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 relating 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).

Towards the railway itself the novel is ambivalent. On the one hand it is seen as the symbol and embodiment of progress. To the present-day reader some aspects of rail travel represented in the novel, such as foot-warmers, travelling rugs, luncheon baskets, ‘ladies only’ compartments and even the steam engines themselves, will appear rather antiquated. Even for readers of the novel in 1890 there may have been an outmoded feel to some of the scenes depicted, for Zola is attempting to describe things not as they were at the time the novel was first published but as they had been twenty years previously. Despite this, he is at pains to emphasize the modernity and the modernizing impact of the railways. The railways are seen as changing long-established patterns of living.14 Séverine is able to travel from Le Havre to Paris and back in a day. The young businessman from Le Havre travels to Paris every week. His fellow passenger, an American, professes to make the journey from New York to Paris every three weeks. This is no doubt an exaggeration, yet it points to the future. Rail travel, along with faster, steam propelled ocean-going liners, one of which is launched in Le Havre amid great festivities on the day after Grandmorin is murdered, is bringing the towns and cities of the world closer together and making access to them easier. The happy young mother who comes close to being murdered by Jacques in the train to Auteuil tells how, the previous summer, she and her family had enjoyed a six-week holiday in a remote part of Brittany, followed in September by a four-week stay at her father-in-law’s in Poitou, and how she now plans to spend the rest of the winter at Cannes. Such a pursuit of fresh air and sunshine would hardly have been possible a generation earlier. For Monsieur Dabadie, the stationmaster at Le Havre, the railway is an instrument of international commercial exchange. ‘He took little interest in the running of the passenger station, concentrating instead on the dock traffic and the enormous transhipment of cargo that passed through the goods yard. He was in constant touch with major companies in Le Havre and all over the world’ (III).