The Beast Within (8 page)

At the lower end of the scale, Phasie, before becoming ill, was paid 50 francs for looking after the level-crossing. This job has now been passed to Flore.

In 1870, a national guard in Paris earned 1.50 francs a day. This would have been a basic survival salary.

The Introduction and explanatory notes to this translation owe a great debt to the inspirational scholarship of F. W. J. Hemmings and Henri Mitterand, in particular to Mitterand’s ‘Étude’ in the Pléiade edition of
La Bête humaine
(1966) and his more recently published two-volume
Zola
(Paris: Fayard, 2001).

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of Bolton for their interest and encouragement — in particular Jon Glover, Ken Hahlo and Barry Wood. The historians Gerry Bryant, Bill Luckin and Bertrand Taithe have also given much valued guidance. Raymond Watton’s inexhaustible knowledge about railways and his long experience of driving steam locomotives have helped elucidate the technical elements in the novel. Claudette Guérin has provided culinary advice and explained certain nineteenth-century colloquialisms. Above all I must thank my wife Janet for her technical assistance, for reading through the translation so carefully and for sharing her valuable critical insights. This translation would not have been possible without her constant support.

Roubaud walked into the room and placed his one-pound loaf, his pate and his bottle of white wine on the table. That morning, before going to work, Madame Victoire must have put an extra heap of slack on the fire in her stove; the place was like an oven! The assistant stationmaster pulled open a window and leaned out.

The room was in the Impasse d‘Amsterdam, in the last house on the right, a tall building in which the Western Railway Company housed certain of its employees. The window was on the fifth floor near the end corner of the mansard roof and looked out over the railway station, a broad trough gouged out of the Quartier de l’Europe.
¹
The horizon suddenly opened out in front of him. That afternoon, distances seemed even greater than usual, beneath a sweep of grey, mid-February sky, a tepid, misty grey, with the sun struggling to come through.

Directly opposite, the houses in the Rue de Rome appeared blurred and indistinct, almost insubstantial in the hazy sunlight. To the left stood the gaping entrances of the train sheds, their glass roofs grimy with smoke. The largest of them — the mainline station — an immense structure stretching back inside as far as the eye could see, was separated from the two smaller ones for the trains to Argenteuil, Versailles and the Paris circle line by the post-office buildings and the foot-warmer depot.
²
To the right, the massive star-shaped iron structure of the Pont de l’Europe
³
straddled the railway cutting, which then reappeared and continued for some distance further, towards the mouth of the Batignolles tunnel. Directly beneath the window at which he was standing, and filling the whole area in front of him, the three sets of double track that emerged from the bridge split up and fanned out in a seemingly infinite proliferation of railway lines, which eventually disappeared under the station roofs. The three pointsmen’s cabins in front of the arches of the bridge each sported their own bare patch of garden. Amidst the profusion of carriages and locomotives that crowded the lines, a large red signal added a vivid splash of colour in the pale afternoon light.
⁴

Roubaud remained standing at the window, absorbed in the scene below and comparing it to his own station back at Le Havre. Whenever he came to Paris and stopped at Madame Victoire’s like this, it never failed to remind him of his job. A mainline train had just arrived from Mantes, and the platforms were a buzz of activity. He watched the comings and goings of the shunting locomotive, a little six-coupled tank engine with diminutive wheels, as it began to disconnect the train. It went about its work with a will, detaching the carriages and reversing them into the adjacent sidings. Another locomotive, a powerful express engine with four large, voracious driving wheels, stood on a separate track, emitting a thick column of black smoke which rose slowly from its chimney into the still air. What most caught his attention, however, was the 3.25 train for Caen. It already had its full complement of passengers but still awaited a locomotive. The engine stood on the other side of the Pont de 1’Europe just out of sight; Roubaud could hear it asking for the road, with short, repeated blasts on its whistle, like someone getting impatient. One of the linemen shouted the all clear, and the driver responded with a further toot on the whistle in acknowledgement. There was a brief pause, the cylinder taps
⁵
were opened, a deafening gush of steam shot along the ground from underneath the locomotive, and it slowly began to back on to its train. A huge white cloud came welling up from beneath the bridge, spreading outwards and swirling through the iron lattice-work like a flurry of snow. One part of the station disappeared behind a swathe of white, while the smoke from the express engine draped itself across the sky in a dense pall of black. From somewhere beyond the murk came the insistent calls of the shunters’ horns, orders being shouted and the clatter of turntables.
⁶
Through a brief clearing in the smoke he caught a glimpse of a Versailles train and an Auteuil train passing each other in opposite directions on the far side of the station, one of them leaving and the other arriving.

