He becomes increasingly excited as, in his imagination, he relives Séverine’s experience. What most appeals to him in Séverine’s harrowing account, however, is her sense of having lived more intensely than she had ever lived before. ‘I lived more in that minute,‘ she tells him, ’than in all my previous life put together’ (VIII). Séverine’s confession of the murder and Jacques’s eager attention to every gory detail is placed in the context of a scene of passionate love-making. For Séverine the confession is represented as a sexual giving of herself to her lover; it rises from within her ‘like an uncontrollable desire to be taken and possessed’ (VIII). For Jacques it is represented as a postponement and inflaming of sexual desire. After the confession, the two lovers come to gratification in an act of sexual ferocity, giving each other ‘the same agonizing pleasure as beasts that tear each other apart as they mate’ (VIII). Unknown to Séverine, this dallying with death unleashes the suppressed demon of Jacques’s sexual desire. She is lucky (on this occasion) to escape alive.

Jacques proves unable to point his murderous instinct in the direction of a man. The two planned murders of Roubaud draw the novel back into the adultery-related motivation of Thérèse Raquin. The murder of an obstructive husband is seen as the prelude to a blissful life of happiness and material prosperity (in this case in America), briefly glimpsed but never realized. Jacques’s failure to kill Roubaud is presented partly as the result of his powerfully dissuasive moral conscience. This aspect of Zola’s discussion of murder is a response to his reading of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-80). The French translation of Crime and Punishment had appeared in 1885 and that of The Brothers Karamazov in 1888. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov argues that certain ‘superior’ human beings have a right to kill ‘inferior’ human beings who stand in their way. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov suggests that, if there is no God, there is no justification for the idea of a moral conscience. Both of these ideas are countered in Zola’s description of Jacques’s inability to kill Roubaud. Although Jacques constructs a rational argument for killing Roubaud and wishes to prove himself worthy of Séverine by doing so, he simply cannot bring himself to kill a defenceless man. He knows it is wrong. Zola excludes from this sense of ‘wrong’ any specific religious imperative; Jacques’s moral conscience is described as ‘no more than a vague assortment of ideas instilled by the slow workings of a centuries-old tradition of justice’ (IX). Yet however ‘vague’ this ‘assortment of ideas’, it is sufficiently ingrained to deter him from killing Roubaud. He knows that he does not have the right to kill, and no matter how hard he tries to convince himself, it is not a right he can consciously persuade himself to assume. Jacques’s moral conscience receives help from a surprisingly different quarter - his fear of blood. It is presented early in the novel as he stands beside the body of Grandmorin, and again in more garish images towards the end of the novel as he prepares for a second time to murder Roubaud. Séverine suggests that they remove their clothes in order to do the killing so that they might clean themselves more easily afterwards. The suggestion fills Jacques with revulsion and does nothing to strengthen his resolve. In the end killing is seen by Zola not as something that can be motivated by reason but as a product of animal instinct, a brutish act which completely takes over whatever elements of culture and civilization might shape human identity, sweeps them aside and annihilates them.

Despite the undisguised physical brutality of the murder of Grandmorin and Séverine, and the heartless killing and maiming of innocent passengers in the train crash, the novel elicits a surprising degree of sympathy for those who commit these acts of violence. Zola invites the reader to see the murderers as themselves victims. Séverine, while still aching and bruised from the beating she has received from Roubaud, watches him as he paces the room and finds herself beginning to pity him. She sees him as a man possessed, a victim of some power greater than himself. She knows that he has been manipulated into marriage by Grandmorin and later comes briefly to regret that she had not been more honest with him.