The Monomaniac (La bête humaine)

by Émile Zola

So as not to see the knife, Jacques turned towards Séverine, who was sleeping very calmly in her intense fatigue, with the even respiration of a child. Her mass of unbound, black hair made her a sombre pillow, and spread over her shoulders. Beneath her chin, her throat appeared amidst the curls, a throat of cream-like delicacy, faintly tinted with rose. He gazed at her, as if he did not know her. And yet he adored her, carrying her image along with him, impressed on his mind, wherever he went. She was ever in his thoughts, even when he was driving his engine; and so much so, that on one occasion, when he awoke to reality, as from a dream, it was to find himself going at full speed past a station, in defiance of the signals.

But, at the sight of that white throat, he was overcome by a sudden, inexorable fascination; and, with a feeling of horror, of which he still had conscience, he felt the imperious necessity rising within him to take the knife from the table and bury it up to the handle in the flesh of this woman. He heard the thud of the blade entering the throat, he saw the body quake with three spasms, then stiffen in the death agony amidst a crimson flood.

In the struggle to free himself from these haunting thoughts, he every second lost a little of his will. It seemed to be succumbing to the fixed idea, to be reaching that extremity when a man yields, vanquished, to the impulse of instinct. Everything went wrong. His revolted hands, overcoming his effort to conceal them, became unclasped of themselves, and escaped. He then understood that, henceforth, he was not their master, and that they would go, and brutally satisfy themselves if he continued gazing at Séverine.

Although it was now broad daylight, the room appeared to him to be full of reddish smoke, as if it was a dawn of icy fog, drowning everything. He shivered with fever. He had taken the knife, and concealed it up his sleeve, certain of killing one woman, the first he should meet on the pavement outside, when a crumpling of linen, a prolonged sigh, made him turn pale and stop riveted beside the table. It was Séverine waking up.

He felt convinced that if he approached her, with that knife in his sleeve, if he only saw her again, in all her delicate beauty, there would be an end to that will which kept him firmly standing there close to her. In spite of himself, his hand would rise and bury the knife in her neck. Distracted, he opened the door, and fled.

It was eight o'clock when Jacques found himself on the pavement of the Rue d'Amsterdam. The snow had not yet been removed, and the footsteps of the few passers-by could barely be heard. He immediately caught sight of an old woman, but, as she happened to be turning the corner of the Rue de Londres, he did not follow her. Being among men he walked down towards the Place du Havre, grasping the handle of the knife, whose blade disappeared up his sleeve. As a girl about fourteen left a house opposite, he crossed the road, but only reached the other side to see her enter the shop of a baker next door. His impatience was such that he could not wait, but sought farther on, continuing to descend the street.

Since he had quitted the room with this knife, it was no longer he who acted, but the other one, him whom he had so frequently felt stirring in the depths of his being, that unknown party who dated back so very far, who was burning with the hereditary thirst for murder. He had killed in days of yore, he wanted to kill again.

And the objects around Jacques were only things in a dream, for he saw them in the light of his fixed idea. His everyday life was as if abolished. He strode along like a somnambulist, without memory of the past, without forethought for the future, a slave to his necessity. His personality was absent from the body, which took its own direction.

Two women who brushed by, as they advanced ahead of him, caused him to hasten his step; and he had caught them up, when a man stopped them. All three stood laughing and chatting together. This man being in his way, he began following another woman who went by, looking feeble and gloomy, and presenting a poverty-stricken appearance in her thin shawl. She advanced with short steps, on her way, no doubt, to some execrated task, that was hard and meanly remunerated, for she did not hurry, and her face looked despairingly sad.

Nor did he hurry, now that he had found a victim, but waited to select a spot where he could strike her at ease. Probably she perceived him following her, as her eyes turned towards him in unutterable distress, astonished that anybody could wish to have anything to say to her. She had already led him to the middle of the Rue du Havre, where she turned round twice more, each time preventing him plunging the knife, which he drew from his sleeve, into her throat—her eyes looked so full of misery, and so supplicating! He would strike her down over there, as she stepped from the pavement. But, he abruptly turned aside, in pursuit of another woman coming the opposite way. And he acted thus without reason, without will, simply because she happened to be passing at that minute.