I think I read this as a teen, but I didn’t remember any specifics – just that it was grim/grimy/bleak, and that’s still accurate! I read it in French, but the quotes are from the translation by Roger Pearson.
In this book I learned
- A recession in the US led to coal mine layoffs in France
- When coal is the economic incentive, you get conflicts over timbering – of course, but that had never occurred to me
- A songbird competition where some sing so hard they die – sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s still bad
- Could this be the origin of the movie trope where someone throws a match or grenade over their shoulder as they walk away? Souvarine has destroyed the mine Le Voreux, which is collapsing and filling with water. “He threw away his last cigarette and, without a backward glance, walked off into the darkness which had now fallen. In the distance his shadowy figure faded from view and melted into the blackness of the night. He was headed somewhere, anywhere, off into the unknown. In his usual calm way he was bound upon extermination, bound for wherever there was dynamite to blow cities and people to smithereens. And in all probability, when the bourgeoisie’s final hour arrives and every cobble is exploding in the road beneath its feet, there he will be.”
Short quotes
- Battle, the white horse who lives in the mine, who dimly remembers his past above ground: “There had been something else, too, something burning away up in the air, some huge lamp or other, but his animal memory could not quite recall its exact nature. And he would stand there unsteadily on his old legs, vainly trying to remember the sun.”
- Souvarine and the rabbit Poland: “As she snuggled down in his lap with her ears flattened along her back, she would close her eyes; and he would stroke her automatically, tirelessly running his hand through the grey silk of her fur and evidently soothed by this warm, living softness.”
- La Maheude: “The worst of it, you know, is when you start telling yourself that things can never change… When you’re young, you think happiness is just around the corner, you hope for things; but then the poverty grinds on and on, and you find you can never escape it… “
- “[Etienne] treated himself to a fine pair of boots, and at once he was a leader; the village began to rally to him.”
- “…[R]ecently he had been coming round to collectivism, which called for the means of production to be returned into the ownership of the collective. But this was all still somewhat vague, and he couldn’t quite see how to acheive this new goal, prevented as he was by scruples of humanity and common sense from enjoying the fanatic’s ability to advance ideas with uncompromising conviction.”
- Madame Hennebeau when the house is being attacked by the striking workers: “On top of everything these beastly workers have chosen the very day that I am entertaining guests. Really! And then they expect to be treated better!”
- “Etienne saw only too well how one man’s misfortune became another man’s gain, and once more it discouraged him deeply to think of the invincible power wielded by the sheer weight of capital, so strong in adversity that it grew fat on the defeat of others, gobbling up the small fry who fell by the wayside.”
- La Maheude’s reaction to the priest assuring the workers “Within a week they would cleanse the world of the evildoers, they would dispatch the unworthy masters, and the true kingdom of God would be at hand, where each man would be rewarded according to his just desserts and the laws of the workplace would ensure the happiness of all.” – “‘That’s all very fine, Father,’ she said. ‘But you’re only saying that because you’ve fallen out with the bourgeois… All our other priests used to dine with the manager, and then they’d threaten us with hell-fire the moment we asked for bread.’”
Longer quotes
The Grégoires now believed steadfastly in their mine. The value would rise again; why, God Himself was not more reliable! At the same time, mixed with this religious faith in the mine, they felt a profound sense of gratitude towards a stock which had now fed and supported an entire family for over a century. It was like a private god whom they worshipped in their egotism, a fairy godmother who rocked them to sleep in their large bed of idleness and fattened them at their groaning table. And so it would continue, from father to son: why tempt fate by doubting it? And deep within their constancy lay a superstitious terror, the fear that the million francs would suddenly have melted away if they had realized their assets and placed the proceeds in a drawer. To their mind it was safer left in the ground, from whence a race of miners, generation after generation of starving people, would extract it for them, a little each day, sufficient unto their needs.
Etienne after the workers turn on him:
These madmen were lying when they accused him of having promised them a life of leisure and plenty to eat. Yet behind his attempts at self-justification, behind all the arguments with which he tried to combat his remorse, lay the unspoken fear that he had not been equal to his task and the niggling doubt of the semi-educated man who realizes that he doesn’t know the half of it. But he had run out of courage, and he no longer felt the same bond with the comrades, indeed he was afraid of them, of the huge, blind, irresistible mass that is the people, passing like a force of nature and sweeping away everything in its path, beyond the compass of rule or theory. He had begun to view them with distaste and had gradually grown apart from them, as his more refined tastes made him feel ill at ease in their company, and as his whole nature slowly began to aspire towards membership of a higher class.
Etienne argues with Souvarine:
Say the old society no longer existed and that every last trace of it had been swept away. Wasn’t there a risk that the new order which grew up in its place would slowly be corrupted by the same injustices, that there would again be the weak and the strong, that some people would be more skilful or intelligent than others and live off the fat of the land, while the stupid or the lazy once more became their slaves? At this prospect of everlasting poverty Souvarine exclaimed fiercely that if justice could not be achieved with man, it would have to be acheived without him. For as long as there were rotten societies, there would have to be wholesale slaughters, until the last human being had been exterminated.