent down on a rope looped under his arms after a 

firedamp explosion which had discouraged the boldest among 

them. 

‘Look,’ he went on, ‘you’re not going to make me wish that 

I hadn’t trusted you, are you.^ You know that I refused to let 

them send a garrison of gendarmes here ... Just take your 

time and tell me what’s on your minds. I’m listening.’ 

Now they all fell into an embarrassed silence, and moved 

away from him; and it was Chaval who finally spoke up: 

‘You see. Monsieur Deneulin, we can’t go on working like 

this, we need five centimes more for each tub.’ 

He looked surprised. ‘Five centimes! Whatever gave you 

that idea.^ 1 have no quarrel with your timbering, I don’t want 

to set a new tariff like the Board at Montsou.’ 

‘That’s as may be, but our comrades at Montsou have got 

the right idea. They’ve rejected the tariff, and they want a rise 

of five centimes, because there’s no way we can work decently 

300 Germinal 

with these new rates ... We want five centimes more, don’t 

we, ail of us?’ 

Voices were raised in approval, the noise grew again and 

they started to brandish their fists. Gradually they had all 

closed in on him, forming a circle. 

Deneulin’s eyes blazed, and he clenched his fist, for he was 

a man with a taste for strong rule, and he was afraid of 

yielding to the temptation to seize one of them by the scruff 

of the neck. He knew it was better to win the argument 

rationally. 

‘You want five centimes, and I grant you that the job is 

worth it. But I just can’t give you the money. If I did. I’d 

quite simply go bust ... You must realize that I’ve got to 

make a living in the first place, if I’m going to pay you a living 

wage. And I’m at the end of my tether, the slightest increase 

in costs will send me under . .. Remember, two years ago, 

when we had the last strike, I gave in, and I could do the same 

again. But that pay rise was a ruin, all the same, that’s why 

I’ve been struggling for the last two years ... Today I’d just 

as soon shut up shop straight away, rather than not know 

where to find the money to pay you with next month.’ 

Chaval laughed cynically at the sight of this master who 

talked so openly of his business. The others looked away, 

incredulous and unmoved, unable to get into their heads the 

idea that a boss didn’t earn millions on the backs of his 

workers. 

Then Deneulin really insisted. He explained how he had to 

struggle against Montsou, which was always on the look-out to 

do him down, if he was ever unlucky enough to come a 

cropper one day. The rivalry was fierce, and forced him to 

economize, especially since the great depth of Jean-Bart in¬ 

creased the cost of extraction, and this disadvantage was barely 

compensated by the thickness of the coal-seams. He would 

never have agreed to raise their wages after the last strike, if he 

hadn’t been forced to imitate Montsou for fear of losing his 

work-force. And he threatened them with the consequences: 

what sort of a success would it be for them if they forced him 

to sell out and they had to come under the iron fist of the 

Board? He, Deneulin, wasn’t an absentee landlord, a distant 

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god; he wasn’t one of those shareholders who pay managers to 

fleece the miners without ever going to see them; he was a real 

boss, he didn’t just commit his money to the job, but his 

intelligence, his health, and his very life. A stoppage of work 

would mean death, no less, for he had no stocks behind him, 

and yet he had to fulfil his orders. And again, the capital he 

had sunk in his plant couldn’t just be left to rot. How could he 

fulfil his commitments? Who would pay the interest on the 

loans that his friends had made him? He would go bankrupt. 

‘So there you are, my fine friends!’ he concluded. ‘I wish I 

could convince you ... You can’t ask a man to sign his 

own death warrant, can you? And whether I give you your 

five centimes or let you go on strike, it’d still be like putting 

my head on the block.’ 

He fell silent. People started muttering among themselves. 

A group of the miners seemed to hesitate. One or two went 

back towards the shaft. 

‘At least,’ said one of the deputies, ‘let everyone decide 

freely . , . Who wants to work?’ 

Catherine was one of the first to come forward. But Chaval 

was furious, and pushed her back, shouting: 

‘We’re all agreed here, you’d have to be a real bastard to let 

your workmates down!’ 

From that moment on there was no hope of compromise. 

People started shouting again, there was a rush to chase people 

away from the entrance to the shaft, and some were nearly 

crushed against the walls. For a moment the manager tried 

desperately to struggle single-handed to hold back the crowd; 

but it was a pointless act of folly, he had to withdraw. And he 

remained for a few moments inside the clerk’s office, sitting 

breathless on a chair, so dismayed at his inability to act that he 

couldn’t muster a single idea. Finally he calmed down, he 

asked one of the supervisors to bring Chaval to see him; then, 

when the latter had agreed to talk to him, he waved the crowd 

away: 

‘Leave us alone.’ 

Deneulin’s idea was to see what this strapping fellow was 

made of. As soon as he heard him start talking, he guessed that 

he was vain, and consumed with envious urges. So he tried to 

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flatter him, appearing to be surprised that a workman of his 

class should take the risk of compromising his future prospects. 

From the way he talked he made it sound as if he had marked 

him out some time ago for rapid promotion; and he finished 

off by openly offering to make him a deputy later on. And 

Chaval listened, silently, with clenched fists, but then he 

gradually relaxed. He ran through a whole scenario in his 

mind: if he insisted on carrying on with the strike, he would 

never escape playing second in command to Etienne, whereas 

he now saw an alternative ambition beckoning, to become one 

of the leaders, A flush of pride burnt his cheeks and made him 

feel light-headed. Besides, the group of strikers that he had 

been waiting for all morning wouldn’t come now; some obstacle 

must have prevented them, perhaps the gendarmes: it was time 

to comply. But nevertheless he shook his head, acting the 

incorruptible, beating his breast indignantly. And at last, with¬ 

out mentioning to his boss that he had invited the miners over 

from Montsou, he promised to calm his comrades down and to 

persuade them to go back down. 

Deneulin kept out of the way, and the deputies themselves 

stayed on the sidelines. For an hour they heard Chaval holding 

forth, arguing, standing on a tub on the landing-stage. One 

group of workers booed him, and 120 of them left in exaspera¬ 

tion, obstinately sticking to the decision that he had made 

them take previously. It was past seven o’clock, and day was 

dawning brightly, radiant with sunlight and sharp frost. And 

suddenly, the pit began to throb with the sounds of work as 

things started moving again. First the crank rod of the engine 

started plunging up and down, coiling and uncoiling the cables 

on the winding-drums. Then, amid the din of signals, the men 

went down; the cages filled up, plunged out of sight, and came 

back up again; the shaft was swallowing up its ration of pit 

boys, tram girls, and hewers; while the labourers pushed the 

trucks over the iron floor with a thunderous rattle. 

‘For God’s sake! What are you doing there.^’ Chaval shouted 

to Catherine, who was waiting her turn, ‘Get yourself down 

there, and fast!’ 

At nine o’clock, when Madame Hennebeau arrived in her 

carriage with Cecile, she found Lucie and Jeanne ready and 

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waiting, very elegant despite their much-mended dresses. But 

Deneulin was astonished to see Negrel riding on horseback 

alongside the carriage. Why were the men mixed up in the 

party? So Madame Hennebeau explained with her maternal air 

that she had taken fright from what people had told her about 

the roads being infested with dangerous characters, and that 

she preferred to take someone with her to defend her. Negrel 

laughed and reassured them: it was nothing to worry about, 

they were only the usual loud-mouthed windbags, who 

wouldn’t dare throw a stone to break a window. Deneulin was 

still full of his success, and told them how he had crushed the 

rebellion at Jean-Bart, He felt that his problems were over 

now. And on the road to Vandame, while the young ladies got 

into their carriage, everyone rejoiced in the splendid day they 

had in view, without suspecting that far off in the countryside 

the first tremors of the people on the march could be heard, 

although had they pressed their ears to the ground, they would 

have heard them, 

‘Well, then, that’s agreed,’ repeated Madame Hennebeau. 

‘This evening you will come to collect your young ladies and 

have dinner with us ... Madame Gregoire has also promised 

to come to collect Cecile.’ 

‘You can count on me,’ Deneulin replied. 

The carriage went off in the direction of Vandame. Jeanne 

and Lucie leant out, laughing, to wave at their father, who was 

standing by the roadside; while Negrel trotted gallantly behind 

their speeding wheels. 

They crossed the forest, and took the road from Vandame to 

Marchiennes. As they approached Tartarus, Jeanne asked 

Madame Hennebeau if she knew La Cote-Verte,* and the 

latter, despite having spent five years in the region already, 

had to admit that she had never been that far. So they made a 

detour. Tartarus, on the edge of the woods, was an uncultivated 

moor, whose sterile volcanic soil had lain for centuries over a 

burning coal-mine. Its history was lost in the mists of time, 

and the local miners told the tale of how a bolt from the 

heavens had fallen on this Sodom in the bowels of the earth, 

where the tram girls were guilty of the vilest abominations; it 

had happened so quickly that they had been unable to get back 

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up to the surface, and still today they were roasting in their 

hell down below. The dark red, scorched rocks were covered 

in a leprous growth of alum. Sulphur grew like yellow flowers 

round the lips of the fissures in the rock. At night the 

foolhardy who risked their eyes to look through these cracks 

swore that they could see flames, and criminal souls crackling 

on the burning coals deep within. Wandering lights ran over 

the surface, and there was a constant stream of hot, poisonous 

vapours, rank with the faecal stench of this devil’s kitchen. 

And like the miracle of eternal spring, in the middle of this 

moor of Tartarus, La Cote-Verte rose with its evergreen 

lawns, its beeches with leaves that grew as soon as they fell, 

and its fields which yielded three crops a year. It was a natural 

greenhouse, warmed by the fires from the lower regions. The 

snow never settled there. Right next door to the bare trees of 

the forest, this huge mantle of greenery was flowering lushly 

on that December day, without the frost having curled the 

slightest blade of grass. 

Soon the carriage was speeding across the plain. Negrel 

made fun of the legend, explaining how the bottom of a pit 

often caught fire, because of the fermentation of coal-dust; and 

when you couldn’t control it, it just went on burning; and he 

mentioned a pit in Belgium that they had had to flood, by 

diverting a river into the shaft. But he fell silent, as the 

carriage had started passing more and more groups of miners 

during the last few minutes. They went by noiselessly, casting 

shifty but insistent glances at the luxurious carriage that was 

forcing them off the road. Their numbers grew and grew, until 

the horses had to slow down to a walking pace over the little 

bridge of the Scarpe. Whatever could be happening, to bring 

the whole population out on to the roads.? The young ladies 

took fright. Negrel became convinced that there must be 

trouble brewing somewhere out there in the seething country¬ 

side; and they were all relieved when they finally got to 

Marchiennes. In the sunlight which seemed to dull their 

flame, the batteries of coke ovens and the blast-furnace chim¬ 

neys belched forth their smoke, raining their sempiternal soot 

over the face of the earth. 

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CHAPTER II 

At Jean-Bart Catherine had been pushing for at least an hour, 

taking the tubs to the relay point; and she was drenched in 

such a flood of sweat that she stopped for a moment to wipe 

her face. 

Back at the coal-face, where he was cutting into the seam 

with his team-mates, Chaval was surprised not to hear the 

rumbling of the wheels any more. The lamps flickered weakly, 

with the coal-dust preventing them from seeing. 

‘What’s up.?’ he cried. 

When she replied that she was sure she was going to melt, 

and she could feel her heart starting to stop, he replied angrily: 

‘Why don’t you take your shirt off like the rest of us, you 

fool!’ 

They were 708 metres under, at the northern end of the pit, 

in the first section of the Desiree seam, three kilometres away 

from the loading bay. When they spoke of this part of the pit, 

the local miners went pale and lowered their voices, as if they 

were speaking of hell, and often they did no more than shake 

their heads, as if they preferred not to talk about these burning 

depths. As the tunnels stretched further north, they came 

closer to Tartarus, and approached the underground furnace 

that scorched the rocks above. The coal-faces here averaged a 

temperature of forty-five degrees. It was a veritable hell, 

surrounded by the flames which people up on the plain only 

glimpsed through the faults in the rock, spewing forth sulphur 

and pestilential vapours. 

Catherine, who had taken off her jacket, hesitated, then took 

off her breeches as well; and with naked arms and thighs, her 

shirt anchored round her hips by a piece of string like a tunic, 

she started hauling again. 

‘Surely that’ll be better now,’ she said out loud. 

She had had a vague sensation of fear when she felt herself 

suffocating. Since they had started working there five days 

before, she had thought of the tales that she had heard all 

through her childhood, of those tram girls from the past who 

were still burning under Tartarus, punished for doing things 

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nobody dared to repeat. Of course she was too old now to 

believe such foolish stories; and yet, what would she have 

done, if she had suddenly seen one of those girls pass through 

the wall, burning like a red-hot poker, with eyes blazing like 

coals.^ This thought made her break out in another sweat. 

At the relay point, eighty metres away from the coal-face, 

another tram girl took the tub and pushed it eighty metres 

further, up to the foot of the incline, for the loader to dispatch 

it with those sent down from the upper tunnels. 

‘Damn it! You don’t care, do you.^’ said this young woman, 

a skinny thirty-year-old widow, when she saw Catherine 

stripped down to her undershirt. ‘I couldn’t do that, the boys 

at the ramp would be after me with their filthy jokes.’ 

‘Too bad!’ the younger girl replied. ‘I couldn’t care less 

what the men think! I’m too uncomfortable.’ 

She went back, pushing an empty tub. The worst thing in 

this underground gallery was that there was another source of 

unbearable heat as well as the proximity to Tartarus. They 

were close to some old workings, an abandoned gallery of the 

Gaston-Marie pit, very deep down, where a firedamp explosion 

ten years before had set the coal-seam on fire, and it was still 

burning, behind the ‘dyke’, the clay wall built there and kept 

under constant repair, so as to limit the damage. Thus deprived 

of oxygen, the fire should have gone out; but it must have 

been nourished by unsuspected draughts, for it had kept going 

for ten years, warming the clay wall of the dyke like bricks in a 

kiln, so much so that you could feel the heat as you went past. 

And this was the rampart that they had to push the tubs past, 

for a distance of more than a hundred metres, in a temperature 

of sixty degrees. 

After two trips, Catherine felt she was suffocating again. 

Luckily the tunnel was wide and comfortable in the Desiree seam, 

one of the thickest in the area. The seam was one metre ninety 

deep, so the miners could work standing up. But they would have 

preferred to work all bent double, if only the air had been cool. 

‘Hey there, have you gone to sleep.?’ Chaval shouted again, 

as soon as he couldn’t hear Catherine moving any more. 

‘Where on earth did I find such a useless mule.? Will you fill 

that tub and keep it moving!’ 

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307 

She was at the bottom of the coal-face, leaning on her 

shovel, and she felt a wave of nausea sweep through her, as she 

stood looking at them stupidly, and showed no signs of comply¬ 

ing with the order. She couldn’t see them clearly in the 

reddish glow of their lamps; they were stark naked like beasts, 

but so black and caked with soot and coal that she wasn’t 

disturbed by their nudity. All you could see of their obscure 

labours was their spines twisting and turning like monkeys and 

an infernal vision of reddened limbs, toiling away amid the 

dull thuds and subdued groaning. But they must have been 

able to see her more clearly, for the picks stopped tapping, and 

they teased her for taking her breeches off. 

‘Hey, you’ll catch cold up your bum, watch out!’ 

‘Now that’s what 1 call a real pair of legs! Come on, Chaval, 

share them with your friends.’ 

‘Let’s have a look! Lift it up. Higher, now, higher!’ 

Then Chaval, who didn’t take offence at their laughter, flew 

at her again. 

‘That’s right, for God’s sake ... She takes her time, doesn’t 

she, when there’s some dirty talk to listen to.^ She’ll still be 

there in the morning at this rate.’ 

Catherine forced herself laboriously to fill the truck; then 

she started pushing again. The tunnel was too wide for her to 

use the props on either side for leverage, her bare feet kept 

catching in the rails as she tried to find a foothold, while she 

strained slowly forwards with her arms stretched stiffly out in 

front of her and her back painfully arched. And as soon as 

she passed by the dyke, she was tormented by the heat, 

sweat streamed all down her body in great drops like rain in a 

thunderstorm. 

She had hardly covered a third of the distance to the relay 

point when she was soaked in sweat, spattered and blinded by 

black mud like the others. Her tight undershirt seemed as if it 

were soaked in ink; it stuck to her skin, and rode right up over 

her hips as she flexed her thighs; and it cut into her so 

painfully that she had to abandon the task again. 

Whatever was wrong with her today.^ She’d never felt her 

legs so like jelly before. The air must be really bad. The 

ventilation didn’t have any effect at the end of this distant 

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308 

gallery. You breathed in all sorts of gases that escaped from 

the coal with a little hissing and bubbling sound like a spring, 

and it was so concentrated sometimes that the lamps wouldn’t 

burn; not to mention the firedamp, which nobody bothered 

about any more, since there was such a quantity of it pouring 

into the miners’ nostrils from one week’s end to another. She 

knew it well enough, this bad air, or dead air,* as the miners 

called it; lower down there were heavy, asphyxiating gases, 

while higher up there were lighter gases which could catch fire 

and blow up every coal-face in a shaft, hundreds of men at one 

go in a single thunderclap. From her childhood onwards she 

had swallowed so much of it that she was amazed that she was 

so affected by it, her ears ringing and her throat burning. 

She felt so oppressed that she wanted to take her shirt off. 

