Germinal

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1885

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Part 2, Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary

When La Maheude arrives home, she finds Alzire, having run out of sugar, trying to stop Estelle’s crying by offering her own breast. La Maheude is angry that Lénore and Henri have eaten all the brioche; Alzire tells her she doesn’t mind.

La Maheude visits La Pierronne to return some coffee she’d borrowed. La Pierronne is young and beautiful, and she and her husband Pierron have a happy marriage “despite all the stories and gossip” (101) about La Pierronne sleeping with the overman Dansaert, who helps them financially. Her house is immaculate, and she makes money selling sweets, resulting in the family never having any debt. The two women have coffee while gossiping about La Levaque and her affair with their lodger Bouteloup. La Pierronne suggests Zacharie and Philomène Levaque get married, though La Maheude is against this idea because it would mean the Maheus would lose Zacharie’s earnings.

On her walk back home, La Maheude encounters La Levaque, who invites her inside. La Levaque says Pierron lets his wife sleep with the overman and that “[s]ome men were so ambitious they’d wipe their boss’s backside just to hear him say ‘thank you’” (105). They then discuss the possibility of Zacharie and Philomène marrying. La Levaque used to be against the idea, but as she watches the two young children, she more and more finds herself in favor.

They look outside to find that Mme. Hennebeau is showing her guests around the village and is entering La Pierronne’s house. They discuss how it must be easy for La Pierronne to keep her house so clean because of the perks she gets from her lovers. When they notice that the party is going to the Maheus’, La Maheude runs home to find that Alzire has taken it upon herself to clean and make soup.

Mme. Hennebeau and her guests compliment La Maheude’s home and children, though they are disgusted by the poverty. Madame Hennebeau is effusive in her enthusiasm for the miners’ houses, saying they can report in Paris that “everybody [is] healthy and happy,” and the village is “the sort of place where you could come for a holiday” (109).

Meanwhile, La Pierronne and La Levaque gossip about La Maheude. When La Maheude returns to them, they gossip about Mme. Hennebeau. Monsieur Hennebeau arrives in a carriage to pick up his wife and guests. A group of miners’ wives stand around talking until the miners return from work.

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary

When Maheu returns from Rasseneur’s, Catherine, Zacharie, and Jeanlin are finishing their soup. Maheu, seeing the groceries, instantly brightens: He had been worried about how they would manage with no food. La Maheude asks if he wants Alzire to fetch him some beer; Maheu declines but is pleased she has money to spare.

Catherine, Zacharie, and Jeanlin bathe in front of the rest of the household as they always have. On the other side of the wall, they hear Levaque beating his wife. While Maheu eats a portion of meat La Maheude had reserved for him, Lénore and Henri watch with envy. La Maheude and Alzire lie and say they’ve all had some, but Maheu cuts a little meat for the two small children.

La Maheude sends Jeanlin, freshly dressed, to pick dandelions for salad. Zacharie goes out on his own. While the other children are otherwise occupied, La Maheude helps Maheu bathe, telling him about her escapades that day. As usual after his bath, Maheu initiates sex with his wife, his “pudding that didn’t cost anything” (118). After, Catherine, all dressed up, says she’s off to Montsou to buy a new ribbon for her bonnet with 10 sous La Mouquette will lend her.

Maheu tends to his vegetable garden. Levaque encourages him to join him at Rasseneur’s, but Maheu refuses, not wanting to use any money that his wife had obtained that day. La Pierronne arrives, and the group stands outside teasing her with lewd remarks and watching the children play.

La Maheude is irritated that the children aren’t home yet to eat the soup and fried onions. Bonnemort, back from a walk, says they should eat dinner without the kids, though he’ll miss the salad.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary

Étienne leaves his room at Rasseneur’s to go for a walk. As he does, he sees Zacharie and Mouquet, who asks him to join them at the Volcano, a local café. Zacharie convinces Philomène to lend him three sous. She says he should convince his mother to let them get married, as she is tired of having sex outside.

Étienne overhears Jeanlin, Lydie Pierron, and Bébert Levaque who, at Jeanlin’s suggestion, had picked a good deal of dandelion and then sold it door to door. Jeanlin lets Bébert keep only a small portion of the money and manipulates Lydie, who is in love with him, into giving him her share.

He passes Réquillart, an “old, ruined mine [where] every girl in Montsou was to be found loitering with her man” (126). Mouque is the caretaker; the Company allows him to live in two rooms beneath the old headgear. Bonnemort, his friend, visits him every night, and the two old men sit in near silence remembering the old days. Étienne is depressed seeing the two old men parting ways. He also wonders why girls continue to come here to have sex and “make babies for themselves, yet more flesh fit only for toil and suffering” (128). He recognizes that his “gloomy thoughts” (128) may be the result of his not having a partner himself.

