GERMINAL
PART IV
CHAPTER VII
IT was the Plan-des-Dames, that vast glade just
opened up by the felling of trees. It spread out
in a gentle slope, surrounded by tall thickets and
superb beeches with straight regular trunks, which
formed a white colonnade patched with green
lichens; fallen giants were also lying in the
grass, while on the left a mass of logs formed a
geometrical cube. The cold was sharpening with
the twilight and the frozen moss crackled beneath
the feet. There was black darkness on the earth
while the tall branches showed against the pale
sky, where a full moon coming above the horizon
would soon extinguish the stars.
Nearly three thousand colliers had come to the
rendezvous, a swarming crowd of men, women, and
children, gradually filling the glade and
spreading out afar beneath the trees. Late
arrivals were still coming up, a flood of heads
drowned in shadow and stretching as far as the
neighbouring copses. A rumbling arose from them,
like that of a storm, in this motionless and
frozen forest.
At the top, dominating the slope, Étienne
stood with Rasseneur and Maheu. A quarrel had
broken out, one could hear their voices in sudden
bursts. Near them some men were listening:
Levaque, with clenched fists; Pierron, turning his
back and much annoyed that he had no longer been
able to feign a fever. There were also Father
Bonnemort and old Mouque, seated side by side on a
stump, lost in deep meditation. Then behind were
the chaffers, Zacharie, Mouquet, and others who
had come to make fun of the thing; while gathered
together in a very different spirit the women in a
group were as serious as if at church. Maheude
silently shook her head at the Levaque woman's
muttered oaths. Philoméne was coughing, her
bronchitis having come back with the winter. Only
Mouquette was showing her teeth with laughter,
amused at the way in which Mother Brulé was
abusing her daughter, an unnatural creature who
had sent her away that she might gorge herself
with rabbit, a creature who had sold herself and
who fattened on her man's baseness. And Jeanlin
had planted himself on the pile of wood, hoisting
up Lydie and making Bébert follow him, all
three higher up in the air than any one else.
The quarrel was raised by Rasseneur, who wished to
proceed formally to the election of officers. He
was enraged by his defeat at the Bon-Joyeux, and
had sworn to have his revenge, for he flattered
himself that he could regain his old authority
when he was once face to face, not with the
delegates, but with the miners themselves.
Étienne was disgusted, and thought the idea
of officers was ridiculous in this forest. They
ought to act in a revolutionary fashion, like
savages, since they were tracked like wolves.
As the dispute threatened to drag on, he took
possession of the crowd at once by jumping on to
the trunk of a tree and shouting:
"Comrades! comrades!"
The confused roar of the crowd died down into a
long sigh, while Maheu stifled Rasseneur's
protestations. Étienne went on in a loud
voice.
"Comrades, since they forbid us to speak,
since they send the police after us as if we were
robbers, we have come to talk here! Here we are
free, we are at home. No one can silence us any
more than they can silence the birds and
beasts!"
A thunder of cries and exclamations responded to
him. "Yes, yes! the forest is ours, we can
talk here. Go on." Then Étienne stood
for a moment motionless on the tree-trunk. The
moon, still beneath the horizon, only lit up the
topmost branches, and the crowd, remaining in the
darkness, stood above it at the top of the slope
like a bar of shadow.
He raised his arm with a slow movement and began.
But his voice was not fierce; he spoke in the cold
tones of a simple envoy of the people, who was
rendering his account. He was delivering the
discourse which the commissioner of police had cut
short at the Bon-Joyeux; and he began by a rapid
history of the strike, affecting a certain
scientific eloquence--facts, nothing but facts.
At first he spoke of his dislike to the strike;
the miners had not desired it, it was the
management which had provoked it with the new
timbering tariff. Then he recalled the first step
taken by the delegates in going to the manager,
the bad faith of the directors; and, later on, the
second step, the tardy concession, the ten
centimes given up, after the attempt to rob them.
Now he showed by figures the exhaustion of the
provident fund, and pointed out the use that had
been made of the help sent, briefly excusing the
International, Pluchart and the others, for not
being able to do more for them in the midst of the
cares of their conquest of the world. So the
situation was getting worse every day; the Company
was giving back certificates and threatening to
hire men from Belgium; besides, it was
intimidating the weak, and had forced a certain
number of miners to go down again. He preserved
his monotonous voice, as if to insist on the bad
news; he said that hunger was victorious, that
hope was dead, and that the struggle had reached
the last feverish efforts of courage. And then he
suddenly concluded, without raising his voice:
"It is in these circumstances, mates, that
you have to take a decision to-night. Do you want
the strike to go on? and if so, what do you
expect to do to beat the Company?"
