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By Root 1744 0

down the groups of onlookers who were standing about laughing a hundred paces away. One bullet entered Mouquet’s mouth, shattering his skull and knocking him flat at the feet of Zacharie and Philomène, whose two children were spattered in blood. At the same instant La Mouquette was hit twice in the belly. She had seen the troops take aim and instinctively, with her characteristic generosity of spirit, she had thrown herself in front of Catherine, shouting at her to mind out. With a scream she tumbled backwards under the force of the shots. Étienne rushed across to lift her up and carry her away, but she gestured that it was too late. Then she gave a last gasp, still smiling at the two of them as though she were happy to see them together now that she was taking her leave.

That was it, or so it seemed; the storm of bullets had passed, and the echo was fading away as it reached the houses in the village when the last shot went off, one single, solitary shot, after the others.

It went through Maheu’s heart: he spun round and fell with his face in a puddle of coal-black water.

Stunned, La Maheude bent down.

‘Come on, love! Up you get. Just a little scratch, eh?’

Because of Estelle she did not have her hands free, and she had to tuck her under one arm in order to be able to turn Maheu’s head.

‘Say something! Where does it hurt?’

His eyes were blank, and his mouth was foaming with blood. She understood. He was dead. And she sat down in the mud, holding her daughter under her arm like a parcel, and stared at her husband in utter disbelief.

The pit had been cleared. The captain had nervously removed his damaged cap and then replaced it on his head, but even as he palely surveyed the greatest disaster of his life he maintained his stiff, military bearing. Meanwhile, expressionless, his men reloaded their rifles. The horrified faces of Négrel and Dansaert could be seen at the window of the loading area. Souvarine was standing behind them, a deep furrow etched across his brow as though the steel bolt of his obsession had ominously planted itself there. Over in the other direction, on the crest of the hill, Bonnemort had not moved, still propped on his stick with one hand and shading his eyes with the other so that he could get a better view of the slaughter of his kin below. The wounded were screaming, and the dead were growing rigid in various twisted postures; all were splashed with the liquid mud left by the thaw, and here and there some were sinking into the inky patches of coal that were now re-emerging from under the tatters of dirty snow. And in the midst of these tiny, wretched human corpses, all shrivelled by hunger, lay the carcass of Trumpet, a pitiful, monstrous heap of dead flesh.

Étienne had not been killed. Standing beside Catherine, who had collapsed with exhaustion and shock, he was still awaiting the arrival of death when the ringing tones of a man’s voice startled him. It was Father Ranvier on his way back from saying Mass, and there he stood with his arms in the air like some crazed prophet, calling down the wrath of God on the murderers. He was proclaiming the dawn of a new age of justice and the imminent extermination of the bourgeoisie by the fires of heaven on account of this, the latest and most heinous of their crimes, for it was they who had brought about the massacre of the workers and caused the poor and outcast of this world to be slain.

PART VII

I

The shots fired at Montsou had reverberated as far away as Paris, where the echo was considerable. For the past four days every opposition newspaper had been voicing its outrage and filling its front page with horrifying tales: twenty-five people wounded and fourteen dead, including two children and three women; and then there were the prisoners, with Levaque now something of a hero, credited with having displayed a grandeur worthy of the Ancients in his replies to the examining magistrate. The Empire had received a direct hit from these few bullets, but it was putting on a show of calm omnipotence, oblivious to the gravity of the wound it