Human Beast: The Emile Zola Society Edition Read online

  Roubaud’s republican outburst against the Sub-Prefect, which is the reason for his being summoned to Paris at the beginning of the novel, acts as an early pointer to the political tensions which underscore the ‘domestic’ events of the novel. Apart from his confrontation with the Sub-Prefect, Roubaud has also, it seems, been airing his views amongst his working colleagues. To Roubaud’s employers and to Camy-Lamotte, republicanism is as serious an offence as murder itself. Roubaud is warned that any further political indiscretion on his part will be dealt with severely. This threat, coupled with Roubaud’s personal decline, effectively silences his political voice. If political disaffection is controlled by threats of reprisal, however, it does not go away. The novel offers repeated reminders of the gathering strength of opposition to the regime and acknowledges the justness of the opposition’s cause in its reference to repressive police measures and police incompetence, to the dubious financing of the building projects of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-91) and to calls for constitutional reform. Zola could not have known, when he first planned the cycle of Rougon-Macquart novels, that by the time he came to complete it the Second Empire would be a thing of the past. The novel still functions, however, as a warning to subsequent generations of how easily injustice and political malpractice, if allowed to go unchallenged, can become the order of the day.

  La Bête humaine lays bare aspects of Second Empire France which the Second Empire would have preferred to sweep under the carpet or disown. Under Napoleon III France had created a bright new image for itself, which it was proud to show to the world. But this is not Zola’s concern. Zola turns his gaze away from the newly created elegance of Haussmann’s Paris, with its boulevards, parks and squares. The novel says nothing about the effervescent gaiety of Offenbach’s opera world. There is little sign of the fashionable, cultivated style of living for which the Second Empire was renowned, the world of haute couture and haute cuisine. There is little either about the thriving commercial life of Second Empire France and the increased affluence of the middle-class population. These things, it is true, are not entirely absent from the novel. We see a glimpse of the flower market on the Place de la Madeleine in all its springtime freshness. Séverine sits beside Jacques in the seclusion of a Paris park as a child plays near by with its bucket and spade under the watchful eye of its mother. Séverine enjoys a celebratory meal in an expensive restaurant outside the Gare Saint-Lazare and tells of her helter-skelter shopping spree for fine clothes at the Bon Marché. The lady on the train to Auteuil has clearly made a good marriage and is enjoying the benefits of her new-found prosperity. The train to Paris conveys a number of businessmen to important appointments and also an English woman with her two daughters, who are presumably going there to enjoy the delights which the city has to offer. But each of these appealing glimpses of seeming normality is undercut by the reader’s knowledge of the disordered and violent world that shadows them. Things are not what they appear to be. The lady on the railway platform who demurely holds her veil across her face does so in order to hide the bruising that has just been inflicted on her by her husband. The elegantly dressed young woman admiring the flowers on the Place de la Madeleine is a murderer’s accomplice. The young mother on the train to Auteuil is sitting next to a man who intends to kill her. At every step in the narrative the reader is permitted to see an alternative reality behind what, to the uninformed, might appear to be unremarkable scenes of peaceful, law-abiding civility. At the same time the novel insists that for most people this reality goes unnoticed. The crowds who rush from place to place in the trains may look out of the carriage windows but they see nothing. The twelve members of the jury and the crowds who flock to the public trial are completely taken in by an elaborate fiction concocted by a frustrated magistrate bent on furthering his own career, as are all those who read the reports of his triumph in the official newspapers the next day. Those like Madame Lebleu, who are determined to get at the truth by spying and eavesdropping, in the end learn nothing. The examining magistrate, when told the truth, refuses to believe it. Camy-Lamotte simply destroys it. Even for the reader, certain parts of the truth are not disclosed immediately or are not revealed at all. It is only late in the novel that Zola confirms that Misard really has been poisoning his wife and tells us exactly how the murder of Grandmorin was committed. What happened to Louisette remains a mystery. A veil is drawn over the exact nature of Grandmorin’s abuse of Séverine and the full extent of Grandmorin’s dissipated life style. The career of Madame Victoire and her relationship with Grandmorin and with Séverine are not fully explained. Is it possible that Séverine could have been Grandmorin’s daughter? The answer is yes. Zola seems to suggest that violence, manipulation and deceit go further than he chooses to tell us.

