The Beast Within - Emile Zola [3]
1902 (29 September) Dies from asphyxiation as the result of the chimney of his bedroom stove being blocked. It is still widely believed that he was assassinated by anti-Dreyfusards.
1908 (4 June) Zola’s remains transferred to the Panthéon.
Introduction
This introduction refers to the novel by its original French
title, La Bête humaine. New readers are advised that the
introduction and the notes which appear at the end of the
book make details of the plot explicit.
La Bête humaine is the seventeenth in the series of twenty novels which Zola wrote under the collective title Les Rougon-Macquart. Zola’s overall purpose in this huge undertaking, as announced by its sub-title, was to depict ‘the Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. La Bête humaine contributes to this family history and continues Zola’s exploration of heredity and social conditioning, but it can be perfectly well read as a novel in its own right. Indeed it is as powerful and dramatic a narrative as any of the other novels in the series. It tells a story of sexual abuse, adultery, murder and suicide. This sombre catalogue of crime and misfortune is set against a background of deeply embedded political corruption which ensures that the voice of justice is silenced, that wickedness goes undetected and that violence is allowed to breed violence. The novel exposes a world of savagery and hypocrisy concealed behind a façade of progressive innovation and social refinement. Its bleak, uncompromising message challenged readers of Zola’s generation, as it challenges readers of today, to seek a clearer understanding of social malignity and to find better ways of dealing with it.
Zola began writing the novel on 5 May 1889 at his country house at Médan and finished it in Paris less than nine months later, on 18 January 1890. He had spent a considerable amount of time and effort in preparing the novel,1 yet the speed at which it was actually written is remarkable, especially when one considers that during this period he also moved house, continued to write articles for newspapers, was conducting a clandestine love affair and was called upon to do a stint of jury service at the Palais de Justice. The novel was first published in serialized form in the illustrated weekly magazine La Vie populaire, the first three chapters appearing on 14 November 1889 and the final instalments on 2 March 1890. The magazine paid Zola 20,000 francs for the serial rights. It appeared in book form immediately afterwards, published by Charpentier in March 1890, and very quickly sold 60,000 copies.
This was not the first time that Zola had written about murder. On 24 December 1866 Le Figaro had published his short story ‘Un Mariage d’amour’, a tale of adultery in which a husband who proves an obstacle to his wife’s amorous adventures is drowned by the two thwarted lovers in the Seine. A more substantial account of murder, again in the context of an adulterous love affair and again incorporating the drowning of the husband, occurs in the novel Thérèse Raquin, which had appeared in 1867. Thérèse Raquin does not belong to the Rougon-Macquart cycle, yet in the prominence it gives to sexually related violence and in the macabre, nightmarish quality of some of the episodes it contains it has as strong an affinity with La Bête humaine as any of the Rougon-Macquart novels. In his preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin in 1868, Zola refers to the bestial, soulless character of his two murderers. ’Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more ... the soul is entirely absent ... The murder they commit is the outcome of their adultery, an outcome that they accept as wolves accept the killing of a sheep.‘2 In the same year, writing as a journalist for La Tribune, Zola had also contributed an article on the trial in Marseille of three women accused of poisoning. ’It is good,‘ he says, referring to the trial, ’that human depravity is sometimes paraded before