Macquart branch
Jacques Lantier
Train driver (mécanicien)
Son of Gervaise Macquart, brother of Étienne and Claude. The most extreme expression of the Macquart line's hereditary damage: Jacques Lantier is a locomotive driver on the Paris–Le Havre line who is competent, respected, genuinely skilled — and who is haunted by an uncontrollable impulse to kill women. It is not a desire he can explain or locate; it arrives with sexual feeling, as part of it, and he has organised his life to avoid any situation where he might act on it, which means avoiding all intimacy. He loves his locomotive Lison with the tenderness and precision of a craftsman who has found his subject — a love that is partly displacement of feeling and partly entirely real, the machine's rhythms and needs as legible to him as another person's breath. When he encounters the Roubaud murder from the cab of his engine — seeing Séverine and her husband kill President Grandmorin as his train passes theirs in the night — he says nothing, an act of suppression whose consequences will destroy him. He falls in love with Séverine despite himself; tries to master the impulse; fails; kills her during a night of passion in a moment that, Zola makes clear, he does not will but also cannot prevent. The Macquart inheritance has won. He is killed shortly after by his fireman Pecqueux in a struggle on the footplate; the unmanned locomotive continues into the dark.
Fils de Gervaise, mécanicien de locomotive sur Paris-Le Havre, hanté par une pulsion meurtrière envers les femmes qu'il ne peut expliquer ni localiser. Il organise sa vie pour éviter tout rapprochement intime, et aime sa locomotive Lison d'une tendresse qu'il ne peut donner aux humains. Il tombe amoureux de Séverine malgré lui, résiste à la pulsion, échoue — il la tue. La Bête l'emporte. Il est tué peu après par son chauffeur Pecqueux.
Strong, handsome, with something rigid and clenched about him — a man fighting constantly against himself, and the particular stillness of someone whose full attention is always somewhere else.
Strong, handsome, with something rigid and clenched about him — a man fighting constantly against himself, and the particular stillness of someone whose full attention is always somewhere else.
Family & Relationships
- Child Gervaise Macquart
- Child Auguste Lantier
- Sibling Nana
- Sibling Étienne Lantier
- Sibling Claude Lantier
- Lover Séverine Roubaud — Their doomed love affair in La Bête humaine.
Géo Dupuis, frontispiece for La Bête humaine (Mornay edition, 1924) — Public domain
Appears In
Details
- Branch
- Macquart
- Generation
- IV