The other murders in the novel have their part to play in this process, each of them impinging on Jacques’s consciousness in different ways. Standing alone beside the corpse of Grandmorin in the darkness and stillness of the night, Jacques longs to lift its head and contemplate the gaping wound in its throat. Moments before, he had come near to killing Flore and had had to flee from her, as previously he had fled from other potential victims. Now, in the presence of an achieved murder, his repeated failure to kill strikes him as an act of cowardice. He admires and envies the man who has had the courage to do this killing and vows that one day he will discover the courage to emulate him, a sinister declaration of intent to make himself worthy of what he appears at that moment to regard as a ‘calling’. Misard’s poisoning of his wife likewise acts upon Jacques as an enticement to kill. In this case what impresses him is the realization that murder can be achieved quietly and unobtrusively. It causes no great upheavals and goes unnoticed by both the police and the public at large. Misard kills his wife and goes about his job as if nothing had happened. The most powerful erosion of Jacques’s determination to resist the urge to kill, however, comes ironically from Séverine, who thereby paves the way for her own death. The knowledge that Séverine, seemingly so gentle and submissive, has participated in a murder inspires admiration in Jacques and a temporary suspension of the murderous impulse that contact with women normally inspires in him. Jacques’s admiration increases when he discovers that the motive behind the murder of Grandmorin was not merely theft, implying a bizarre, perverted scale of values which places other types of murder, including that to which he himself is drawn, into a more ‘worthy’ category. Jacques’s questioning of Séverine about the murder of Grandmorin is as intense in its different way as Roubaud’s brutal interrogation about her relationship with Grandmorin in the first chapter of the novel. He becomes increasingly excited as, in his imagination, he relives Séverine’s experience. What most appeals to him in Séverine’s harrowing account, however, is her sense of having lived more intensely than she had ever lived before. ‘I lived more in that minute,‘ she tells him, ’than in all my previous life put together’ (VIII). Séverine’s confession of the murder and Jacques’s eager attention to every gory detail is placed in the context of a scene of passionate love-making. For Séverine the confession is represented as a sexual giving of herself to her lover; it rises from within her ‘like an uncontrollable desire to be taken and possessed’ (VIII). For Jacques it is represented as a postponement and inflaming of sexual desire. After the confession, the two lovers come to gratification in an act of sexual ferocity, giving each other ‘the same agonizing pleasure as beasts that tear each other apart as they mate’ (VIII). Unknown to Séverine, this dallying with death unleashes the suppressed demon of Jacques’s sexual desire. She is lucky (on this occasion) to escape alive.
Jacques proves unable to point his murderous instinct in the direction of a man. The two planned murders of Roubaud draw the novel back into the adultery-related motivation of Thérèse Raquin. The murder of an obstructive husband is seen as the prelude to a blissful life of happiness and material prosperity (in this case in America), briefly glimpsed but never realized. Jacques’s failure to kill Roubaud is presented partly as the result of his powerfully dissuasive moral conscience. This aspect of Zola’s discussion of murder is a response to his reading of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-80). The French translation of Crime and Punishment had appeared in 1885 and that of The Brothers Karamazov in 1888. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov argues that certain ‘superior’ human beings have a right to kill ‘inferior’ human beings who stand in their way. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov suggests that, if there is no God, there is no justification for the idea of a moral conscience. Both of these ideas are countered in Zola’s description of Jacques’s inability to kill Roubaud. Although Jacques constructs a rational argument for killing Roubaud and wishes to prove himself worthy of Séverine by doing so, he simply cannot bring himself to kill a defenceless man. He knows it is wrong. Zola excludes from this sense of ‘wrong’ any specific religious imperative; Jacques’s moral conscience is described as ‘no more than a vague assortment of ideas instilled by the slow workings of a centuries-old tradition of justice’ (IX). Yet however ‘vague’ this ‘assortment of ideas’, it is sufficiently ingrained to deter him from killing Roubaud. He knows that he does not have the right to kill, and no matter how hard he tries to convince himself, it is not a right he can consciously persuade himself to assume. Jacques’s moral conscience receives help from a surprisingly different quarter - his fear of blood. It is presented early in the novel as he stands beside the body of Grandmorin, and again in more garish images towards the end of the novel as he prepares for a second time to murder Roubaud. Séverine suggests that they remove their clothes in order to do the killing so that they might clean themselves more easily afterwards. The suggestion fills Jacques with revulsion and does nothing to strengthen his resolve. In the end killing is seen by Zola not as something that can be motivated by reason but as a product of animal instinct, a brutish act which completely takes over whatever elements of culture and civilization might shape human identity, sweeps them aside and annihilates them.