The cloth was starting to torment her, as every fold cut into 

her and burnt her. She resisted the temptation, and tried to 

keep pushing, but she was forced to stop and stand up again. 

Then suddenly, telling herself that she’d cover up again when 

she got to the relay point, she took it all off, string and shirt 

together, feeling so feverish that she would have ripped her 

skin off if she had been able. And now, stark naked and 

reduced to the pitiful level of a scavenger scrabbling for a 

livelihood in the mud of the gutter, she struggled painfully 

along, her buttocks smeared with sweat and grime, wallowing 

belly-deep in the mire, pushing along on all fours, like a horse 

hitched to a cab. 

But she was filled with despair, for she felt no relief even 

now that she was naked. What else could she remove.^ She was 

deafened by the ringing in her ears, she felt as if her temples 

were squeezed in the grip of a vice. She fell to her knees. The 

lamp, wedged in the coal on top of the tub, seemed to go out. 

The only thought that surfaced from her mental confusion was 

the idea of turning up the wick. Twice she tried to check it, 

and each time, as she placed it in front of her on the ground, 

she saw it grow dim, as if it too were running out of breath. 

Suddenly the lamp went out. Then everything slid away into 

the darkness, a millstone had started turning in her head, her 

heart weakened and stopped beating, numbed in its turn by 

the great fatigue that had overcome her limbs. She had fallen 

Part V 

309 

over flat on her back, and was suffocating from the lack of air 

at ground level. 

‘I do believe, for God’s sake, that she’s taking time off 

again!’ growled Chaval, 

He listened out from the top of the coal-face, but couldn’t 

hear the rumble of wheels. 

‘Hey, Catherine, you lazy cow!’ 

His voice echoed down into the distance along the dark 

tunnel, and not a whisper came to answer it. 

‘Have I got to come and get you moving myself?’ 

Nothing stirred, there was still the same deathly silence. He 

climbed down in a fury and ran along with his lamp so 

hurriedly that he nearly tripped over the body of the tram girl, 

which was blocking the gallery. He looked down at her, open- 

mouthed. What had got into her? Was she trying it on, in 

order to take a quick nap? But the lamp, which he had lowered 

to get a look at her face, nearly went out. He lifted it and 

lowered it again and then he understood: there must be a 

pocket of bad air. His anger vanished, and his professional 

conscience awoke in the presence of a fellow miner in peril. He 

shouted immediately for someone to bring her shirt, and he 

seized the unconscious, naked girl in his arms, and lifted her as 

high up off the ground as he could. When they had thrown 

their garments over her shoulders, he raced off, holding his 

burden up with one arm, carrying the two lamps in the other 

hand. The deep tunnels sped by, as he raced along, turning 

right, turning left, rushing to find the life-giving air of the 

plains coming from the ventilator. At last he stopped when he 

heard the sound of a spring flowing through a crack in the 

rock. He had reached a crossroads on a haulage road which 

had previously served the Gaston-Marie pit. Here the ventila¬ 

tion blew like a hurricane, and it was so cold that, when he sat 

down on the ground and leaned against the props, he was 

shaken by a fit of shivering; he held on to his mistress, who lay 

unconscious, with her eyes closed. 

‘Come on, Catherine, for God’s sake, stop mucking around 

... Hold on a moment while I dip this in the water,’ 

He was terrified to see how limp she was. But lie managed 

to soak her shirt in the spring water, and he washed her face 

310 

Germinal 

with it. She looked like a corpse, buried alive in the depths of 

the earth, with her slim, undeveloped body, where puberty 

had hardly yet sketched any female forms. Then a tremor ran 

through her childish breasts, and her pitiful, prematurely 

experienced stomach and thighs. She opened her eyes and 

stammered: 

‘Pm cold.’ 

‘That’s more like it, that’s better!’ cried Chaval, in relief 

He dressed her, slipping her easily into her shirt, but 

cursing at the difficulty of getting her breeches on, for she 

couldn’t help much. She was still dazed, and unable to under¬ 

stand where she was, nor why she was naked. When she did 

remember, she was overcome with shame. How could she have 

dared to take all her clothes off! And she asked him whether 

anyone had seen her in that state, without even a kerchief 

round her waist to hide her. He laughed, and made up stories 

about it, alleging that he had just brought her there surrounded 

by workmates forming a guard of honour. What had got into 

her to take his advice literally and take her pants off! Then he 

gave her his word that his mates couldn’t have guessed whether 

her behind was round or square, because of the speed it 

travelled at. 

‘Damn it. Pm dying of cold,’ he said, getting dressed in his 

turn. 

She had never seen him so kind. Usually every kind word 

he addressed to her was immediately followed by a couple of 

insults. And yet it would have been so nice to live in harmony! 

She was filled with tenderness, in the midst of her lassitude 

and fatigue. She smiled at him and murmured: 

‘Kiss me.’ 

He kissed her, and lay down alongside her, waiting until she 

was ready to get on her feet, 

‘You see,’ she went on, ‘you were wrong to shout at me 

down there, for I really couldn’t go on, you know! You don’t 

feel so hot at the coal-face; but you can’t imagine how you get 

roasted alive further down the track!’ 

‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘we’d be better off sitting under the 

trees in the shade . . . This pit is making you ill, I realize that, 

my poor girl.’ 

Part V 

311 

She was so touched to hear him agree that she put a brave 

face on it. 

‘Oh! I just had a bad turn. And today the air was really 

poisonous , . . But you'll see, in a minute, that I’m not a lazy 

cow. When you have to work, you do work, don’t you? I’d 

rather die than give up.’ 

Silence fell. With one arm round her waist, he held her 

against his chest, to keep her from harm. And although she felt 

strong enough to go back to work, she let herself go, enjoying 

her moment of pleasure. 

‘Except,’ she went on very quietly, ‘I do wish you’d be 

kinder to me ... You know it’s so nice when we love each 

other a bit.’ 

And she started weeping softly. 

‘But I do love you,’ he cried, ‘after all. I’ve taken you to live 

with me.’ 

She could only nod her head in reply. It was common 

enough for a man to take a woman simply in order to have her, 

without worrying about her happiness. Her tears flowed hotly 

now; she felt suddenly miserable at the thought of the enjoyable 

life she might lead if she had happened upon a different young 

man, one whose arms she would always have round her waist. 

Another man? And she pictured the blurred outlines of this 

rival in the turmoil of her emotions. But it was already over, 

she felt no more than the wish to live out her days with the 

one she had got, if only he wouldn’t be quite so rough with 

her. 

‘Well then,’ she said, ‘try to act like this every now and then.’ 

She broke off, sobbing, and he kissed her again. 

‘What a fool you are! ... Look, I swear I’ll be kind. I’m no 

worse than the next man, you know!’ 

She looked at him, and started to smile again through her 

tears. Maybe he was right; you didn’t often meet a happy 

woman. Then, although she only half-believed his promise, 

she let herself enjoy the happiness of having him act pleasantly. 

Oh God! If only it would last! They took hold of each other 

once again, and while they were locked in a prolonged embrace, 

they heard steps, and stood up. Three comrades, who had seen 

them pass, had come to see how they were getting on. 

312 

Germinal 

They went off again together. It was nearly ten o’clock, and 

they ate lunch in a cool spot before going back to the sweltering 

coal-face. But just as they were finishing off their sandwiches, 

and were about to take a swig of coffee from their flasks, a 

rumbling noise coming from the distant coal-faces disturbed 

them. What was it? Was it another accident? They got up and 

ran. Hewers, tram girls, and pit boys passed them running in 

every direction; but nobody knew what had happened, every¬ 

one was shouting, it must be something really bad. Gradually 

the whole mine was seized with terror, panicky silhouettes 

leapt out of the galleries, lanterns danced and ran through the 

shadows. Where was it? Why could nobody tell them? 

Suddenly a deputy ran past, shouting: 

‘They’re cutting the cables!* They’re cutting the cables!’ 

Then there was a rush of panic. Everyone galloped madly 

down the dark galleries. They started to lose their heads. Why 

should anyone cut the cables? And whoever would cut them, 

with men down below? It seemed monstrous. 

But the voice of another deputy rang out and then faded 

away. 

‘It’s them from Montsou that are cutting the cables! Every¬ 

body out!’ 

As soon as he realized what was happening, Chaval stopped 

Catherine in her tracks. The thought of meeting the Montsou 

miners up there, if he got out, cut his legs from under him. So 

the Montsou group had given the gendarmes the slip and had 

come after all! For a moment he thought of turning back and 

going back up through the Gaston-Marie shaft; but it was no 

longer in working order. He hesitated, swearing in order to 

cover his fear, repeating how stupid it was to run so fast. They 

wouldn’t leave them underground, surely to goodness! 

The deputy’s voice rang out again, getting nearer. 

‘Everybody out! Up the ladders, up those ladders!’ 

And Chaval was swept forwards along with his comrades. 

He jostled Catherine onwards, accusing her of running too 

slowly. Did she want to stay down the pit and die of hunger? 

For the thugs from Montsou were quite capable of smashing 

the ladders without waiting for everyone to get out. This 

ghastly suggestion finally made them lose their heads, and all 

PartV 

313 

along the tunnels there was one crazy stampede, a hysterical 

race to get there first, to climb out ahead of the others. People 

were shouting that the ladders were broken, that nobody could 

escape. And when the terrified groups started to reach the 

loading bay, there was a violent surge: they flooded into the 

shaft, and crushed each other in their rush to get through the 

narrow doorway leading to the ladder well; while an old 

stableman, who had just taken the precaution of leading his 

horses back into their stalls, watched them with supercilious 

unconcern, since he was used to spending his nights down the 

mine and was sure that he would get back up again some day 

or other. 

‘For God’s sake! Will you get up in front of me!’ said 

Chaval to Catherine. ‘At least I’ll catch you if you fall.’ 

Dazed and breathless from the three-kilometre dash that 

had covered her in sweat all over again, she had lapsed into a 

state of bewilderment, abandoning herself to the ebb and flow 

of the crowd. So he had to pull on her arm hard enough to 

break it; she shouted in pain, and tears welled up in her eyes; 

he had already forgotten his promise, she would never be 

happy. 

‘Go on, move!’ he shouted. 

But she was too afraid of him. If she went up ahead of him 

he would never stop bullying her. So she resisted, while the 

stream of desperate comrades swept them aside. The water 

that filtered through the shaft fell in great drops, and the floor 

of the pit bottom, shaken by the trampling herd, vibrated as 

they passed over what they called the ‘bog’, which was a 

muddy sump, ten metres deep. And in fact it had been here at 

Jean-Bart two years earlier that a terrible accident, caused by a 

broken cable, had sent the cage hurtling down to the bottom of 

the bog, where two men had drowned. And they were all 

thinking of it, they all feared they would go plunging down 

into it never to return, if the whole crowd kept piling on to the 

boards. 

‘Bloody blockhead!’ cried Chaval. ‘Drop dead if you like. 

I’ll be better offl’ 

He went up, and she followed. 

To reach daylight from the bottom of the well, you had to 

Germinal 

314 

climb up 102 ladders, each about seven metres high, and each 

one perched on a narrow ledge that ran across the breadth of 

the well, leaving a square hole only just wide enough to let 

your shoulders through. It was like a flat chimney 700 metres 

high between the outer wall of the winding shaft and its lining, 

a damp, dark, endless tube, with its ladders following on 

almost vertically in regular stages. It took a fit man twenty-five 

minutes to climb this giant staircase. In fact the well was only 

ever used in emergencies. 

Catherine climbed quite briskly at first. Her bare feet were 

hardened to the sharp coal chips of the gallery floor and felt 

no discomfort on the square rungs, which were shod in iron to 

prevent wear. Her hands, which were toughened from pushing 

the tubs, grasped the uprights firmly, although they were too 

wide for her grip. And this unforeseen climb even gave her 

something to think about and made her forget her problems, 

as she became one member of a slippery human serpent, 

gliding upwards three at a time on each ladder, so that when 

the head eventually reached daylight, the tail would still be 

snaking over the top of the bog. But this hadn’t happened yet, 

the leaders must still be only a third of the way up the well. 

Nobody spoke any more, there was only the dull slap of their 

feet on the rungs; while their lamps became spaced further 

apart the higher they rose, like an ever-lengthening stream of 

shooting stars. 

Behind her Catherine could hear a pit boy counting the 

ladders. That gave her the idea of counting them too. They 

had already gone up fifteen, and they had reached another 

loading bay. But at that moment she stumbled into ChavaFs 

legs. He swore, shouting to her to watch out. As each man 

stopped the next, the whole column ground to a halt. What 

was up? What had happened? And their voices returned, 

asking questions, expressing fears. Their anxiety had been 

mounting since they had left the bottom of the shaft behind, 

the fear of the unknown above their heads felt more and more 

suffocating as they approached the daylight. Someone an¬ 

nounced that they had to go back down again, for the ladders 

were broken. That was what had haunted them all, the fear of 

finding themselves lost in limbo. Another explanation was 

Part V 

3*5 

passed down from mouth to mouth, a hewer had slipped and 

fallen down one of the ladders. Nobody was quite sure what 

was happening, with everyone shouting it was impossible to 

hear clearly, at this rate they’d be spending the night there. 

And at last, without them having any better idea of what had 

happened, the climb started up again, with the same tramping 

of feet and dancing of lamps. As for the broken ladders, they 

must be higher up, obviously. 

By the thirty-second ladder, as they went past the third 

loading bay, Catherine felt her arms and legs growing stiff. At 

first she had felt a slight tingling of the skin. Now she had lost 

all feeling of the wood and the iron on her hands and feet. A 

vague but slightly burning ache spread through her muscles. 

And amid the numbness that invaded her, she remembered the 

stories told by grandfather Bonnemort, of the days when there 

used to be no ladder well and ten-year-old girls climbed up 

ladders placed against the side of the shaft, carrying the coal 

baskets on their shoulders; so that, if one of them slipped, or 

even if a piece of coal fell out of one of their baskets, three or 

four children would go tumbling down together, head first. 

The cramp in her muscles became unbearable, she’d never get 

to the top. 

They had to stop again, and each time this happened she 

was able to catch her breath. But the terror which wafted 

down from above on these occasions finally made her head 

reel. Above and below her, people were breathing with increas¬ 

ing difficulty, the endless climb was causing a state of vertigo, 

and, like everyone else, she started to feel waves of nausea pass 

through her. She felt that she was suffocating, drowning in 

darkness, her head spinning with the pressure of the walls 

hemming her body in. And at the same time she was shivering 

from the dampness, for her body was soaked by heavy droplets 

of water as well as dripping in sweat. They were nearing the 

water-table, and the rain beat down so heavily that it threatened 

to extinguish the lamps. 

Twice Chaval questioned Catherine without obtaining a 

reply. What was she up to down there, had she swallowed her 

tongue? She might at least tell him whether she was still ail 

right. They had been climbing for half an hour; but so 

Germinal 

3*6 

laboriously that they were only on the fifty-ninth ladder. 

Forty-three to go. Catherine finally stammered that she was 

still holding out. He would have called her a lazy cow if she'd 

admitted her exhaustion. The iron edges of the rungs must be 

eating into her feet, it felt as if someone was sawing into her 

very bones. After each pull up with her arms, she expected to 

see her hands fall away from the uprights, they were so 

skinned and stiff that she could no longer grip with her 

fingers; and she could feel herself on the point of falling 

backwards, with her shoulders and hips torn out of their 

sockets by their ceaseless straining. Above all it was the near¬ 

vertical slant of the ladders that exhausted her, since they were 

so steep she had to pull herself up by her wrists, with her 

stomach pressed up against the wood. The sound of people 

wheezing and gasping for breath was now louder than the 

rumbling of their footsteps, it sounded like one great, booming 

death-rattle, echoing tenfold off the sounding-board of the 

lining of the well, swelling up from the depths and dying away 

as it rose towards the daylight. There was a groan, rumours 

flew up and down the line, apparently a pit boy had split his 

head open against the rim of one of the landings. 

Still Catherine kept on climbing upwards. They had got 

past the water-table. It stopped raining, and the underground 

air became heavy with the misty, poisonous vapours given off 

by the rusty iron and rotten wood. She forced herself to keep 

counting mechanically under her breath, eighty-one, eighty- 

two, eighty-three; nineteen to go. As she repeated the figures 

to herself their very rhythm kept her going. She had lost all 

consciousness of her movements. When she looked upwards, 

the lamps span round in a spiral. Her blood seemed to be 

ebbing out of her veins, she felt that she was dying, and that 

the slightest draught would blow her away. The worst was that 

the people below her were pressing upwards now, and the 

whole column was rushing, yielding to a growing rage, fuelled 

both by exhaustion and by the frenzied urge to get out into 

daylight. Some of their comrades, at the top of the column, 

had already emerged; so the ladders weren’t broken; but the 

thought that someone might still have time to break them to 

stop the last people escaping, while the first in the queue were 

Part V 

317 

already breathing in the fresh air, finally drove them crazy. 

And when there was another bottleneck, they started swearing 

and kept on climbing, jostling each other and clambering over 

anyone who paused for a moment and got in their way, 

determined to get out at any cost. 

