Germinal quotes

Over the open plain, beneath a starless sky as dark and thick as ink, a man walked alone along the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, a straight paved road ten kilometres in length, intersecting the beetroot fields.

He could not even see the black soil before him, and only felt the immense flat horizon by the gusts of March wind, squalls as strong as on the sea, and frozen from sweeping leagues of marsh and naked earth.

Étienne, who forgot himself before the stove, warming his poor bleeding hands, looked round and could see each part of the pit: the shed tarred with siftings, the pit-frame, the vast chamber of the winding machine, the square turret of the exhaustion pump.

This pit, piled up in the bottom of a hollow, with its squat brick buildings, raising its chimney like a threatening horn, seemed to him to have the evil air of a gluttonous beast crouching there to devour the earth.

While examining it, he thought of himself, of his vagabond existence these eight days he had been seeking work. He saw himself again at his workshop at the railway, delivering a blow at his foreman, driven from Lille, driven from everywhere.

Bonnemort slowly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“It’s coal. I’ve got enough in my carcass to warm me till I die. And it’s five years since I put a foot down below. I stored it up, it seems, without knowing it; it keeps you alive!”

There was silence. The distant hammer struck regular blows in the pit, and the wind passed by with its moan, like a cry of hunger and weariness coming out of the depths of the night.

But Bonnemort was for a moment so suffocated by a new and violent spasm that he could not get his breath. Then, when he had expectorated and wiped the black froth from his lips, he replied in the rising wind:

“Eh? all that belong to? Nobody knows. To people.”

And with his hand he pointed in the darkness to a vague spot, an unknown and remote place, inhabited by those people for whom the Maheus had been hammering at the seam for more than a century. His voice assumed a tone of religious awe;

“What is it that you want? Let things be, and see about the soup. It’s no good talking, better be at work down below.”

“True enough,” replied Maheude. “Blow out the candle: I don’t need to see the colour of my thoughts.”

He blew out the candle. Zacharie and Jeanlin were already going down; he followed them, and the wooden staircase creaked beneath their heavy feet, clad in wool. Behind them the closet and the room were again dark. The children slept; even Alzire’s eyelids were closed;

The cages in the middle of the clear space appeared and disappeared, were filled and emptied, without Étienne being at all able to understand the complicated proceeding.

He only understood one thing well: the shaft swallowed men by mouthfuls of twenty or thirty, and with so easy a gulp that it seemed to feel nothing go down.

Since four o’clock the descent of the workmen had been going on. They came to the shed with naked feet and their lamps in their hands, waiting in little groups until a sufficient number had arrived.

But Maheu, behind her, had heard and replied, talking with Étienne for a moment. No, no one was wanted. This poor devil of a man who had lost his way here interested him. When he left him he said to the others:

“Eh! one might easily be like that. Mustn’t complain: everyone hasn’t the chance to work himself to death.”

The band entered and went straight to the shed, a vast hall roughly boarded and surrounded by cupboards shut by padlocks.

Why risk displeasing fate by doubting it? And at the bottom of their fidelity there was a superstitious terror, a fear lest the million of the denier might suddenly melt away if they were to realize it and to put it in a drawer.

It seemed to them more sheltered in the earth, from which a race of miners, generations of starving people, extracted it for them, a little every day, as they needed it.

For the rest, happiness rained on this house. M. Grégoire, when very young, had married the daughter of a Marchiennes druggist, a plain, penniless girl, whom he adored, and who repaid him with happiness.

It would rise again: God Himself was not so solid. Then with his religious faith was mixed profound gratitude towards an investment which for a century had supported the family in doing nothing.

It was like a divinity of their own, whom their egoism surrounded with a kind of worship, the benefactor of the hearth, lulling them in their great bed of idleness, fattening them at their gluttonous table.

From father to son it had gone on. Why risk displeasing fate by doubting it?

“And the soup? would you like me to make it if you come back late?”

“Soup, soup: no, wait till I come.”

Alzire, with the precocious intelligence of a little invalid girl, could make soup very well. She must have understood, for she did not insist.

As she walked she was already spending the five francs, first bread, then coffee, afterwards a quarter of butter, a bushel of potatoes for the morning soup and the evening stew; finally, perhaps, a bit of pig’s chitterlings, for the father needed meat.