A deep silence fell from the starry sky. The
crowd, which could not be seen, was silent in the
night beneath these words which choked every
heart, and a sigh of despair could be heard
through the trees.
But Étienne was already continuing, with a
change in his voice. It was no longer the
secretary of the association who was speaking; it
was the chief of a band, the apostle who was
bringing truth. Could it be that any were
cowardly enough to go back on their word? What!
They were to suffer in vain for a month, and then
to go back to the pits, with lowered heads, so
that the everlasting wretchedness might begin over
again! Would it not be better to die at once in
the effort to destroy this tyranny of capital,
which was starving the worker? Always to submit
to hunger up to the moment when hunger will again
throw the calmest into revolt, was it not a
foolish game which could not go on for ever? And
he pointed to the exploited miners, bearing alone
the disasters of every crisis, reduced to go
without food as soon as the necessities of
competition lowered net prices. No, the timbering
tariff could not be accepted; it was only a
disguised effort to economize on the Company's
part; they wanted to rob every man of an hour's
work a day. It was too much this time; the day
was coming when the miserable, pushed to
extremity, would deal justice.
He stood with his arms in the air. At the word
"justice" the crowd, shaken by a long
shudder, broke out into applause which rolled
along with the sound of dry leaves. Voices cried:
"Justice! it is time! Justice!"
Gradually Étienne grew heated. He had not
Rasseneur's easy flowing abundance. Words often
failed him, he had to force his phrases, bringing
them out with an effort which he emphasized by a
movement of his shoulders. Only in these
continual shocks he came upon familiar images
which seized on his audience by their energy;
while his workman's gestures, his elbows in and
then extended, with his fists thrust out, his jaw
suddenly advanced as if to bite, had also an
extraordinary effect on his mates. They all said
that if he was not big he made himself heard.
"The wage system is a new form of
slavery," he began again, in a more sonorous
voice. "The mine ought to belong to the
miner, as the sea belongs to the fisherman, and
the earth to the peasant. Do you see? The mine
belongs to you, to all of you who, for a century,
have paid for it with so much blood and
misery!"
He boldly entered on obscure question of law, and
lost himself in the difficulties of the special
regulations concerning mines. The subsoil, like
the soil, belonged to the nation: only an odious
privilege gave the monopoly of it to the
Companies; all the more since, at Montsou, the
pretended legality of the concession was
complicated by treaties formerly made with the
owners of the old fiefs, according to the ancient
custom of Hainault. The miners, then, had only to
reconquer their property; and with extended hands
he indicated the whole country beyond the forest.
At this moment the moon, which had risen above the
horizon, lit him up as it glided from behind the
high branches. When the crowd, which was still in
shadow, saw him thus, white with light,
distributing fortune with his open hands, they
applauded anew by prolonged clapping.
"Yes, yes, he's right. Bravo!"
Then Étienne trotted out his favourite
subject, the assumption of the instruments of
production by the collectivity, as he kept on
saying in a phrase the pedantry of which greatly
pleased him. At the present time his evolution
was completed. Having set out with the
sentimental fraternity of the novice and the need
for reforming the wage system, he had reached the
political idea of its suppression. Since the
meeting at the Bon-Joyeux his collectivism, still
humanitarian and without a formula, had stiffened
into a complicated programme which he discussed
scientifically, article by article. First, he
affirmed that freedom could only be obtained by
the destruction of the State. Then, when the
people had obtained possession of the government,
reforms would begin: return to the primitive
commune, substitution of an equal and free family
for the moral and oppressive family; absolute
equality, civil, political, and economic;
individual independence guaranteed, thanks to the
possession of the integral product of the
instruments of work; finally, free vocational
education, paid for by the collectivity. This led
to the total reconstruction of the old rotten
society; he attacked marriage, the right of
bequest, he regulated every one's fortune, he
threw down the iniquitous monument of the dead
centuries with a great movement of his arm, always
the same movement, the movement of the reaper who
is cutting down a ripe harvest. And then with the
other hand he reconstructed; he built up the
future humanity, the edifice of truth and justice
rising in the dawn of the twentieth century. In
this state of mental tension reason trembled, and
only the sectarian's fixed idea was left. The
scruples of sensibility and of good sense were
lost; nothing seemed easier than the realization
of this new world. He had foreseen everything; he
spoke of it as of a machine which he could put
together in two hours, and he stuck at neither
fire nor blood.
