by Emile Zola
Naomi Schor, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore, 1978)
Colin Smethurst, Émile Zola. ‘Germinal’ (London, 1974; repr. Glasgow, 1996)
Philip Walker, ‘Germinal’ and Zola’s Philosophical and Religious Thought (Amsterdam, 1984)
Angus Wilson, Émile Zola. An Introductory Study of his Novels (New York, 1952)
Richard H. Zakarian, Zola’s ‘Germinal’. A Critical Study of its Primary Sources (Geneva, 1972)
In French
CRITICAL EDITIONS
Germinal, ed. Colette Becker (Paris, 1989)
Germinal, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1978)
BIOGRAPHY
Henri Mitterand, Zola. I. Sous le regard d’Olympia (1840–1871), II. L’Homme de ‘Germinal’ (1871–1893), III. L’Honneur (1893–1902) (Paris, 1999–2002)
CRITICAL STUDIES
Colette Becker, Émile Zola: ‘Germinal’ (Paris, 1984)
—, La Fabrique de ‘Germinal’ (Paris, 1986)
Philippe Hamon, Le Personnel du roman: le système des personnages dans les ‘Rougon-Macquart’ d’Émile Zola (Geneva, 1983)
Henri Mitterand, Le Regard et le signe (1987)
—, Zola: L’Histoire et la fiction (1990)
—, Zola et le naturalisme (1986)
Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume: Zola (Paris, 1975)
FILMOGRAPHY
La Grève [The Strike], dir. Ferdinand Zecca (France, 1903)
Au pays noir [In the Black Country], dir. Lucien Nonguet (France, 1905)
Au pays des ténèbres [In the Land of Darkness], dir. Victorin Jasset (France, 1912)
Germinal, dir. Albert Capellani (France, 1913)
Germinal, anonymous direction (France, 1920)
Germinal, dir. Yves Allégret (France, 1963)
Germinal, dir. Claude Berri (France, 1993)
Note on the Translation
This translation is based on the text of Germinal edited by Henri Mitterand and published in vol. iii (1964) of Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart (5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67) and as a separate volume (Gallimard, Folio, 1978).
Germinal was first translated into English in a pirated, American edition published by Belford, Clarke & Co. in Chicago in 1885. Given the extensive mistranslations and omissions of this version (by ‘Carlynne’), it might be fairer to say that the first English translation was that undertaken by the journalist Albert Vandam, Paris correspondent of the London newspaper the Globe. This appeared in instalments in the Globe from 30 November 1884 to 26 April 1885 and was afterwards purchased and published in book form in June 1885 by Henry Vizetelly, father of Ernest (who subsequently edited and/or translated many of the Rougon-Macquart novels). But Vandam’s version was bowdlerized. The first complete and unexpurgated translation of Germinal into English, privately published in London in 1894 by the Lutetian Society, was by Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), the celebrated authority on sex. Ellis’s translation, prepared in collaboration with his wife Edith Lees (1861–1916), was first published in the Everyman Library in 1933. It was revised and edited by David Baguley for Everyman Paperbacks in 1996.
The present translation replaces that of Leonard Tancock for Penguin Classics, first published in 1954. Since then there have been at least two American translations: by Willard R. Trask for Bantam Books (New York, 1962) and by Stanley and Eleanor Hochman (New American Library, New York, 1970). The most recent translation is that by Peter Collier in the Oxford World’s Classics (1993), which is helpfully annotated by the translator and has an informative and well-judged Introduction by Robert Lethbridge
Germinal poses none of the problems of L’Assommoir where the central characters employ the colloquialisms and slang of the contemporary urban working class. Zola chose not to repeat that experiment (which has been cleverly reconstructed by Margaret Mauldon in her 1995 translation for Oxford World’s Classics). When an early reviewer of Germinal complained that its characters were unrealistic because they did not speak the local dialect of the Département du Nord, its author replied that if they had, no one would have bothered to read his novel. In translating the language of the miners of Montsou, therefore, I have respected the predominantly polite and literate register of the original French. As to the colloquialisms and ‘bad language’ with which their language is nevertheless laced, I have tried to render this in a modern English which will seem neither too squeamish nor like a pastiche of working-class ‘speak’. I have sought to use four-letter (and six-letter) words as sparingly as Zola uses the French equivalents (notably ‘foutre’ and ‘bougre’) but with an equivalent measure of the shock value (in a literary context) which I suppose these words to have had in 1885. In particular, Zola makes a point of using such terms when his characters are under exceptional pressure, whether drunk, as in Étienne’s case on one occasion, or having finally lost patience, as in La Maheude’s case later in the novel. Hence my own usage at these points in the narrative.