Then Catherine fell. She had called out Chaval’s name in a 

desperate appeal. But he didn’t hear her, he was fighting with 

one of his comrades, kicking at his ribs with his heels to get 

past him. She was crushed and trampled. As she fainted she 

dreamed that she was one of the little tram girls of days gone 

by, and that a piece of coal that had fallen from a basket above 

her had just knocked her down to the bottom of the shaft, like 

a sparrow felled by a stone. There were only five ladders left 

to climb, after nearly an hour. She never knew how she got 

up to the surface, pushed upwards by the heaving mass of 

shoulders below her, held upright by the sheer narrowness of 

the well. Suddenly she found herself blinded by the sunlight, 

amid a crowd of people hissing and screaming at her. 

CHAPTER III 

In the early morning, since before daylight, a tremor had been 

running through the villages, a tremor which had now become 

a rumbling which traversed the highways and the whole 

countryside. But they couldn’t depart when they had planned, 

for they had heard the news that dragoons and gendarmes were 

scouring the plain. People said that they had arrived from 

Douai during the night, and Rasseneur was accused of betray¬ 

ing his comrades by warning Monsieur Hennebeau; there was 

even a tram girl who swore that she had seen the manservant 

go past taking the dispatch to the telegraphist. The miners 

clenched their fists, watching out for the soldiers from behind 

their shutters in the pale light of dawn. 

Towards half-past seven, as the sun was rising, another 

rumour spread, which calmed their impatience: that it was a 

false alarm, a simple military manceuvre, like others which the 

general had organized from time to time since the start of the 

Germinal 

318 

strike, at the instigation of the Prefect in Lille. The strikers 

abominated this official, whom they accused of deceiving them 

with the promise of arranging a compromise, but who did no 

more than parade his troops through Montsou once a week to 

show that they meant business. Thus, when the dragoons and 

gendarmes went off peacefully towards Marchiennes, satisfied 

with simply deafening the inhabitants of the villages with the 

trotting of their horses’ hooves on the hard earth, the miners 

made fun of this foolish Prefect, with his soldiers who turned 

tail just when things were starting to hot up. Until nine o’clock 

they cheered each other up, standing peacefully in front of 

their houses, watching the unhurried backs of the last gen¬ 

darmes marching away down the cobbled street. Deep in their 

comfortable beds, the good citizens of Montsou were still 

asleep, their heads sunk in their soft pillows. At the manager’s 

house Madame Hennebeau had just been seen leaving by 

carriage, and must have taken Monsieur Hennebeau with her 

to drop him off at work, for their villa was closed, silent, and 

seemingly uninhabited. None of the pits had a military guard, 

which was a fatal act of imprudence in this hour of danger, 

showing people’s usual stupidity when faced with disaster, and 

all the mistakes a government can make as soon as any insight 

is required. And nine o’clock was striking when the colliers 

finally took the road to Vandame, to keep the rendezvous they 

had fixed the night before in the forest. 

Moreover Etienne understood straight away that there was 

no hope of finding at Jean-Bart the 3,000 comrades that he 

had been counting on. A lot of them thought that the demon¬ 

stration had been postponed, but the worst of it was that two 

or three groups of men had already started out, and were 

bound to compromise their cause if he didn’t go out and take 

charge of them, like it or not. Nearly a hundred men who had 

left home before daylight must have been sheltering under the 

beech trees in the forest to wait for the others. Souvarine, 

whom the young man went upstairs to consult, shrugged his 

shoulders: ten stout and resolute men could achieve more than 

a crowd; and he plunged immediately back into the book that 

was open in front of him, refusing to get involved with it. 

They were acting like a crowd of sloppy romantics, when all 

Part V 

319 

they needed to do was burn Montsou to the ground, which 

would be easy enough. As Etienne left the house by the front 

path, he noticed Rasseneur sitting in front of the cast-iron 

hearth, looking very pale, while his wife, wearing her changeless 

black dress, seemed to have grown in stature as she insulted 

him with elegance and precision. 

Maheu’s opinion was that they should keep their word. 

Such a meeting was sacred. However, the night had cooled 

everyone’s ardour; now he was afraid of some tragedy, and he 

explained that their duty was to go there, to make sure that 

their comrades behaved themselves. La Maheude nodded her 

approval. Etienne repeated reassuringly that, although they 

had to act as revolutionaries, they must not threaten life and 

limb. Before he left, he refused his share of a loaf of bread 

which, along with a bottle of gin, he had been given the night 

before; but he drank three small tots one after the other, just 

to keep out the cold; and he even filled a flask to take along 

with him. Alzire would look after the children. Old Bonnemort, 

whose legs were weak from having walked too much the night 

before, had stayed in bed. 

They took the precaution of leaving separately. Jeanlin had 

disappeared a long time before. Maheu and La Maheude went 

off on their own, cutting across country to Montsou, while 

Etienne made off towards the forest, where he hoped to join 

his comrades. On the way he caught up with a band of women, 

among whom he recognized old Ma Brule and La Levaque: as 

they went along they were eating some chestnuts that La 

Mouquette had given them, and even swallowed the skins to 

have more in their stomachs. But he found nobody in the 

forest; his comrades were already at Jean-Bart. So he ran off, 

arriving at the pit just as Levaque and a hundred or so others 

reached the pit-head. Miners were arriving from all sides, the 

Maheus from the highway, the women from across the fields, 

all in dribs and drabs, with no leaders, and no weapons, 

flooding in like some natural stream that had overflowed its 

banks and was pouring downhill. Etienne saw Jeanlin, who had 

climbed up on to an overhead gangway and had settled down as 

if to watch a show. Etienne ran faster so as to be among the 

first to arrive. There were no more than 300 of them. 

320 

Germinal 

When Deneulin showed himself at the top of the staircase 

which led to the entrance hall, they faltered. 

‘What do you want?’ he called out in a loud voice. 

After he had watched the carriage depart out of sight, with 

his daughters still laughing inside, he had returned to the pit, 

seized by a vague anxiety. And yet everything was in good 

order, the men had gone down, the coal was coming up, and 

he felt reassured again. He was just talking to the overman 

when he was told of the approaching strikers. Swiftly he 

moved to a window in the screening shed; and seeing the 

surging flood of men filling the yard, he suddenly realized that 

he was powerless. How could he defend these buildings, which 

were open on all sides? He couldn’t muster more than a score 

of men at his side. He was lost. 

‘What do you want?’ he repeated, pale with suppressed 

anger, making an effort to put a brave face on disaster. 

The men were surging back and forth and muttering among 

themselves. Etienne managed to break free and speak: 

‘Sir, we have not come to cause trouble. But work must 

cease in every pit.’ 

Deneulin treated him quite simply as an imbecile, 

‘Do you think you’re going to cause me no harm if you stop 

people working for me? You might as well shoot me in the 

back at point-blank range ... Yes, my men have gone down to 

work, and no, they won’t come up again, unless you murder 

me first!’ 

This tough talk caused an uproar. Maheu had to restrain 

Levaque, who was rushing forward threateningly, while 

Etienne went on arguing, trying to convince Deneulin of the 

legitimate nature of their revolutionary action. But Deneulin 

answered that his men had the right to work. 

And what’s more he wasn’t going to get involved in such 

stupid arguments, he was master of his works, and he was only 

sorry that he didn’t have a handful of gendarmes with him to 

gun down the rabble. 

‘Fair enough, it’s my own fault, it serves me right. With your 

kind of lout there’s only force that counts. It’s like the government, 

thinking they can buy you off by making concessions. You’ll bring 

them down, sure enough, once they’ve given you the weapons.’ 

Part V 

321 

Etienne was shaking, but he continued to control himself. 

He lowered his voice. 

‘I beg of you, Sir, give your workers the order to come up. I 

can’t answer for what my comrades might do. You can prevent 

a tragedy.’ 

‘No, go to hell! Why should I have anything to do with you.? 

I don’t employ you, you’ve got nothing to discuss with me . . . 

You’re just a bunch of thugs roaming round the countryside 

looting people’s houses.’ 

Angry protests covered his voice now, and the women 

especially hurled insults at him. But he continued to face up to 

them, and felt relieved at this open confrontation where he 

could give free rein to his authoritarian disposition. Since he 

was ruined, whatever happened, there was no point in resorting 

to cowardly platitudes. But the crowd kept growing, there 

were already over five hundred of them rushing towards the 

door, and he was about to get himself done in, when his 

overman pulled him roughly back. 

‘For heaven’s sake, Sir! ... There’ll be a massacre. There’s 

no point in getting people killed for nothing.’ 

He struggled, protesting, and launched one last cry at the 

crowd. 

‘You bunch of thugs, just you wait till we get the upper 

hand again!’ 

They dragged him away, and a sudden surge of the crowd 

threw the people at the front up against the staircase, buckling 

the handrail. It was the women that pushed hardest, squealing 

with excitement and goading the men on. The door gave way 

immediately, for it had no lock, only a simple catch. But the 

staircase was too narrow, and the mob was all crushed up 

together and would have taken ages to get through, if the 

assailants at the back of the queue hadn’t decided to go 

through the other entrances. And then they spilled over on all 

sides, overrunning the changing shed, the screening shed, and 

the boiler-house. In less than five minutes they were masters 

of the whole pit, they had the run of all three storeys, 

surrounded by a furious clamour of shouts and gestures, 

carried away by their intoxicating victory over a stubborn 

boss. 

322 Germinal 

Maheu was horrified, and ran off with the first group, 

saying to Etienne: 

‘They mustn’t kill him!’ 

Etienne had already started running too; then, when he 

realized that Deneulin had barricaded himself in the deputies’ 

quarters, he replied: 

‘What if they did? Would it be our fault, with such a 

bloody-minded devil?’ 

Yet he felt deeply disturbed, and still too calm to give in to 

this wave of anger. His pride as leader was also offended, when 

he saw the crowd escape his authority, getting carried away 

and failing to execute the will of the people dispassionately as 

he had planned. He called in vain for calm, shouting that they 

mustn’t give ammunition to their enemies by committing 

pointless acts of destruction. 

‘Get the boilers!’ screamed old Ma Brule. ‘Let’s put out the 

fires!’ 

Levaque, who had found a file, was brandishing it like a 

dagger, and his awful cry could be heard above the din: 

‘Cut the cables! Cut the cables!’ 

Soon everyone had taken up his cry; only Etienne and 

Maheu continued to protest, but their voices were drowned 

out by the uproar, and they failed to make any impact. At last 

Etienne managed to make himself heard: 

‘But, comrades, there are men down below!’ 

The hubbub increased, shouts arose from all sides. 

‘Too bad, they shouldn’t have gone down! .. . Serve the 

traitors right ... Yes, and let them stay down there! . . . 

Anyway, they’ve got the ladders!’ 

So when he saw that the thought of the ladders was inspiring 

them with renewed fury, Etienne realized that he’d have to 

give in. Fearing an even greater disaster, he rushed towards 

the engine, hoping at least to get the cages up first, to prevent 

the severed cables from falling down the whole depth of the 

shaft, and crushing the cages with their enormous weight. The 

mechanic in charge had disappeared, as had the handful of 

surface workers; and he grasped the control lever himself, 

pulling at it while Levaque and two others climbed up the iron 

framework which supported the pulleys. There was just time 

Pan V 

323 

to lock the cages into their keeps before the harsh rasping of a 

file biting into the steel resounded. There was a deep silence, 

the sound seemed to fill the whole pit, everyone raised his 

head, looking and listening, feeling a wave of emotion. In the 

front row, Maheu felt himself possessed by a wild thrill of 

pleasure, as if every cut of the file was setting him free from 

the bonds of unhappiness, by hacking away at the cable 

leading to one of those hell-holes that they’d never have to go 

down into again. 

But old Ma Brule had disappeared into the staircase at the 

back of the hall, still screaming: 

Tmpty the furnaces! Get the boilers! Go and get them!’ 

A group of women followed her. La Maheude hurried after, 

hoping to stop them from breaking everything up, just as her 

husband had wanted to make his workmates see reason. She 

was the most sensible among them, arguing that they could 

stand up for their rights without smashing things to pieces. By 

the time she reached the boiler-house, the women were already 

driving away the two boiiermen, and old Ma Brule had armed 

herself with a large shovel, and was squatting down in front of 

one of the furnaces, emptying it violently, throwing the burning 

coal on to the brick floor, where it continued to burn, giving off 

a cloud of black smoke. There were ten furnaces fuelling the 

five generators. Soon all the women had set to work: La 

Levaque was wielding her shovel with both hands, La Mou- 

quette lucking her skirt up over her thighs to avoid getting it 

burned, all of them blazing red in the reflection of the fire, 

sweating and dishevelled from this witches’ sabbath. As they 

piled up the heaps of coal, the burning fumes scorched the 

ceiling of the great hall. 

‘That’s enough!’ cried La Maheude. ‘The store room’s on 

fire.’ 

‘Who cares!’ old Ma Bride replied. ‘We’ll have done our job 

... Oh my God! I told them I’d make them pay for my man’s 

death!’ 

At that moment they heard Jeanlin’s shrill voice: 

‘Watch out! I’m going to put it out! Here goes!’ 

He had been one of the first on the scene, and was delighted 

at the prospect of a fight, looking out for any mischief he could 

324 

Germinal 

contribute; and he had been struck by the idea of opening the 

safety valves, to let out the steam. The jets blew out as violently 

as gunshots, and the five boilers emptied with a tempestuous 

blast, whistling with such a thunderous roar that it made their 

ears bleed. Everything was drowned in steam, the coal seemed 

white, the women looked like ghosts, making dreamlike ges~ 

tures. Only the boy showed up clearly, standing on the over¬ 

head platform where he had clambered, beyond the spirals of 

white vapour, looking delighted, with his mouth cracked open 

by the pleasure of having unleashed such destruction. 

It lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. They had thrown a few 

buckets of water on the heaps of burning coal, to help extin¬ 

guish them: there was no longer any danger of the building 

catching fire. But the anger of the crowd, instead of abating, 

was only whetted. Men came down wielding hammers, women 

armed themselves with iron bars; they talked of smashing the 

generators, breaking the engines, and demolishing the pit. 

When Etienne realized what was happening, he ran up, 

accompanied by Maheu. Even he felt intoxicated, carried away 

by the hot breath of revenge. Nevertheless he struggled to 

urge them to stay calm, now that the broken cables, the 

doused flames, and the empty boilers rendered work impossi¬ 

ble. But they still wouldn’t listen to him, and his voice was 

about to be smothered again, when they heard a commotion 

outside, coming from a little low door, where the ladder well 

emerged. 

‘Down with the traitors! . .. Look at their filthy, cowardly 

faces!.. . Down with the lot of them!’ 

The underground workers had started to emerge. The first 

of them, blinded by the dazzling daylight, stopped still, blink¬ 

ing their eyelids. Then they filed off, trying to reach the road 

and escape. 

‘Down with cowards! Down with false friends!’ 

The whole band of strikers had run up. In less than three 

minutes, there was not a man left inside the buildings, and the 

500 men from Montsou formed two lines, forcing the Van- 

dame traitors, who had gone down the mine, to run the 

gauntlet. And as each new miner surfaced at the door of the 

well, covered in the muck of work and with his clothes in 

Part V 325 

tatters, they renewed their insults and welcomed them with 

bitter sarcasm: ‘Just look at him, Tom Thumb in person, with 

his arse scraping the ground, and how about that one, with his 

nose eaten off by the slags at the Volcan! And there’s one with 

enough gunge in his eyes to make candlewax for a whole 

cathedral! And look at the one with no arse, he’s taller than a 

Bible story!’ An enormous tram girl who tumbled out, with 

breasts down to her belly and her belly billowing round into 

her behind, raised a gale of laughter. They wanted to have a 

feel, the jokes got cruder and crueller, and punches were soon 

going to fly; while the poor wretches continued to file past, 

suffering the insults shivering and in silence, keeping a wary 

eye on the strikers’ fists, and much relieved when they were at 

last able to run free of the pit. 

‘Who’d believe it, how many of them are there down there?’ 

asked Etienne. 

He was astonished to see so many of them keep pouring out, 

and was upset at the idea that it wasn’t just a handful of 

workers, driven by hunger or bullied by the deputies. So had 

they lied to him in the forest? Almost the whole of Jean-Bart 

had gone down to work. But he gasped out loud and dashed 

forward, as he saw Chaval loom up in the doorway. 

‘In God’s name! Is this your idea of a strike?’ 

There was a volley of oaths, and a surge of people wanted to 

throw themselves at the traitor. Damn him, he had sworn to 

support them the night before, and now he had gone down the 

mine with the others! Who did he take them for? 

‘Get him! Off to the pit! Let’s go!’ 

Chaval was white with fear, and tried to stammer out some 

excuse, but Etienne interrupted him furiously, carried away by 

the fury of the crowd. 

‘You wanted to join in, and so you bloody well shall, get 

walking, you bastard!’ 

Another cry drowned his words. It was Catherine’s turn now 

to emerge, dazzled by the bright sunlight, terrified at finding 

herself surrounded by these savages. As she staggered forward, 

her legs giving way beneath her after the effort of climbing 102 

ladders, her hands torn to shreds, and her breath failing. La 

Maheude saw her and rushed at her with her hand raised. 

Germinal 

326 

‘Oh, you’re here too, you bitch! .. . While your mother’s 

dying of starvation, you run off to work for your pimp!’ 

Maheu held her arm to stop her hitting her daughter. But 

he grabbed the girl and shook her, feeling as outraged as his 

wife over her behaviour; both of them quite lost control, and 

started screaming even louder than their comrades. 

The sight of Catherine had finally made Etienne lose his 

temper: 

‘Let’s go! Off to the other pits! And you’re coming with us, 

you dirty bastard!’ 