"Our turn is come," he broke out for the
last time. "Now it is for us to have power
and wealth!"
The cheering rolled up to him from the depths of
the forest. The moon now whitened the whole of
the glade, and cut into living waves the sea of
heads, as far as the dimly visible copses in the
distance between the great grey trunks. And in
the icy air there was a fury of faces, of gleaming
eyes, of open mouths, a rut of famishing men,
women, and children, let loose on the just pillage
of the ancient wealth they had been deprived of.
They no longer felt the cold, these burning words
had warmed them to the bone. Religious exaltation
raised them from the earth, a fever of hope like
that of the Christians of the early Church
awaiting the near coming of justice. Many obscure
phrases had escaped them, they could not properly
understand this technical and abstract reasoning;
but the very obscurity and abstraction still
further enlarged the field of promises and lifted
them into a dazzling region. What a dream! to be
masters, to suffer no more, to enjoy at last!
"That's it, by God! it's our turn now! Down
with the exploiters."
The women were delirious; Maheude, losing her
calmness, was seized with the vertigo of hunger,
the Levaque woman shouted, old Brulé,
carried out of herself, was brandishing her
witch-like arms, Philoméne was shaken by a
spasm of coughing, and Mouquette was so excited
that she cried out words of tenderness to the
orator. Among the men, Maheu was won over and
shouted with anger, between Pierron who was
trembling and Levaque who was talking too much;
while the chaffers, Zacharie and Mouquet, though
trying to make fun of things, were feeling
uncomfortable and were surprised that their mate
could talk on so long without having a drink. But
on top of the pile of wood, Jeanlin was making
more noise than any one, egging on Bébert
and Lydie and shaking the basket in which Poland
lay.
The clamour began again. Étienne was
enjoying the intoxication of his popularity. He
held power, as it were, materialized in these
three thousand breasts, whose hearts he could move
with a word. Souvarine, if he had cared to come,
would have applauded his ideas so far as he
recognized them, pleased with his pupil's progress
in anarchism and satisfied with the programme,
except the article on education, a relic of silly
sentimentality, for men needed to be dipped in a
bath of holy and salutary ignorance. As to
Rasseneur, he shrugged his shoulders with contempt
and anger.
"You shall let me speak," he shouted to
Étienne.
The latter jumped from the tree-trunk.
"Speak, we shall see if they'll hear
you."
Already Rasseneur had replaced him, and with a
gesture demanded silence. But the noise did not
cease; his name went round from the first ranks,
who had recognized him, to the last, lost beneath
the beeches, and they refused to hear him; he was
an overturned idol, the mere sight of him angered
his old disciples. His facile elocution, his
flowing, good-natured speech, which had so long
charmed them, was now treated like warm gruel made
to put cowards to sleep. In vain he talked
through the noise, trying to take up again his
discourse of conciliation, the impossibility of
changing the world by a stroke of law, the
necessity of allowing the social evolution time to
accomplish itself; they joked him, they hissed
him; his defeat at the Bon-Joyeux was now beyond
repair. At last they threw handfuls of frozen
moss at him, and a woman cried in a shrill voice:
"Down with the traitor!"
He explained that the miner could not be the
proprietor of the mine, as the weaver is of his
loom, and he said that he preferred sharing in the
benefits, the interested worker becoming the child
of the house.
"Down with the traitor!" repeated a
thousand voices, while stones began to whistle by.
Then he turned pale, and despair filled his eyes
with tears. His whole existence was crumbling
down; twenty years of ambitious comradeship were
breaking down beneath the ingratitude of the
crowd. He came down from the tree-trunk, with no
strength to go on, struck to the heart.
"That makes you laugh," he stammered,
addressing the triumphant Étienne.
"Good! I hope your turn will come. It will
come, I tell you!"
