Human Beast: The Emile Zola Society Edition

by Emile Zola

  Pecqueux had opened the firebox door to put on more coal, but Jacques stopped him.

  ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to overdo it. She’s running well.’

  Pecqueux started to mutter and swear.

  ‘Running well, is she? Call this running well! She’s a load of rubbish! She’s bloody useless! When I think what we got out of La Lison! She did what you asked her to do! All this lousy thing’s worth is a kick up the arse!’

  Jacques didn’t want to lose his temper, so he said nothing. But he knew that the old menage à trois was a thing of the past. With the death of La Lison, the close, working partnership between him, his colleague and the locomotive had gone for good. They argued over the least little thing — a nut that was too tight, a shovelful of coal not put on properly. He would have to tread carefully where Philomène was concerned; he didn’t want it to come to open war between him and his fireman, when the two of them had to work together in such a confined space. Until now, Pecqueux had been devoted to Jacques, like a faithful dog, and would have done anything for him, grateful for being left to his own devices, allowed to have the occasional nap and finish the leftovers in Jacques’s lunch box. The two of them had lived together like brothers, resolutely facing the constant dangers of their job and understanding each other without the need for words. If they could no longer get on together, life was going to be hell, having to work side by side so closely, at daggers drawn. Only the week before, the Company had had to separate the driver and fireman of the Cherbourg express, because of a quarrel over a woman, the driver having physically attacked the fireman for not following instructions. They had come to blows, and there had been a fight, on the footplate itself, in complete disregard of the trainload of passengers they were carrying behind them.

  Twice Pecqueux opened the firebox door and threw on more coal, deliberately trying to antagonize his driver. Jacques pretended not to notice, keeping his eye on the controls, each time carefully putting the injector on to reduce the pressure. The air was so soft, the night was warm and there was a lovely fresh breeze as the train sped along! When the train reached Le Havre at five past eleven, the two men cleaned down the locomotive, apparently the best of friends as always.

  Just as they were leaving the engine shed and setting off for the Rue François-Mazeline to get some sleep, a voice called them: ‘Hey, you two, what’s the rush? Why don’t you come in for a minute?’

  It was Philomène; she must have been looking out for Jacques from the door of her brother’s house. She seemed put out when she saw that he was with Pecqueux; she only decided to call them because she wanted to speak to her new lover, even if it meant doing so in front of her old one.

  ‘Sod off!’ snarled Pecqueux. ‘You’re a bloody nuisance. We need to get some sleep.’

  ‘Charming!’ Philomène retorted merrily. ‘What about you, Monsieur Jacques? You’ll come and have a little drink, won’t you?’

  Jacques, thinking it best to err on the side of caution, was about to refuse when Pecqueux suddenly accepted the invitation, realizing that it would give him a chance to observe the two of them together and find out what was going on between them. They went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, on which she placed some glasses and a bottle of brandy.

  ‘We must try to keep our voices down,’ she whispered. ‘My brother’s asleep upstairs and he doesn’t like me having people in.’

  She poured them a drink.

  ‘By the way,’ she continued, ‘did you know old mother Lebleu kicked the bucket this morning? I always said it would kill her if she was put into one of those rooms at the back. It’s like living in a prison. She stuck it for four months, going on and on about how all she could see out of her window was a zinc roof ... What finished her off, when she couldn’t get out of her chair any more, was not being able to spy on Mademoiselle Guichon and Monsieur Dabadie. I’m sure of it. It was all she ever did. She was absolutely furious she never managed to catch them out. It killed her.’

  Philomène paused to swallow her brandy.

  ‘They must be sleeping together,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But they’re too clever. You’ll never catch that pair napping ... I think Madame Moulin saw them together one evening, but she’s not likely to say anything, she’s too stupid. Besides, her husband’s an assistant stationmaster and ...’

  She paused.

  ‘Hey!’ she continued excitedly. ‘It’s the Roubaud trial next week, in Rouen!’

  So far, Jacques and Pecqueux had listened to her without saying a word. Pecqueux couldn’t help but notice how talkative she was; she never had much to say when she was with him. He couldn’t stop looking at her, gradually becoming more and more jealous as he saw how animated she was in the presence of Jacques.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jacques calmly, ‘I’ve had the summons.’

  Philomène moved herself closer, happily allowing her elbow to rest against him.