Despite the undisguised physical brutality of the murder of Grandmorin and Séverine, and the heartless killing and maiming of innocent passengers in the train crash, the novel elicits a surprising degree of sympathy for those who commit these acts of violence. Zola invites the reader to see the murderers as themselves victims. Séverine, while still aching and bruised from the beating she has received from Roubaud, watches him as he paces the room and finds herself beginning to pity him. She sees him as a man possessed, a victim of some power greater than himself. She knows that he has been manipulated into marriage by Grandmorin and later comes briefly to regret that she had not been more honest with him. Roubaud’s subsequent depression and moral disintegration and his wrongful conviction in the final trial leave him a pitiful and abject figure at the end of the novel. Séverine herself, despite her complicity and resolve in the attempted murder of her husband, is presented throughout the novel as a figure of innocence - timid, gentle and submissive. She longs to be once more a young girl of fifteen, to be as she was before she was abused, before her arranged marriage and before her involvement in an act of murder. Zola insists on her purity of spirit and childlike naivety. ‘Her beautiful blue eyes, so innocent and appealing ... had a permanently frightened look about them. In spite of everything, she had remained virgin’ (VI). In the end, Séverine is the unwitting victim of her own desire to repair the damage that has been done to her life. Flore, having come close to being a victim of Jacques’s murderous instinct, is, paradoxically, a victim of his rejection of her. She is also a victim of her own independent spirit; her suicide is both an act of contrition at the horror she has perpetrated and an expression of despair at ever finding happiness in a male-driven world to which she refuses to submit.
Jacques, far from being cast as the sadistic, merciless killer that might have been conjured up by contemporary accounts of ‘Jack the Ripper’, is presented as a man of an essentially gentle and innocent nature. In this he has much in common with Séverine. ‘At heart they were still children, young innocents, amazed at falling in love for the first time’ (VI). Zola’s insistence on the hereditary origin of Jacques’s affliction serves to deflect responsibility for his acts away from Jacques himself. Furthermore, Jacques’s desire to kill is presented consistently as an illness. When the mania strikes, he experiences, as described at various points in the novel, a splitting headache behind the ears, sudden fevers, blurred vision, loss of control of his limbs (especially his hands) and, it seems, contractions of the facial muscles. The attacks are accompanied by a disorientating sense of panic, a loss of memory and possibly of consciousness. He returns from his pursuit of the young lady on the train with only the vaguest recollection of where he has been or what he has done. Lombroso had suggested (wrongly) that cer
tain types of criminal behaviour could be a consequence of epilepsy and this may have influenced Zola when he came to describe the physical symptoms of Jacques’s malady. The doctors who visit Jacques when the attacks first occur fail to diagnose the illness, and Zola gives no name to it, but it is clear that he wishes to present it as a neurological disorder. This attempted medical description of Jacques’s murderous instinct functions in two ways. It counters possible accusations of sensationalism by offering a more clinical approach to the subject and, more importantly, it points to a condition which visits Jacques and over which he has little control. Jacques’s desire to kill is not of his own volition, and he makes strenuous efforts to overcome it. He is certainly not the sort of ‘soulless’ character Zola had spoken of in connection with Thérèse Raquin. When the impulse to kill takes hold of him, it is presented as a temporary aberration, in which his naturally gentle nature and his heroic attempt to combat the enemy within are overthrown. Lombroso, having read the novel, wrote to Zola to tell him that he found such redeeming features incompatible with his own understanding of the mind of a ‘born criminal’. Jacques is presented not as an inhuman monster but as a man who is afflicted and who bravely seeks to come to terms with his affliction, a man condemned to a life of isolation and constantly forced to flee not only his potential victims but also his other self. Towards the end of the novel the future seems as bleak for Jacques as it had done for Flore. ‘All that lay before him was a night of darkness, an eternity of despair, from which there could be no escape’ (XII).6
It is not clear at what stage Zola decided that the novel would also be about railways. He had the regular opportunity of observing the workings of a busy railway station when, between 1871 and 1872, as a journalist writing for La Cloche, he travelled daily from the Gare Saint-Lazare to Versailles to report on the activities of the Constituent Assembly. In 1878 Zola bought a country house at Médan on the river Seine about thirty miles from Paris, where the railway line from the Gare Saint-Lazare ran at the bottom of the garden. He photographed the trains as they went by his house. The idea of a novel about railways was certainly in place in 1878, when he received a visit from the Italian novelist and critic Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908), who recorded in his Ricordi di Parigi (Memories of Paris, 1879) a year later that Zola had told him of his plans to write a novel unlike any of the others in the series, which would be centred on a railway line and which would include, among other things, a railway accident. When he later came to plan La Bête humaine, however, Zola was faced with a quandary. He had already extended the Rougon-Macquart series of novels from the original ten to a proposed twenty and he was determined not to extend it further. He had also decided that the series should include novels devoted to the subjects of money, war and science, which he proposed to deal with in the final three novels.7 This left him little opportunity to write about the railways as a separate subject. If he was to write about railways as well as about crime and the law, the two subjects would need to be accommodated in a single novel.
