I.
"LA BÊTE HUMAINE" AND CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
If I had to be the judge of M. Zola I could be only a very partial judge. To me the books of Zola are, with those of Dostoyewski and Tolstoï, the only ones which have struck a fresh tone in the literary monotony of this quarter of a century, in which it is said the political levelling and the general abasement of character extend even to the republic of letters. Thus I am partial to Zola, for, as the chief of a school which pushes the science of psychiatry far into the field of psychology and of sociology, I find in Zola an ally the more valuable that he has not been sought and that he reigns in a very different empire. To the scientific charlatans who deny, as does M. Colajanni, the importance and the gravity of alcoholism, its associations with crime and degeneracy, "L'Assommoir" is perhaps the best of refutations. "Germinal" and "La Fortune des Rougon" give us the demonstration of that cruelty which is born for the crowd and in the crowd, and both prove the influence that criminals and lunatics have in rebellions. Zola is the only one of the Latin race who endeavors to introduce the scientific method into literary work.
His romances are modern histories which are founded upon living data, as histories in general are on dead data. And in history he knows also how to employ soberness, by contenting himself with a very simple sketch, disdaining the vulgar tricks which are as easy to invent as they are far from the truth.
I ought to be still more partial to "La Bête Humaine"; for, with a generosity not very frequent in men of letters, M. Zola avows that he had recourse to my "Homme Criminel" and my "Homme de Génie" for the material for his romance. Nevertheless, I cannot forbear mixing some criticism with the praises merited by this work, for I do not find satisfied by it that which I regard more than my personal vanity: my love of truth. In "La Bête Humaine" all those artifices which the romanticists had accustomed us to, and from which Zola was freed, reappear, and that alas too often!
In the first place, it is a sufficiently strange fatality that the same knife that was given as a mark of conjugal love should be by turns the instrument of every murder committed, and that all the assassinations, derailments, and suicides invariably occur at the Croix-de-Maufras, where the first lewd practices of the President Grandmorin took place. That a great number of criminals should be congregated in the small enclosure of a second-rate railway station and of its approaches, is in itself a strange fact, but it is still more strange that every crime always derives its character from that accursed place which already bears a fateful and dismal name. This is contrary to the laws of probability; for we know by statistics that the number of criminals, as well as of crimes, is always the same for a certain number of people, or a certain number of square miles, or years, and cannot be massed and restricted to a small space of ground, to so few individuals, and so short a time. This is an atavistic reversion, or, we might say, a return to the old ways of romance, in which fatal events always followed each other in certain fatal localities, or through particular men and by certain fated weapons, etc. In "La Fortune des Rougon," also, there is a certain musket which serves for the murder of gendarmes by a grandfather and his nephew, and of the nephew by gendarmes; as if the cause of the fatality was not the hereditary instinct, but this silent and unconscious instrument.
However, the greatest fault is not here; but rather in the delineation of character. Zola, who, in my opinion, has admirably depicted people poisoned by alcohol, and the common middle classes of the towns and of the country, has not studied criminals according to nature: undoubtedly because the latter are not so easily met with; nor allow themselves to be studied even in prisons. Zola's figures of criminals give me the false pictorial effect produced by certain photographs taken from portraits, and not from the living subjects. For this reason it is then that I, who have studied thousands and thousands of criminals, should not know how to class his Roubaud, a good clerk and a good husband, who on accidentally discovering the secret of the old amours of his wife with Grandmorin, which were not yet done with, throws himself upon her, wishes to kill her, finally changes his mind, and ends by deciding on the murder of the pseudo-adulterer, with the complicity of his wife. Can he be called a criminal through passion? But then it is she that he should have killed, or at least the adulterer being killed he should have repented of it. And again, criminals through passion are, like Roubaud, very good and respectable people, but in their crimes they rush blindly and headlong forward, without accomplices, without premeditation, and without artifices. And they repent, they confess: they are the only criminals who feel remorse. He has no remorse; for some time he leads a life of revenge, and, afterwards, suddenly, he gives himself up to vice, to wine, to gambling, and forgets his wife, and he is jealous of her no more; on the contrary, indifferent, he assists in her infidelities. Can he be called a born criminal, a bête? But then how explain that he had lived so long without vices, free from debauchery, and that he had been so good a clerk? He could still be a criminal incidentally; but for a correct, steady, quiet man, as a railway official ought to be, would the discovery of the old amour of his wife be a proportionate reason for him to commit a premeditated murder, the greatest of crimes? And then, as we shall see, criminaloids are born criminals in part; they have many of the latters' psychological and physical characteristics. Now Roubaud has a full beard, red hair, and quick eyes: the only anomalies are meeting eyebrows, a low forehead, and a flat head: nothing is said of hysterical or epileptical ancestors.
