Germinal

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

There’s only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.

This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies.

It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches.

All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir's barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes - and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody's elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour's elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter.

It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century. Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes, the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians.

On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.

They spoke one after the other in a despairing voice, giving expression to their complaints. The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since ‘89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one way or another it would have to come to an end, either quietly by laws, by an understanding in good fellowship, or like savages by burning everything and devouring one another. Even if they never saw it, their children would certainly see it, for the century could not come to an end without another revolution, that of the workers this time, a general hustling which would cleanse society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with more cleanliness and justice.

No, the only good in life lay in not being - or, if one had to be, then in being a tree, a stone, or even less than that, the grain of sand that cannot bleed beneath the grinding heel of a passer-by.

Não era um grito de fome que rolava com o vento de março através destes campos nus? As rajadas do vento haviam aumentado e pareciam trazer consigo a morte do trabalho, uma escassez que mataria muitos homens. E, com os olhos errando de um ponto a outro, ele se esforçava por furar as sombras, atormentado pelo desejo e pelo medo de ver.

Decididamente, ela era encantadora. Assim que acabasse de comer, tomá-la-ia em seus braços e beijaria aqueles lábios grossos e róseos. Era a resolução de um tímido, um pensamento de violência que chegava a estrangular-lhe a voz.

Homens brotavam, um exército negro, vingador, que germinava lentamente nos sulcos da terra, crescendo para as colheitas do século futuro, cuja germinação não tardaria em fazer rebentar a terra.

Zavallı insanlar makinelerde yem gibi öğütülüyor, işçi mahallelerindeki daracık izbelere hayvanlar gibi tıkılıyor, büyük işletmelerce kuralına uydurulan kölelik sayesinde, emekçi halk, milyonlarca kafa ve kol, sırf bin kadar sömürücü tembel, el bebek gül bebek yaşasın, servetlerine servet katabilsin diye, asker gibi çalıştırılıp yavaş yavaş tüketiliyordu. Ama madencinin gözü açılmıştı, toprağın dibinde ezilen cahil bir adam değildi artık. Madenocaklarının derinliklerinden bir ordu, filizlenmekte olan bir yurttaşlar ordusu fışkıracaktı; evet, tohum yeşerecek ve güneşli bir günde toprağı delip çıkacaktı. İşte o zaman, kırk yıl emek verdikten sonra öksürdükçe kömür tüküren, madenin rütubetiyle bacakları tutulmuş altmış yaşındaki bir ihtiyara, yüz elli frank emekli aylığı vermeye kalkışmak ne demekmiş göreceklerdi! Evet! Emek, kapitalizmden hesap soracaktı.

They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.