The Beast Within by Émile Zola Page A

called a normal family. So many of them had some flaw, and he often thought he must have inherited this family flaw himself. 10 Not that his health was poor; it was the anxiety and the shame he felt about his attacks that had made him lose weight when he was younger. But there were times when his mind seemed to be suddenly tipped off balance, when he felt as if there were breaches or holes in him, through which his identity evaporated, and he was surrounded by a thick fog that prevented him from seeing things clearly. At such times his body took on a life of its own; he became the slave of the beast within. And yet he did not drink, not even a tiny sip of brandy, knowing full well that the least drop of alcohol sent him crazy. He had become convinced that he was paying the penalty for all the drinkers who had gone before him, fathers and grandfathers, whole generations of drunkards, whose tainted blood he had inherited. It was a poison slowly eating away inside him, unleashing savage instincts, like a wolf lurking in the depths of the forest waiting to kill.
    Such were the thoughts that ran through his mind. He raised himself on to one elbow and gazed into the dark mouth of the tunnel. A new wave of sobbing shook his frame, and he sank down again, rolling his head from side to side on the ground and crying out in anguish. That little girl! He had wanted to kill her! The thought kept returning, sharp and incisive, as if the scissors were piercing his own flesh. He could find no solace to dispel his tormented fears; he had wanted to kill her, and would kill her still if she were there now with her blouse ripped open and her breasts laid bare. He recalled the first time this malady had struck. He was barely sixteen. He was out playing with a girl, the daughter of one of his relatives, two years younger than him. She had fallen down, showing her legs, and he had tried to molest her. The following year, he remembered, he had sharpened a knife so as to stab another girl in the neck, a fair-haired girl who used to walk past his house every morning. She had a pink, fleshy neck, with a little brown birth-mark underneath one ear; he had decided that that was where the knife would go in. There had been others, many others, a nightmare succession of women who, by the mere fact of being near him, had made him suddenly want to kill them — women he had brushed past in the street, women he simply happened to find himself next to. He remembered once sitting beside a young newly wed at the theatre. She had a very loud laugh, and he had had to rush out in the middle of the performance to prevent himself from attacking her. None of these women were known to him personally, so what could he possibly have against them? Each time it happened it came as a flash of blind rage, an insatiable desire to exact revenge for offences done to him in the distant past, offences which no longer found room in his conscious memory. Could it really come from so far back, from the accumulated ill that women had inflicted upon the entire race of men? Was this the swollen legacy of a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave? 11 When the frenzy came upon him, his one desire was to attack, to conquer and to dominate a woman. It was a perverse wish to sling her over his back, dead, as if she were his own personal trophy, his alone and his for ever. He felt that his head would burst. He had no answer to all these questions. He knew nothing. His brain was numb. There seemed no way out for him. He was a man driven to acts beyond his control, and whose cause was beyond his understanding.
    Another train came past, its headlamps ablaze, and plunged into the tunnel; from within its dark interior came a rumble like thunder that echoed and re-echoed before finally dying away. Almost as if he feared that this anonymous crowd rushing past absorbed in their own affairs might have heard him, Jacques sat up, choked