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘They’ve called me as a witness ... Ah, Monsieur Jacques! They asked me all sorts of questions about you! They wanted to know the exact truth about you and poor Madame Roubaud. What I said to the judge was: “Monsieur, he adored her. He couldn’t possibly have hurt her!” I’d seen you both together, you understand, and I could tell them all about it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jacques with a shrug of the shoulders, ‘I wasn’t worried. I was able to tell them what I was doing every hour of the day. The Company kept me on because they knew I’d done absolutely nothing wrong.’

  They sat in silence, slowly sipping their brandy.

  ‘It makes you cringe,’ said Philomène. ‘That beast they arrested, that Cabuche, covered in her blood! Some men must be mad! Why kill a woman just because he fancies her! What good’s she going to be to him when she’s dead? Anyway, I’ll never forget it, as long as I live, that day when Monsieur Cauche came and arrested Roubaud too. He was on the platform. I was there. It was only a week afterwards. He’d started back at work the day after his wife’s funeral and he seemed quite normal. Then Monsieur Cauche came and tapped him on the shoulder and told him he had orders to take him to prison. Can you imagine it! They’d been inseparable. They’d played cards together, night after night! Still, there you are! If you’re a policemam you’d send your own mother and father to the guillotine! That’s your job! Monsieur Cauche couldn’t care less! I saw him again the other day, shuffling the cards in the Café du Commerce and never giving his friend a thought!’

  Pecqueux clenched his teeth and banged his fist on the table.

  ‘God Almighty! His wife was running rings round him! If I was in Roubaud’s shoes ... Look, you were the one sleeping with her, someone else murders her, and it’s Roubaud who gets sent for trial! It makes me mad!’

  ‘Listen, you idiot,’ said Philomène, ‘Roubaud is accused of persuading Cabuche to get rid of his wife for him. It was something to do with money. It seems they found President Grandmorin’s watch at Cabuche’s place — you remember ... the one who was killed on the train eighteen months ago. They say the two murders are connected; it’s a long story, and all very complicated. I couldn’t begin to explain it, but it was in the paper — two whole columns of it!’

  Jacques’s mind was on something else; he didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘What’s the point of getting worked up about it?’ he muttered. ‘What’s it got to do with us? If the law doesn’t know what it’s doing, there’s not much we can do to help.’

  He suddenly turned pale and sat looking into space.

  ‘The only one I feel sorry for is that poor woman,’ he said. ‘That poor woman!’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a woman,’ Pecqueux exclaimed angrily, ‘and if anyone started messing with her, I’d strangle the pair of them. They could cut my head off — I couldn’t care less!’

  There was another silence. Philomène shrugged her shoulders dismissively and refilled the glasses. Deep down, Pecqueux disgusted her. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He wasn’t looking
after himself; he was dirty, and his clothes were in tatters. Since breaking her leg, Madame Victoire had been unable to get about; she had had to give up her job at the lavatories and had been admitted to a home. She was no longer there to molly-coddle him, to slip him the odd silver coin and mend his clothes, in case his other woman, the one in Le Havre, accused her of neglecting ‘their man’. She pulled a face. Jacques looked clean and smart and so much more attractive.

  ‘Is it your Paris woman you’d strangle?’ she gibed. ‘Who’d want to run off with her?’

  ‘Never you mind!’ he muttered.

  Philomène raised her glass, taunting him: ‘Here’s to you! You can bring me your dirty washing. I’ll get it washed and mended. You’re a disgrace ... to both of us. Cheers, Monsieur Jacques!’

  Jacques shuddered, as if he were emerging from a dream. Since the murder, he had felt absolutely no remorse and had experienced a sense of relief and physical well-being, but now and then the thought of Séverine moved his gentle nature to the point of tears. Trying to hide his emotion, he raised his glass and suddenly blurted out: ‘Did you know there’s going to be a war?’

  ‘Surely not!’ exclaimed Philomène. ‘Who against?’

  ‘Against the Prussians, of course ... just because some prince of theirs wants to be King of Spain!1 That’s all they talked about yesterday in the Assembly.’

  ‘That’ll be fun!’ Philomène grumbled. ‘As if they haven’t caused us enough trouble already, with their elections and plebiscites and riots in Paris2 ... If there’s going to be fighting, will all the men get called up?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be all right,’ said Jacques. ‘They’ll need to keep the railways running ... but it’s going to make life difficult. There’ll be soldiers and provisions to be transported ... Anyway, if it happens, we’ll just have to do our duty.’