The Curé of Montsou, Abbé Joire, was passing, holding up his cassock, with the delicate air of a fat, well-nourished cat afraid of wetting its fur.

He was a mild man who pretended not to interest himself in anything, so as not to vex either the workers or the masters.

The Curé of Montsou, Abbé Joire, was passing, holding up his cassock, with the delicate air of a fat, well-nourished cat afraid of wetting its fur.

He was a mild man who pretended not to interest himself in anything, so as not to vex either the workers or the masters.

“Good day, Monsieur le Curé.”

M. Grégoire, who had gone back to his newspaper, sat up indignantly.

“Seven children! But why? good God!”

“It is imprudent,” murmured the old lady.

“And my husband, sir,” said Maheude in her turn, “you must come and see him. He always has those pains in his legs.”

“It is you who take too much out of him. Just leave me alone!”

The two women were left to gaze at the doctor’s retreating back.

“We give them more coal than they can burn,” went on Madame Hennebeau. “A doctor visits them twice a week; and when they are old they receive pensions, although nothing is held back from their wages.”

“A Thebaid! a real land of milk and honey!” murmured the gentleman in delight.

Maheude had hastened to offer chairs. The ladies refused.

“It is marvellous, marvellous!” exclaimed the gentleman, in a final outburst of enthusiasm.

They left with that enchanted air with which people leave a booth in a fair

, and Maheude, who accompanied them, remained on the threshold while they went away slowly, talking very loudly.

The cries redoubled, and there was a terrible push which shook the wall, followed by complete silence. Then the miner, swallowing the last spoonful, concluded, with an air of calm justice:

“If the soup is not ready, one can understand.”

And after having drunk a glassful of water, he attacked the chitterlings. He cut square pieces, stuck the point of his knife into them and ate them on his bread without a fork. There was no talking when the father was eating.

Over this immense sea of reddish earth the low sky seemed to melt into black dust, without a breath of wind now to animate the darkness.

It was the wan and deathly melancholy of a funeral.

Étienne walked straight ahead at random, with no other aim but to shake off his fever.

Only just as they now knew him he at last also knew them, as one knows the rascally magpies who become corrupted in the pear-trees in the garden.

Ah! youth! youth! how it goes on, how wild it is!

Sometimes he wagged his chin with silent regret, turning away from the noisy wantons who were breathing too loudly in the darkness. Only one thing put him out of temper: two lovers had acquired the bad habit of embracing outside his wall.

At Rasseneur’s, in the lighted room, an engine-man and two day-workers were drinking. But before going in Étienne stopped to throw one last glance into the darkness. He saw again the same black immensity as in the morning when he had arrived in the wind.

Before him the Voreux was crouching, with its air of an evil beast, its dimness pricked with a few lantern lights.

The three braziers of the bank were burning in the air, like bloody moons, now and then showing the vast silhouettes of Father Bonnemort and his yellow horse.

Gradually the night came on, the rain was now falling slowly, continuously, burying this void in its monotonous streaming.

Only one voice was still heard, the thick, slow respiration of the pumping engine, breathing both by day and by night.

And he replied with his gentle voice, almost without an accent:

“I am thirsty when I eat.”

His companion also joked him about the girls, declaring that he had seen him with a putter in the wheat on the Bas-de-Soie side. Then he shrugged his shoulders with tranquil indifference. What should he do with a putter?

Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free.

Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves.

It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No!

If they fall too low, the workers die, and the demand for new men makes them rise. If they rise too high, more men come, and they fall.

It is the balance of empty bellies, a sentence to a perpetual prison of hunger.

”

But the day promised to be very warm; it was one of those heavy skies threatening storm, which in summer stifle this flat bare country of the Nord.

Sunday upset the hours for rising, even among the Maheus.

While the father, after five o’clock, grew weary of his bed and dressed himself, the children lay in bed until nine.

“And if we go out on strike you can see how useful that fund will be. We can snap our fingers at the Company, we shall have there a fund to fight against them. Eh? don’t you think so?”

Pierron lowered his eyes and grew pale; he stammered:

“I’ll think over it. Good conduct, that’s the best Provident Fund.”

Then her hands fell on to her knees with a gesture of immense dejection:

“Then if that’s true, we are done for, we are.”