  Early in the novel Zola describes a train rushing through the night carrying a crowd of revellers to Le Havre for the celebration of the launch of a new ship. A child presses its nose to the carriage window and peers out into the darkness. This is one of many images of innocence that occur throughout the novel. The child is presumably excited at the prospect of the next day’s festivities, but what it sees through the carriage window is an unknown world of ill-defined shapes and shadows. Without the child knowing it, the train has just passed within inches of the body of a murdered man. The novel ends with a parallel image of another train running through the night carrying innocent passengers of a different sort, soldiers, riotously drunk and singing at the top of their voices as they are transported in cattle trucks to the battlefront, into a world in which the violence described in the novel is enacted on an even grander scale and with official government sanction. The soldiers do not know it but they may die before they get to fight in a war for the train has no driver and is out of control. Both of these images point the novel towards an unknown and uncertain future. What sort of world are the child and the soldiers being carried into? The question is not quite as indeterminate as the open ending of the novel might suggest. When the novel first appeared in 1890 the Franco-Prussian war was past history, and the novel could be read in the light of France’s humiliation and the enormous loss of life that the war had incurred. Similarly, for the present-day reader the question which the novel throws into the future can be set against the even greater disasters of twentieth-century history. La Bête humaine is first and foremost a graphic exploration of the criminal mind and an expose of political corruption, but it also warns against the assumption that technological advance will improve the human condition.

  NOTES

  1 Zola’s preparatory notes for the novel cover 600 pages.

  2 Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, translated by Robin Buss (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 22.

  3 Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), vol. IV, pp. 1,709-10.

  4 Ibid., p. 1,709.

  5 Ibid., p. 1,716.

  6 Jean Renoir’s film version of La Bête humaine ends with Jacques committing suicide by leaping from the footplate of his locomotive.

  7 In effect the last three novels of the cycle are L‘Argent (1891), which analyses the world of the Stock Exchange, La Débâcle (1892), which describes France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and Le Docteur Pascal (1893), which proposes that the pursuit of scientific truth is the highest of all human aspirations.

  8 An account of the Poinsot murder and the judicial inquiry which followed it is given in Roger L. Williams, Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 103-12.

  9 Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, p. 1,716.

  10 Zola visited Les Halles (the central Paris food market) when preparing Le Ventre de Paris; he visited three Paris department stores when preparing Au Bonheur des Dames; and he went down a mine when preparing Germinal.

  11 . The illustration is reproduced in Zola, Œuvres Complètes, edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), vol. VI, p. 303.

 
12 Edmond de Goncourt, writing in his Journal on 17 April 1890, refers to the novel as ‘pure invention, imagination and fabrication’ (Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal: mémoires de la vie littéraire (Monaco: Les Editions de l‘Imprimerie Nationale de Monaco, 1956), vol. XVII, p. 34). The anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum on 22 March 1890 describes the novel as ‘not true to life’ (quoted in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990), p. 70).

  13 Zola’s father was for a while a railway engineer.

  14 Even in 1890 there would have been many people alive who could remember the world as it was before the coming of the railway.

  15 These procedures are described in Williams, Manners and Murders, pp. 4-15.

  16 Zola’s article ‘J’accuse’, in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the army captain falsely convicted of spying, was published in L’Aurore on 13January 1898.

  17 Quoted in James F. McMillan, Napoleon III (New York: Longman, 1991), p. 37.

  18 Ibid., p. 49.

  19 Ibid., pp. 125-7.

  Further Reading

  The following suggestions for further reading are restricted to works in English. A fuller Zola bibliography will be found in Henri Mitterand’s two-volume Zola (Paris: Fayard, 2001).

  Baguley, David (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).

  Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (New York: Macmillan, 1995).

  Burchell, S. C., Imperial Masquerades: The Paris of Napoleon III (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

  Guillais, Joëlle, Crimes of Passion: Dramas of Private Life in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by Jane Dunnett (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1990).

  Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

  Hemmings, F. W. J., Culture and Society in France, 1849- 1898 (London: Batsford, 1971), especially chapter 4, ‘Fête Impériale’ .

  Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London: Paul Elek, 1977).

  Horne, Alistair, Seven Ages of Paris (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), especially chapter 14, ‘The Second Empire’.

  Jones, Colin, Paris: Biography of a City (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2004), especially chapter 9, ‘Haussmannism and the City of Modernity’.

  McLynn, Pauline, “‘Human Beasts?”: Criminal Perspectives in La Bête humaine’, in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).

  McMillan, James, F., Napoleon III (New York: Longman, 1991).

  Nye, Robert, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

  Price, Roger, The French Second Republic: A Social History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).

  Semmens, P. W. B. and A. J. Goldfinch, How Steam Locomotives Really Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  Simmons, Jack and Gordon Biddle, The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge, 1985).

  Williams, Roger L., Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).

  Wilson, Nelly, ‘A Question of Motives: Heredity and Inheritance in La Bête humaine’, in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).

  Zola, Émile, Œuvres Complètes, edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), vol. VI. This edition of the French text of La Bête humaine contains a number of contemporary illustrations of places mentioned in the novel, including photographs taken by Zola himself.

  A Note on This and Some Other Translations

  The text used for this translation of La Bête humaine is that published in the fourth volume of Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), edited by Henri Mitterand.