  Whereupon he stood up, realizing that she had slipped one of her legs under his. Pecqueux noticed it too; he went red in the face and clenched his fist.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jacques, ‘it’s time for bed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pecqueux muttered, ‘it certainly is.’

  He had grabbed Philomène by the arm and was squeezing it so hard that she felt it would break. Stifling a cry of pain, she whispered into Jacques’s ear, as Pecqueux knocked back his brandy, ‘Be careful. When he’s had a drink he can get really rough.’

  Just then they heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs.

  ‘It’s my brother,’ said Philomène in a panic. ‘Quick, you’ll have to go!’

  They hadn’t walked twenty paces from the house when they heard the sound of blows, followed by screams. Philomène was being given a beating, like a little girl who’d been caught stealing jam from the cupboard. Jacques stopped and wanted to go back to help her, but Pecqueux restrained him.

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ he said. ‘The bitch! She deserves all she gets!’

  Jacques and Pecqueux reached the Rue François-Mazeline and went to bed without exchanging a word. The room was so tiny that their two beds almost touched; they remained awake for a long time, their eyes open, listening to the sound of each other’s breathing.

  The hearings in the Roubaud case were due to begin on the Monday, in Rouen. For Denizet, the examining magistrate, the investigation had been a signal triumph; people in legal circles could not speak highly enough of the way he had brought such a complicated and involved case to so successful a conclusion. It was a masterpiece of astute analysis, they said, a superb, logical reconstruction of the truth; in short, a triumph of creative imagination.

  The first thing that Denizet did when he arrived on the scene of the crime at La Croix-de-Maufras, a few hours after Séverine’s murder, was to have Cabuche arrested. Everything clearly pointed to him being the murderer — the fact that he was covered in blood, and the damning evidence of Roubaud and Misard, who described how they had found him in the room with the body, alone and distraught. When questioned and asked to explain why and how he came to be there, Cabuche had mumbled some tale that Denizet simply dismissed with a shrug of his shoulders, so naive and predictable did it seem. It was just the sort of story he had been expecting; he had heard it so many times before — the fictitious murderer, the invented criminal, whom the real criminal claimed to have heard running off into the night. If this mysterious person was still running, he would be well away by now, wouldn’t he! When asked what he was doing outside the house at such a late hour, Cabuche became flustered and couldn’t give a straight answer, eventually claiming that he was just out for a walk. It was childish. How could Denizet take this unknown intruder seriously — committing a murder and then running away, leaving all the doors of the house open, without touching a thing or helping himself to even a handkerchief? Where had he come from? Why had he killed her? From the very beginning of his inquiry, however, the judge had known about Jacques’s affair with the victim and was concerned to establish his whereabouts on the day of the murder. But, in addition to Cabuche’s own testimony that he had accompanied Jacques to Barentin, to catch the 4.14 train, the hotel proprietor in Rouen was quite adamant that her guest had gone to bed straight after his evening meal and had not left his room until the next morning, at about seven o’clock. Surely a lover does not murder the woman he loves for no reason at all, when there has never been the slightest disagreement between them. It would be absurd! It was unthinkable! There was only one possible murderer, the obvious murderer — the man they had arrested, the man found in the room with his hands covered in blood and the knife lying on the floor at his feet, the inhuman beast who was trying to spin him a ridiculous fairy story.

  Having come to this conclusion, however, although convinced he was right, and even though his instinct, which, he said, he always relied on more than actual proof, told him that Cabuche was indeed the murderer, Monsieur Denizet encountered a minor difficulty. An initial search of Cabuche’s hovel in the Bécourt woods had revealed nothing. It had proved impossible to establish theft as a motive, and he needed to find some other reason for the murder. Then, quite by chance, during the course of one of his interviews, Misard had put him on the track. Misard said that one night he had seen Cabuche climbing over a wall to watch Madame Roubaud through the window as she was going to bed. When Jacques was questioned about Cabuche, he simply stated what he knew: Cabuche secretly adored her, he followed her everywhere, he always wanted to be near her and he would do anything for her. To Denizet, it seemed obvious; Cabuche had been driven by pure animal instinct. Everything fell into place perfectly. He had let himself in through the front door — he may even have had a key — he had left the door open in his unseemly haste, and there had been a struggle, after which he had murdered her and finally raped her, interrupted only by the arrival of her husband. One final question remained in his mind; it was odd that Cabuche, knowing Roubaud might arrive at any minute, should choose precisely the moment when he could be caught. But when he thought about it, this simply made the crime appear worse and convinced him that Cabuche was guilty; it suggested that he had acted out of sheer carnal desire and was afraid that, if he didn’t seize the opportunity when Séverine was still alone in an empty house, he would never have another chance, as she was due to leave the next day. Monsieur Denizet’s mind was made up; there could be no other explanation.

