fears; he had wanted to kill her, and would kill her still if she were there now with her blouse ripped open and her breasts laid bare. He recalled the first time this malady had struck. He was barely sixteen. He was out playing with a girl, the daughter of one of his relatives, two years younger than him. She had fallen down, showing her legs, and he had tried to molest her. The following year, he remembered, he had sharpened a knife so as to stab another girl in the neck, a fair-haired girl who used to walk past his house every morning. She had a pink, fleshy neck, with a little brown birth-mark underneath one ear; he had decided that that was where the knife would go in. There had been others, many others, a nightmare succession of women who, by the mere fact of being near him, had made him suddenly want to kill them — women he had brushed past in the street, women he simply happened to find himself next to. He remembered once sitting beside a young newly wed at the theatre. She had a very loud laugh, and he had had to rush out in the middle of the performance to prevent himself from attacking her. None of these women were known to him personally, so what could he possibly have against them? Each time it happened it came as a flash of blind rage, an insatiable desire to exact revenge for offences done to him in the distant past, offences which no longer found room in his conscious memory. Could it really come from so far back, from the accumulated ill that women had inflicted upon the entire race of men? Was this the swollen legacy of a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave?11 When the frenzy came upon him, his one desire was to attack, to conquer and to dominate a woman. It was a perverse wish to sling her over his back, dead, as if she were his own personal trophy, his alone and his for ever. He felt that his head would burst. He had no answer to all these questions. He knew nothing. His brain was numb. There seemed no way out for him. He was a man driven to acts beyond his control, and whose cause was beyond his understanding.
Another train came past, its headlamps ablaze, and plunged into the tunnel; from within its dark interior came a rumble like thunder that echoed and re-echoed before finally dying away. Almost as if he feared that this anonymous crowd rushing past absorbed in their own affairs might have heard him, Jacques sat up, choked back his tears and tried to look as if nothing had happened. How often in the past, after one of his fits, had the slightest sound made him start, guiltily, like someone caught in the act! The only times he felt relaxed, happy and at ease with the world were when he was driving his locomotive. When he was being hurtled along at full speed, with his ears ringing from the din of the wheels, with his hand on the regulator and his eyes fixed on the line ahead watching out for signals, his mind was at rest, and he filled his lungs with the fresh, clean air that whistled past him. This was why he loved his locomotive as he did; it was like a mistress, soothing him and bringing him only happiness. When he left the Technical College, he had chosen to be an engine driver, despite being highly intelligent, because it allowed him to be on his own, and it took his mind off other things; this was his one ambition. He had become a top-link driver within four years, which earned him 2,800 francs. He also received bonuses for firing and greasing the locomotive, which brought his earnings to over 4,000 francs. He had no wish to earn more. Most of his fellow drivers, in the class two and class three grades,12 fitters taken on as apprentices and trained by the company, married an ordinary sort of woman doing a menial job somewhere behind the scenes, the sort of woman you might see occasionally when, for instance, she came to deliver a passenger’s lunch basket just before a train was due to leave. The more ambitious of his colleagues, especially those who had been to college, preferred to wait until they had become shed foremen