  The first translation into English of La Bête humaine appeared in 1890 (in the same year as the publication of the novel in French) under the title Human Brutes, described in The National Union Catalogue as ‘a realistic novel by Émile Zola, translated from the French by Count Edgar de V. Vermont’. It was published by Laird and Lee in Chicago. The first translation to appear in Britain was that of Edward Vizetelly, published by Hutchinson in 1901 under the title The Monomaniac. Vizetelly & Co., the publishing house founded by Edward’s father, Henry, had been prosecuted following the publication in 1888 of Earth (La Terre) on the grounds that the novel was pornographic. Henry Vizetelly was sentenced to three months in prison and a heavy fine, and his publishing house subsequently went bankrupt. These censorious measures might explain why it was only ten years later that Edward Vizetelly felt able to risk translating another novel by Zola and why, when it was eventually published, it appeared in a bowdlerized version prepared by his brother Ernest. Scenes of a sexual nature and anything that might be considered in the least indelicate were removed. The fact that Madame Victoire works as a lavatory attendant is not mentioned. Roubaud’s attempt to make love to his wife and the first love-making between Jacques and Séverine are omitted. The novel does not work convincingly without these scenes. The difficulties that are reflected in Vizetelly’s translation would make a very rewarding study for anyone interested in the practicalities of Victorian censorship. Despite (or perhaps thanks to) these excisions The Monomaniac was reprinted in 1902. and again in 1915 and 1920. More recent translations have benefited from a more open approach to such matters. They include Alec Brown’s The Beast in Man (1956), Leonard Tancock’s La Bête Humaine (1977) and Roger Pearson’s La Bête Humaine (1996).

  The novel has also lent itself to a number of film adaptations. The most famous of these is La Bête Humaine (1938), directed by Jean Renoir, with Jean Gabin as Lantier, Simone Simon as Séverine, Fernand Ledoux as Roubaud and Renoir himself as Cabuche. For the present-day viewer it is a strikingly ‘period’ piece, although the period in question is different from that depicted in the novel. The film focuses on Séverine’s unhappy marriage to Roubaud and her relationship with Jacques. The stories of Flore and Philomène are sidelined; the blizzard, the train crash and Misard’s murder of Aunt Phasie are omitted entirely. Jacques is portrayed as a killer with a conscience; he eventually takes his own life by leaping from his train. The film redirects Zola’s narrative but it engages with Zola’s text intimately. The dialogue is at times exactly as Zola has written it, and scenes are recreated which draw upon subtle details of Zola’s descriptions of moment and place. A freer adaptation is Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954). Lang’s film is more properly speaking a reworking of Renoir’s film rather than of Zola’s novel. It translates the action into the context of post-war America. The characters are given new names, and Jacques (Jeff Warren in Lang’s film) becomes an entirely different person. He is no longer the ‘monomaniac’, driven by atavistic instinct to kill women; he is a perfectly ordinary, fun-loving American soldier who has just returned from military service in Korea. The killings are worked out in the context of a domestic rift. There are no steam trains in Lang’s film, and much of the powerful symbolism which Zola attaches to his ‘ferocious’ locomotives is lost. The film is a tame reflection of the disturbing power of Zola’s novel, yet at the same time it succeeds in relating it to a more modern world.

  The achievements and insights of previous translators and film-makers have acted as an inspiration and encouragement in the preparation of this new translation. Given the novel’s violent subject matter, the writing displays a remarkable reserve and sobriety. This is not the Zola that the Duchesse de Guermantes delights in referring to as ‘the Homer of the sewers’1. The use of idiomatic or colloquial French is limited; ‘expletives’ are few and far between, and
fairly mild when they do occur. Zola makes considerable use of free indirect speech, which allows him to transcribe conversations and direct exchanges with a degree of formality that direct speech would lack. There is a controlled precision in the novel’s description of even the most violent scenes, which suggests that Zola was consciously trying to avoid the sensationalism that his subject matter could so easily engender. The violence contained within the novel emerges all the more forcefully as a result of this stylistic restraint. Joanna Richardson’s claim that ‘there is no beauty in La Bête humaine‘2is untenable. Contained within Zola’s closely restrained narrative there are moments of poetic expressiveness, when, like the pent-up forces that the novel describes, the language opens out and moves into a different register. The ‘Impressionist’ play of steam, mists and sunlight at the beginning of the novel, the sombre grandeur of the winter’s night as the express prepares to leave (chapter I), the idyllic picture of dawn rising over Le Havre with the last stars fading in the sky and a salty breeze blowing in from the sea (chapter III), the more macabre lyricism of Séverine’s confession in the still of the night as the stove casts a sinister red glow on the ceiling above (chapter VIII), these are moments of varied and intense suggestive power that serve to complement the stark realities around which the novel is structured. This translation attempts to recreate the balance of staid, measured narrative and poetic suggestiveness that distinguish Zola’s text. The title The Beast Within may appear somewhat gothic. It is based on an image that rears throughout the novel, applied initially to Roubaud (chapter I) and subsequently to the central protagonist, Lantier.