The Beast Within - Emile Zola [234]
CHAPTER IX
1 he could pay off his debt and he had all this money to wager: Zola tells us above that Roubaud’s gambling had begun ‘shortly after the murder’. The murder took place in mid-February 1869, which at this point in the novel is still less than a year ago. If it is assumed that the money taken from under the floorboard is used to pay off Roubaud’s gambling debts and that he had already paid money out of his own pocket, he appears to have so far lost something in the region of 1,000 francs and to be acquiring new debts as fast as he settles them. Zola had indicated earlier in the novel that Roubaud’s annual salary was about 2,000 francs (see chapter I, note 15).
2 She had asked him to give her a photograph of himself:Zola himself was a keen photographer.
3 bristling factory chimneys: Today Paris is not thought of as an industrial city, but during the Second Empire there was a considerable amount of industrial activity both in the suburbs and close to the city centre. Haussmann opposed the further development of heavy industry (including a proposal for a large railway works at Batignolles) in favour of the manufacture of luxury goods (see Jeanne Gaillard, Paris la Ville, Librairie Honoré Champion, 1976, pp. 55 ff.).
4 the right of the strong to destroy the weak who get in their way: It is here that Zola most clearly confronts the arguments of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (see Introduction). Zola had toyed with the idea of giving his novel the title The Right to Murder (Le Droit au meurtre). Raskolnikov had justified murder by reference to the concept of a ‘superior being’. Jacques here attempts to justify murder by reference to the less rarified concept of animal instinct. 5. whatever moral scruples had since been invented to keep men living together: In his ‘discussion’ of the rights and wrongs of murder, both here and elsewhere in the novel, Zola avoids specific mention of any religious imperative.
6 The government had been badly shaken by the general elections: ‘In a poll of around eight million electors, government candidates won only 4.5 million votes, while opposition candidates polled 3.5 million’ (McMillan, Napoleon III, p. 126). This represented the most serious challenge to its authority that the Second Empire had ever faced.
CHAPTER X
1 Misard had been putting the rat poison into her enemas rather than mixing it with the salt: This is the first confirmation that Misard had indeed been poisoning his wife. In June 1889, Zola had written for advice about poison to a doctor friend of his, Docteur Gouverné. Gouverné provided him with a detailed explanation of how various poisons worked, recommending white arsenic as the most appropriate to Zola’s purposes in the novel, being a tasteless white powder used as an ingredient in rat poison and ideally suited to slow poisoning. Gouverné further explained that it was also used to treat farm animals and would therefore be easily available in a country district such as the one Zola had in mind.
2 she walked out of the Malaunay end of the tunnel, safe and sound: Zola based this episode on an official report on the dangers incurred by railway men working inside tunnels. The report emphasized the disorientating effect of the noise and the dark and recommended that all tunnels should be equipped with electric lighting. Zola himself had a mortal fear of tunnels and confined spaces. In the short story ‘La Mort d’Olivier Bécaille’ a train is immured inside a tunnel. In Germinal the miners are trapped below ground.
3 ballast train: Ballast was broken stone, used as a bed for the tracks.
4 it automatically set the signal at red: The system of ‘interlocking signalling’ had been described to Zola by Pol Lefèvre. It was a system which linked signals and points and was operated by the signalman. Zola appears to be confusing it with a system of ‘automatic signalling’, in which signal