Chaval just had time to retrieve his clogs from the shed, and 

to sling his woollen jersey over his freezing shoulders. The 

whole mob dragged him off, forcing him to gallop along in 

their midst. Filled with despair, Catherine also put on her 

clogs, buttoned up round her neck the shabby man’s jacket 

that they had draped her in when she had caught cold; and she 

ran off behind her lover, afraid of leaving him, because she 

was sure they were going to do him in. 

In another couple of minutes Jean-Bart was empty. Jeanlin, 

who had found a horn, blew a series of rough blasts on it, as if 

he were rounding up cattle. The women, including old Ma 

Brule, La Levaque, and La Mouquette, tucked up their skirts 

to run; while Levaque, with an axe in his hand, swung it 

round like a drum-major’s baton. More and more comrades 

kept arriving, until there were nearly a thousand of them, 

spilling chaotically down the road like a swollen stream bursting 

its banks. The road out of the pit was too narrow, so they 

broke through the fences, 

‘To the pits! Down with traitors! Down with work!’ 

And Jean-Bart was suddenly reduced to absolute silence. 

Not a man could be seen, not a breath could be heard. 

Deneulin came out of the deputies’ hut, and all by himself, 

forbidding anyone to follow him, he went to inspect the pit. 

He was very pale, but perfectly calm. First he stopped in front 

of the shaft, raised his eyes and looked at the severed cables: 

their steel strands hung limp and useless, the file had torn into 

their flesh, carving a raw wound which showed up like a livid 

open sore amid the greasy black mass. Then he went over to 

the engine, and studied the motionless crank rod, like the joint 

Part V 327 

of a giant limb stricken with paralysis; and he touched the 

metal, which had already turned cold, so cold that he shivered 

as if he had touched a corpse. Then he went down to the 

boilers, walking slowly over to the extinguished furnaces, wide 

open and flooded, gave a kick at the generators, which rang 

with a hollow sound. Well then, that was it, he really was 

ruined! Even if he mended the cables and relit the furnaces, 

where would he find the men.'^ Another two weeks of strike, 

and he would be bankrupt. And as he knew that disaster was 

inevitable, he felt no more hatred for the bandits from Mont- 

sou; for he felt that they were all in it together, he and they, all 

guilty accomplices from time immemorial. Doubtless they 

were brutes, but they were illiterate, starving brutes. 

CHAPTER IV 

And in this fashion the group made off over the bare plain, 

white with frost beneath the pale winter sun, spilling over the 

sides of the road on to the beetfields. 

By the time they had reached La Fourche-aux-Boeufs, 

Etienne had taken charge. Without anyone stopping, he called 

out orders and organized the march. Jeanlin galloped on 

ahead, blasting a barbarous music from his horn. Then, in the 

front ranks, the women advanced, some of them armed with 

sticks, La Maheude with wild eyes which seemed to burn with 

the vision of some distant city of instant Justice; old Ma Brule, 

La Levaque, La Mouquette, all striding out in their rags, like 

soldiers marching off to war. If they met the enemy, they^d 

soon see if the gendarmes dared to strike women. And the men 

followed, in a straggling herd, fanning out in a widening tail, 

iron bars bristling everywhere, and Levaque’s single axe waving 

overhead, its blade glinting in the sunlight. Etienne, in the 

centre, kept his eyes on Chaval, whom he forced to march in 

front of him; while Maheu, further behind, threw angry, 

sidelong glances at Catherine, the only woman in this group of 

men, determined to trot along behind her lover to prevent him 

coming to any harm. Their bare heads were dishevelled by the 

Germinal 

328 

stiff breeze, the noise of clattering clogs, sounding like a herd 

of cattle on the loose, spurred on by Jeanlin’s wild trumpeting. 

But suddenly a new cry arose. 

‘Bread! Bread! We want bread!’* 

It was noon, and the hunger born of six weeks of strike 

stirred in their empty bellies, whipped up by running across 

the open countryside. It was already a long time since they had 

shared their few pieces of bread in the morning and La 

Mouquette’s few chestnuts; their stomachs were groaning, and 

this suffering added to their fury against the traitors. 

‘To the pits! No more work! We want bread!’ 

Etienne, who had refused to eat his share at the village, felt 

an unbearable tearing feeling in his chest. He didn’t complain; 

but seized his flask from time to time with a mechanical 

motion and swallowed a mouthful of gin, for he was shivering 

so much that he thought he needed it to carry on. His cheeks 

were flushed, and his eyes blazed. Yet he kept a cool head; he 

still wanted to avoid any unnecessary damage. 

As they arrived at the road to Joiselle, a hewer from 

Vandame, who had joined the band in order to avenge himself 

on his boss, urged his comrades over to the right, shouting 

out: 

‘Let’s go to Gaston-Marie! Stop the pump! Let’s flood 

Jean-Bart!’ 

The crowd had already started moving that way, carried 

away despite Etienne’s protests, as he begged them to leave the 

drainage pumps alone. What was the point in ruining all the 

tunnels.^ That offended his deepest feelings as a workman, 

despite all his grievances. Maheu, too, found it was unfair to 

attack a machine. But the hewer kept shouting his cry for 

vengeance, so Etienne had to shout even louder: 

‘To Mirou! There are traitors down there! ... To Mirou! 

To Mirou!’ 

With a wave of his arm he had swept the band round the 

corner on to the path leading to the left, while Jeanlin, taking 

the lead, blew harder and harder. They pushed and jostled as 

they ran off For the moment, Gaston-Marie was saved. 

And they covered the four kilometres to Mirou in half an 

hour, almost at running speed, over the limitless plain. The 

PartV 

329 

canal sliced through the surrounding landscape like a long 

ribbon of ice. Only the bare trees on its banks, transformed by 

the ice into giant candelabras, interrupted the endless, monoto- 

nous flatness of the plain, which fell away into the horizon, as 

if the sky were the sea. Montsou and Marchiennes were 

hidden behind a dip in the ground, and the immense terrain 

looked entirely bare. 

As they reached the pit they saw a deputy go up on to one 

of the overhead tracks at the screening shed to meet them. 

They all knew old Quandieu well; he was the senior deputy at 

Montsou, an old man with white hair and skin who must have 

been seventy, a real miracle of health for a miner. 

‘What the hell are you doing here, you destructive louts?’ he 

shouted. 

The crowd stopped. He wasn’t one of the bosses, he was 

one of their workmates; and they felt inhibited by their respect 

for an old workman. 

‘There are men at work down there,’ said Etienne. ‘Get 

them to come out.’ 

‘Yes, there are some,’ old Quandieu went on, ‘There arc six 

dozen or so, the others were afraid of you, you bastards! ... 

But you can take it from me that not one of them is coming 

back up, over my dead body!’ 

Exclamations rang out, men pushed and shoved, the women 

moved nearer. The deputy got down off the gangway quickly 

now, and barred their way to the door. 

Then Maheu tried to intervene. 

‘Look, old man, it’s our right, how can we turn it into a 

general strike if we don’t force our mates to come out on our 

side?’ 

The old man fell silent for a moment. Obviously his ignor- 

ance in questions of political alliances was as great as the 

hewers’. Finally, he replied: 

‘It’s your right, I don’t deny it. But as far as I’m concerned, 

rules are rules ... I’m on my own here. The men are supposed 

to be below till three o’clock, and they’re going to stay there 

till three o’clock,’ 

His last words were lost amid a tumult of booing and 

hissing. The men shook their fists at him, and the women 

330 

Germinal 

shouted him down so deafeningly that he could feel their hot 

breath on his face. But he stood his ground, holding his head 

high, with his snow-white hair and little beard bristling; and 

his voice was so full of courage that it could be heard quite 

clearly despite the din. 

‘In God’s name! I won’t let you past! ... As sure as the sun 

rises. I’d rather die than let anyone touch the cables . . . Stop 

pushing, or I’ll throw myself down the bloody shaft before 

your very eyes!’ 

There was a general shudder, and the crowd drew back, 

shocked by what he had said. He continued: 

‘Is there any bloody fool who doesn’t get the message? . .. 

I’m only a workman like the rest of you. I’ve been told to 

stand guard, so I’m standing guard.’ 

And that’s about all there was to old Quandieu’s intellectual 

capacities, as he dug his heels into his military duty, with his 

narrow forehead and his eyes dulled by half a century of 

dreary existence underground. His comrades looked at him, 

feeling moved, because somewhere deep within them they, too, 

felt an echo of what he was saying to them, with his soldierly 

obedience, fraternity, and resignation in the face of danger. He 

thought that they were still undecided, and he repeated: 

‘I’ll throw myself down the bloody shaft before your very 

eyes!’ 

A shudder ran right through the group, and they all wheeled 

round away from him, and cantered off again down the open 

road which stretched away into infinity over the countryside. 

Once again their cries rang out: 

‘To Madeleine! To Crevec(eur! Down with work! We want 

bread, bread!’ 

But in their midst there was a disturbance in the rhythm of 

the march. Someone said that Chaval had tried to escape in 

the confusion. Etienne had just grabbed hold of one of his 

arms, threatening to break his back if he tried any tricks. And 

Chaval struggled, protesting furiously: 

‘What’s all this about? Aren’t I a free man? .. . I’ve been 

freezing for the last hour, I need a scrub. Let go of me!’ 

And he was indeed suffering from the coal-dust sticking 

sweatily to his skin, and his jersey was no protection. 

Part V 

331 

‘Keep moving, or we’il scrub you down ourselves,’ replied 

Etienne. ‘You shouldn’t have gone on about asking for blood.’ 

As they galloped onwards Etienne finally turned round to 

look at Catherine, who was managing to keep up. He experi¬ 

enced a wave of despair at feeling her close to him, so 

wretched and shivering in her baggy man’s jacket and her 

mud-stained breeches. She must have been fit to drop with 

fatigue, but she still kept on running. 

‘You can go, if you like,’ he said at last. 

Catherine didn’t seem to hear. When her eyes met Etienne’s 

they showed only the briefest glimmer of a reproach. And still 

she didn’t stop. Why should she let her man down.^^ Chaval 

was no gentleman, she knew, and he even beat her on occasions. 

But he was her man, the first man to have had her; and she felt 

furious when she saw the whole pack of them turn on him, 

more than a thousand of them against one man. Even if she 

had had no feeling for him, she would have defended him 

simply for honour’s sake. 

‘Go away!’ Maheu repeated, violently. 

This order from her father slowed her down for a moment. 

She trembled, and her eyelids swelled with tears. Then, despite 

her fear, she kept running and took up her place again. So they 

left her alone. 

The group crossed the road to Joiselle, followed the road to 

Cron for a while, and then went up towards Cougny. Over 

there the flat skyline was etched with factory chimneys; wooden 

sheds and brick workshops with wide dusty windows sped past 

them as they pounded over the cobbles. In quick succession 

they passed the low houses of two mining villages, one Hun¬ 

dred and Eighty and Seventy-Six; and from each, answering 

the call of the horn and the cries from every mouth, whole 

families emerged, men, women, and children, joining the 

stampede in the wake of their comrades. By the time they 

arrived at Madeleine, there must have been 1500 of them. The 

road sloped gently downwards, and the raging torrent of 

strikers then had to flow round the slag-heap before they could 

spread out over the flagstones at the entrance to the pit-head. 

At that moment it was still only two o’clock. But the 

deputies, warned in advance, had hurried to get their men up 

332 

Germinal 

early; and as the group arrived, the evacuation was almost 

complete; only a score of men had not yet left, and they were 

just emerging from the cage. They fled, under a hail of stones. 

Two of them were caught and beaten, another escaped, leaving 

the sleeve of his jacket behind. The man-hunt saved the plant, 

nobody touched the cables or the boilers. The sea of men was 

already surging on its way towards the next pit. 

This pit, Crevecceur, was only five hundred metres away 

from Madeleine. There, too, the group arrived just as the 

miners were on their way out. One of the tram girls was 

caught by the women, who tore her breeches apart and gave 

her a good whipping on her bare buttocks, while the men 

stood by and laughed. The pit boys were punched and slapped, 

and the hewers ran off with bloody noses and their ribs black 

and blue. And as the violence mounted, driven by a deep- 

rooted need for revenge, whose savage fury started sending 

everyone off their heads, they called in strangled cries for 

death to traitors, they screamed their hatred of underpaid 

work, and lamented their empty, starving bellies. They tried to 

cut the cables, but the file didn’t make much impact, and it 

looked as if it would take too long, now that they felt driven 

feverishly onwards, ever onwards. In the boiler-room they 

broke a stopcock, and threw bucket after bucket of water 

inside the furnaces, making the cast-iron grids shatter. 

Outside, they wanted to march on Saint-Thomas. This was 

the most obedient pit; the strike had not yet reached it, and 

nearly 700 men must have gone down to work; this infuriated 

the group, who decided to lie in wait for them with cudgels 

and do battle hand to hand, and then they’d see if any of them 

were left standing. But they heard a rumour that there were 

gendarmes at Saint-Thomas, the same gendarmes that they 

had seen and laughed at that very morning. How had someone 

found this out.^ Nobody could say. But the rumour was 

enough to strike fear into them and they decided to head for 

Feutry-Cantel instead. They were swept off their feet again, 

spinning dizzily back round on to the road, rushing along with 

their clogs clattering: Feutry-Cantel here we come, look out 

Feutry-Cantel! There were at least four hundred of the cowards 

down there, that would mean some fun! The pit was three 

Party 

333 

kilometres away, and hidden by a dip in the ground, near the 

Scarpe. They had already reached the slope of Les Platrieres, 

after the road to Beaugnies, when a voice that they didn’t 

recognize threw out the notion that the dragoons might be 

over at Feutry-Cantel. So all the way up and down the column 

people repeated the news, that the dragoons were at Feutry- 

Cantel. They faltered and slowed their pace, and panic started 

to waft through their ranks. They must have been tramping 

over the countryside for hours now, without shaking it out of 

the torpor of its enforced idleness. Why had they not run up 

against any soldiers,? They were worried by their impunity, 

and by the thought of the impending repression. 

Without anyone knowing who had launched it, a new slogan 

spurred them on towards another pit. 

‘La Victoire! Over to La Victoire!’ 

So were there no dragoons or gendarmes at La Victoire? 

Nobody knew. That seemed to reassure them. And they 

turned about and went down towards Beaumont, cutting across 

the fields, to pick up the road to Joiselle, The railway line 

blocked their path, but they knocked down the fences to cross 

it. Now they were approaching Montsou, where the gently 

undulating countryside flattened out and opened up on to a 

sea of beetfields, stretching far, far away towards the black 

houses of Marchiennes. 

This time they were in for a run of at least five kilometres. 

But they were driven on by such an urge that they didn’t feel 

their appalling fatigue or their bruised and aching feet. Their 

column grew longer and longer, swelling with comrades picked 

up along the way in the villages. When they had crossed the 

canal at Magache bridge, and gathered in front of La Victoire, 

there were 2,000 of them. But three o’clock had struck, the 

men had come up, and there was not a soul left down below. 

They vented their frustration in empty threats, and had to 

console themselves with throwing brickbats at the stonemen 

who turned up to start their shift, but now turned tail and 

fled, leaving the group in control of the deserted pit. And as 

they felt enraged at finding no traitors in front of them to 

punch in the face, they turned to lash out at any object 

they could find. Their rancour had swollen gradually but 

334 

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poisonously within them, and now it burst like a boil. Year 

after year of starvation spilled over into a feverish hunger for 

murder and destruction. 

Looking behind a shed, Etienne saw some men loading a 

cart with coal. 

‘Get the hell out of here!’ he cried. ‘No one must move a 

single piece of coal!’ 

A hundred or so strikers ran up to carry out his instructions; 

and all the loaders had time to do was to run away. Some of 

the men unharnessed the horses, and whipped their flanks, 

making them take fright and run off; while others tipped the 

carts over and broke their shafts. 

Levaque had swung out wildly at the trestles with an axe to 

cut down the overhead tracks. But as they withstood his blows, 

he decided to tear out the rails to cut the track right across the 

pit-head. Soon the whole gang had set to work to carry out 

this task. Maheu dislodged the cast-iron clasps, using his 

crowbar as a lever. Meanwhile old Ma Brule led the women on 

and invaded the lamp depot, and they lashed out on all sides 

with their sticks, strewing the ground with the wreckage of 

shattered lamps. La Maheude was carried away and lashed out 

as violently as La Levaque. They were all covered in oil, and 

La Mouquette wiped her hands on her petticoat, laughing at 

the filthy state she was in. Jeanlin had emptied a lamp down 

her neck for a laugh. 

But this orgy of vengeance didn’t help fill their bellies, 

whose claims became more vociferous. The great lament rose 

again, drowning out other concerns: 

‘Bread! Bread! We want bread!’ 

As it happened, there was a former deputy from La Victoire 

who ran a canteen there. He must have taken fright, because 

his stall was abandoned. When the women returned and the 

men had finally demolished the track, they stormed the can¬ 

teen, whose shutters caved in at the first assault. They didn’t 

find any bread there, there were only a couple of pieces of raw 

meat and a sack of potatoes. However, their pillage did bring 

to light nearly fifty bottles of gin, which evaporated as quickly 

as a drop of water in a sandpit. 

Etienne emptied his flask, and was able to fill it up again. 

