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Ricordi di Parigi (Memories of Paris, 1879) a year later that Zola had told him of his plans to write a novel unlike any of the others in the series, which would be centred on a railway line and which would include, among other things, a railway accident. When he later came to plan La Bête humaine, however, Zola was faced with a quandary. He had already extended the Rougon-Macquart series of novels from the original ten to a proposed twenty and he was determined not to extend it further. He had also decided that the series should include novels devoted to the subjects of money, war and science, which he proposed to deal with in the final three novels.7 This left him little opportunity to write about the railways as a separate subject. If he was to write about railways as well as about crime and the law, the two subjects would need to be accommodated in a single novel.

This was not as arbitrary a decision as it might initially appear. The rapid spread of railways in the 1850S and i86os had offered new opportunities for crime on an unprecedented scale. Robbery and assaults on female passengers were frequent occurrences in the early years of rail travel. The small, self-contained compartments of early railway carriages, the remote, inaccessible areas through which trains travelled, the lack of any effective alarm system and the noise made by a train moving at speed, which was capable of drowning even the most desperate calls for help, facilitated such crimes. There had also been a number of railway murders. On the morning of 6 December 1860, Victor Poinsot, a High Court judge returning to Paris from Troyes, was found dead in a first-class compartment of a train at its arrival at the Gare de l‘Est. He had been shot through the head and chest, and his head had subsequently been battered with a blunt instrument. The murderer had stolen money, a gold watch and a travelling rug. The examining magistrate appointed to conduct the initial inquiry remained unconvinced that such a vicious murder could have been committed solely for the purpose of theft. A rumour circulated that Poinsot had seduced a village girl during his trip to Troyes, and that the murder was an act of revenge committed by the girl’s brother, but this was never proved. The main suspect was a certain Charles Jud, whom the court of inquiry connected with another murder on the same railway line three months earlier. Jud escaped from police custody and was never recaptured. His elusiveness became the subject of satirical comments in the press, which seized the opportunity to criticize police incompetence and even suggested that Jud had been invented in order to detract attention from suspicions that Poinsot was acting as a Prussian agent.8 Readers of La Bête humaine will recognize certain similarities between the Poinsot murder and the murder of President Grandmorin in the novel. Although it had occurred almost thirty years before Zola began writing La Bête humaine, the Poinsot murder undoubtedly fuelled his imagination. But it was not an isolated case. In England, Thomas Briggs, a City banker, was beaten, robbed of his gold watch and thrown from a train on the North London Railway on 9 July 1864. In 1886, only three years before Zola began writing La Bête humaine, the Prefect of the département of the Eure, a Monsieur Barrême, was killed on board a train travelling from Cherbourg to Paris, and his body was thrown out of the carriage door. Again the murderer was never captured. Events such as these were reported extensively in the press, often accompanied by lurid illustrations. The connection between crimes of violence and railways was thus not something that Zola had to struggle to invent; it was a recurring fact of life. Moreover the coverage that such incidents received in the press made clear not only their dramatic potential but also the appeal they exercised on the popular imagination. By 1888 the broad lines of the novel had been decided. Zola’s intention was to bring together the novel about railways and the novel about crime and the law. Writing on 16 November