The Monomaniac (La bête humaine)

Three months later, on a warm June night, Jacques was driving the Havre express that had left Paris at 6.30. His engine, No. 608, was quite new, and he began to know it thorough...

Aunt Phasie died, in a final convulsion, at nine o'clock on Thursday evening; and Misard, standing at the bedside, tried in vain to close her lids. The eyes obstinately remained...

During the ensuing days at Havre, Jacques and Séverine, who were alarmed, displayed great prudence. As Roubaud knew all, would he not be on the watch to surprise and wreak venge...

One day, during the second week in March, M. Denizet, the examining-magistrate, had again summoned certain important witnesses in the Grandmorin case, to his chambers at the Rou...

On that particular Friday, the travellers who were to take the 6.40 express from Havre, awoke with an exclamation of surprise; snow had been falling since midnight, so thickly a...

Precisely at 11.15, the advertised time, the signalman at the Pont de l'Europe, gave the two regulation blows of the horn, to announce the Havre express, which issued from the B...

The house at La Croix-de-Maufras stands aslant, in a garden which the railway has cut in two, and is so near the metals that it feels the shock of every train passing by. A sing...

The scene shifted to the bedroom at La Croix-de-Maufras, the room hung in red damask, with the two high windows looking on the railway line a few yards away. From the bedstead--...

Roubaud, on entering the room, placed the loaf, the pâté, and the bottle of white wine on the table. But Mother Victoire, before going down to her post in the morning, had cramm...

A month passed, and great tranquillity again pervaded the lodging occupied by the Roubauds, on the first floor of the railway station, over the waiting-rooms. With them, with th...

The train did not reach the Paris terminus before 10.40 at night. There had been a stoppage of twenty minutes at Rouen to give the passengers time to dine; and Séverine had hast...

The following day, a Sunday, five o'clock in the morning had just struck from all the belfries of Havre, when Roubaud came down under the iron marquee of the station, to resume...

This striking work, now published for the first time in England, but a hundred thousand copies whereof have been sold in France, is one of the most powerful novels that M. Émile...