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each of which has its roots in various forms of sexually related discontent or frustration. Roubaud’s killing of Grandmorin, in the early part of the novel, is a crime of passion, conceived in the space of half an hour by an insanely jealous husband after discovering that his wife, Séverine, has been abused as a child. The immediate cause of Roubaud’s anger is a sense of outrage towards the man who has supposedly molested his wife, coupled with a feeling of resentment towards his wife at having concealed the incident from him. The violence of his reaction, however, is a product of his own unstable and irascible character. Roubaud is capable of excessive fits of rage for the most trivial of reasons and at such moments he is transformed instantly into a creature of brutal and murderous instinct. He suffers from a sense of his social inferiority to his wife and from the fact that he is fifteen years older than her. He is puzzled by her sexual reticence towards him. The discovery of what he clearly considers to be a form of pre-marital sexual licence on the part of his wife (only minutes after she has resisted his own sexual advances towards her) prompts a reaction of unbridled fury.

Séverine is forced against her will to assist Roubaud in the murder of Grandmorin. Strictly speaking, she is an accomplice to murder rather than a murderer in her own right. Yet her involvement in the killing of Grandmorin emboldens her to instigate and assist in a second murder when she decides that the time has come to be rid of her husband. On the two occasions that this murder is planned she proves herself to be more calculating, fearless and resolute than her partner in crime.

Flore’s attempt to murder Séverine and Jacques is also the product of a lover’s fury. She is jealous of her rival in love and feels bitter towards the man who has spurned her. For Flore, as for Roubaud, murder is an act of revenge. But for Flore revenge is more than an act of personal retribution; it is conceived on a cataclysmic scale as a destruction of everything around her. It proceeds from the nihilistic, suicidal conviction that, having been rejected by Jacques, her life is no longer worth living. She sees no reason why, if her own life is at an end, other lives, and even perfectly innocent lives, should not end too. Flore inhabits a world of her own. Fiercely independent and proud of her womanhood, she scorns the company of men, preferring to be alone and to roam the countryside. The name ‘Flore’ emphasizes her separateness from the man’s world of technological progress. Yet she is certainly no Botticellian goddess of flowers and springtime. She is a bringer of death and destruction. She has an aggressive, even warlike character. The seemingly impossible exploits she is credited with (such as singlehandedly stopping a runaway railway wagon on an incline) stand as manly, even super-manly, intrusions by a woman into the male-dominated world of the railway. When she is rejected by Jacques she loses the one opportunity she has ever had to form a pact with the man’s world. The train crash which she plans as an act of revenge on the two people who have destroyed her hopes of happiness is also a gesture of defiance towards the male-driven concept of material progress.

The murder of Aunt Phasie by her husband Misard seems on the face of it to be murder of a different sort. It is a calculated, callous and secretive murder by poisoning which has been going on for some time before the novel begins. Misard’s motive for murdering his wife is ostensibly to lay his hands on the 1,000 francs she has inherited from her father, but the conflict between Misard and his wife has evolved into a strange contest as to which of the two will outwit and outlive the other. Even here, then, murder is the product of a perverted form of sexual rivalry. Misard, having shown no interest in the sexual side of his marriage, takes an insidious delight in slowly destroying a once vivacious and sexually attractive woman, whilst his wife, even though she is at death’s door, comforts herself with