As to the technical vocabulary associated with mining, I have endeavoured, like Zola, to do my research. This vocabulary is explained in the Glossary of Mining Terms.
GERMINAL
PART I
I
Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night, a lone man was following the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou,1 ten kilometres of paved road that cut directly across the fields of beet. He could not make out even the black ground in front of him, and he was aware of the vast, flat horizon only from the March wind blowing in broad, sweeping gusts as though across a sea, bitterly cold after its passage over league upon league of marsh and bare earth. Not a single tree blotted the skyline, and the road rolled on through the blinding spume of darkness, unswerving, like a pier.
The man had left Marchiennes around two o’clock in the morning. He walked with long strides, shivering in his threadbare cotton jacket and his corduroy trousers. A small bundle, tied up in a check handkerchief, was evidently an encumbrance; and he pressed it to his side, first with one arm, then with the other, so that he could thrust both hands – numb, chapped hands lashed raw by the east wind – deep into his pockets. Homeless and out of work, he had only one thing on his vacant mind: the hope that the cold would be less severe once day had broken. He had been walking like this for an hour when, two kilometres outside Montsou, he saw some red fires over to his left, three braziers burning out in the open as though suspended in mid-air. At first he hesitated, suddenly afraid; but then he could not resist the painful urge to warm his hands for a moment.
A sunken path led away from the road, and the vision vanished. To the man’s right was a wooden fence, more like a wall, made from thick planks and running alongside a railway line; to his left rose a grass embankment topped by a jumble of gables, apparently the low, uniform roof-tops of a village. He walked on a further two hundred paces or so. Abruptly, at a turn in the path, the fires reappeared close by him, but he was still at a loss to explain how they could be burning so high up in this dead sky, like smouldering moons. But at ground level something else had caught his attention, some large, heavy mass, a huddled heap of buildings from which rose the outline of a factory chimney. Gleams of light could be seen here and there through grime-coated windows, while outside five or six paltry lanterns hung from a series of wooden structures whose blackened timbers seemed to be vaguely aligned in the shape of gigantic trestles. From the midst of this fantastical apparition, wreathed in smoke and darkness, rose the sound of a solitary voice; long, deep gasps of puffing steam, invisible to the eye.
And then the man realized that it was a coal-mine. His misgivings returned. What was the point? There wouldn’t be any work. Eventually, instead of heading towards the buildings, he ventured to climb the spoil-heap to where the three coal fires stood burning in cast-iron baskets, offering warmth and light to people as they went about their work. The stonemen must have worked late, because the spoil was still being removed. He could now hear the banksmen pushing their trains of coal-tubs along the top of the t
restles, and in the light from each fire he could see moving shadows tipping up each tub.
‘Hallo,’ he said, as he walked towards one of the braziers.
Standing with his back to it was the driver, an old man in a purple woollen jersey and a rabbit-skin cap. His horse, a large yellow animal, stood waiting with the immobility of stone as the six tubs it had just hauled up were emptied. The workman in charge of the tippler, a skinny, red-headed fellow, was taking his time about it and looked half asleep as he activated the lever. Above them the wind was blowing harder than ever, gusting in great icy blasts like the strokes of a scythe.
‘Hallo,’ the driver replied.
There was a silence. Sensing the wariness with which he was being observed, the man introduced himself at once.