Part V 

335 

Gradually his eyes became bloodshot with the unhealthy in¬ 

toxication of a starving man, and his teeth seemed to stand out 

like the fangs of a wolf between his ashen lips. Then suddenly 

he noticed that Chaval had slipped away under cover of the 

chaos. He swore loudly, and sent his men scurrying around 

until they laid hands on the fugitive, who had been hiding 

with Catherine behind the woodpile. 

‘You bastard, now you’re afraid of getting involved!’ Etienne 

shouted. ‘Out in the forest, you were the one who wanted to 

call the mechanics out on strike, and shut down the pumps, 

and now you’re trying to leave us in the shit! All right, I swear 

to God, we’re going back to Gaston-Marie, and you’re going 

to smash the pump for us! Yes, I swear to God, you’re going 

to smash it!’ 

He was drunk, there he was launching his men to attack the 

pump which he had saved just a few hours earlier. 

‘To Gaston-Marie! To Gaston-Marie!’ 

They all acclaimed his decision and rushed off; they grabbed 

Chaval by the shoulders and dragged him off, while he asked 

them again to let him wash himself. 

‘Go away!’ shouted Maheu to Catherine, who had started 

running with the rest of them. 

This time she didn’t even falter, but gave her father a fierce 

look and kept on running. 

The mob was now cutting across the flat plain again. They 

retraced their route down the long straight roads, over the 

widening fields. It was four o’clock, and the sun, as it sank on 

the horizon, threw the long shadows of this rampaging horde 

with their wild, threatening gestures across the frozen ground. 

They went straight past Montsou, and picked up the road to 

Joiselle further on; and to save having to make a detour round 

La Fourche-aux-Boeufs, they passed beneath the wails of La 

Piolaine. The Gregoires had just left, in order to call on their 

notary, before dining with the Hennebeaus, where they planned 

to meet up with Cecile. The estate seemed fast asleep, with its 

deserted line of lime trees, and both the vegetable garden and 

the orchard stood bare from winter. Nothing moved in the 

house, whose closed windows were misty with the warm con¬ 

densation inside; and this deep silence gave out an impression 

Germinal 

336 

of friendliness and well-beings a patriarchal feeling of comfort¬ 

able beds and rich cooking, of well-tempered happiness, which 

surrounded the existence of the landlord and his family. 

Without stopping, the mob looked menacingly through the 

iron bars of the gates and along the high perimeter walls 

bristling with broken bottles. The cry went up again: 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

The only reply came from the dogs, a pair of tawny Great 

Danes, who barked fiercely and rose up on their hind legs, 

baring their fangs. And behind the closed blinds there were 

only the two maids, Melanie, the cook, and Honorine, the 

chambermaid, attracted by the shouting but sweating with fear 

and deathly pale at the sight of this horde of savages dancing 

past. They fell down on their knees, believing that their doom 

was sealed, when they heard one of the windows in the next 

room shatter. But this single stone-throw was only one of 

Jeanlin’s pranks: he had made himself a sling from a piece of 

string, and was merely sending a parting message to the 

Gregoires. He had already started blowing his horn again, and 

the mob disappeared into the distance, with their call dying 

away: 

‘Bread! Bread! We want bread!’ 

When they arrived at Gaston-Marie their ranks had further 

increased, until there were 2,500 of the desperadoes, smash¬ 

ing or sweeping aside everything in their path, with the un¬ 

stoppable force of a raging torrent. Some gendarmes had been 

there an hour earlier, and had gone off towards Saint-Thomas, 

sent on a wild-goose chase by the local farm workers, leaving 

in such a hurry that they hadn’t even taken the precaution of 

leaving a small picket of men to guard the pit. In less than a 

quarter of an hour the furnaces were emptied, the boilers 

drained, the buildings invaded and sacked. But it was the 

pump above all that they had it in for. It wasn’t enough for it 

to give out a last dying gasp of steam, they threw themselves at 

it as if it were a living person that they wanted to throttle. 

‘You strike the first blow!’ Etienne repeated, placing a 

hammer in Chaval’s hands. ‘Come on, you swore along with 

the others!’ 

Chaval trembled and stepped back a pace; and as the crowd 

Part V 

337 

jostled him he dropped the hammer, while his workmates, 

without waiting, started hacking the pump to pieces, hitting it 

with bricks, crowbars, or anything else that came to hand. 

Some even tried to beat it with sticks, which split. The screws 

fractured, and the steel and copper plates broke loose, like 

dislocated limbs. A flying stroke with a pickaxe smashed the 

cast-iron lining, the water burst out, and the boiler emptied 

with a final gurgle, sounding like a death-rattle. 

It was all over. The mob found themselves outside again in 

a state of hysteria, piling up behind Etienne, who refused to let 

Chaval go. 

'Death to the traitor! Down the shaft with him!' 

The wretch was livid and stammering, but still stubbornly 

obsessed with his compulsive need to clean himself up. 

'Well, if that’s bothering you,’ said La Levaque, 'here’s a 

basin for you, look!’ 

She had found a great puddle formed by the overspill of 

water from the pump seeping through the rock. It was white, 

and covered by a thick coat of ice; they pushed him towards it, 

broke the ice, and forced him to plunge his head into the icy 

water. 

'Down you go!’ repeated old Ma Brule. ‘I swear to God, if you 

don’t get your head under, we’ll throw you in . . . now have a 

drink, that’s right, like an animal, get your snout in the trough!’ 

He had to get down on all fours and drink. They all 

laughed, enjoying the cruel fun. One woman pulled his ears, 

and another picked up a handful of fresh horse dung off the 

road to throw in his face. His old woollen jersey hung off him 

in shreds. He lurched about wildly, his back heaving with his 

desperate attempts to escape. 

Maheu had pushed him, and La Maheude was one of the 

most ferocious of the women, for both of them were eager to 

take their long-overdue revenge; and even La Mouquette, who 

usually kept on good terms with her former lovers, had it in 

for him, calling him a good-for-nothing, and suggested taking 

his trousers down to see if he was still a man. 

Etienne shut her up. 

‘That’s enough! We don’t all need to join in ... If you 

want, you and I will sort this out on our own.’ 

Germinal 

338 

He clenched his fists, and his eyes lit up with homicidal 

fury, his intoxication brewing up within him an urge to kill. 

‘Are you ready? A fight to the death ... Give him a knife. 

I’ve got one already.’ 

Catherine looked at him, exhausted and terrified. She remem¬ 

bered what he had confided to her, how when he had been 

drinking he felt like tearing someone to pieces, poisoned with 

alcohol after only three glasses, because his tipsy parents had 

filled his body with so much of the muck already. Suddenly 

she threw herself at him, pummelled him with her small 

woman’s fists, thrust her face up against his, and shouted at 

him, choking with indignation. 

‘You coward, you rotten coward! ... Wasn’t all that filth 

enough for you? Do you want to murder the man now he’s 

down on his knees?’ 

She turned to face her father and mother and then towards 

the others, 

‘You are all cowards! Rotten cowards ... Go on then, kill 

me along with him. I’ll scratch your eyes out if you touch him 

again. Oh, you cowards!’ 

She had taken her stand in front of her man, defending him, 

forgetting his beatings and their poverty, borne on by the idea 

that she belonged to him, because he had taken her, and that it 

was shameful for her to let him be so degraded. 

Etienne had turned pale under the blows that the girl had 

rained on him. His first reaction had been to strike her down. 

But then he drew his hand across his brow, with a gesture that 

showed him returning to his senses, and said to Chaval, amid a 

deep silence: 

‘She’s right, that’s enough ... bugger off]’ 

Chaval took to his heels immediately, and Catherine raced 

off after him. The crowd stood watching in stupefaction, until 

they disappeared round a bend in the road. Only La Maheude 

murmured: 

‘You’re wrong, we should have held on to him. He’s bound 

to pull some vile trick on us.’ 

But the mob had set off again already. It was nearly five 

o’clock, and low on the horizon the sun was as red as hot coals, 

scorching the whole vast plain. A passing pedlar told them that 

Part V 

339 

the dragoons were on their way, over by Crevecoeur. So they 

turned back, and the order flew among them: 

‘To Montsou! To the management! . *. Bread! Bread! We 

want bread!’ 

CHAPTER V 

Monsieur Hennebeau had stationed himself at the window 

of his study, in order to watch the departure of the carriage 

which was taking his wife off to lunch at Marchiennes. For a 

moment he had followed the progress of Negrel, trotting 

alongside the carriage door; then he had come back to sit down 

in peace and quiet at his desk. When it was not enlivened by 

the sounds of the existence of his wife or his nephew, the 

house seemed empty. And on this occasion, in fact, the coach¬ 

man had gone to drive Madame; Rose, the new chambermaid, 

had her day off until five o’clock; and only Hippolyte, the 

manservant, was left, shuffling round the house in his slippers, 

apart of course from the cook, who had been up since dawn 

marshalling her whole battery of pots and pans in readiness for 

the dinner that her masters were giving that evening. So 

Monsieur Hennebeau was looking forward to a thorough day’s 

work, amid the profound quietness of the deserted house. 

At about nine o’clock, although he had orders not to let 

anyone in, Hippolyte thought he ought to show in Dansaert, 

who had brought news. It was only then that the manager 

learnt of the meeting in the forest the previous evening; and 

the report was so detailed that while he listened he had time to 

reflect on La Pierronne’s amorous exploits, which were so 

notorious that two or three anonymous letters a week de¬ 

nounced the overman’s indiscretions: obviously the husband 

must have been talking, the espionage reeked of the bedroom. 

He even took the opportunity to suggest that he was entirely in 

the know, and was content to recommend discretion, for fear 

of scandal. Horrified to hear such reproaches interrupt his 

report, Dansaert denied all, and stammered excuses, while the 

sudden reddening of his large nose admitted the crime. He 

340 

Germinal 

didn’t insist on his innocence too vigorously, however, pleased 

to be let off so lightly; for usually the manager showed an 

implacable puritan severity whenever one of his employees 

made himself a present of a pretty girl from the pit. They 

carried on discussing the strike: the forest meeting was nothing 

but bluff and bluster, with no serious consequences. In any 

case, the mining villages would surely stay calm for a few days, 

after the morning’s military manceuvres had imbued them 

with a feeling of awe and respect. 

When Monsieur Hennebeau was alone again, however, he 

felt like sending a dispatch to the Prefect. Only the fear of 

gratuitously admitting his anxiety restrained him. Already he 

couldn’t forgive himself for having lacked intuition to the 

extent of telling everyone, and even writing to the Board, that 

the strike wouldn’t last more than a fortnight. And now it had 

been dragging on for nearly two months, much to his surprise; 

and it was driving him to despair; every day he felt diminished 

and compromised, needing to achieve some signal victory if he 

wanted to return to favour in the eyes of the Board. And he 

had deliberately asked them for instructions in case of conflict. 

The reply was late in coming, he was expecting to find it in 

the afternoon’s mail. And he said that then would be time 

enough to send out telegrams and have the military occupy the 

pits, if that was the wish of those gentlemen. He felt absolutely 

sure that there would be a pitched battle, with blood and 

bodies. He found such a responsibility disturbing, despite his 

usual vigour. 

Until eleven o’clock he worked on quietly, hearing nothing 

in the abandoned house except the sound of Hippolyte, who 

was wax polishing one of the first-floor rooms at the far end of 

the house. Then he suddenly received two dispatches in quick 

succession, the first announcing the invasion of Jean-Bart by 

the gang from Montsou, the second giving details of the cut 

cables, the extinguished furnaces, and the rest of the destruc¬ 

tion. He didn’t understand. Why had the strikers gone off to 

Deneulin’s mine instead of taking on one of their own Com¬ 

pany’s.? Although they were welcome to sack Vandame, since it 

would further his plans for the take-over that he was contem¬ 

plating. And at twelve o’clock he had lunch alone in the vast 

Part V 

341 

room, served silently by the manservant, whose slippers he 

didn’t even hear. The solitude made him feel even more 

gloomy and preoccupied, and he felt chilled to the heart when 

an overman who had run all the way was ushered in, and told 

him of the mob’s march on Mirou. And almost immediately, 

just as he was finishing his coffee, he learned from a telegram 

that Madeleine and Crevecceur were threatened in their turn. 

So his dilemma was exacerbated. He expected more mail for 

two o’clock: should he call for troops straight away? Or should 

he wait patiently a while longer, to avoid acting before knowing 

the orders of the Board? He went back to his study, he wanted 

to read a note to the Prefect which he had asked Negrel to 

draft the day before. But he couldn’t discover where he had 

put it; he wondered whether the young man might have left it 

in his room, where he often wrote at night. And unable to 

come to a decision, haunted by the thought of this note, he 

walked rapidly upstairs to look for it in Negrel’s bedroom. 

As he entered the room. Monsieur Hennebeau was taken 

aback: the room hadn’t been tidied, no doubt through Hippo- 

lyte’s negligence or laziness. There was a moist, warm atmo¬ 

sphere, the stale warmth of a bedroom which had been heated 

all night by an open stove; and his nostrils were assailed by a 

suffocating, penetrating scent, which he assumed was the smell 

of the water the young man had washed in, for the basin was 

full. The room was in a state of considerable disorder, clothes 

scattered here and there, wet towels thrown over the backs of 

chairs, the bed unmade, with an untucked sheet hanging down 

over the side on to the carpet. However, at first he gave the 

scene only a cursory glance, and walked straight over to a table 

covered in papers, to start searching for the lost note. Twice 

he went through all the papers one by one; it definitely wasn’t 

there. Where the hell had that scatter-brained Paul hidden it? 

But as Monsieur Hennebeau moved back towards the middle 

of the room, glancing at each piece of furniture, he noticed 

something in the unmade bed which seemed to catch the light, 

like a spark. He went over mechanically and stretched out his 

hand. There, between two folds of the sheet, was a little 

golden flask. He immediately recognized Madame Hennebeau’s 

flask of ether; she never went anywhere without it. But he 

342 

Germinal 

couldn't understand what this object was doing there: how 

could it have come to be in Paul’s bed? And suddenly he went 

deathly pale. His wife had slept there. 

‘Excuse me, Sir,’ Hippolyte murmured from the doorway, ‘I 

saw Sir go upstairs ...’ 

The manservant had come into the room, and was dismayed 

by the mess that the bedroom was in. 

‘Good heavens, the bedroom hasn’t been tidied, that’s for 

sure. So Rose went out and left me with all the housework to 

catch up on.’ 

Monsieur Hennebeau had hidden the flask in his hand, and 

was squeezing it hard enough to break it. 

‘What do you want?’ 

‘Sir, there’s another man ... He’s come from Crevecoeur, 

he’s got a letter.’ 

‘Well, leave me alone, tell him to wait!’ 

His wife had slept there! When he had bolted the door, he 

opened his hand up again, and looked at the flask, which had 

left a red mark on his flesh. Suddenly he could see and hear 

the obscenities which had been taking place in his own house 

for months. He recalled his previous suspicions, those rustling 

noises behind closed doors, sounds of bare feet creeping around 

the silent house at night. Yes, it was his wife coming upstairs 

to sleep in this bedroom! 

He slumped into a chair, staring bemused at the bed in 

front of him, and spent several minutes in a kind of trance. He 

was awakened by the noise of someone knocking on the door; 

someone was trying to open it. He recognized the manservant’s 

voice. 

‘Sir .. . Ah, Sir has locked himself in ...’ 

‘What now?’ 

‘It seems to be urgent. The workmen are smashing every¬ 

thing to pieces. There are two other men downstairs. There 

are some telegrams too.’ 

‘Leave me alone! I’ll be down in a minute!’ 

The thought that Hippolyte would have discovered the flask 

himself, if he had cleaned the bedroom that morning, had just 

sent a chill through his bones. And besides, the servant must 

be in the know, a dozen times he must have found the bed 

Part V 

343 

warm from their adultery, Madame’s hairs left on the pillow, 

disgusting stains defiling the bed-linen. And that was why he 

was deliberately pestering him, he was trying to rub salt in his 

wounds. 

Perhaps he spent hours listening at the keyhole, excited by 

the debauchery of his masters. 

So Monsieur Hennebeau remained motionless. He kept 

staring at the bed. The long litany of his past sufferings 

unfolded before his eyes, his marriage to this woman, their 

immediate misunderstanding of heart and body, the lovers she 

had had without him being aware of it, the one he had put up 

with for ten years as one humours a sick woman’s cravings for 

some disgusting taste. Then came their arrival at Montsou, a 

crazy hope of curing her, months of languishing, of slumbering 

in exile, waiting for the approach of middle age which would 

finally yield her up to him. Then their nephew arrived, this 

Paul whose mother she became, to whom she spoke of her 

withered heart, buried for ever under ashes. And he suspected 

nothing, idiotic husband that he was; he adored the woman, 

who was his very own, yet she had belonged to others, and he 

alone could not possess her! He adored her with a shameful 

passion, and would have fallen on his knees in gratitude if she 

would only have thrown him the scraps from the favours she 

lavished on others! These scraps she was now throwing to a 

boy. 

At that moment a distant ringing made Monsieur Hennebeau 

jump. He recognized it as the sound of the bell which had to 

be rung, on his orders, when the postman arrived. He got up, 

and spoke out loud, releasing a flood of coarse language which 

had been painfully strangling his throat despite his attempts to 

restrain it. 

*Oh, damn and blast them, damn their bloody dispatches 

and letters!’ 

