The Beast Within - Emile Zola [8]
Pecqueux’s killing of Jacques is another crime of passion which results in a violent physical attack on the victim. In this case the violence is exacerbated by drink. Pecqueux murders Jacques as a reprisal for having, as he sees it, seduced his mistress, although he does not live to savour his revenge, for in killing Jacques he also succeeds in killing himself.
A further act of sexually related violence lurks in the shadows cast by these other crimes. The incident is only alluded to and is never fully explained, but it seems to have involved a savage assault by Grandmorin on Flore’s younger sister, Louisette, as a result of which she subsequently dies. The implication is that Grandmorin, as well as being guilty of sexual assault, a crime to which officialdom and certain members of his own family are quite prepared to turn a blind eye, is also guilty, along with Roubaud, Séverine, Flore, Pecqueux and Jacques, of murder.
Like that of the novel’s other murderers, Jacques’s urge to kill is sexually driven, and is described as a desire to exact reprisal. In Jacques’s case, however, reprisal is directed not at any one individual but at women in general. Jacques is prompted by a desire to right a cumulative wrong, to settle a grudge which he vaguely senses has been passed from man to man from time immemorial. When the urge to kill comes upon him, it requires a particular victim, but the victim can be any woman who happens to be around at the time, and in this sense his urge to kill is indiscriminate. One of the more chilling episodes in the novel depicts Jacques, knife in hand, stalking potential victims in the streets of Paris early one winter’s morning - a girl of fourteen, a frail and impoverished woman on her way to work and finally a pretty young mother whom he follows on to a train. Although Jacques’s urge to kill is described as having been inherited at birth, it is not until puberty that it has manifested itself. It is thus related to Jacques’s sexual coming of age. ‘Whereas other boys coming to puberty dreamed of possessing a woman, the only thing that had excited him was the thought of killing one’ (II). Even though the urge to kill may have its roots in the remote past, what immediately triggers it is sexual arousal, and it reveals itself as a perverse form of sexual desire. Early in the novel Jacques stands beside the body of the murdered Grandmorin, and his craving to kill grows more intense ‘like lust that is denied gratification’ (II). When, in what is probably the most climactic scene in the novel, Jacques murders Séverine, the act is presented as the result of sexual enticement on the part of Séverine and as an act of sexual possession on the part of Jacques. ‘The fearful door that guarded the dark abyss of sexual desire lay open. If she loved him she must die. To possess her fully he must kill her’ (XI). When the deed is done, Jacques experiences an orgasmic sense of completion. ’An extraordinary feeling of elation bore him aloft. He savoured the long-awaited fulfilment of his desire’ (XI).
If, miraculously, at the age of twenty-six, Jacques has managed to avoid killing anyone it is mainly because he immerses himself in his job. Just as Flore eschews the company of men by escaping into the wild countryside near by, so Jacques avoids contact with women by spending every minute he can in the company of his locomotive. When he is not actually driving it, he attends to its needs, cleaning it and checking that it is in good working order. This exemplary commitment to his job is presented as a redirection and transference of Jacques’s sexual energies. The locomotive becomes his ‘mistress’. It is referred to not as ‘it’ but as ‘she’. Not only does Jacques love and care for her, he also learns how to ‘handle’ her, to master her and make her do his bidding. The locomotive is described as a creature with a mind of her own, who has to be properly looked after but whose whims must ultimately be subjugated