Germinal Read Online Free Page B

and when the combination of falling demand and rising costs is exacerbated by worker unrest, he goes under, losing all his capital and reduced to being a mere employee in the company of which he once owned part. ‘Theft’, it seems, pays better than enterprise. And better than subservience. Hennebeau, the manager of the Company’s mines, is the paid lackey, rewarded with a free house and a salary that earns the contempt of his heiress wife. A company executive perhaps, with servants and an entrée to the Grégoires’ drawing-room, but a servant none the less, beholden to a Board of Directors whose grace and favour he must earn with sleepless nights. Emasculated by his adulterous wife, he is also the emasculated representative of a higher power, a mouthpiece for capitalism (we employers take the financial risks; we are subject to market forces and can only pay what we can pay; we are not a charity) while envying the workers what he perceives to be their glorious sexual freedom.
    In illustrating ‘the struggle between capital and labour’, Zola is careful above all to nuance his effects and to avoid a crass polarization of goodies and baddies. On the side of ‘labour’, Maheu and his wife may be the models of decency and good sense, but their neighbours the Levaques are their feckless, hot-headed opposites. Chaval is a wife-beater (like Levaque), even if his ‘wife’ is only a girl in her mid teens who has not yet reached puberty. He is without principle, a violent, jealous man, a trimmer ready to call the comrades out to impress his girl and no less ready to send them back to work again at the first hint of promotion. The Pierrons are collaborators, selfish enough to lock their daughter in the cellar and send her grandmother on a fool’s errand while they stuff themselves on rabbit and drink wine before a roaring fire. On the side of ‘capital’, the Grégoires are doting parents and benevolent employers. It is, of course, easy to be both these things when you have the money, but Deneulin manages it in straitened circumstances, and his daughters are no less resourceful in their penny-pinching than thebeleaguered La Maheude. Mme Hennebeau is the model of the blithe bourgeoise, oblivious to the reality of the miners’ suffering, but her husband is intended to evoke sympathy as the victim of a sexless and unhappy marriage; and the current cause of his cuckoldry, his young nephew Paul Négrel, is not without his merits as an engineer and a leader of men, professionally and genuinely concerned for the miners’ safety and a devoted and courageous participant in their rescue. Maigrat, the shopkeeper – whose name in French suggests the presence of a rat in the midst of fasting and lean times – is the fat and unacceptable face of capitalism, at once a usurer charging exorbitant rates of interest and a man for whom a woman’s body is but part of a universal barter system regulated by the exigencies of supply and demand. But his silent, suffering wife, chained to her ledgers from morning till night, may become the focus of the reader’s compassion and illicit glee as she looks down from a window at the terrible mutilation of her dead husband’s very own means of (re)production.
    Just as he illustrates the different faces of capitalism, so too Zola takes pains to represent the wide variety of ways in which ‘labour’ reacts politically and practically to the impossibilities of its situation. Clearly the Catholic Church is of no use, be it in the form of cuddly Father Joire who is all things to all men and wants only a quiet life, or in the form of his replacement, Father Ranvier, a skeletal fanatic who exploits the miners’ suffering to try and convert (or return) them to the Catholic faith with false promises of a meritocracy and universal happiness. No, labour must find its own solution; and the options occupy a spectrum which runs from