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; he tries, and cannot. Instead, during a night of passion, the impulse takes him by surprise and he kills Séverine — whom he loves — with his hands. He is destroyed by this. Flore, a level-crossing keeper who is passionately in love with Jacques and cannot accept that he loves Séverine, causes a catastrophic collision of two trains to kill them together. The novel ends on the iron road: a train full of drunken soldiers rushing towards the war with Prussia, unmanned, its driver and fireman having killed each other in a brawl, racing 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. Il n'y arrive pas et tue Séverine à la place. Flore provoque un accident ferroviaire catastrophique pour les tuer tous les deux. Roman final : un train lancé à pleine vitesse dans la nuit, sans conducteur, vers la guerre.
Setting: Paris–Le Havre railway