According to Henry Héricourt (Revue Bleue, p. 14), M. Zola was inspired by a recent trial, that of the apothecary Fenayron, who is said to have had much resemblance to Roubaud. Marin Fenayron, the apothecary, was a man of forty-one, intelligent, steady, and industrious. He had married, twelve years before, the youngest daughter of his old employer, whom he had succeeded. His wife, who was eighteen years old at the time of her marriage, and who had consented to the union only with repugnance, was not slow to deceive him, and soon formed an intimacy with his assistant. This triangular relation lasted a time, not precisely stated by the proceedings, but sufficiently long for Gabrielle Fenayron, tired of her first lover, to take the opportunity to replace him by several others. The husband, who during this time has become a gambler and idle fellow, is informed of the misconduct of his wife. Although he did not put much credit in this at first, yet in the quarrels which followed and were continually renewed he ended by abusing her, striking her, and menacing her with death: and at last he obtained from her the confession of her relations with his old assistant Aubert, then himself established as a chemist. According to her recital, the woman could obtain the pardon of her husband only by the promise that she would assist him in his plans of revenge, and she had consented through shame without protesting. Then, by the order of her husband, she writes several letters to her old lover, renews relations with him, and finally, under the pretext of a country excursion, draws him into an ambush where she aided her husband in killing him with a hammer. It will be remembered that Aubert, after the first blow, turned round, recognised his murderer, and prepared to defend himself: but his mistress threw herself on him, twined her arms about him, and the husband could thus finish his work in safety.
After the crime there was no remorse on the part of either the one or the other. Far to the contrary. The criminal pair delivered themselves anew to their accustomed distractions with the most perfect tranquillity, and the performance appeared without doubt very natural to Fenayron, for one day, meeting his mother-in-law, he accosted her, saying, "Well, Mother, it is done. I have killed Aubert."
But let it be remarked how this Marin Fenayron, who figures as an occasional criminal, this time reveals himself a criminal by habit, meditating and premeditating his vengeance, waiting two long months before putting it into execution, surrounding himself with every precaution to secure immunity for the crime. Such a one certainly is not the violent man whom passion blinds and who is instantaneously inflamed with anger. It is rather the degenerated man with whom predisposition has found the opportunity to reveal and to develop itself. It is necessary to add that Marin had a brother feeble in mind: an hereditary defect.
The true bête humaine, Jacques Lantier, possesses the anatomical characters of the born criminal; "his thick black locks were curled, like his moustaches, so heavy and dark that they increased greatly the natural paleness of his complexion." Moreover, the inclination to crime in him was justified by inheritance. And this passion for murder which supplants the sensual passion is truly intoxicating. Where the author has gone astray is where he makes Jacques find pleasure for a considerable time with Séverine without any thought of murder; while these unfortunates, at least all that I have studied, do not experience sexual pleasure except in murder. On the other hand, the vertigo of epileptic amnesia which Zola often causes Jacques to suffer, is based on fact and actually accords with the most recent observations:
"He had finally found himself on the brink of the Seine without being able to explain to himself how. That of which he retained a very clear impression, was of having thrown from the top of the bank the knife that his hand held clutched in his pocket. Then he knew no more, stupefied and absent of mind, out of which the other, and the knife too, had entirely vanished…. He was in his narrow chamber in the Rue Cardinet, fallen across his bed, fully dressed. Instinct had brought him back there, as a worn out dog crawls to his kennel. Besides he remembered neither having ascended the stairs, nor of having slept. He awoke from a heavy sleep, scared to re-enter abruptly into possession of himself, as after a profound fainting fit. Perhaps he had slept three hours, perhaps three days."