Étienne sees Chaval force Catherine into the shadows; he does not recognize them but thinks the girl is clearly a virgin. Catherine, who still awaits puberty, is accustomed to walking to Montsou without issue. After La Mouquette said she could not lend Catherine money for the ribbon after all, Chaval emerged from a bar and told her he would buy the ribbon for her. She agreed, promising to pay him back. As Chaval nudges her down to Réquillart, she at first is intrigued and then frightened, and she begs him to let her go. He pushes her down, and she ceases resisting “even though she was not yet ready for him” (132).

When Étienne sees them emerging and realizes the girl is Catherine, jealousy overwhelms him, thinking her a “slut” (132). He is angry that “he’d let her be taken from under his very nose” (133) and follows them as they walk along. He ponders how this is a lesson that he should not be “polite and easy on the girls” (133). After following her into the village, he goes back to Rasseneur’s.

Part 2, Chapters 3-5 Analysis

Like the Grégoires, Mme. Hennebeau and her guests exploit the poor, proudly displaying their own magnanimity until the rawness of poverty becomes a discomfort. Madame Hennebeau boasts to her guests of the charm of the miners’ homes, explaining they give them gardens, doctor visits, and coal to heat their ovens. The guests, in turn, call the village “[a] land of milk and honey” (108), a place “where you could come for a holiday” (109). However, they are “repulsed by the vague odour of poverty that hung everywhere” (108). Mme. Hennebeau’s insistence that her guests inform their friends in Paris of the beauty of the miners’ homes demonstrates that, like the Grégoires, the wealthy use the poor to bolster their own images. Their concern is superficial and self-serving, and it extends only until it forces them to reckon with their own privilege. The miners’ suffering is a mere vehicle for the wealthy, something they have created and deny, minimize, or embrace depending on their needs. Like the Grégoires, they have “uneasy sympathy” (109) for them, unwilling to consider that they themselves are responsible.

The bourgeois’ obliviousness to the plight of the poor is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the Hennebeau party’s compliments of Alzire’s being “so grown-up for her age” (109). Alzire, at only 9 years old, is left to take care of baby Estelle while La Maheude goes to beg at the Grégoires’. Described as a “little housewife” (99), Alzire cleans the house, keeps up the fire, and even offers Estelle her breast when the baby cries in hunger. Alzire is mature beyond her years, knowing instinctively to lie to her father that she’s had her share of meat. Rather than something to celebrate, Alzire’s maturity indicates the harshness of the miners’ lives.

Household responsibility is not the only way miners’ daughters grow up too fast. Miners’ children, “[f]lung together at a young age” (103), begin having sex at young ages, barely bothering to hide as they meet on rooftops or at Réquillart. Even Jeanlin and Lydie, at 10 years old, “knew all about it”—having witnessed it “going on at home behind partition walls or through cracks in the door”—and play “mums and dads” (125) together in the spoil-heap. Zacharie already has two children with his teenage girlfriend Philomène. La Mouquette, “[f]rom the age of ten,” has “been having sex in every corner of the ruins” (127). The sexuality of the miners’ children is one more way the harshness of their lives robs them of their childhood. Despite the unhealthy conditions and lack of nourishment stunts their growth, they grow up prematurely, both in their responsibility to their families and in their sexual knowledge.

As the miners become adults, sex becomes not only a pastime but also a commodity, and they trade it freely for perks to ease the harshness of their lives. Sexual bribery is common, and the miners openly discuss such dealings. Shopkeeper Maigrat accepts sex in exchange for credit. Bouteloup, Levaque’s boarder, sleeps with Levaque’s harried wife, who is “included in the rent” (105). Pierron, who “used to give the overman rabbits before he was married,” now “lend[s] him his wife” (105) in exchange for “perks” (107). The commodification of sex shows how in the miners’ villages, desperation loosens morals: The exchange of sex for goods and services is normalized, as is the gossip that sustains the women after long days worrying how to stave off their families’ hunger. These chapters offer a glimpse into the ways the miners and their families survive and find relief in an otherwise harsh existence.

Notably, it is only the women and girls who are criticized for sexual commodification. Étienne wonders at the girls who are “stupid enough to […] make babies for themselves” and thinks it would be better if they “stop up their wombs and cross their legs” (128). He watches Chaval push Catherine into the shadows but decides not to interfere, for “[i]f girls say no, it’s only because they like a spot of rough treatment first” (129). Étienne thinks her a “slut,” not realizing she has submitted to Chaval with “that inborn passivity” (132) of mining girls in the face of a “man’s all-conquering advance” (131). This scene of innocence shattered presents without sympathy, from Étienne’s point of view, and is yet one more example of the resignation with which the poor meet their inevitable descent.