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By Root 1629 0

then Mouque and he had appeared preoccupied, with that air they always had of thinking back to the old days. No doubt he had been taken with one of his periodic fits of garrulousness in which his memories were so strongly stirred that they welled up inside him and poured out of his mouth for hours on end. A deep silence fell and people listened to the old man, who looked as white as a ghost standing there in the moonlight; and as he talked of things that had no immediate bearing on the recent debate, long tales that no one could quite follow, so their amazement grew. He was talking about his youth and about his two uncles who had been buried alive in Le Voreux, and then he moved on to the pneumonia that had carried off his wife. But he kept to his point all the same: things had never been good, and they never would be. They, too, had met like this in the forest, five hundred of them, because the King had refused to reduce the number of working hours; but then he stopped and began to talk about another strike. He had seen so many! It always ended up with them meeting here under the trees at Le Plan-des-Dames, or over at La Charbonnerie, or even as far away as Le Saut-du-Loup. Sometimes it was freezing cold, sometimes it was hot. One evening it had rained so hard that they had had to go home again without a word being said. And always the King’s soldiers would come, and always it would end in a shooting match.

‘We raised our hands like this, and we took an oath not to go back down. And I took that oath! Yes I did, I took that oath!’

The crowd listened open-mouthed, and it was beginning to have misgivings when Étienne, who had been attending keenly, leaped on to the fallen tree-trunk and stood beside the old man. He had just recognized Chaval among the people he knew in the front row. The thought that Catherine must be there had put new fire in his belly and a strong desire to be acclaimed in front of her.

‘Comrades, you’ve just heard what he said. Here is one of our oldest miners, and this is what he has suffered and what our children will suffer, too, if we don’t have done with these thieves and murderers once and for all!’

He was awesome: he had never spoken with such vehemence before. With one arm he held on to old Bonnemort, displaying him like an emblem of misery and grief and baying for vengeance as he did so. Speaking very quickly, he went back in time to the first of the Maheus and described how since then the whole family had been worn out by the mine and exploited by the Company and now found itself, after a hundred years of toil, even hungrier than it had ever been before; and then he compared them with the fat-bellied directors, men who oozed money from every pore, and with all those shareholders who had spent the past century living like kept women with nothing to do but delight in the pleasures of the flesh. Wasn’t it terrible? A whole lineage of human beings working themselves to death down the mine from father to son so that government ministers could have their kickbacks and generations of noble lords and gentlemen could give grand parties or sit and grow fat by their firesides! He had studied the occupational diseases of miners, and he regaled them with the full panoply in gruesome detail: anaemia, scrofula, the bronchitis that made them spit black coal, the asthma that choked them, the rheumatisms that stopped them walking. The miserable devils were no better than machine-fodder, they were penned in villages like livestock, and the big companies were gradually absorbing them all, regulating their slavery and threatening to enlist every worker in the country, millions upon millions of hands, in order to make the fortunes of a thousand idle men. But the miner was no longer the ignorant brute who could be crushed underfoot in the bowels of the earth. An army was taking root in the depths of the mines, a crop of citizens whose seed was slowly germinating under the surface of the earth and who would, one fine sunny day, finally break through to the light. And then they’d learn whether anyone would still dare