7.21 Zola — Germinal — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the complete first chapter of Émile Zola 's Germinal : a jobless young man walks through the night towards a coal mine in the north of France. Follow long descriptive sentences built from many phrases, separated by commas and semicolons, the hallmark of Zola's style. Recognise how Zola turns the mine into a monster through images: it breathes, it crouches, it eats men. Understand the vocabulary of coal mining that the novel is built on: la fosse , la houille , la berline . Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Alors, l’homme reconnut une fosse. Then the man recognised a pit. que ces feux nocturnes des pays de la houille et du fer than those night fires of the lands of coal and iron Tournant le dos au brasier, le charretier était debout His back to the fire, the carter was standing Une rafale leur coupa la parole. A gust of wind cut them short. Cette fois, il n’amenait que trois berlines. This time he brought only three wagons. reprit derrière Étienne le charretier, qui était revenu. said the carter behind Étienne , who had come back. Prerequisites : 7.20 — this reading follows 7.20 Reading . You need the economy and work vocabulary of 5.17 Vocabulary , because the chapter is about unemployment and crisis, and the literary past and imperfect of 3.15 Conjugation . About this text Note: this text contains a death in a mine. Émile Zola (1840–1902) was the leader of le naturalisme , the movement that wanted the novel to observe society as a scientist observes nature. His great work is a cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart , which follows one family through the Second Empire, from 1852 to 1870. Germinal , the thirteenth, appeared in 1885. To prepare it, Zola went down a mine and visited the mining towns of the north during a strike. The hero, Étienne Lantier , is a young mechanic of twenty-one who has been fired from a railway workshop in Lille for slapping his boss. In March, at night, cold and hungry, he walks along a straight road across the flat plain, looking for work. He sees fires in the darkness, climbs a slag heap, and finds a pit, le Voreux . An old carter, nicknamed Bonnemort, tells him there is no work: the crisis is everywhere. The rest of the novel follows Étienne into the mine, among the miners' families, and through a great strike. The title is the name of a spring month in the calendar of the French Revolution, the month of germination: the seeds of revolt are growing under the earth. The text here is the complete first chapter of the first part, about 3,500 words, in the first edition published in Paris by Charpentier in 1885, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Zola The long sentence. Zola builds sentences by adding phrase to phrase: the first sentence gives the plain, the night, the man, the road, the distance and the fields, all separated by commas. Read for the main clause, un homme suivait seul la grande route , and let the rest add detail. Semicolons often separate two halves of a picture. The monster. The pit is described as a living animal. It crouches like a greedy beast pour manger le monde ; its pump breathes like l'haleine engorgée du monstre ; in the last sentence it digests human flesh. Notice each image as it comes; together they announce the novel. Point of view. The reader discovers the place exactly as Étienne does: first fires in the sky, then dark buildings, then the pit, then the old man. The narration follows his eyes and his ignorance; only when Bonnemort speaks does the place get its names. Spoken French. Bonnemort speaks like a worker: Fallait voir ça , without the subject il , and he talks politics, blaming the crisis on the emperor's war en Amérique , the French expedition to Mexico of the 1860s. Reading it a second time, part by part The road. A man walks in the dark on a straight paved road between beet fields, frozen by the March wind, with a small bundle under his arm. He has no work and no home. The fires. He sees three fires hanging in the air, comes closer, makes out buildings and a chimney, and recognises a pit. He climbs the slag heap to warm himself by the fires of coal. The carter. An old man in a purple jersey waits with a yellow horse while the wagons it has hauled up, full of waste rock, are emptied. Étienne gives his name and asks for work; there is none. The crisis. Bonnemort names the places in the dark around them, the pits, the sugar works, the factories, and tells of the crisis that is closing them one by one. Bonnemort. The old man tells his own story: fifty years in the mine, pulled out three times half dead, hence his nickname, good-death . He coughs and spits black. The beast. Étienne stays alone on the slag heap, facing the pit that seems to breathe and digest in the night. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Germinal On the bare plain, under a starless night as dark and thick as ink, a man was walking alone along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobbles cutting straight ahead through the beet fields. In front of him he could not even see the black ground, and he felt the immense flat horizon only through the gusts of the March wind, squalls as broad as on a sea, icy from having swept across leagues of marsh and bare earth. No shadow of a tree stained the sky; the cobbled road unrolled with the straightness of a pier, in the midst of the blinding spray of the darkness. The man had left Marchiennes at about two o'clock. He walked with long strides, shivering in the thin, worn cotton of his jacket and his corduroy trousers. A small bundle, tied up in a checked handkerchief, was very much in his way; and he pressed it against his side, now with one elbow, now with the other, so as to slip both hands deep into his