>>6054770>MINING CANNIBALISMI am glad you are familiar with the origin story of Souvarine. I read the Zola novel (English translation, French past historic literary tense il fut... scares me nooo) a long time ago, also L'Assommoir which is about drunken prostitutes it is not as good.
As a child I did not know what communism socialism or anarchism even meant, otherwise I probably would not have read the novels lol, I do remember a scene where the mining womenfolk castrate a local butcher and parade his genitals around on a stick. In the contemporaneous era of English literature, it was an outrage for novels to even feature unchaperoned women tee hee hee
summary of the end scene of Germinal from wikipedia:
>Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart (...)>Disillusioned, the miners go back to work, blaming Étienne for the failure of the strike; then, Souvarine sabotages the entrance shaft of one of the Montsou pits, trapping Étienne, Catherine and Chaval at the bottom. After Chaval is killed by Étienne, Catherine and Étienne are finally able to be lovers before Catherine dies in his arms. Étienne is eventually rescued but he goes on to live in Paris(...)***
She gazed at the darkness with distraction, wringing her hands in another fit of sobbing.
"My God, my God, how black it is!"
It was no longer the meadows, the odour of the grass, the song of larks, the great yellow sun; it was the fallen, inundated mine, the stinking gloom, the melancholy dripping of this cellar where they had been groaning for so many days. Her perverted senses now increased the horror of it; her childish superstitions came back to her; she saw the Black Man, the old dead miner who returns to the pit to twist naughty girls' necks.
"Listen! did you hear?"
"No, nothing; I heard nothing."
"Yes, the Man—you know? Look! he is there. The earth has let all the blood out of the vein to revenge itself for being cut into; and he is there—you can see him—look! blacker than night. Oh, I'm so afraid, I'm so afraid!"
She became silent, shivering.
(...)
With a sudden impulse she hung on to him, seeking his mouth and pressing her own passionately to it. The darkness lighted up, she saw the sun again, and she laughed a quiet laugh of love. He shuddered to feel her thus against his flesh, half naked beneath the tattered jacket and trousers, and he seized her with a reawakening of his virility. It was at length their wedding night, at the bottom of this tomb, on this bed of mud, the longing not to die before they had had their happiness, the obstinate longing to live and make life one last time. They loved each other in despair of everything, in death.
After that there was nothing more. Étienne was seated on the ground, always in the same corner, and Catherine was lying motionless on his knees. Hours and hours passed by. For a long time he thought she was sleeping; then he touched her; she was very cold, she was dead.