‘I’m Étienne Lantier, I’m a mechanic. I don’t suppose there’s any work here?’
The fire lit up his features; he must have been about twenty-one, a handsome, swarthy sort, thin-limbed but strong-looking all the same.
The driver, reassured, shook his head.
‘No, no work for a mechanic…We had two of them come by yesterday. There’s nothing to be had.’
A sudden squall interrupted the two men. Then, pointing down at the dark huddle of buildings at the foot of the spoil-heap, Étienne asked:
‘It is a coal-pit, isn’t it?’
This time the old man was unable to reply, choked by a violent fit of coughing. At length he spat, and his spittle left a black stain on the crimson ground.
‘Yes, it’s a pit all right. Le Voreux 2…Look, the miners’ village is just over there.’
It was his turn to point, and he gestured through the darkness to the village whose roof-tops Étienne had glimpsed earlier. But the six tubs were empty now, and so the old man followed after them on his stiff rheumatic legs, not even needing to crack the whip: his big yellow horse had set off automatically and was plodding forward between the rails, hauling the tubs behind it. A fresh gust of wind ruffled its coat.
Le Voreux was now emerging as though from a landscape of dream, and while he lingered at the brazier warming his sore, chapped hands, Étienne took in the scene. He was able to locate each part of the pit: the screening-shed with its asphalt roof; the headgear over the pit-shaft; the huge engine-house; and the square tower containing the drainage-pump. Hunkered in a hollow in the ground, with its squat brick buildings and a chimney that poked up like a menacing horn, the pit looked to him like some monstrous and voracious beast crouching there ready to gobble everyone up. As he stared at it, he began thinking about himself and the vagrant life he had been living for the past week in search of work: he saw himself back in Lille, in his railway workshop, hitting his boss and being fired and then getting turned away wherever he went. On Saturday he had arrived in Marchiennes. He had heard there was work at Les Forges, the ironworks; but there’d been nothing, neither at Les Forges nor at Sonneville’s, and he’d had to spend the Sunday hidden under a woodpile in a cartwright’s yard, from where the watchman had just evicted him at two o’clock that morning. He had nothing, not a penny to his name, not even a crust of bread. So what was he supposed to do now, wandering the highways and byways like this with nowhere to go and not even the slightest idea where to find shelter from the wind? Yes, it was a pit all right: he could see the paved yard in the light of the few lanterns hanging there, and the sudden opening of a door had allowed him a glimpse of the boiler fires blazing with light. Gradually he worked out what everything was, even that noise of the pump letting off steam, a slow, deep, insistent puffing that sounded as though the monster were congested and fighting for breath.
Hunched over his machine, the tippler-operator had not even looked up at Étienne, who was just going over to pick up his small bundle where he had dropped it when a fit of coughing signalled the return of the driver. He and his yellow horse could be seen slowly emerging from the darkness, having hauled up six more tub-loads.
‘Are there any factories in Montsou?’ Étienne asked.
The old man spat black phlegm and shouted back above the wind:
‘Oh, we’ve got the factories all right. You should have seen them three or four years ago. Things were humming then. You couldn’t find enough men to work in them, and folk had never earned as much in their lives…And here we all are having to tighten our belts again. Things are in a bad way round these parts now, what with people being laid off and workshops closing down all over the place…Well, maybe it isn’t the Emperor’s fault, but what does he want to go off fighting in America3 for? Not to mention the animals that are dying of cholera,4 and the people too for that matter.’
Both men continued to share their grievances in short, breathless bursts of speech. Étienne described his week of fruitless searching. What was he supposed to do? Starve to death? The roads would soon be full of beggars. Yes, the old man agreed, things weren’t looking good at all. In God’s name, it just wasn’t right turning so many Christian souls out on to the streets like that.
‘There’s no meat some days.’
‘Even bread would do!’
‘That’s true. If only we had some bread!’
Their voices were lost in the bleak howl of the wind as squalling gusts snatched their words away.