They all looked at one another. Father Bonnemort spat into his handkerchief, while Maheu sat with his extinguished pipe, which he had forgotten, in his mouth. Alzire listened between Lénore and Henri, who were sleeping on the edge of the table.

and beneath the dazzling gleam of fairyland justice descended from heaven.

Since the good God was dead, justice would assure the happiness of men, and equality and brotherhood would reign.

A new society would spring up in a day just as in dreams, an immense town with the splendour of a mirage, in which each citizen lived by his work, and took his share in the common joys.

But little by little the charm worked on her also. Her imagination was aroused and she smiled at last, entering his marvellous world of hope. It was so sweet to forget for a while the sad reality!

When one lives like the beasts with face bent towards the earth, one needs a corner of falsehood where one can amuse oneself by regaling on the things one will never possess.

And what made her enthusiastic and brought her into agreement with the young man was the idea of justice.

“My God! we shall soon be all dead if this goes on.”

“When one is dead,” said Maheu, “one doesn’t get hungry.”

He put some nails into his shoes, and decided to set out. The Deux-Cent-Quarante settlement would not be paid till towards four o’clock.

Étienne, who was looking fixedly at the flags on the floor, raised his head, and murmured with eyes lost in a vision of the future:

“Ah! it is time! it is time!”

At last Madame Hennebeau called the servant:

“Hippolyte, before we go into the drawing-room just open the windows and let in a little air.”

The fund was exhausted; the Company would not yield; every day must aggravate the situation; and they preserved their hope and showed a smiling contempt for facts. If the earth opened beneath them a miracle would save them.

This faith replaced bread and warmed their stomachs.

When the Maheus and the others had too quickly digested their soup, made with clear water, they thus rose into a state of semi-vertigo, that ecstasy of a better life which has flung martyrs to the wild beasts.

Why mix oneself up with other people’s affairs, when one would get nothing out of it but hard knocks? And she kept her esteem for him because he did not get drunk, and regularly paid his forty-five francs for board and lodging.

When a man behaves well one can forgive him the rest.

Étienne then talked about the Republic, which would give bread to everybody. But Maheude shook her head, for she remembered 1848, an awful year, which had left them as bare as worms, her and her man, in their early housekeeping years.

When he raised his head he saw that he was in front of the Voreux. The gloomy mass of buildings looked sombre beneath the growing darkness. The deserted square, obstructed by great motionless shadows, seemed like the corner of an abandoned fortress.

As soon as the winding-engine stopped, the soul left the place.

At this hour of the night nothing was alive, not a lantern, not a voice; and the sound of the pump itself was only a distant moan, coming one could not say whence, in this annihilation of the whole pit.

the solitude even extended to the Volcan, where the ladies were resting for lack of admirers, although they had lowered their price from ten sous to five in view of the hard times.

A deep mourning was breaking the heart of the entire country.

“By God!” exclaimed Widow Désir, slapping her thighs with both hands, “it’s the fault of the gendarmes! Let them run me in, devil take them, if they like, but I must plague them.”

The engine-man shrugged his shoulders, and a smile again came on his lips.

“Oh! blood!” he murmured. “What does that matter? The earth has need of it.”

Étienne, growing calm, took a chair, and put his elbows on the other side of the table. This fair face, with the dreamy eyes, which sometimes grew savage with a red light, disturbed him, and exercised a singular power over his will.

Then Souvarine concluded peacefully, with his gaze fixed on space:

“All reasoning about the future is criminal, because it prevents pure destruction, and interferes with the progress of revolution.”

This made Étienne laugh, in spite of the cold shiver which passed over his flesh. Besides, he willingly acknowledged that there was something in these ideas, which attracted him by their fearful simplicity.

Who had ever seen such boobies? To think that they swallowed all his humbug, and went away with empty hands while he ate the cod in this warm place, tickled his sides with amusement. Then he concluded, with the gravity of a little philosopher:

“Much better be alone, then there’s no falling out.”

Étienne had finished his bread. He drank a gulp of the gin.

The calcined rocks, of a sombre red, were covered by an efflorescence of alum as by a leprosy.

Sulphur grew like a yellow flower at the edge of the fissures.

At night, those who were brave enough to venture to look into these holes declared that they saw flames there, sinful souls shrivelling in the furnace within.

Another fortnight’s strike and he would be bankrupt. And in this certainty of disaster he no longer felt any hatred of the Montsou brigands; he felt that all had a complicity in it, that it was a general age-long fault.