Roubaud was about to walk away from the window when he heard someone calling his name. He leaned out to look. On the fourth-floor balcony below him stood a young man, some thirty years old, by the name of Henri Dauvergne. He worked for the railway company as a guard and lived there with his father, who was an assistant stationmaster at the mainline station, and his two sisters, Claire and Sophie, a pair of very attractive fair-haired girls aged eighteen and twenty. The two men brought in six thousand francs
⁷
between them, and with this the girls saw to the family’s daily needs. It always seemed a wonderfully happy household; the elder sister was forever laughing and the younger one singing songs, accompanied by lively competition from a cage full of exotic birds.

‘Monsieur Roubaud!’ Henri called. ‘What brings you to Paris? Oh, of course ... I heard about your little brush with the Sub-Prefect!’
⁸

Roubaud stood at the window and explained how he’d had to come down from Le Havre that morning by the 6.40 express. He’d been hauled over the coals by the senior traffic manager. He’d been told to come and see him in Paris immediately. He was lucky he hadn’t been given the sack.

‘Is Madame Roubaud with you?’ Henri inquired.

Yes, she had wanted to come too in order to do some shopping. He was expecting her back at any minute. Madame Victoire always let them have the key to her room whenever they came to Paris. They liked to have a quiet meal there on their own, while she, bless her, went off to her job as a lavatory attendant. They’d had a quick sandwich at Mantes so that they could get everything done before they had lunch, but it was now gone three o’clock, and he was starving.

Henri was in a chatty mood and asked if they were staying overnight.

No, they weren’t. They were returning to Le Havre that evening, on the 6.30 express. Some holiday! A lot of fuss and bother just to get a ticking off, and then it was back to the grind!
⁹

The two men exchanged knowing looks, but their voices were drowned by a loud burst of spirited piano playing. The sisters must have been at the piano together; their laughter could be heard above the sound of the music, and it had obviously excited the birds in their cage. Henri, not wanting to miss out on the fun, waved goodbye and went back into the room. Left alone, Roubaud stood for a minute or two looking down at the balcony, from which the sounds of youthful merriment continued to rise. When he looked up again, he saw that the locomotive had closed its cylinder taps and that the pointsman was sending it on to the Caen train. A few last wisps of steam evaporated into the great swirls of dark smoke that blackened the sky. Roubaud turned and walked back into the room.

The cuckoo clock now said twenty past three. Roubaud shook his hand at it in frustration. Where on earth had Séverine got to? She only had to walk into a shop and you couldn’t get her out of it! In an effort to take his mind off the pangs of hunger that were churning away inside his stomach, he decided to lay the table. He knew the room well. It was a large room with two windows and it served as bedroom, dining room and kitchen all in one. All the furniture was in walnut — a bed with a red cotton quilt, a sideboard-cum-dresser, a round table and a Normandy wardrobe. He opened the sideboard and took out napkins, plates, knives and forks and two glasses. Everything was spotlessly clean. He enjoyed performing his little domestic chores, like a little girl laying the table for a dolls’ tea-party, admiring the beautiful white tablecloth, thinking how very much in love with his wife he was and smiling to himself as he thought of her breezing into the room and laughing when she saw his handiwork. He placed the pate on a plate and put the bottle of white wine beside it. Suddenly a puzzled expression came over his face; there was something missing. He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out two packages that he had forgotten — a small tin of sardines and a piece of Gruyère cheese.