And as if to reject all responsibility for the
evils which he foresaw, he made a large gesture,
and went away alone across the country, pale and
silent.
Hoots arose, and then they were surprised to see
Father Bonnemort standing on the trunk and about
to speak in the midst of the tumult. Up till now
Mouque and he had remained absorbed, with that air
that they always had of reflecting on former
things. No doubt he was yielding to one of those
sudden crises of garrulity which sometimes made
the past stir in him so violently that
recollections rose and flowed from his lips for
hours at a time. There was deep silence, and they
listened to this old man, who was like a pale
spectre beneath the moon, and as he narrated
things without any immediate relation with the
discussion--long histories which no one could
understand--the impression was increased. He was
talking of his youth; he described the death of
his two uncles who were crushed at the Voreux;
then he turned to the inflammation of the lungs
which had carried off his wife. He kept to his
main idea, however: things had never gone well and
never would go well. Thus in the forest five
hundred of them had come together because the king
would not lessen the hours of work; but he stopped
short, and began to tell of another strike--he had
seen so many! They all broke out under these
trees, here at the Plan-des-Dames, lower down at
the Charbonnerie, still farther towards the
Saut-du-Loup. Sometimes it froze, sometimes it
was hot. One evening it had rained so much that
they had gone back again without being able to say
anything, and the king's soldiers came up and it
finished with volleys of musketry.
"We raised our hands like this, and we swore
not to go back again. Ah! I have sworn; yes, I
have sworn!"
The crowd listened gapingly, feeling disturbed,
when Étienne, who had watched the scene,
jumped on to the fallen tree, keeping the old man
at his side. He had just recognized Chaval among
their friends in the first row. The idea that
Catherine must be there had roused a new ardour
within him, the desire to be applauded in her
presence.
"Mates, you have heard; this is one of our
old men, and this is what he has suffered, and
what our children will suffer if we don't have
done with the robbers and butchers."
He was terrible; never had he spoken so violently.
With one arm he supported old Bonnemort,
exhibiting him as a banner of misery and mourning,
and crying for vengeance. In a few rapid phrases
he went back to the first Maheu. He showed the
whole family used up at the mine, devoured by the
Company, hungrier than ever after a hundred years
of work; and contrasting with the Maheus he
pointed to the big bellies of the directors
sweating gold, a whole band of shareholders, going
on for a century like kept women, doing nothing
but enjoy with their bodies. Was it not fearful?
a race of men dying down below, from father to
son, so that bribes of wine could be given to
ministers, and generations of great lords and
bourgeois could give feasts or fatten by their
firesides! He had studied the diseases of the
miners. He made them all march past with their
awful details: anaemia, scrofula, black
bronchitis, the asthma which chokes, and the
rheumatism which paralyses. These wretches were
thrown as food to the engines and penned up like
beasts in the settlements. The great companies
absorbed them, regulating their slavery,
threatening to enrol all the workers of the
nation, millions of hands, to bring fortune to a
thousand idlers. But the miner was no longer an
ignorant brute, crushed within the bowels of the
earth. An army was springing up from the depths
of the pits, a harvest of citizens whose seed
would germinate and burst through the earth some
sunny day. And they would see then if, after
forty years of service, any one would dare to
offer a pension of a hundred and fifty francs to
an old man of sixty who spat out coal and whose
legs were swollen with the water from the
cuttings. Yes! labour would demand an account
from capital: that impersonal god, unknown to the
worker, crouching down somewhere in his mysterious
sanctuary, where he sucked the life out of the
starvelings who nourished him! They would go down
there; they would at last succeed in seeing his
face by the gleam of incendiary fires, they would
drown him in blood, that filthy swine, that
monstrous idol, gorged with human flesh!
He was silent, but his arm, still extended in
space, indicated the enemy, down there, he knew
not where, from one end of the earth to the other.
This time the clamour of the crowd was so great
that people at Montsou heard it, and looked
towards Vandame, seized with anxiety at the
thought that some terrible landslip had occurred.
Night-birds rose above the trees in the clear open
sky.
He now concluded his speech.
"Mates, what is your decision? Do you vote
for the strike to go on?"
Their voices yelled, "Yes! yes!"
"And what steps do you decide on? We are
sure of defeat if cowards go down to-morrow."
Their voices rose again with the sound of a
tempest:
"Kill the cowards!"