Now he was filled with rage, as if he wanted to open up the 

sewers to kick the filth back down them. That woman was a 

bitch, he sought the crudest words to sully her image. The sud¬ 

den thought of the marriage between Cecile and Paul that she 

was organizing with such tranquil beatitude finally made him 

lose patience. Was there no passion, no jealousy, behind her 

344 

Germinal 

sensual energy? Was there nothing left but playful perversity, 

the habit of male company, a recreation enjoyed like a favourite 

pudding? He accused her of the vilest crimes, and almost 

excused the youth, whom she had bitten into when her appetite 

revived, as if she were biting into the first unripe fruit stolen 

from over a garden wall. Whom would she gobble up, how low 

would she fail, when she had run out of indulgent nephews, 

sensible enough to share the family table, bed, and wife? 

There was a nervous tap at the door, and Hippolyte’s voice 

could be heard whispering through the keyhole: 

‘Sir, the mail .,. And there’s Monsieur Dansaert back 

again, he says that the bloodshed has started .. 

‘I’m coming, for heaven’s sake!’ 

What would he do to them? Throw them out as soon as they 

returned to Marchiennes, like rabid dogs he refused to shelter 

under his roof. He’d take a cudgel to them and would shout 

out loud at them to take their poisonous fornication elsewhere. 

It was their sighs and mingled breath that clotted the air in the 

room; the pervasive scent that had suffocated him was the 

odour of musk secreted by his wife’s skin, another of her 

perverse tastes, her physical need for powerful scents; and he 

recognized the warmth and the smell of fornication, the living 

traces of adultery, in the jars left open in unemptied wash¬ 

basins, the tangled bed-linen and displaced furniture, in the 

whole room, which stank of immorality. In an impotent rage 

he flung himself on the bed and pounded it with his fists, 

messing it up entirely, thumping the places where he saw the 

imprint of their joined bodies, furious to find that the blankets 

he tore off and the sheets that he crumpled remained flabby 

and unresponsive under his blows, as if they themselves were 

worn out from a whole night of love-making. 

But suddenly he heard Hippolyte coming back upstairs 

again, and he stopped, out of shame. 

He stayed a few moments without moving, panting, wiping 

his brow, waiting for his racing heart to quieten down; standing 

in front of a mirror, he studied his face, which was so 

distraught that he hardly recognized himself Then, when he 

had watched it gradually calm down, he made himself walk 

downstairs, through a supreme act of will. 

Part V 

345 

Downstairs five messengers, as well as Dansaert, stood 

waiting. They all brought increasingly grave news about the 

march of the strikers from pit to pit; and the overman told him 

in full detail what had happened at Mirou, and how it had 

been saved by the fine stand taken by old Quandieu. He 

listened, nodding his head, but he wasn’t taking it in, his mind 

was still up there in the bedroom. Finally he sent them away, 

saying that he would take the necessary steps. When he was 

left alone again, sitting at his desk, he seemed to nod off, with 

his head buried in his hands, and his eyes covered. His mail 

was there in front of him, and he decided to look out the long- 

awaited letter, the reply from the Board, but at first its lines 

span round in front of his eyes. However, he gradually made 

out that these gentlemen were in favour of some kind of battle: 

not that they were actually ordering him to make things worse; 

but they managed to suggest that the disturbances would 

precipitate the end of the strike by justifying vigorous reprisals. 

Thereupon he lost no further time in hesitation, he sent out 

dispatches in all directions, to the Prefect in Lille, to the army 

headquarters in Douai, to the gendarmerie at Marchiennes. He 

felt relieved, now all he had to do was stay in and wait, and he 

even let it be known that he was suffering from an attack of 

gout. And so he spent the whole afternoon shut away in the 

depths of his study, refusing to let anyone in, content to do 

nothing more than sit back and read the mounting flood of 

dispatches and letters. In this way he followed the progress of 

the mob from a distance, from Madeleine to Crevecoeur, from 

Crevecceur to La Victoire, from La Victoire to Gaston-Marie. 

In addition, he received news of the confusion of the gendarmes 

and the dragoons, who had got lost along the way, and 

constantly found themselves marching away from whichever 

pit was being attacked. Let them murder and destroy, he had 

plunged his head into his hands again and, placing his fingers 

over his eyes, he let himself sink into the great silence of the 

empty house, where the only sound that emerged was the 

noise of the cook wielding saucepans, enthusiastically prepar¬ 

ing that evening’s dinner. 

Twilight was already darkening the room when, at five 

o’clock, a sudden din made Monsieur Hennebeau jump, jolting 

Germinal 

34^ 

him out of the state of stupefied inertia he was plunged in, still 

buried up to the elbows in his papers. He thought that the two 

wretched sinners must have returned home. But the tumult 

grew louder, and a terrible cry burst out just as he went over 

to the window. 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

It was the strikers, who were now invading Montsou, while 

the gendarmes, thinking that Le Voreux was in danger of 

attack, were galloping away in the other direction to guard the 

wrong pit. 

Meanwhile, two kilometres away from the first houses, just 

below the crossroads where the main highway met the road to 

Vandame, Madame Hennebeau and her young ladies had just 

watched the mob file past. They had spent a happy day at 

Marchiennes, including a friendly lunch with the manager of 

Les Forges, and then an interesting visit to his workshops and 

to a neighbouring glassworks, to fill up the afternoon, and as 

they were at last on their way home, in the limpid air of a fine 

winter evening, Cecile had suddenly had the urge to drink a 

mug of milk when she saw a little farm by the roadside. So 

they all got out of the carriage, Negrel having gallantly jumped 

off his horse to help them down; while the farmer’s wife, 

aghast at this invasion by high society, rushed around trying to 

find a table-cloth before she would serve them. But Lucie and 

Jeanne wanted to see the cow being milked, and they all took 

their mugs right into the cowshed, to have a little country 

picnic, and laughed with delight as they sank into the straw. 

Madame Hennebeau was still drinking her milk unenthusi¬ 

astically, while radiating dutiful motherly approval, when a 

strange noise rumbling in the background outside disturbed 

her, 

‘Whatever can that be,?’ 

The cowshed was situated by the roadside, and had a wide 

entrance gate, to let the haycart through, since the building 

also served as a barn. The girls had already poked their heads 

out and were astonished at what they could see over to the left, 

a great black crowd of people pouring like a flood down the 

road towards Vandame and yelling fiercely. 

‘My God!’ murmured Negrel, who had also come to the 

Part V 

347 

door. ‘I wonder if our noisy brats are at last getting seriously 

angry 

‘Perhaps it’s the colliers,’ said the farmer’s wife. ‘That’s the 

second time they’ve gone past. Seems things aren’t going too 

well, they’ve taken over the countryside.’ 

She mouthed each word cautiously, watching for the effect 

it would have on her audience; and when she saw that they 

were all horrified, and realized how anxious this discovery had 

made them, she hastened to conclude: 

‘Oh, they’re just beggars, that rabble!’ 

Negrel, seeing that it was too late to get back into the 

carriage and return to Montsou, gave the coachman the order 

to put the carriage away quickly inside the farmyard and hide 

the pair of horses behind a shed. He took his own horse, which 

a lad had been holding by the reins, and tethered it inside the 

same shed. When he came back, he found that his aunt and 

the girls were distraught, ready to follow the farmer’s wife, 

who offered to shelter them in her home. But he felt that they 

would be safer where they were; surely nobody w^ould think of 

looking for them in all that hay. But the double doors didn’t 

shut at ail well, and they were so full of cracks that they could 

see the road between the rotten planks. 

‘Come on, chin up!’ he said, ‘We’ll make them pay dearly 

for our lives.’ 

This joke made them even more fearful. The noise increased, 

although there was nothing to be seen as yet, and it seemed as 

if a violent storm wind were blowing up along the empty road, 

like the sudden gusts which precede a great thunderstorm. 

‘No, I can’t look, I won’t look,’ said Cecile, running to hide 

in the hay. 

Madame Hennebeau had turned pale with anger, furious at 

these people for spoiling her pleasure, and she stood back, 

looking away with an expression of distaste, while Lucie and 

Jeanne, despite their shivers, had crept up to peep through a 

crack in the door, so as not to miss any of the action. 

The thunderous noise came nearer, they felt the ground 

vibrate beneath their feet, and they saw Jeanlin at the head of 

the mob blowing his horn. 

‘Pass the smelling salts, please, here come the sweating 

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348 

masses!’ murmured Negrel, who, despite his republican convic¬ 

tions, liked to amuse the ladies by mocking the rabble. 

But his witty remark was swept away in a hurricane of 

shouting and gesticulating. The women had arrived, nearly a 

thousand of them, their hair straggling untidily in the wind, 

their rags showing patches of bare skin, the careless nudity of 

women sick and tired of bearing more and more starving 

young in an endless, animal cycle. Some of them had their 

babes in their arms, and they raised them up in the air and 

waved them about, like banners symbolizing mourning and 

vengeance. Other, younger women, with firm and warlike 

breasts, were brandishing sticks; while dreadful old crones 

screamed so loud that their scraggy necks looked as if they 

would stretch too far and snap. Then the men hove into view, 

a raging mob 2,000 strong, pit boys, hewers, and wastemen, a 

compact mass tumbling forwards like a single body, whose 

discoloured breeches and ragged woollen jerseys merged into a 

single mud-coloured mass. Only their burning eyes and the 

dark holes of their gaping mouths could be seen as they sang 

the ‘Marseillaise’,* and the verses tailed off into a vague 

bellowing, echoing to the beat of their clogs clattering over the 

hard ground. Over their heads, among the spikes of the iron 

bars that stabbed at the air, they passed an axe, keeping it 

upright; and this single axe, flaunted like the battle standard of 

the band, took on the sharp profile of a guillotine blade against 

the light evening sky. 

‘What dreadful faces!’ stammered Madame Hennebeau. 

Negrel said between his teeth: 

‘I’m damned if I recognize a single one of them! Where on 

earth do these thugs come from?’ 

And in fact their anger, hunger, and the last two months of 

suffering, as well as their crazy marathon from pit to pit, had 

etched on to the placid faces of the Montsou colliers the savage 

masks of wild animals. At that moment the sun was setting, 

and its last, dark purple rays dyed the plain blood red. And 

then the road seemed bathed in blood, as the men and women 

continued to gallop onward, looking blood-stained, like butch¬ 

ers in a slaughterhouse. 

‘Oh, how exquisite!’ said Lucie and Jeanne under their 

Part V 

349 

breath, moved in their artistic souls by the horrible beauty of 

the scene. 

Yet they were afraid, and they huddled up to Madame 

Hennebeau, who was leaning against one of the troughs. The 

idea that a single glance between the gaping planks of the 

tumbledown doors would be enough to cause the massacre of 

the whole family made her blood run cold. Even Negrel, who 

was usually brave, felt himself turning pale too, as a wave of 

panic overwhelmed his will, a wave surging up out of the 

unknown. Down in the hay, Cecile didn’t move a muscle. But 

the others, however strongly they would have liked to look 

away, found they couldn’t stop themselves watching. 

It was a scarlet vision of the revolution that would inevitably 

carry them all away, on some blood-soaked Jin de siecle evening. 

That was it, one night the people would rise up, cast caution 

aside, and run riot like this far and wide all over the country¬ 

side; and there would be rivers of bourgeois blood, their heads 

would be waved on pikes, their strong-boxes hacked open, and 

their gold poured all over the ground. The women would 

scream, and the men would look gaunt as wolves, their fangs 

drooling and gnashing. Yes, these same rags and the same 

thunder of clogs, the same terrifying pack of animals with 

dirty skins and foul breath, would sweep away the old world, 

as their barbarian hordes overflowed and surged through the 

land. There would be blazing fires, not a stone of the towns 

would be left standing, and they would become savages again, 

living out in the woods, once the poor had enjoyed their great 

orgy and garnered their harvest, sucked the women dry and 

sacked the cellars of the rich. There would be nothing left, not 

a sou of inherited wealth, not a line of legal entitlement, until 

the day when, perhaps, a new order might at last spring up 

from the earth. And that was the future out there, tearing 

down the road like some natural disaster, and buffeting their 

faces with its great hurricane wind. 

A great cry arose, drowning out the strains of the 

‘Marseillaise’: 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

Lucie and Jeanne huddled closer to Madame Hennebeau, 

who was on the point of fainting; while Negrel stood in front 

350 

Germinal 

of them as if to shield them with his body. Was this then to be 

the night when traditional society went under.^ And what they 

saw next finally made them speechless. The mob had almost 

finished flowing past, there were only a few laggards bringing 

up the rear, when La Mouquette came into sight. She was 

taking her time, because she was on the look-out for any 

members of the bourgeoisie guarding their garden gates or 

peeping out of their windows; and when she discovered any, 

since she was too far away to spit in their faces, she showed 

them what was for her the utmost contempt. She must have 

spied one just then, for she suddenly lifted her skirts and 

thrust out her rear, displaying her enormous naked buttocks in 

the dying blaze of the setting sun. Her behind seemed savage 

rather than obscene, and there was nothing comic about it. 

Then they had all disappeared, and the flood went off again 

towards Montsou, between the low houses daubed in bright 

colours. They had the carriage wheeled out of the yard, but 

the coachman didn’t dare answer for Madame and her young 

ladies if the strikers had the run of the road. And the worst 

thing was that there was no other route. 

‘But we’ve got to get back, dinner will be ready,’ said 

Madame Hennebeau, in a temper, her nerves frayed by fear. 

‘Those foul workmen deliberately chose the day when I had 

guests. What’s the point of treating them decently.^’ 

Lucie and Jeanne were busy extracting Cecile from the hay, 

while she fought them off, thinking that the savages were still 

on the war-path, and repeating that she didn’t want to see 

them. At last they were all seated in the carriage. Negrel 

mounted his horse, and then thought it would be a good idea 

to return through the back streets of Requillart. 

‘Drive slowly,’ he said to the coachman, ‘you know it’s an 

awful road. Then if there are any gangs out there who stop 

you from getting back on to the road, you can stop behind the 

old pit, and we’ll walk home through the side gate in the 

garden, and you’ll just have to shelter the carriage and horses 

where you can, an inn-yard or somewhere.’ 

Off they went. In the distance the mob was pouring into 

Montsou. Since they had seen the gendarmes and the dragoons 

on two occasions, the inhabitants were agitated, and seized 

PartV 

351 

with panic. Abominable stories were going the rounds, telling 

of handwritten notices threatening to rip open the bellies of 

the bourgeois; and although nobody had read one, there were 

still those who could quote from them word for word. At the 

notary’s, the panic was particularly hysterical, for he had just 

received an anonymous letter through the door, warning him 

that there was a barrel of gunpowder buried in his cellars, 

ready to blow him up if he didn’t come out on the side of the 

people. 

And the Gregoires, whose visit had been protracted by the 

arrival of this letter, were just in the process of discussing it 

and concluding that it was the work of a practical joker, when 

the invasion of the town by the mob sent the household into a 

state of terminal panic. The Gregoires, however, merely smiled. 

They drew a corner of the curtain aside to look out, and 

refused to admit that there was the slightest danger, saying 

that they were sure it would all come to an amicable conclusion. 

It had only just struck five o’clock, so they had plenty of time 

to wait for the road to clear before they went over the other 

side to dine with the Hennebeaus, where Cecile, who must 

have returned by now, would be waiting for them. But no one 

else in Montsou seemed to share their confidence: people were 

running around wildly, doors and windows were slammed 

fiercely shut. They noticed that Maigrat on the other side of 

the road was barricading his shop with every iron bar he could 

lay hands on, and his hands shook so much that his skinny 

little wife was obliged to tighten the nuts and bolts herself. 

The mob had come to a halt in front of the manager’s 

house, and their cry rang out: 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

Monsieur Hennebeau was standing at the window when 

Hippolyte came in to close the shutters, afraid that the windows 

might be broken if they started to throw stones. He closed all 

the other ground-floor shutters too, then went up to the first 

floor, and the creaking of hasps and the clatter of shutters 

could be heard in quick succession. Unfortunately they 

couldn’t close the main kitchen window, down in the basement, 

which left a dangerously exposed view of the saucepans and 

spit sizzling over the glowing fire. 

352 

Germinal 

Monsieur Hennebeau, who wanted to see what was happen¬ 

ing, went mechanically up to the second floor, into Paul’s 

room: it had the best position, over to the left of the house, 

overlooking the whole length of the road down as far as the 

Company’s yards. And he stood behind the shutters, surveying 

the crowd. But he was struck anew by the state of the room: 

the dressing table had been wiped and tidied, and the bed 

looked cool, with its clean, neatly tucked sheets. His whole 

afternoon’s fury, the inner struggle that had raged within the 

depths of his lonely silence, now fizzled out into a feeling of 

enormous fatigue. His inner being had already become like this 

room, cooled down, swept clean of the morning’s filth, restored 

to its usual propriety. What was the point in creating a 

scandal.^ Had anything in the household changed,? His wife had 

merely acquired another lover; it was hardly any worse because 

she had chosen one of the family; perhaps there might even be 

an advantage in it, for it would help to keep up appearances. 

He felt sorry for himself when he recalled the jealous fury he 

had felt. How ridiculous he had been to try to beat up the bed 

with his fists! Since he had already put up with another man, 

he could surely put up with this one. It would only mean that 

he would feel a little more contempt. His mouth seemed to be 

poisoned with the bitter taste of universal futility, the endless 

pain of existence, shame at himself for still adoring and 

desiring this woman in the filth that he allowed her to wallow 

in. 