Never have I found a more perfect description of that which I have termed criminal, epileptoid vertigo. But here again is a mistake of fact arising from a velleity not content with knowledge. It is that the novelist several times explains these bloodthirsty sexual instincts by a peculiar kind of atavism: the tendency, namely, to avenge the evil that women had done to his race; the spite accumulated from male to male since the first deceit in the depths of caverns. This is an error of fact. Primitive women have never done wrong to men. More feeble than men, they have always been their victims. These bloodthirsty sexual instincts are explained by a quite different atavism, which goes back to inferior animals, to the conflict between the males for the conquest of the female, who remained for the strongest; and by the blows that were inflicted on the woman in order to reduce her to conjugal slavery, conflicts of which traces still remain in Roman history (the Rape of the Sabines), and in the nuptial rites of almost all European countries, and in those of New Zealand, where the husband knocks down his wife before carrying her off to the matrimonial bed.
Another technical defect is, that a man who has arrived at the degree of degeneracy that Jacques has, ought to have still other vices: as great violence of character, impulsiveness without cause, profound immorality; while, as a matter of fact, except in moments of sexual fury, he appears as a good and honorable man. However, even recognising the force of his bloody sexual monomania, I find that instinctive aversion, characteristic of the good man, to be proper which Jacques feels at the thought of killing some one who is not a young and beautiful woman; for instance, to killing his rival, notwithstanding the favorable circumstances and the suggestions of Séverine.
"To kill that man, my God! Had he the right to do it? When a fly troubled him he would crush it with a blow. One day when a cat had got between his legs, he had broken its back with a kick. But to kill this man, his fellow-creature! He must reason with himself, he must prove his right to murder; the right of the strong whom the weak are troublesome to…. But afterwards that appeared to him monstrous, impracticable, impossible. The civilised man revolted in him, the acquired force of education, the slow and indestructible concretion of inherited ideas. His cultivated brain, filled with scruples, repelled murder with horror, as soon as he began to reason about it. Yes, to kill in a case of necessity, in a transport of rage! But to kill voluntarily by design, and from interest, no never, never could he do it!"
All that is very true. Where the author has certainly copied after nature is in the personality of Séverine. She is not a true criminal; sensual, depraved though still young, experiencing love only in adultery. Though deceitful, she is nevertheless a good wife and a good housekeeper up to the day where chance had thrown her into evil doing. She is united to her husband, and for that reason she becomes his accomplice in crime, without horror or dread; but afterwards, seized with love for Jacques, she experiences dislike for her husband and wishes to turn the lover into his murderer.
"The need increased in her of having Jacques for herself, all for herself, to live together, days and nights, without ever more parting. Her hatred of her husband grew greater, the mere presence of this man threw her into a morbid and intolerable condition of excitement. Tractable, and with all the amiability of a delicate woman, she became enraged at everything in which he was concerned; she flew into a passion at the least obstacle he put to her wishes…. The stupid tranquillity in which she saw him, the indifferent glance and manner with which he received her anger, his round back, his enlarged stomach, all that greasy dullness which has the appearance of happiness, made her exasperation complete. Oh! to go far away from him…. One day when he returned, pale and livid, to say that in passing before a locomotive he had felt the buffer graze his elbow, she thought to herself that if he were dead she would be free…. She would go with Jacques to America…. She who at other times so rarely went out now conceived a passion for going to see the steamships sail. She would go to the pier, and would lean on her elbow watching the smoke of the departing vessels…. [And at the decisive moment] she threw herself passionately on Jacques's neck. She fastened her burning lips to his. How she loved him and how she hated the other! Oh! if she had dared, twenty times already would she have done the deed … but she felt herself too gentle, it required the hand of a man. And this kiss which would never come to an end, was all that she could communicate to him of her courage, the full possession that she promised him, the communion of her body. When she finally withdrew her lips nothing more was left to her; she believed that she had passed completely into him."
