Germinal - Emile Zola [289]
2. scrofula: ‘A constitutional disease characterized mainly by chronic enlargement and degeneration of the lymphatic glands’ (OED). The condition could be identified particularly by the presence of hard lumps or sores round the neck.
3. cap: In French ‘béguin’, a thin, bonnet-like cap usually made of cotton and worn under the leather cap, or ‘barette’, which miners wore to protect their heads.
4. till the fortnight’s up: During the nineteenth century mine-workers in both Britain and France were customarily paid fortnightly. Since usually they did not work on pay-day, as we learn later in Germinal, weekly payment would have meant another day off.
5. nine francs: In so far as the equivalent sum today can reasonably be calculated, one franc would now be worth in the region of £3 to £4, or approximately $5. At this period in the second half of the nineteenth century a sou, a pre-revolutionary unit of currency, was applied colloquially to a five-centime piece. It would therefore now be worth somewhere between 15p and 20p, or approximately 25c. See also Part II, Chapter IV, where La Maheude’s purchases provide some evidence of what money would buy at the time: 7 sous for brawn (£1–£1.25); 18 sous for potatoes (£2.80–£3.60), which seems very expensive, although we do not know how many she bought nor how scarce they were. A beer cost two sous (30p–40p) (see below, Chapter VI, note 1).
6. five francs: La Maheude uses the colloquial term ‘cent sous’ to mean a five-franc coin.
7. Emperor and Empress: The Emperor Napoleon III and his Spanish-born wife the Empress Eugénie (1826–1920).
8. ‘piece’: In French ‘briquet’, because of the brick-like shape of the thick sandwich.
CHAPTER III
1. stealing the girls’ bread out of their mouths: As alluded to earlier in the chapter, the miners were keen for women and girls to be employed since it boosted the family’s income.
CHAPTER IV
1. This particular seam was so thin: So-called ‘thin-seam mining’ of this kind was particular to northern France and Belgium and required different systems of working. Zola highlights it both for documentary reasons and to dramatize the difficulty of the conditions in which miners had to work.
2. special token: A piece of metal or leather stamped with the hewer’s or putter’s number or distinctive mark, and fastened to the tub he is filling or putting.
3. laundry-woman…rue de la Goutte d’Or: Gervaise Lantier, the central character in L’Assommoir (1877) lives and works as a laundry-woman in this slum area of northern Paris situated between Montmartre and the Gare du Nord. The plot of the earlier novel is briefly recalled in Étienne’s reminiscences in the following paragraph. At this point in the fictional time-setting of Germinal (March 1866) Gervaise has not yet reached the point within the fictional chronology of L’Assommoir where she walks the streets and dies a squalid and lonely death; but the readers of Germinal would have known the outcome already.
4. the lesion…harboured within his young, healthy body: Principally on the basis of his reading of Prosper Lucas’s Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle (1847–50), Zola was persuaded that alcoholism was inherited, and he used this as one of the main elements in his depiction of the degenerate Macquart branch of the family. Étienne’s brother Jacques in La Bête humaine is similarly afflicted.
5. Pas-de-Calais: The Department of the Pas-de-Calais is situated immediately to the north-west of the Département du Nord.
CHAPTER V
1. crosse: This game, somewhat similar to golf, is described in detail in Part IV, Chapter VI.
2. ten years’ service: Horses were generally sent down the mine at the age of four, ponies at the age of three, and the average length of service was ten years. Mules and donkeys had also been used but proved less co-operative.
CHAPTER VI
1. beer: In French ‘chope’, literally a beer mug or tankard. As Zola discovered on his visit