She sees no reason why, if her own life is at an end, other lives, and even perfectly innocent lives, should not end too. Flore inhabits a world of her own. Fiercely independent and proud of her womanhood, she scorns the company of men, preferring to be alone and to roam the countryside. The name ‘Flore’ emphasizes her separateness from the man’s world of technological progress. Yet she is certainly no Botticellian goddess of flowers and springtime. She is a bringer of death and destruction. She has an aggressive, even warlike character. The seemingly impossible exploits she is credited with (such as singlehandedly stopping a runaway railway wagon on an incline) stand as manly, even super-manly, intrusions by a woman into the male-dominated world of the railway. When she is rejected by Jacques she loses the one opportunity she has ever had to form a pact with the man’s world. The train crash which she plans as an act of revenge on the two people who have destroyed her hopes of happiness is also a gesture of defiance towards the male-driven concept of material progress.

The murder of Aunt Phasie by her husband Misard seems on the face of it to be murder of a different sort. It is a calculated, callous and secretive murder by poisoning which has been going on for some time before the novel begins. Misard’s motive for murdering his wife is ostensibly to lay his hands on the 1,000 francs she has inherited from her father, but the conflict between Misard and his wife has evolved into a strange contest as to which of the two will outwit and outlive the other. Even here, then, murder is the product of a perverted form of sexual rivalry. Misard, having shown no interest in the sexual side of his marriage, takes an insidious delight in slowly destroying a once vivacious and sexually attractive woman, whilst his wife, even though she is at death’s door, comforts herself with thoughts of her earlier flirtations and the knowledge that her husband’s plan to acquire her money will never succeed.

Pecqueux’s killing of Jacques is another crime of passion which results in a violent physical attack on the victim. In this case the violence is exacerbated by drink. Pecqueux murders Jacques as a reprisal for having, as he sees it, seduced his mistress, although he does not live to savour his revenge, for in killing Jacques he also succeeds in killing himself.

A further act of sexually related violence lurks in the shadows cast by these other crimes. The incident is only alluded to and is never fully explained, but it seems to have involved a savage assault by Grandmorin on Flore’s younger sister, Louisette, as a result of which she subsequently dies. The implication is that Grandmorin, as well as being guilty of sexual assault, a crime to which officialdom and certain members of his own family are quite prepared to turn a blind eye, is also guilty, along with Roubaud, Séverine, Flore, Pecqueux and Jacques, of murder.

Like that of the novel’s other murderers, Jacques’s urge to kill is sexually driven, and is described as a desire to exact reprisal. In Jacques’s case, however, reprisal is directed not at any one individual but at women in general. Jacques is prompted by a desire to right a cumulative wrong, to settle a grudge which he vaguely senses has been passed from man to man from time immemorial. When the urge to kill comes upon him, it requires a particular victim, but the victim can be any woman who happens to be around at the time, and in this sense his urge to kill is indiscriminate. One of the more chilling episodes in the novel depicts Jacques, knife in hand, stalking potential victims in the streets of Paris early one winter’s morning - a girl of fourteen, a frail and impoverished woman on her way to work and finally a pretty young mother whom he follows on to a train. Although Jacques’s urge to kill is described as having been inherited at birth, it is not until puberty that it has manifested itself. It is thus related to Jacques’s sexual coming of age. ‘Whereas other boys coming to puberty dreamed of possessing a woman, the only thing that had excited him was the thought of killing one’ (II). Even though the urge to kill may have its roots in the remote past, what immediately triggers it is sexual arousal, and it reveals itself as a perverse form of sexual desire. Early in the novel Jacques stands beside the body of the murdered Grandmorin, and his craving to kill grows more intense ‘like lust that is denied gratification’ (II). When, in what is probably the most climactic scene in the novel, Jacques murders Séverine, the act is presented as the result of sexual enticement on the part of Séverine and as an act of sexual possession on the part of Jacques. ‘The fearful door that guarded the dark abyss of sexual desire lay open. If she loved him she must die.