They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.

There was a rush, and the deserted pit belonged to them. And in their rage at not finding a traitor’s face to strike, they attacked things. A rankling abscess was bursting within them, a poisoned boil of slow growth.

Years and years of hunger tortured them with a thirst for massacre and destruction.

Behind a shed Étienne saw some porters filling a wagon with coal.

A sound of thunder came near, the earth was shaken, and Jeanlin galloped up first, blowing into his horn.

“Take out your scent-bottles, the sweat of the people is passing by!”

murmured Négrel, who, in spite of his republican convictions, liked to make fun of the populace when he was with ladies.

Cécile, in the hay, no longer stirred; and the others, in spite of the wish to turn away their eyes, could not do so: they were compelled to gaze.

It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century.

Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite.

“Bread! is that enough, idiots!”

He could eat, and all the same he was groaning with torment.

His desolate household, his whole wounded life, choked him at the throat like a death agony. Things were not all for the best because one had bread. Who was the fool who placed earthly happiness in the partition of wealth?

They would even enlarge the unhappiness of the earth; they would one day make the very dogs howl with despair when they had taken them out of the tranquil satisfaction of instinct, to raise them to the unappeasable suffering of passion.

No, the one good thing was not to exist, and if one existed, to be a tree, a stone, less still, a grain of sand, which cannot bleed beneath the heels of the passerby.

And in this exasperation of his torment, tears swelled in M. Hennebeau’s eyes, and broke in burning drops on his cheeks. The twilight was drowning the road when stones began to riddle the front of the villa.

The twilight was drowning the road when stones began to riddle the front of the villa. With no anger now against these starving people, only enraged by the burning wound at his heart he continued to stammer in the midst of his tears:

But the cry of the belly dominated, and a roar blew like a tempest, sweeping everything before it:

The abuse increased, while the dead man, stretched on his back, gazed motionless with his large fixed eyes at the immense sky from which the night was falling.

This earth heaped in his mouth was the bread he had refused to give.

And henceforth he would eat of no other bread. It had not brought him luck to starve poor people.

This enthusiastic sermon lifted him to mystic heights, and the poor people had long ceased to understand him.

“No need for so many words,” growled Maheu suddenly. “You’d best begin by bringing us a loaf.”

“Come on Sunday to mass,” cried the priest. “God will provide for everything.”

we ought to have pulled the bloody place to the ground, down to the last brick. And do you know I’ve only one regret, that we didn’t let the old man strangle the Piolaine girl. Hunger may strangle my little ones for all they care!”

Her words fell like the blows of an axe in the night.

The closed horizon would not open, and the impossible ideal was turning to poison in the depths of this skull which had been crushed by grief.

Two women perhaps were standing there, the mother and the sister, clutching their windblown coifs, gazing as if they could see what was now happening to the little fellow through the leagues which separated them. They would always wait for him now.

What an abominable thing it is for poor devils to kill each other for the sake of the rich!

But this corpse had to be disposed of. Étienne at first thought of throwing it into the canal, but was deterred from this by the certainty that it would be found there. His anxiety became extreme, every minute was of importance;

Then the days began to pass by as before, always without bread, but without the luck to die outright; things picked up here and there rendered to the wretches the poor service of keeping them alive.

Nothing had changed in their existence, only her man was gone.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Étienne, made miserable by the sight of this silent woman, left the room, and walked slowly along the paved street of the settlement.

It’s true enough that they harnessed us like horses to work, and it’s not at all a just sharing of things to be always getting the stick and making rich people’s fortunes bigger without hope of ever tasting the good things.

There’s no pleasure in life when hope goes.

Yes, that couldn’t have gone on longer; we had to breathe a bit. If we had only known! Is it possible to make oneself so wretched through wanting justice?”

There’s no pleasure in life when hope goes. Yes, that couldn’t have gone on longer; we had to breathe a bit. If we had only known!

Is it possible to make oneself so wretched through wanting justice?

”

Étienne, in the background, grew faint, and there was bitterness at his heart. He recalled Rasseneur’s prediction in the forest, threatening him with the ingratitude of the mob. What imbecile brutality! What an abominable forgetfulness of old services!

It was a blind force which constantly devoured itself.