‘It’s like this,’ the driver continued at the top of his voice, turning to face south. ‘In Montsou over there…’
Stretching out his hand once more, he indicated various invisible points in the darkness, naming each one as he did so. Over in Montsou the Fauvelle sugar-refinery was still working, but the Hoton refinery had just laid off some of its men, and of the remainder only the Dutilleul flour-mill and the factory at Bleuze that made cables for the mines were managing to keep going. Then, with a broad sweep towards the north, his arm took in a whole half of the horizon: the Sonneville construction works had received only a third of its usual number of orders; of the three blast-furnaces at the ironworks in Marchiennes only two were lit; and at the Gagebois glass factory there was the threat of a strike because there’d been talk of reducing the men’s wages.
‘I know, I know,’ said the young man as each place was identified. ‘I’ve just been there.’
‘The rest of us are all right so far,’ the driver added. ‘But the pits have cut their production. And look at La Victoire over there. Only two batteries of coke-ovens still going.’
He spat and departed once more behind his sleepy horse, having harnessed it to the empty tubs.
Étienne now looked out over the whole region. It was still pitch black, but the driver’s hand seemed to have imbued the darkness with misery and suffering, and the young man intuitively felt its presence all around him in the limitless expanse. Was that not the cry of famine he could hear being borne along on the March wind as it swept across this featureless countryside? The gale was blowing even more furiously now, and it was as though it were bringing the death of labour in its wake, a time of want that would take the lives of many men. And Étienne scanned the horizon trying to pierce the gloom, at once desperate to see and yet fearful of what he might find.
Everything remained sunk in darkness, concealed by the obliterating night; all he could make out, in the far distance, were the blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens. These last, batteries of a hundred slanting chimneys, stood all in a line like ramps of red flame; while the two towering furnaces, further over to the left, blazed with a blue light like giant torches in the middle of the sky. It was a melancholy sight, like watching a building on fire; and the only suns to rise on this menacing horizon were these, the fires that burn at night in a land of iron and coal.
‘Are you from Belgium, then?’ Étienne heard the driver asking behind him when he next returned.
This time he had brought up only three tubs. They might as well be emptied: there was a problem with the extraction cage, where a nut had broken off a bolt, and work would be held up for a quarter of an hour or more. At the foot of the spoil-heap silence had fallen, and the trestles no longer shook wi
th the constant rumble of the banksmen’s tubs. All that could be heard was the distant sound of metal being hammered somewhere down in the pit.
‘No, I’m from the south,’ the young man replied.
Having emptied the tubs, the man in charge of the tippler had sat down on the ground, delighted by the hold-up; but he remained fiercely taciturn and simply looked up at the driver with wide, expressionless eyes as though somehow put out by so much talking. For indeed the driver was not usually given to such expansiveness. He must have liked the look of this stranger and felt one of those sudden urges to confide that sometimes make old people talk to themselves out loud.
‘I’m from Montsou,’ he said. ‘The name’s Bonnemort.’
‘Is that some kind of nickname?’ asked Étienne in surprise.
The old man chuckled contentedly and gestured towards Le Voreux:
‘Yes, it is…They’ve dragged me out of there three times now, barely in one piece. Once with my hair all singed, once full to the gills with earth, and once with my belly full of water, all swollen like a frog’s…So when they saw that I just refused to pop my clogs, they called me Bonnemort, for a laugh.’5
His mirth came louder still, like the screech of a pulley in need of oil, and eventually degenerated into a terrible fit of coughing. The light from the brazier was now shining fully on his large head, with its few remaining white hairs and a flat, ghostly pale face that was stained with bluish blotches. He was a short man, with an enormous neck; his legs bulged outwards, and he had long arms with square hands that hung down to his knees. Otherwise, just like his horse standing there motionless and apparently untroubled by the wind, he seemed to be made of stone and appeared oblivious to the cold and the howling gale that was whistling round his ears. When finally, with one deep rasping scrape of the throat, he had finished coughing, he spat by the foot of the brazier, and the earth turned black.