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faces that pass by in the trains are ‘an indistinct blur, all merging into each other and all ending up looking alike’ (II). Even Jacques, her own adopted son, whom she looks out for every time his train goes by, comes and goes so quickly that she barely has time to return his wave. The same sense of anonymity and depersonalization lies behind Flore’s disregard for the innocent victims of the train crash she causes. Aunt Phasie’s reaction to the bright new future that the railway is said to be leading towards, in which ‘all the peoples of the world ... would soon be one big family’ (II), is one of scepticism. Her reaction is to a large extent a product of her own personal disappointments; whatever benefits the railway may have brought for others, none of them have come her way. But Aunt Phasie’s disenchantment is supported elsewhere in the novel by the image of the railway as a colossus stretching itself across the country, soulless and triumphant, ‘wilfully disregarding whatever shreds of humanity survived on either side of it’ (II), and even more forcibly by the image that ends the novel of a trainload of soldiers being carried out of control towards the carnage of war. Both of these images present the railway as a mechanical, inhuman and destructive force.

Alongside descriptions of the railway, which might be classed as objective representations of observed reality, there are descriptions which function as suggestive poetry. The first time the railway is mentioned in the novel it is described in terms of a physical assault on the city of Paris; the railway line and the station have been ‘gouged out’ (I) of the Quartier de l’Europe. Towards the end of the first chapter, as the night express on which Grandmorin will be murdered prepares to leave Paris, a mist gathers, and a damp chill fills the air. A red light pierces the darkness ‘like a splash of blood’. Shapes loom out of the mist. Sounds are heard - giant gasps of breath ‘like someone dying of a fever’ and sudden sharp whistles ‘like the screams of women being violated’ (I). At this point in the novel the reader has already heard of Grandmorin’s abuse of Séverine, has seen the violence of Roubaud’s reaction and has been alerted to an imminent act of murder. The sombre description of the railway station echoes the violence that has been perpetrated and intimates the violence that is to come. It offers an image of the world of darkness and confusion into which the novel is about to escort us. In general terms Zola presents the trains, undoubtedly with a degree of hyperbole, as monsters belching smoke and flames, passing by with the force of a hurricane, making the ground shake like an earthquake and deafening the world with their noise. Descriptions of this sort provide a running accompaniment to the violence that pervades the novel. The sexually rooted nature of the violence that is done is also underscored by repeated descriptions of the railway and its trains in terms of sexual imagery. The train entering and emerging from tunnels has lent itself to what may seem to the present-day reader to have become a range of rather clichéd metaphors of sexual arousal and penetration. This was not the case at the time Zola was writing. Zola uses such imagery in a resourceful and frequently poignant way. Flore walks resolutely to her end by entering a tunnel in the face of an approaching express. She unfastens her blouse and lets it hang from her shoulders. As the train enters the tunnel she walks towards it as if to greet a woman friend. The moment of impact, ‘the final embrace’, is described as ‘a last gesture of defiance and revolt’. The half-naked corpse is recovered an hour later. The head is ‘a terrible mess’ but the rest of the body is ‘without a mark’, ‘remarkably beautiful - strong and unblemished’ (X). Zola’s description contains complex and inexhaustible associations of a female assertion of identity and independence, of female despair and self-sacrifice, of male dominance and aggressiveness and also, surprisingly perhaps, of male innocence. The episode suggests much