"Then you decide to call them back to duty
and to their sworn word. This is what we could
do: present ourselves at the pits, bring back the
traitors by our presence, show the Company that we
are all agreed, and that we are going to die
rather than yield."
"That's it. To the pits! to the pits!"
While he was speaking Étienne had looked
for Catherine among the pale shouting heads before
him. She was certainly not there, but he still
saw Chaval, affecting to jeer, shrugging his
shoulders, but devoured by jealousy and ready to
sell himself for a little of this popularity.
"And if there are any spies among us,
mates," Étienne went on, "let
them look out; they're known. Yes, I can see
Vandame colliers here who have not left their
pit."
"Is that meant for me?" asked Chaval,
with an air of bravado.
"For you, or for any one else. But, since
you speak, you ought to understand that those who
eat have nothing to do with those who are
starving. You work at Jean-Bart."
A chaffing voice interrupted:
"Oh! he work! he's got a woman who works
for him."
Chaval swore, while the blood rose to his face.
"By God! is it forbidden to work,
then?"
"Yes!" said Étienne, "when
your mates are enduring misery for the good of
all, it is forbidden to go over, like a selfish
sneaking coward, to the masters' side. If the
strike had been general we should have got the
best of it long ago. Not a single man at Vandame
ought to have gone down when Montsou is resting.
To accomplish the great stroke, work should be
stopped in the entire country, at Monsieur
Deneulin's as well as here. Do you understand?
there are only traitors in the Jean Bart cuttings;
you're all traitors!"
The crowd around Chaval grew threatening, and
fists were raised and cries of "Kill him!
kill him!" began to be uttered. He had grown
pale. But, in his infuriated desire to triumph
over Étienne, an idea restored him.
"Listen to me, then! come to-morrow to
Jean-Bart, and you shall see if I'm working!
We're on your side; they've sent me to tell you
so. The fires must be extinguished, and the
engine-men, too, must go on strike. All the
better if the pumps do stop! the water will
destroy the pits and everything will be done
for!"
He was furiously applauded in his turn, and now
Étienne himself was outflanked. Other
orators succeeded each other from the tree-trunk,
gesticulating amid the tumult, and throwing out
wild propositions. It was a mad outburst of
faith, the impatience of a religious sect which,
tired of hoping for the expected miracle, had at
last decided to provoke it. These heads, emptied
by famine, saw everything red, and dreamed of fire
and blood in the midst of a glorious apotheosis
from which would arise universal happiness. And
the tranquil moon bathed this surging sea, the
deep forest encircled with its vast silence this
cry of massacre. The frozen moss crackled beneath
the heels of the crowd, while the beeches, erect
in their strength, with the delicate tracery of
their black branches against the white sky,
neither saw nor heard the miserable beings who
writhed at their feet.
There was some pushing, and Maheude found herself
near Maheu. Both of them, driven out of their
ordinary good sense, and carried away by the slow
exasperation which had been working within them
for months, approved Levaque, who went to extremes
by demanding the heads of the engineers. Pierron
had disappeared. Bonnemort and Mouque were both
talking together, saying vague violent things
which nobody heard. For a joke Zacharie demanded
the demolition of the churches, while Mouquet,
with his crosse in his hand, was beating it
against the ground for the sake of increasing the
row. The women were furious. The Levaque, with
her fists to her hips, was setting to with
Philoméne, whom she accused of having
laughed; Mouquette talked of attacking the
gendarmes by kicking them somewhere; Mother
Brulé, who had just slapped Lydie on
finding her without either basket or salad, went
on launching blows into space against all the
masters whom she would like to have got at. For a
moment Jeanlin was in terror, Bébert having
learned through a trammer that Madame Rasseneur
had seen them steal Poland; but when he had
decided to go back and quietly release the beast
at the door of the Avantage, he shouted louder
than ever, and opened his new knife, brandishing
the blade and proud of its glitter.
"Mates! mates!" repeated the exhausted
Étienne, hoarse with the effort to obtain a
moment's silence for a definite understanding.
At last they listened.
"Mates! to-morrow morning at Jean-Bart, is
it agreed?"
"Yes! yes! at Jean-Bart! death to the
traitors!"
The tempest of these three thousand voices filled
the sky, and died away in the pure brightness of
the moon.