Beneath the window the shouting rang out louder and more 

violently than ever. 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

‘Fools!’ said Monsieur Hennebeau between clenched teeth. 

He heard them insulting him because of his high salary, and 

calling him an idle, fat, dirty pig, making himself sick on fine 

food while the workers were dying of hunger. 

The women had noticed the kitchen, and they hurled a 

barrage of insults at the pheasant that was roasting on the spit, 

and the sauces whose rich odour wrought havoc on their 

empty stomachs. Oh! How they would like to stuff the bour¬ 

geois so full of champagne and truffles that their guts would 

explode! 

Part V 

353 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

‘You fools!’ Monsieur Hennebeau repeated. ‘Do you suppose 

that I’m happy?’ 

He felt a wave of anger at these uncomprehending people. 

He would willingly have given them his high salary if he could 

have had their thick skins in exchange, allowing them to slip in 

and out of bed with no regrets. Why couldn’t he invite them to 

dinner and let them stuff their faces with his pheasant while he 

went off to fornicate in the bushes, screwing the girls without 

giving a damn about whoever had screwed them before? He 

would have given everything, his education, his comfort, his 

luxury, his power as manager, if just for one day he could have 

been one of the lowliest of his employees, but crass and free 

enough in his body to beat his wife and take his pleasure with 

his neighbours’ womenfolk. And he would like to be starving 

too, with nothing in his belly, and his stomach racked with 

cramps that made his head spin: perhaps that would dull his 

endless suffering. Oh, to live like a wild animal, to have no 

possessions, to tumble in the hay with the ugliest, dirtiest tram 

girl, and be able to be happy with that! 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

Then his anger rose and he shouted furiously amid the din: 

‘Bread, is that all you want, you fools?’ 

He had enough to eat, and yet he still writhed in agony. His 

rickety marriage, his whole lifetime of suffering, rose up and 

caught in his throat to choke him, like a death-rattle. Life was 

not perfect just because you had bread to eat. What idiot would 

measure happiness in this world by the distribution of wealth? 

These unimaginative revolutionaries could go ahead and de¬ 

stroy one society and rebuild a different one, they wouldn’t add 

a drop of happiness to humanity, they wouldn’t cancel a single 

sorrow by cutting up the bread into equal slices. In fact they 

would spread even more misery over the face of the earth, until 

one day they would make even dogs howl in misery, if they 

forced them away from the simple satisfaction of their instincts 

and introduced them to the unquenchable suffering of frus¬ 

trated passion. No, the best thing was not to be, and if you had 

to be, then let it be a tree or a stone, less even, a grain of sand, 

so as not to bleed when trampled underfoot. 

354 

Germinal 

And in this paroxysm of suffering, Monsieur Hennebeau’s 

eyes swelled with tears, which poured in burning drops down 

his cheeks. The road was starting to disappear into the twilight 

when stones began to rake the front of the villa. Feeling no 

anger now against these starving creatures, but merely goaded 

by the raw wound in his heart, he kept on stammering through 

his tears: 

‘The fools, the fools!’ 

But the call from their empty bellies rang out louder, and 

the shouting re-echoed thunderously, sweeping all before it: 

‘Bread, bread, we want bread!’ 

CHAPTER VI 

Etienne, who had sobered up after being slapped by Cather¬ 

ine, had stayed at the head of his comrades. But while he 

launched them into the attack on Montsou, shouting hoarsely, 

he heard another voice within him, the voice of reason, asking 

in astonishment what the purpose of all this could be. He 

hadn’t wanted any of it to happen, so how could it have come 

about that he had left Jean-Bart with the intention of prevent¬ 

ing a disaster and now here he was, at the end of a day of 

mounting violence, attacking the manager’s residence,^ 

And yet it was he who had just called a halt. Except that his 

first instinct had been merely to protect the Company’s yards, 

when they had proposed going there to smash things up. And 

now that the first stones were already chipping away at the 

front of the villa, he cast around vainly in his mind for a 

legitimate target to launch the mob at, in order to avoid 

greater disasters. As he stood in the middle of the road feeling 

lonely and helpless, someone called him, it was a man standing 

in the doorway of the Tison bar, whose landlady had hurried 

to put up the shutters, just leaving the door clear. 

‘Yes, it’s me ... Listen to me.’ 

It was Rasseneur. A group of nearly thirty men and women, 

nearly all of them from village Two Hundred and Forty, who 

had stayed in during the morning and come out that evening 

Part V 

355 

when they heard the news, had invaded the bar when they 

heard the strikers coming, Zacharie was at one table with his 

wife Philomene, Further back, Pierron and La Pierronne, with 

their backs to the door, were hiding their faces. In fact nobody 

was actually drinking, they had all simply come in to take 

shelter. 

Etienne recognized Rasseneur, and he started to walk away, 

when Rasseneur added: 

TouVe ashamed to see me here, aren’t you? . .. You can’t 

say I didn’t warn you, your problems are only just starting. 

You can ask for all the bread you like now, but what you’ll get 

is a bellyful of lead.’ 

So Etienne turned back towards him, and answered: 

‘What I’m more worried about is the cowards who are 

sitting down doing nothing but watch us while we risk our 

lives.’ 

‘So you fancy going over the road for a bit of looting and 

pillage?’ asked Rasseneur. 

‘I fancy staying with my comrades through thick and thin, 

even if we all have to die together.’ 

And Etienne, with heavy heart, returned to take his place 

among the crowd, ready to die. As they went down the road, 

three children started throwing stones, and he chased them to 

give them a good kick in the pants, and cried out, to stop his 

comrades from joining in, that they wouldn’t get anywhere by 

breaking windows. 

Bebert and Lydie, who had just come to join Jeanlin, were 

learning from him how to use the sling. They each slung a 

stone, betting who could cause the most damage. Lydie, with a 

clumsy throw, had cut open the head of a woman in the 

crowd; and the two boys split their sides laughing. Behind 

them, Bonnemort and Mouque sat on a bench watching them. 

Bonnemort’s swollen legs were so weakened that he had had a 

terrible job getting that far, and yet nobody knew what he 

found so interesting, for he had that lifeless expression about 

him which meant that no one would get a word out of him. 

By now, nobody obeyed Etienne any more. Despite his 

orders, the stones continued to fly, and he was astonished and 

dismayed to see these brutes that he had unleashed, so slow to 

Germinal 

356 

be roused, and yet so terrible afterwards, with their vicious 

and implacable fury. All the old Flemish blood was there, in 

these heavy, placid people; it took months for it to warm up, 

but then they threw themselves into the most abominable 

savagery, and were incapable of listening to reason, until the 

beast had drunk its fill of atrocities. In the South of France, 

where he came from, the crowds were more excitable, but they 

were less destructive. He had to fight with Levaque to tear 

away his axe, and he couldn’t find a way to calm the Maheus, 

who were throwing stones with both hands. And the women 

were especially frightening, La Levaque and La Mouquette 

and the others were shaking with murderous fury, baring their 

teeth and nails, barking like bitches, goaded on by old Ma 

Brule, whose tall, skinny figure stood out above them. 

But they stopped abruptly, when a sudden surprise brought 

the period of calm that Etienne’s supplications had failed to 

achieve. It was simply the Gregoires, who had decided to take 

their leave of the notary, and cross over to go to the manager’s 

house; they seemed so peaceful, they looked so much as if they 

thought that these kind miners whose passive compliance had 

made their fortune for a century past were staging some kind 

of practical joke, that the amazed miners themselves stopped 

throwing stones, worried that they might hit this old lady and 

gentleman who looked as if they had dropped in from heaven 

on a visit. They allowed them to enter the manager’s garden, 

mount the steps, and ring at the barricaded door, which 

nobody hurried to open. But at the same moment, Rose, the 

chambermaid, returned from her day off, laughing in the 

direction of the frenzied workers, for she knew all of them, 

since she was from Montsou. And she it was who hammered at 

the door until Hippolyte was forced to edge it open. The 

Gregoires slipped through just in time, for the hail of stones 

started up again. Once they had got over their astonishment 

the crowd started clamouring even louder: 

‘Death to the bourgeoisie! Power to the people!’ 

Rose was still laughing as they came through the entrance 

hall of the villa, as if she were enjoying the adventure, repeating 

to the terrified manservant: 

‘They don’t mean any harm, I know them well enough.’ 

Part V 

357 

Monsieur Gregoire hung up his hat carefully. Then, when 

he had helped Madame Gregoire remove her thick woollen 

cloak, he replied: 

‘Pm sure that they’re not basically wicked. When they’ve 

had a good shout, they’ll go home to supper with a better 

appetite.’ 

Meanwhile, Monsieur Hennebeau arrived downstairs from 

the second floor. He had seen what had happened, and he 

came to greet his guests with his usual cold, polite expression. 

Only the pallor of his face betrayed the fact that he had been 

shaken and weeping. The inner man was under control, there 

was no trace of anything other than the perfect executive, 

resolved to do his duty. 

*Did you know’, he said, ‘that our ladies haven’t returned 

yet,!^’ 

For the first time the Gregoires’ feelings were upset by the 

worry that Cecile had not returned. How would she manage to 

get home if the miners continued their silly antics,^ 

‘I thought of sending for the gendarmes to clear them away 

from the house,’ added Monsieur Hennebeau. ‘But the problem 

is that I’m on my own here, and anyway I don’t know where 

to send my servant to fetch them, otherwise four men and a 

corporal would easily get rid of the rabble for me.’ 

Rose, who had stayed to listen, felt bound to murmur again: 

*Oh, Sir, they don’t mean any harm.’ 

The manager nodded his head, while the din outside grew 

louder and they could hear the muffled impact of the stones 

against the front of the house. 

‘I have no grudge against them, in fact I excuse them; you 

have to be as stupid as they are to believe that we’re wasting 

all our energy trying to make them miserable. But I have to 

guarantee peace and quiet... To think that the gendarmes are 

running up and down the roads all over the countryside, 

everyone insists that it’s true, and yet I haven’t been able to 

find a single one of them all day!’ 

He broke off, and moved aside to let Madame Gregoire 

pass, saying: 

‘I beg of you. Madam, don’t stay there, come into the 

sitting-room.’ 

Germinal 

358 

But cook had come up from the basement, and she kept 

them talking in the hall for ten minutes more. She was at her 

wits’ end and declared that she washed her hands of the 

dinner, since she was still waiting for the vol-au-vent cases 

that she had ordered from the patisserie at Marchiennes for 

four o’clock. Obviously the pastry-cook must have lost his 

way, for fear of meeting these bandits. Perhaps they had even 

pilfered his valuable wares. She saw her vol-au-vents waylaid 

and assaulted, ravished at gun-point and taken to swell the 

bellies of the 3,000 wretches who were calling for bread. 

Anyway, Sir should know the truth, that she’d rather throw 

the dinner into the grate and burn it than have it spoiled by a 

revolution. 

‘Be patient,’ said Monsieur Hennebeau. ‘All is not yet lost. 

There is still time for the pastry-cook to arrive.’ 

But, as he turned to let Madame Gregoire through the door 

to the sitting-room, he was extremely surprised to see that 

there was a man sitting on the bench in the hall, whom he 

hadn’t noticed till then, because of the gathering dusk. 

‘Oh, it’s you, is it, Maigrat? What’s up then.^^’ 

Maigrat got to his feet and his plump face appeared in the 

light, his features pale and distorted with terror. He no longer 

cut his usual figure of a large, calm man, as he humbly 

explained that he had slipped in to see the manager, to ask for 

help and protection, Sir, in case the bandits attacked his shop. 

‘You can see that I’m threatened myself and that I’ve 

nobody to protect me,’ replied Monsieur Hennebeau. ‘You’d 

have done better to stay at home and look after your merchan¬ 

dise.’ 

‘Oh, I’ve put up my iron bars, and I’ve left my wife in 

charge.’ 

The manager lost patience with him and didn’t try to hide 

his contempt. What a fine guard she would make, that skinny 

creature, stunted by his bullying! 

‘Anyway, I can’t do anything about it, try to look after 

yourself. And I advise you to go home immediately, because 

here they come again asking for bread ... Listen.’ 

And indeed the tumult had broken out again, and Maigrat 

thought he heard his name among the words shouted. It was 

Part V 

359 

too late to go back home now, he would only be lynched. And 

besides, he was shattered by the idea of his ruin. He pressed 

his face up against the glass panel of the door, sweating, 

trembling, expecting a catastrophe; while the Gregoires decided 

to go through into the sitting-room. 

Monsieur Hennebeau tried to proceed discreetly with the 

business of making his guests feel at home. But he asked them 

in vain to be seated. The room was shuttered and sealed, and 

lit by two lamps although night had not yet fallen, but it 

became filled with renewed terror each time a fresh clamour 

was heard outside. Muffled by the tapestries, the anger of the 

crowd was even more disturbing, its muttered threats vague 

and hideous. They couldn’t help talking, however, and con¬ 

stantly returning to the subject of this unthinkable revolt. He 

was surprised that he had not foreseen anything like it, and he 

was so ill informed by his services that it was Rasseneur who 

was the main target of his anger, as he said that he could 

recognize his deplorable influence. However, the gendarmes 

would soon be coming, they couldn’t possibly abandon him in 

this way. As for the Gregoires, they had thoughts for no one 

and nothing but their daughter: their poor darling who took 

fright so easily! Perhaps they had been warned of the danger 

and their carriage had returned to Marchiennes, Their wait 

lasted for another quarter of an hour, exacerbated by the 

uproar from the road outside, by the noise of stones striking 

the closed shutters from time to time, echoing like drumbeats. 

The situation was becoming intolerable, and Monsieur Hen¬ 

nebeau said he was going to go out and chase all those 

braggarts away single-handed and go to meet the carriage, 

when Hippolyte came in crying: 

‘Sir, Sir, here comes Madam, they’re murdering Madam!’ 

The carriage had been unable to get further than the lane 

leading to Requillart; surrounded by threatening groups, 

Negrel had put his plan into action, walking the hundred 

metres which separated them from the villa, then knocking at 

the little gate which gave on to the garden, near the outbuild¬ 

ings: the gardener would hear them, there was bound to be 

someone still there to open the gate for them. And at first 

everything had gone perfectly; Madame Hennebeau and the 

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360 

young ladies had arrived there safely and were already knocking 

at the door, when some women, who had got wind of it, 

rushed out into the lane. Things went from bad to worse. 

Nobody came to open the gate, and then Negrel failed in his 

attempts to force it open with his shoulders. The crowd of 

women grew, he was afraid of being swept away, so he decided 

in desperation to push his aunt and the girls in front of him, to 

break through the ranks of their assailants and reach the main 

steps at the front of the villa. But this manoeuvre led to a 

scrum: they were unable to break away from a screaming 

group that followed them, while the mass of the crowd eddied 

around them on both sides, without understanding what was 

happening, but none the less astonished to see these ladies in 

their finery straying across the battlefield. At that moment the 

confusion reached such a peak that there occurred one of those 

extravagant events that are impossible to explain. Lucie and 

Jeanne had reached the steps and slipped through the door 

which the chambermaid held ajar; Madame Hennebeau had 

managed to follow them; Negrel finally came in behind them, 

and bolted the door, convinced that he had seen Cecile go in 

first. But she was not there, she had got lost along the way, 

swept away by such a fear that she had turned her back on the 

house and had plunged into the heart of the danger. 

Immediately the cry went up: 

‘Up with the people! Death to the bourgeoisie! Kill them!' 

Some of them, seeing her veiled face from a distance, 

thought it was Madame Hennebeau. Others guessed she must 

be a friend of the manager's wife, the young spouse of a local 

factory owner who was detested by his workmen. And in the 

end it made little difference, for it was her silk dress, her fur 

coat, and even the white feather in her hat, which drove them 

to a frenzy. She smelled of perfume, she wore a watch, her fine 

skin spoke of a life of idleness, never touching a piece of coal. 

‘Just you wait!’ cried old Ma Brule. ‘We'll stuff your lacy 

drawers right up your arse!’ 

‘These bitches are robbing us to cover their bare bums in 

warm fur,' went on La Levaque, ‘while we’re dying of cold ,.. 

Let’s bloody well strip her naked, and teach her a thing or two 

about real life!’ 

Part V 

361 

Suddenly La Mouquette spat out: 

‘Yes, that’s right, let’s whip her, too.’ 

And the women exploded in a savage rivalry, holding up 

their rags, and each wanting to get her hands on a bit of this 

little rich girl. They bet her behind wasn’t any finer than 

anyone else’s. Lots of these creatures were worm-eaten enough 

under their fancy fur and feathers. This injustice had lasted 

long enough, it was time to force all those whores to dress like 

working women, and stop them spending fifty sous every time 

they had their petticoats laundered! 

Amid this horde of furies Cecile was quaking with fear, her 

legs paralysed, stammering the same sentence over and over 

again: 

‘Ladies, please, ladies, please don’t hurt me.’ 

But then she started screaming hoarsely: cold hands had 

come to seize her round the neck. It was old Bonnemort who 

had grabbed hold of her, when the crowd had pushed her close 

to him. He seemed drunk with hunger, drugged by his long- 

drawn-out suffering, but now suddenly shaken out of half a 

century of resignation, without anyone being able to tell which 

particular complaint had suddenly become unbearable. After 

having saved the lives of a dozen comrades during his career, 

risking his neck in firedamp and rock falls, he yielded to some 

force he couldn’t explain, the irresistible fascination of the 

girl’s white neck. And as he had lost his tongue that day, he 

tightened his fingers, taking on the look of an old, sick animal, 

chewing over his memories, 

‘No, no!’, the women screamed. ‘Get them off, let’s have 

her arse!’ 