  Cabuche was questioned again and again, gradually becoming ensnared in the skilful web of Denizet’s investigation, completely unaware of the traps that were being set for him to fall into. He stuck to his original story. He was walking along the road, enjoying the cool night air, when someone brushed past him, running off into the dark so fast that he couldn’t even say which way he went. He had been worried and when he went to look at the house he noticed that the front door had been left wide open. He had eventually decided to go upstairs and had found the woman, dead but still warm, looking at him with her eyes wide open. He had put her on the bed, thinking she was still alive, and had covered himself in blood. That was all he knew. He repeat
ed it over and over again, never changing a single detail, as if he were simply rehearsing a predetermined story. When they tried to get him to say anything different, he became frightened and fell silent, like a man of low intelligence who didn’t understand what he was being asked. The first time Monsieur Denizet asked him whether he had been in love with the victim, he blushed violently, like a young boy being told off the first time he had kissed a girl. Cabuche denied it; he had never allowed himself to think of sleeping with her, as if it were something dreadful and unspeakable, yet at the same time something delicate and mysterious, something hidden away at the bottom of his heart, which he could reveal to no one. No, he hadn’t been in love with her, and he hadn’t wanted to sleep with her. He refused to say anything; to talk of such things now she was dead seemed to him to be a sacrilege. But his persistent denial of something that several witnesses had testified to also went against him. Naturally, according to the prosecution, he had a vested interest in concealing the insane attraction he felt towards the unfortunate woman he was to kill in order to satisfy his desire. When the examining magistrate, putting all the evidence together, attempted to force an admission from him by directly accusing him of murder and rape, Cabuche flew into a blind rage, protesting his innocence. How could he have killed her to have sex with her? He worshipped her like a saint! The police had to be called in to restrain him; he was saying he’d kill the whole damned lot of them. Cabuche, concluded Monsieur Denizet, was the most dangerous sort of villain — a devious character, but one who was betrayed by his own violent temper, which in the end plainly attested to the crimes he was attempting to deny.

  It was at this point in the investigation, with Cabuche losing his temper every time he was accused of murder and shouting that it was the other man, the unknown person who had run away, that Monsieur Denizet made an important discovery, which transformed the whole affair and put an entirely new complexion on things. Monsieur Denizet had always claimed to have a nose for the truth. Some instinct prompted him to conduct another search of Cabuche’s hovel. Behind one of the beams he found a little hiding place containing a woman’s handkerchiefs and gloves, and underneath them a gold watch, which to his great delight he recognized immediately. It was President Grandmorin’s watch, the one he had spent so much time trying to track down before, a large watch engraved with two initials intertwined and, on the inside of the case, the maker’s number, 2516. This discovery came as a sudden revelation; everything became clear. The two crimes were connected. He was amazed at the way it all fitted together so logically. But the consequences were going to be very far-reaching. First, before mentioning the watch, he questioned Cabuche about the gloves and the handkerchiefs. For a moment Cabuche was on the point of confessing everything — yes he adored her, yes he desired her, he even kissed the dresses she had worn, picked up and stole things she dropped — laces from her stays, grips, hairpins. Then he was suddenly overcome with shame and embarrassment and would say no more. Monsieur Denizet, deciding that this was the moment, produced the watch and showed it to him. Cabuche looked at it aghast. He remembered it clearly; he had discovered it tied inside a handkerchief, which he had stolen from beneath Séverine’s pillow and taken home with him as one of his trophies. He had left it in his house while he racked his brains to think of a way of returning it. But what was the point of saying that? He would then have to admit to all the other things he had taken — bits of clothing and underwear with the scent of her perfume on them. He felt so ashamed of himself. They didn’t believe anything of what he said already. He could no longer understand it himself; everything was confused in his mind. It was all too complicated for him; it was becoming a nightmare. He no longer flew into a rage whenever they accused him of murder but stood there looking bewildered, answering that he did not know to every question he was asked. He did not know about the gloves and the handkerchiefs. He did not know about the watch. The whole thing was beginning to irritate him. Why didn’t they stop pestering him and take him off to be guillotined?