And beneath his anger at seeing these brutes spoil their own cause, there was despair at his own fall and the tragic end of his ambition. What! was it already done for!

Souvarine had remained standing near the Avantage, at the corner of the road. For half an hour he had been looking at the colliers who were returning to work in the darkness, passing by with the dull tramp of a herd.

He was counting them, as a butcher counts his beasts at the entrance to the slaughterhouse, and he was surprised at their number; even his pessimism had not foreseen that the number of cowards would have been so great.

The stream continued to pass by, and he grew stiff, very cold, with clenched teeth and bright eyes.

But Catherine having approached, he recognized her also. Étienne protested, declaring that he allowed no one to judge his conduct. And the engine-man’s eyes went from the young girl to her companion, while he stepped back with a sudden, relinquishing movement.

When there was a woman in a man’s heart, that man was done for; he might die.

Perhaps he saw again in a rapid vision his mistress hanging over there at Moscow, that last link cut from his flesh, which had rendered him free of the lives of others and of his own life. He said simply:

When M. Hennebeau came back to the captains a nervous spasm was drawing his face. He made a gesture of despair, and gave orders that the mine should be evacuated at once.

It was a kind of funeral procession, in silent abandonment, with glances thrown back at those great masses of bricks, empty and still standing, but which nothing henceforth could save.

And as the manager and the engineer came down last from the receiving-room, the crowd met them with its clamour, repeating obstinately:

And at the end of its disembowelled chamber, the engine could be seen seated squarely on its massive foundation of masonry; its copper was shining and its huge steel limbs seemed to possess indestructible muscles.

The enormous crank, bent in the air, looked like the powerful knee of some giant quietly reposing in his strength.

After this hour of respite, M. Hennebeau’s hopes began to rise. The movement of the soil must have come to an end, and there would be some chance of saving the engine and the remainder of the buildings.

It was thought that it would be crushed to fragments and fly to powder, when suddenly it sank in one block, drunk down by the earth, melted like a colossal candle; and nothing was left, not even the point of the lightning conductor.

It was done for; the evil beast crouching in this hole, gorged with human flesh, was no longer breathing with its thick, long respiration.

The Voreux had been swallowed whole by the abyss.

and nothing was left, not even the point of the lightning conductor. It was done for; the evil beast crouching in this hole, gorged with human flesh, was no longer breathing with its thick, long respiration.

The Voreux had been swallowed whole by the abyss.

The crowd rushed away yelling. The women hid their eyes as they ran. Terror drove the men along like a pile of dry leaves.

The incomplete dam allowed numerous leaks, and frothy streams fell in a cascade down the enormous hole of the engulfed mine. The crater was being emptied, however, and the water, drunk by the earth, was sinking, and revealing the fearful ruin at the bottom.

Beneath the tender azure of this beautiful day there lay a sewer, the ruins of a town drowned and melted in mud.

“And people come out of their way to see that!” exclaimed M. Grégoire, disillusioned.

The old man did not stir nor wink his eyelids beneath the sudden light from the door; he seemed imbecile, as though he had not seen all these people come in.

At his feet lay his plate, garnished with ashes, such as is placed for cats for ordure.

“Don’t mind if he’s not very polite,” said the Levaque woman, obligingly. “Seems he’s broken something in his brain. It’s a fortnight since he left off speaking.”

“He won’t say thank you,” said the Levaque woman, who had cast a look of deep envy on the boots.

“Might as well give a pair of spectacles to a duck, asking your pardon.”

She went on; she was trying to draw the Grégoires into her own house, where she hoped to gain their pity. At last she thought of a pretext;

Not a sound, not a moan had traversed the thin partition to the neighbouring house. It seemed to be an outbreak of sudden madness, a longing to murder before this white young neck.

Such savagery was stupefying in an old invalid, who had lived like a worthy man, an obedient brute, opposed to new ideas.

What rancour, unknown to himself, by some slow process of poisoning, had risen from his bowels to his brain? The horror of it led to the conclusion that he was unconscious, that it was the crime of an idiot.

He was standing up, going backward and forwards, vainly beating the miners call, enraged at this remainder of life which he was obliged to live here tied to a rival whom he detested.

Not even enough space to die away from each other!

As soon as he had gone ten paces he must come back and knock up against this man. And she, this sorrowful girl whom they were disputing over even in the earth! She would belong to the one who lived longest;