A clock chimed half past three. Roubaud paced up and down the room, listening intently for the least sound on the staircase. There was nothing he could do but wait. As he passed in front of the mirror he stopped and looked at himself. He didn’t look his age. He was approaching forty, but still had a good head of strikingly red, curly hair, with not a sign of grey. He sported a full, vigorous, shiny blond beard. He was of no more than average height but he looked very fit. He prided himself on his appearance — the shape of his head, his low forehead, his strong neck, his round face, his fresh colouring and the glint in his big, bright eyes. His eyebrows met in a bristly line across his forehead, lending his face a permanent frown, like a jealous lover. He had married a woman fifteen years younger than himself and he often looked in the mirror; he found it reassuring.

He heard footsteps on the stairs and ran to open the door. But it was a woman who sold newspapers at the station, coming home next door. He walked back across the room. On the sideboard he noticed a box decorated with sea-shells. It was something he remembered, a present from Séverine to Madame Victoire, who had nursed her when she was a baby. It was a tiny little thing, but one glance had reminded him of how he came to marry her. It was now almost three years ago.

He had been born in Plassans,
¹⁰
in the South of France. His father was a carter. He had completed his military service and gained his sergeant’s stripes and had then worked for several years as a porter at the station at Mantes. He had been promoted to head porter at Barentin, and it was there that he had made the acquaintance of the woman he fell in love with, when she came to catch the train on her way back from Doinville with Mademoiselle Berthe, the daughter of President Grandmorin.
¹¹
Séverine Aubry came from a fairly humble background; she was the youngest daughter of a gardener on the Grandmorins’ estate, who had died while in their employ. But the President, who was Séverine’s godfather and guardian, simply doted on her. He arranged to have her looked after at the château, and she and his daughter became the closest of friends. He sent them both to the same boarding school in Rouen. Séverine had such a naturally genteel manner that for some time Roubaud resigned himself to worshipping her from afar, with the same sort of passion as a working-class person who has risen in the world might covet a fine piece of jewellery that he thought was worth a lot of money. Séverine was the only love of his life, and he would have been quite happy to marry her without a penny, just for the pleasure of knowing she was his. When he eventually plucked up courage to ask for her hand, he found himself better off than he could ever have dreamed. Not only did Séverine become his wife, with a dowry of ten thousand francs, but the President, who by then had retired and was a member of the board of directors of the Western Railway Company, took Roubaud himself under his wing. On the day after his marriage he had been promoted to assistant stationmaster at Le Havre. This was due partly, no doubt, to the fact that he had a very respectable work record; he was reliable, punctual and honest, not particularly intelligent perhaps, but very practical — all very laudable qualities which might explain why his application had been so quickly approved and why he had made such rapid progress. But Roubaud was inclined to think that he owed his success entirely to his wife. He simply worshipped her.

He opened the tin of sardines. His patience was beginning to wear thin. They had agreed to meet at three o’clock. Where could she be? Surely she wasn’t going to tell him it took a whole day to buy a pair of boots and half a dozen blouses. As he walked back in front of the mirror, he caught sight of himself again, his eyebrows bristling, his face set in a harsh scowl. In Le Havre he never worried about what she might be up to. But here in Paris he found himself imagining her involved in all sorts of escapades, secret assignations and deceptions. The blood rushed to his head. He clenched his fists; they were hard and tough from the days when he used to work in the shunting yard pushing goods wagons around. Suddenly he had become a brute beast, an animal unaware of its own strength. He was so angry he could have beaten the life out of her.

Séverine popped her face round the door. The fresh air had brought the colour to her cheeks, and she looked full of the joys of spring.

‘Here I am,’ she said. ‘You must have thought I’d got lost.’

She was twenty-five years old, tall, slim and athletic. She was quite slightly built, but she had a good figure. At first glance she was not what you would call pretty; she had a long face and a rather large mouth, but beautiful shiny teeth. Yet she had an attractiveness all of her own — strangely appealing big blue eyes and thick dark hair.