No. 17 · 1890
La Bête humaine
The Beast Within
La Bête humaine is a detective novel, a love story, and an investigation into hereditary violence — the most mechanically controlled of the twenty novels, built around a railway line as both setting and metaphor. Jacques Lantier, son of Gervaise Macquart, drives the express between Paris-Saint-Lazare and Le Havre. He is gifted, careful, respected by his colleagues, and he loves his locomotive Lison with a tenderness he cannot feel for human beings — because whenever he feels sexual desire for a woman, it is accompanied by an impulse to kill her. He has no explanation for this; Zola gestures towards hereditary transmission (the accumulated violence of the race, older than memory) but does not reduce it to biology. It is the family's darkness in its most extreme form. The novel's crime is introduced before Jacques enters it: the deputy stationmaster Roubaud discovers that his wife Séverine was sexually abused as a girl by President Grandmorin, a powerful railway board member; in a fit of violent jealousy, he forces Séverine to help him murder Grandmorin on the Paris-Le Havre express. Jacques witnesses the murder from the cab of his engine as the trains pass in the dark, but says nothing — partly from fear, partly from an obscure solidarity with violence he recognises in himself. Jacques and Séverine fall in love; she wants him to kill Roubaud so they can be free. Flore — a level-crossing keeper passionately in love with Jacques who cannot accept that he loves Séverine — causes a catastrophic collision of two trains in a desperate attempt to destroy them both; many passengers die, but neither Jacques nor Séverine is killed, and Flore then kills herself by running in front of another train. Jacques cannot bring himself to kill Roubaud. Instead, during a night alone with Séverine, the murderous impulse that has haunted him his whole life takes him by surprise: he kills her — the woman he loves — with his hands. The novel ends on the iron road: a locomotive carrying drunken soldiers towards the war with Prussia, its driver and fireman having fallen from the cab in a violent brawl, racing unmanned through the darkness towards whatever comes next.
Roman policier, histoire d'amour, enquête sur la violence héréditaire. Jacques Lantier, mécanicien de locomotive fils de Gervaise, aime son train Lison d'une tendresse qu'il ne peut donner aux femmes — car le désir l'envahit toujours avec une pulsion meurtrière. Roubaud et Séverine tuent Grandmorin dans un train ; Jacques est témoin mais se tait. Il tombe amoureux de Séverine. Elle veut qu'il tue Roubaud. Flore — amoureuse de Jacques, incapable d'accepter qu'il aime Séverine — provoque une collision ferroviaire catastrophique pour les détruire tous les deux ; de nombreux voyageurs meurent, mais ni Jacques ni Séverine ne sont tués ; Flore se suicide en se jetant sous un train. Jacques ne réussit pas à tuer Roubaud. Il tue Séverine à la place, lors d'une nuit seul avec elle, saisi par l'impulsion meurtrière qui le hante depuis toujours. Roman final : une locomotive lancée dans la nuit, sans conducteur, vers la guerre.
Setting: Paris–Le Havre railway