Germinal - Emile Zola [288]
And far beneath his feet the stubborn tap-tap of the picks continued. The comrades were all there, he could hear them following him with each stride he took. Wasn’t that La Maheude beneath this field of beet, bent double at her work, her rasping breaths audible above the roar of her ventilating machine? On the left, on the right, ahead of him, he thought he recognized others, there beneath the corn and the hedges and the young trees. The risen April sun now shone from the sky in all its glory, warming the parturient earth. Life was springing from her fertile bosom, with buds bursting into verdant leaf and the fields a-quiver with the thrust of new grass. Seeds were swelling and stretching, cracking the plain open in their quest for warmth and light. Sap was brimming in an urgent whisper, shoots were sprouting with the sound of a kiss. And still, again and again, even more distinctly than before, as if they had been working their way closer to the surface, the comrades tapped and tapped. Beneath the blazing rays of the sun, on this morning when the world seemed young, such was the stirring which the land carried in its womb. New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.
Notes
(For explanations of mining vocabulary see Glossary of Mining Terms.)
PART I
CHAPTER I
1. Marchiennes to Montsou: Marchiennes, now Marchiennes-Ville, is situated east-north-east of Douai in northern France, in the Deépartment du Nord, just south of the border with Belgium and to the west of Valenciennes. Montsou is a fictional town, the name of which literally means ‘mountain of sous’. With the exception of Valenciennes and Anzin (see below, note 6) the remaining place-names used to describe the area around Montsou are also fictional.
2. Le Voreux: This fictional name suggests the ‘voracious’ nature of the mine. See Introduction, p. xxi.
3. fighting in America: This war in Mexico lasted from 1861 to 1867. In 1861 Britain, Spain and France had sent troops to Mexico in response to the refusal by the recently installed President Benito Juarez (1806–72) to honour the country’s foreign debts. Although Britain and Spain made peace in the course of the following year, France pursued its intervention, and the Emperor Napoleon III (1808–73), nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), sought to impose the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (1832–67), brother of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria (1830–1916), as the country’s new ruler in 1863. After France was forced to withdraw by America in 1867, Maximilian was executed by firing squad on 19 March, an event strikingly recorded in a painting by Manet. The accompanying reference to cholera (see below, note 4) implies that the novel opens in 1866, when the French position in Mexico was becoming untenable.
4. cholera: Zola is here using a small degree of historical licence in that the cholera epidemic which gripped the Lille and Valenciennes region of northern France occurred several months later in 1866.
5. they called me Bonnemort, for a laugh: Bonnemort means literally ‘good death’.
6. Anzin: A small mining town in the Denain coal-field, very close to Valenciennes, Anzin was the scene of several notable miners’ strikes and was visited by Zola as he researched Germinal. See Introduction, p. xix.
CHAPTER II
1. Two Hundred and Forty: These purpose-built pit-villages were indeed known by numbers rather than names, a fact which Zola