The Beast Within - Emile Zola [25]
At the lower end of the scale, Phasie, before becoming ill, was paid 50 francs for looking after the level-crossing. This job has now been passed to Flore.
In 1870, a national guard in Paris earned 1.50 francs a day. This would have been a basic survival salary.
Acknowledgements
The Introduction and explanatory notes to this translation owe a great debt to the inspirational scholarship of F. W. J. Hemmings and Henri Mitterand, in particular to Mitterand’s ‘Étude’ in the Pléiade edition of La Bête humaine (1966) and his more recently published two-volume Zola (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of Bolton for their interest and encouragement — in particular Jon Glover, Ken Hahlo and Barry Wood. The historians Gerry Bryant, Bill Luckin and Bertrand Taithe have also given much valued guidance. Raymond Watton’s inexhaustible knowledge about railways and his long experience of driving steam locomotives have helped elucidate the technical elements in the novel. Claudette Guérin has provided culinary advice and explained certain nineteenth-century colloquialisms. Above all I must thank my wife Janet for her technical assistance, for reading through the translation so carefully and for sharing her valuable critical insights. This translation would not have been possible without her constant support.
THE BEAST WITHIN
I
Roubaud walked into the room and placed his one-pound loaf, his pate and his bottle of white wine on the table. That morning, before going to work, Madame Victoire must have put an extra heap of slack on the fire in her stove; the place was like an oven! The assistant stationmaster pulled open a window and leaned out.
The room was in the Impasse d‘Amsterdam, in the last house on the right, a tall building in which the Western Railway Company housed certain of its employees. The window was on the fifth floor near the end corner of the mansard roof and looked out over the railway station, a broad trough gouged out of the Quartier de l’Europe.1 The horizon suddenly opened out in front of him. That afternoon, distances seemed even greater than usual, beneath a sweep of grey, mid-February sky, a tepid, misty grey, with the sun struggling to come through.
Directly opposite, the houses in the Rue de Rome appeared blurred and indistinct, almost insubstantial in the hazy sunlight. To the left stood the gaping entrances of the train sheds, their glass roofs grimy with smoke. The largest of them — the mainline station — an immense structure stretching back inside as far as the eye could see, was separated from the two smaller ones for the trains to Argenteuil, Versailles and the Paris circle line by the post-office buildings and the foot-warmer depot.2 To the right, the massive star-shaped iron structure of the Pont de l’Europe3 straddled the railway cutting, which then reappeared and continued for some distance further, towards the mouth of the Batignolles tunnel. Directly beneath the window at which he was standing, and filling the whole area in front of him, the three sets of double track that emerged from the bridge split up and fanned out in a seemingly infinite proliferation of railway lines, which eventually disappeared under the station roofs. The three pointsmen’s cabins in front of the arches of the bridge each sported their own bare patch of garden. Amidst the profusion of carriages and locomotives that crowded the lines, a large red signal added a vivid splash of colour in the pale afternoon light.4
Roubaud remained standing at the window, absorbed in the scene below and comparing it to his own station back at Le Havre. Whenever he came to Paris and stopped at Madame Victoire’s like this, it never failed to remind him of his job. A mainline train had just arrived from Mantes, and the platforms were a buzz of activity. He watched the comings and goings of the shunting locomotive, a little six-coupled tank engine with diminutive wheels, as it began to disconnect the train. It went about its work with a will, detaching the carriages and reversing