In the villa, as soon as they realized what was happening, 

Negrel and Monsieur Hennebeau had bravely reopened the 

door in order to fly to Cecile’s rescue. But now the crowd was 

pressing up against the garden railings, and it was not easy to 

go out. A struggle started, as the Gregoires emerged on the 

steps in a state of terror. 

‘Leave her alone. Grandpa! It’s the girl from La Piolaine!’ 

cried La Maheude to her grandfather, recognizing Cecile, 

whose veil had been torn off by one of the women. 

And Etienne for his part was shocked by this vengeful 

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362 

attack on a child and tried to get the gang to let her go. He 

suddenly had an idea and brandished the axe which he had 

snatched from Levaque’s hands. 

‘Let’s go to Maigrat’s, for God’s sake! .., He’s got bread 

there! Let’s tear his shop to pieces!’ 

And he flew off immediately to strike the first blow at the 

door with his axe. A group of comrades, Levaque, Maheu, and 

a few others, followed him. But the women persisted. Cecile 

had fallen from Bonnemort’s clutches into the hands of old Ma 

Brule. Lydie and Bebert, led by Jeanlin, had got down on their 

hands and knees and crawled under her skirts, to have a look 

at the lady’s bottom. She was already being mauled, and her 

clothes were being torn off her, when a man on horseback 

arrived, spurring his mount forward and lashing out with his 

riding-crop at anyone who didn’t get out of the way quick 

enough. 

‘You scum, you’ve started to whip little girls now, have 

you.^’ 

It was Deneulin, who had turned up for his dinner appoint¬ 

ment. He jumped down on to the road quickly, picked up 

Cecile by her waist, and with his other hand, manoeuvring his 

horse with extraordinary skill and strength, used it as a living 

wedge, cutting through the crowd, which fell back beneath his 

charges. The battle was still in full swing by the railings. Yet 

he forced his way through, crushing one or two arms and legs 

on the way. This sudden help released Negrel and Monsieur 

Hennebeau from their ordeal of oaths, blows, and even worse 

perils. And while the young man at last made his way into the 

house with Cecile, who had fainted, Deneulin, who had reached 

the top of the steps, using his large frame as a shield to protect 

the manager, was struck so violently by a stone that it almost 

dislocated his shoulder. 

‘Go ahead,’ he cried, ‘break all my bones now you’ve broken 

my machines.’ 

He closed the door promptly behind him. A volley of stones 

pitted the woodwork. 

‘What maniacs!’ he said. ‘Another couple of seconds and 

they would have split my skull open like a ripe marrow ... 

There’s no point in talking to them any more, that’s obvious. 

Part V 363 

TheyVe out of their minds, the only thing to do now is knock 

them down.’ 

In the sitting-room the Gregoires were weeping as they 

watched Cecile coming to her senses. She wasn’t hurt, she 

hadn’t even a scratch: all she had lost was her veil. But they 

became increasingly aghast when they recognized their cook 

Melanie standing in the room, and she told them how the mob 

had destroyed La Piolaine. Crazed with fear, she had run to 

warn her masters. She too had got in by the half-open door in 

the thick of the struggle without anyone noticing her; and as 

her story grew longer and longer the single stone with which 

Jeanlin had broken just one window became a regular salvo, 

splitting the walls asunder. Now Monsieur Gregoire’s ideas 

underwent a sea-change: his daughter was torn apart, his 

house was razed to the ground; did this really mean, then, that 

the miners had a grudge against him, just because he lived 

comfortably from providing them with work.^ 

The chambermaid, who had brought a towel and some eau- 

de-Cologne, repeated: 

‘It’s strange, all the same, they really don’t mean any harm.’ 

Madame Hennebeau sat quite still and very pale, and could 

not get over the shock to her nerves; then suddenly she found 

a smile, when everyone congratulated Negrel. 

Cecile’s parents were most grateful to the young man; he 

could count on the marriage. Monsieur Hennebeau looked on 

in silence, casting his eyes now on the wife, now on the lover 

he had sworn to kill only that morning, now at the young lady 

who would doubtless soon take him away. He was in no hurry, 

for his main fear was that his wife might stoop even lower, and 

choose some manservant or suchlike, 

‘And how about you, my little dears,^’ Deneulin asked his 

daughters. ‘Nothing broken, I hope.^’ 

Lucie and Jeanne had been frightened enough, but they 

were pleased to have had the experience, and they had already 

started to laugh about it. 

‘Goodness gracious!’ their father continued. ‘What an excit¬ 

ing day! ... If you want a dowry, it looks as if you’re going to 

have to earn it yourselves; and even then you may well have to 

look after me as well.’ 

Germinal 

364 

He was joking, but his voice quavered. His eyes were 

brimming with tears, and his daughters rushed into his arms. 

Monsieur Hennebeau had listened to this confession of ruin. 

His face was lit by a luminous thought. For in fact Vandame 

would belong to Montsou; it was the compensation devoutly 

longed for, the stroke of luck which would bring him back into 

favour with the gentlemen of the Board. Each time in his life 

that he had been stricken by some disaster, he had taken 

refuge in the strict execution of orders received, and he drew 

from the military discipline with which he surrounded himself 

a limited form of solace. 

But they recovered their nerves, and a tired peace fell on the 

room, beneath the soft light shed by the two lamps and the 

cosy warmth that had built up behind the portieres. Whatever 

might be happening outside.^ They had stopped their hue and 

cry, and the stones no longer rained down on the front wall; 

and all that could be heard were some heavy, muffled thuds, 

like axe blows re-echoing in the depths of the forest. They 

wanted to find out, and they went back into the hallway to 

snatch a glimpse through the glass panel in the door. Even the 

good ladies and their daughters went upstairs to peep through 

the shutters on the first floor. 

‘Can you see that scoundrel Rasseneur, opposite us, in the 

doorway of that inn?’ said Monsieur Hennebeau to Deneulin. 

‘I thought as much, you might have known he’d join in.’ 

And yet it wasn’t Rasseneur, it was Etienne, staving in 

Maigrat’s shop with his axe. And he kept calling out to his 

comrades: didn’t the goods over there belong to the coal 

workers? Didn’t they have the right to retrieve their own 

property from this thief who had been exploiting them for so 

long, and who was ready to starve them to death just because 

the Company told him to? Gradually, everyone left the man¬ 

ager’s villa, and ran over to loot the neighbouring shop. The 

cry ‘bread, bread, we want bread!’ thundered out yet again. 

They would find some bread at last, behind this door. A 

hungry fury bore them on, as if they suddenly felt that if they 

waited any longer, they would just fall down in the road and 

die. They milled so violently around the door that Etienne was 

afraid of wounding someone with each swing of the axe. 

Meanwhile Maigrat, who had left the entrance hall of the 

villa, had at first taken refuge in the kitchen; but he couldn’t 

hear anything there, and he imagined all sorts of abominable 

outrages being perpetrated against his shop; so he had just 

come back to hide behind the pump outside, from where he 

quite distinctly heard the noise of the door splitting, and the 

sound of his own name mingled with the other cries of the 

looters. It wasn’t just a bad dream, then: although he still 

couldn’t see, at least he could hear, and he followed the 

progress of the assault, with his ears burning. Every splitting 

blow pierced his very heart. That must have been one of the 

hinges bursting; in another five minutes they would have 

stormed the shop. He saw it in clear, terrifying pictures inside 

his head, the brigands rushing in, then the drawers broken 

open, the sacks split down the middle, everything eaten up and 

drunk down, the house itself carried off, nothing left, not even 

a stick to pick up and go begging with from village to village. 

No, he wouldn’t allow them to bring ruin down on his head, 

he’d rather risk his life to stop them. Standing there, he had 

noticed at one window of his house, situated in a wing which 

was set back from the front wall, the frail figure of his wife, 

pale and indistinct behind the pane: doubtless she was watching 

every blow, with her silent, hangdog expression. Below there 

was a shed, so situated that, from the garden of the villa, you 

could use a trellis on the adjoining wall to climb up on to it: 

then from there it was easy enough to climb on to the tiles, up 

to the level of the window. And the idea of getting back inside 

his house now obsessed him, for he bitterly regretted having 

gone out in the first place. Perhaps he might find time to 

barricade the shop up with furniture; and he even saw himself 

setting up further heroic defences, pouring boiling oil and 

burning paraffin down on the crowd. But his passion for his 

merchandise conflicted with his fear, and he groaned with 

tortured cowardice. Suddenly he made up his mind, when he 

heard another blow of the axe ring out louder than the 

previous ones. And it was avarice that won the day; he 

preferred to lay down his life, and his wife’s, to protect his 

sacks of provisions with their very bodies, rather than relin¬ 

quish a single loaf of bread. 

Germinal 

366 

Almost immediately the cries rang out. 

‘Look^ look! . . . Look at the alley cat up there! Look at that 

tomcat! Catch the cat!’ 

The mob had caught sight of Maigrat on the roof of the 

shed. Carried away by his passion, he had scrambled swiftly 

up the trellis despite his bulk, paying no heed to the pieces of 

wood that split under his weight; and now he flattened himself 

against the tiles, trying to reach the window. But the slope of 

the roof was extremely steep, and he was encumbered by the 

size of his belly, and he tore his nails trying to cling on. Even 

so, he would have made it to the top if he hadn’t started 

trembling with fear that they would throw stones at him, for 

although he couldn’t see them, he could hear the crowd 

chanting away beneath him: 

‘Look at the tomcat! Bad cat! Kill the cat!’ 

And suddenly both his hands gave way at once; he tumbled 

downwards, bounced off a gutter, and fell on to the adjoining 

wall so awkwardly that he tumbled back over the other side 

into the road, and split his skull against the edge of a milestone. 

His brains spilled out. He was dead. His wife, above him, 

looked on, still pale and indistinct. 

At first they were stupefied. Etienne came to a halt, and the 

axe slipped from his fingers. Maheu, Levaque, and the rest of 

them forgot the shop, and looked at the wall, down which a 

thin line of blood was gently running. Now the cries had 

ceased, and silence spread through the deepening gloom. 

Suddenly the yelling recommenced. It was the women who 

rushed up to him, giddy with the scent of blood. 

‘Now I believe there’s a God in heaven! It’s all over now, 

you fat pig!’ 

They gathered round the warm corpse, and mocked it with 

insulting laughter, called the smashed skull an ugly mug, and 

screamed out the bitter litany of their endless starvation into 

the ears of the dead man, 

‘I owed you sixty francs, now I’ve paid you back, you thiefi’ 

said La Maheude, as furious as the rest of them. ‘You won’t 

refuse me credit any more .. . Wait a moment, just wait! I’m 

sure you’ve got room for more.’ 

And stretching out her fingers she dug deep into the soil. 

Part V 367 

tore up two full handfuls of earth and stuffed them violently 

right into his mouth. 

‘There you are! There’s some food for you! . . . Eat it all up, 

like you ate us out of house and home!’ 

Then the insults exploded around the dead man, who lay 

there on his back looking up with staring eyes at the empty 

heavens which had become veiled by the gathering dusk. The 

earth crammed into his mouth was the bread that he had 

denied them. And he would never eat any other bread now. It 

hadn’t brought him much luck to starve the poor. 

But the women had other wrongs to avenge. They walked 

round him, nostrils flaring, vicious as vixens. They were on 

the look-out for some spectacular vengeance, some ferocious 

act which would release their pent-up passions. 

Then the bitter voice of old Ma Brule made itself heard. 

‘Dirty tomcat! Cut it offi’ 

‘Yes, get the dirty tomcat! ... He’s spent too long on the 

tiles, the dirty bastard!’ 

And already La Mouquette was hauling his trousers off, 

while La Levaque lifted his legs up in the air. And old Ma 

Brule, with her dry old hands, spread his bare thighs open, 

and grasped his lifeless virile organ. She seized the whole 

thing, tearing it all away with an effort that strained her skinny 

spine and stretched her bony arms. The soft flesh at first 

resisted, and she had to keep pulling, but it finally came away 

in her hands, a lump of hairy, bleeding flesh, and she waved it 

around, laughing in triumph: 

‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ 

The ghastly trophy was greeted with a volley of shrill 

imprecations. 

‘You bastard, you won’t stuff our daughters with that any 

more!’ 

‘Right, we won’t have to bend over and kiss that lump of 

mutton any more every time we can’t afford to pay for a loaf of 

bread.’ 

‘Hey, I owe you six francs, do you want a bit on account.^ 

I’m willing, if you still feel up to it!’ 

They rocked with terrible hilarity at this joke. They passed 

round the bleeding stump, as if they had finally exterminated a 

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368 

wild animal that had been preying on each and every one of 

them, and saw it there inert and in their power. They bared 

their teeth, and spat on it, repeating in a furious explosion of 

scorn: 

‘He can’t get it up! He can’t do a thing! .. . Throw his 

bones to the crows, he’s not even a man ... Rot in hell, you 

useless creature!’ 

Then old Ma Brule stuck the whole thing on the end of her 

stick; and she held it up in the air, bearing it aloft like a 

banner, and set out down the road followed by a screaming 

horde of women. The wretched lump of flesh dangled limply, 

dripping blood, like a strip of offal at the butcher’s. Up above 

at her window, Madame Maigrat still didn’t move; but the last 

rays of the setting sun refracted through the flaws in the glass 

distorted her pale face into the semblance of a smile. Since 

she had been beaten and deceived every hour of the day, and 

had spent her days bent double over the accounts, perhaps 

she was in fact laughing, as the mob of women galloped by 

with the wild, wicked beast crushed and impaled on the end of 

a stick. 

This dreadful mutilation had been accompanied by a horri¬ 

fied silence. Neither Etienne nor Maheu, nor the others, had 

been able to intervene in time: they remained motionless in the 

face of these charging furies. At the door of the Tison bar 

faces could be seen, Rasseneur white-faced with revulsion, and 

Zacharie and Philomene stupefied at the sight. The two older 

men, Bonnemort and Mouque, shook their heads, impressed 

with the gravity of the affair. Only Jeanlin sniggered, nudged 

Bebert in the ribs, and forced Lydie to look up and watch. But 

the women were already on their way back, retracing their 

steps, passing beneath the windows of the manager’s house. 

And behind the shutters, the ladies of the house peered out 

more intently. They hadn’t been able to make out wbat had 

been happening, with the wall in the way, and they couldn’t 

see anything distinctly in the gathering dark. 

‘Whatever have they got on the end of their stick.^’ asked 

Cecile, who had plucked up the courage to look out. 

Lucie and Jeanne declared that it must be a rabbit skin. 

‘No, I don’t think so,’ murmured Madame Hennebeau, 

Part V 369 

‘they must have raided the charcuterie^ it looks more like a 

strip of pork.’ 

But then she suddenly gave a shudder and fell silent, 

Madame Gregoire had nudged her with her knee. They both 

remained transfixed. The young ladies had gone very pale, and 

asked no more questions, watching with staring eyes as the red 

vision swam away into the depths of the night. 

Etienne had started wielding his axe again. But it was 

impossible to dispel the uneasy feeling, the corpse seemed to 

block the path to the shop and protect it. A lot of men had 

turned back. They all seemed suddenly appeased, as if their 

thirst had been quenched. Maheu was still downcast; then he 

heard a voice in his ear telling him to run for it. He turned 

round and recognized Catherine, still wearing the man’s coat 

they had lent her, black with mud, and out of breath. He 

swept her aside with his hand. He refused to listen to her, and 

made as if to hit her. Then she gestured in despair, hesitated, 

and ran towards Etienne. 

‘Run for it, run for it, the gendarmes are coming!’ 

He too chased her away, swearing at her, feeling the blood 

rise to his cheeks with the memory of the slaps he had 

received. But she refused to be discouraged, she forced him to 

throw the axe away, and dragged him away by the arms, with 

irresistible strength. 

‘Listen to me, will you! . .. I’m telling you the gendarmes 

are coming! Chaval went to fetch them and he brought them 

here if you must know, I think it’s disgusting, so I came back 

... Run for it, I don’t want them to get you.’ 

And Catherine dragged him away, just as they heard the 

thunder of hooves beating over the cobbles in the distance. 

Suddenly the cry rang out: ‘The gendarmes! The gendarmes!’ 

There was such a hectic, chaotic scramble, with every man 

looking out for himself, that in only a couple of minutes the 

road was empty, swept absolutely clear as if by a hurricane. 

Maigrat’s corpse made a solitary patch of shadow against the 

white ground. The only man still standing in front of the 

Tison bar was Rasseneur, whose relief could be seen in his 

radiant features, as he welcomed the swift succe.ss of the 

sword; while in the deserted town of Montsou, the bourgeois 

370 

Germinal 

hid behind closed shutters with their lights extinguished, 

sweating with fear, their teeth chattering, not even daring to 

look out. The plain was drowned in the endless night; only the 

silhouettes of the blast-furnaces and the burnt-out coke ovens 

showed up tragically against the horizon. The thunder of 

hooves became louder, and the gendarmes surged into sight in 

one dark indistinguishable mass. And behind them, entrusted 

to their care, the pastry-cook’s carriage arrived at last from 

Marchiennes; then out of this little vehicle the baker’s boy 

sprang, and started cheerfully unpacking his vol-au-vent cases. 

PART VI