And is this, then, the woman criminal, the criminaloid, as I have called her (Vol. II of my "Uomo Delinquente")? A criminal who, when she is not urged onward by opportunities, (and these opportunities always have love for their origin,) is not capable of any true crime, and who when she commits it always makes use of the arm of another; and this latter is always her lover, for she finds herself too feeble to accomplish it herself. Her anatomical characters, as well as her physiognomy, if not those of the born criminal, have at least some features which those of other females have not, and which unite her with the animal. "She had very black and very thick hair, which stood like a helmet on her forehead, a long face, a strong mouth, and large blue-green eyes."
M. Héricourt justly finds that many features of this woman are to be met with in Gabrielle Fenayron, the accomplice of her husband. Gabrielle Fenayron is about thirty years of age: she is a tall dark woman with a very pale complexion; her hair is very black, the oval of her face elongated, and her eyes have a certain hardness that accentuate the projecting and unsightly cheek-bones. Gabrielle Fenayron, as we know, pretended to have been terrorised by the threats which her husband had uttered against her, and to have been infatuated, on the other hand, by the love that she felt for him; she had thus submitted her will in order to repair her fault. In the appreciation of this system of defence, the bill of indictment stated that the energy and the coolness exhibited by this woman in the preparation of assassination, the facilities that she had during the course of the long premeditation which had preceded the murder to warn Aubert without danger to herself, induced the belief that she had in the commission of the crime yielded to a profound hatred against her old lover. But this interpretation appears to me, psychologically, to be a clumsy and a forced one. It is not necessary to have recourse to motives left mysterious in order to explain the absolutely strange conduct of some women.
Perhaps Zola would have completed his picture if he had known Gabrielle Gompard; who allies and unites the passion of murder with prostitution when she attaches herself to a wicked man, but who grows animated for virtue and denounces herself an accomplice when she becomes the mistress of a virtuous man. These women change their personality in changing a lover, and then make a point of playing a role in the miserable world where their fickle passions destroy them.
Less happy, perhaps, has Zola been in the case of Flora, "fair, strong, with thick lips, and great greenish eyes, with low forehead set beneath heavy hair." According to the plot of the novel, she should be a criminal of passion. A good woman throughout her whole life, she commits a crime through jealousy. But the method of the crime (the derailment of a train with a view to striking her rival and her lover) is not that which is chosen by criminals of passion, who are unable to meditate long on their crimes, and who kill in day-light without premeditation. It is true that it is natural to the mind of female criminals to deal indirect and very complicated blows, and without proportion to the end to be attained: but all this is only the effect of their weakness. In a virago as strong as Flora is depicted, (a bellicose maid with the strong and hard arms of a boy,) this reason fails to satisfy us; and when she meditates her crime she is urged much less by thoughts of revenge, than by a necessity to commit the wrong in order to become cured of her own; she is then a born criminal, an epileptic rather than a creature of passion; and in this sense the attribute that he gives to Flora of a monstrous muscular force, that is observed very frequently in born criminals, would be reasonable. Thus the girl who always wore masculine clothes had a remarkable muscular power. Her weapon was a hammer, and with it she struck down many men.
I knew at Turin a murderess, a courtesan, who when a model in Paris, killed for money and love an artist, whose portrait she carried tattooed on her arm. This unfortunate woman fought two or three times with the five wardens of her prison. When liberated she was the head of all the scoundrels of Turin, challenging them to contest. One day even I found her in a red shirt, with epaulettes on. "It is my ensign," said she to me, "I am the captain of the scoundrels of Turin." But all these women are very different from Flora. Of course, a single and only love is wanting in their case.
It will finally be said, that the propensity which casts the two criminaloid women into the arms of the born criminal, the bête humaine, is copied from nature. As a matter of fact, there does exist a true elective affinity which unites the two sexes of these unfortunates; a cause that gives rise to criminal families, which form the nucleus of gangs. Nevertheless, the demonstration of it in this instance is not evident, for in crowding a large number of criminals into so narrow a space, great liberty of choice is excluded.