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.