This was not as arbitrary a decision as it might initially appear. The rapid spread of railways in the 1850S and i86os had offered new opportunities for crime on an unprecedented scale. Robbery and assaults on female passengers were frequent occurrences in the early years of rail travel. The small, self-contained compartments of early railway carriages, the remote, inaccessible areas through which trains travelled, the lack of any effective alarm system and the noise made by a train moving at speed, which was capable of drowning even the most desperate calls for help, facilitated such crimes. There had also been a number of railway murders. On the morning of 6 December 1860, Victor Poinsot, a High Court judge returning to Paris from Troyes, was found dead in a first-class compartment of a train at its arrival at the Gare de l‘Est. He had been shot through the head and chest, and his head had subsequently been battered with a blunt instrument. The murderer had stolen money, a gold watch and a travelling rug. The examining magistrate appointed to conduct the initial inquiry remained unconvinced that such a vicious murder could have been committed solely for the purpose of theft. A rumour circulated that Poinsot had seduced a village girl during his trip to Troyes, and that the murder was an act of revenge committed by the girl’s brother, but this was never proved. The main suspect was a certain Charles Jud, whom the court of inquiry connected with another murder on the same railway line three months earlier. Jud escaped from police custody and was never recaptured. His elusiveness became the subject of satirical comments in the press, which seized the opportunity to criticize police incompetence and even suggested that Jud had been invented in order to detract attention from suspicions that Poinsot was acting as a Prussian agent.8 Readers of La Bête humaine will recognize certain similarities between the Poinsot murder and the murder of President Grandmorin in the novel. Although it had occurred almost thirty years before Zola began writing La Bête humaine, the Poinsot murder undoubtedly fuelled his imagination. But it was not an isolated case. In England, Thomas Briggs, a City banker, was beaten, robbed of his gold watch and thrown from a train on the North London Railway on 9 July 1864. In 1886, only three years before Zola began writing La Bête humaine, the Prefect of the département of the Eure, a Monsieur Barrême, was killed on board a train travelling from Cherbourg to Paris, and his body was thrown out of the carriage door. Again the murderer was never captured. Events such as these were reported extensively in the press, often accompanied by lurid illustrations. The connection between crimes of violence and railways was thus not something that Zola had to struggle to invent; it was a recurring fact of life. Moreover the coverage that such incidents received in the press made clear not only their dramatic potential but also the appeal they exercised on the popular imagination. By 1888 the broad lines of the novel had been decided. Zola’s intention was to bring together the novel about railways and the novel about crime and the law. Writing on 16 November to his friend and admirer the Dutch journalist Jacques Van Santen Kolff, Zola confided that his next novel ‘would describe a terrible drama set in the context of the railways. It would be a study of crime, and show the workings of the courts of law.’9
Having decided that the railways would be incorporated into his novel about crime, Zola began a systematic and intensive programme of documentation and research. He was not content simply to read about the railways; as with previous novels in the Rougon-Macquart series he needed to experience at first hand the working environment that he proposed to describe.10 In February 1889 he wrote to Monsieur Pol Lefèvre, the assistant traffic manager of the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l‘Ouest (Western Railway Company), asking for assistance. As well as holding an important managerial position with the railway company, Lefèvre had recently published a book about railways. He proved extraordinarily helpful. He sent Zola a copy of his book and arranged for him to be shown around the Gare Saint-Lazare, the engine sheds at Batignolles (in Paris) and at Mantes, and the station buildings at Le Havre. Lefèvre met and corresponded with Zola regularly during the following eighteen months, supplying information on various technical aspects of railway operation, such as the mechanics of the steam locomotive, couplings, signalling and track-laying and also providing details of the duties of engine drivers and stationmasters. Lefèvre’s most important contribution to Zola’s railway ‘education’, however, was to arrange for him to travel on the footplate of a locomotive. Zola made the journey on 15 April 1889 on a train travelling between Paris and Mantes. He would not have found the experience easy; he did not always enjoy the best of health and he had a mortal fear of tunnels. André Antoine, the director of the Théâtre-Libre in Paris, whom Zola was due to meet at a rehearsal later that day, reported in his memoirs that he arrived late and weak at the knees. On 8 March 1890, shortly after the publication of La Bête humaine, a picture of Zola standing on the footplate of the locomotive appeared in L’Illustration; he was certainly not averse to acting as his own publicist.11 Before he began writing the novel Zola had produced over 300 pages of notes r
elating to different aspects of railway operation.
The most obvious effect of this research on the writing of the novel is its technically informed and closely observed description of railway activities. The reader may feel that such technicality is at times intrusive, but it is never included for its own sake or merely to prove that the author had done his homework. In the first instance it provides a counterpoise to the novel’s more emotive descriptions of physical abuse, murder and suicide. If the swift succession of murders, attempted murders and other acts of violence that make up the core of Zola’s tale risks appearing as novelistic fantasy,12 the descriptions of the railway constantly draw the reader back into the working world of everyday reality. At their best they convey a sense of energy and excitement. The reader is drawn into the bustle and activity that attend the departure of the night express from Paris and lives the engine driver’s battle to get his train through heavy drifts of snow in the teeth of a blizzard. The novel celebrates the separate skills and the special working relationship of the engine driver and his fireman as they defy wind, rain and violent storms and confront whatever perils the day may bring. Zola appears to have a genuine admiration for the pioneering courage of the early railwaymen.13 Even when attired in his Sunday best, on an afternoon stroll through the streets of Paris, Jacques has about him ‘a sort of proud independence, a sense of being out in the open air, braving danger day by day’ (V).