



Produced by Clare Graham & Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature
(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)







THE MONOMANIAC

(_LA BÊTE HUMAINE_)


By ÉMILE ZOLA


Translated and Edited, with a Preface
By EDWARD VIZETELLY


London
HUTCHINSON & CO
Paternoster Row. 1901

_All rights reserved._




[Illustration: "SÉVERINE UTTERED AN INVOLUNTARY CRY, AND ROUBAUD TURNED
ROUND, TERRIFIED." _p._ 196.]




TABLE OF CONTENTS

 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I
 CHAPTER II
 CHAPTER III
 CHAPTER IV
 CHAPTER V
 CHAPTER VI
 CHAPTER VII
 CHAPTER VIII
 CHAPTER IX
 CHAPTER X
 CHAPTER XI
 CHAPTER XII




PREFACE

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 Zola has written. It will be doubly
interesting to English readers, because for them it forms a missing
link in the famous Rougon-Macquart series.

The student of Zola literature will remember in the _Assommoir_ that
"handsome Lantier whose heartlessness was to cost Gervaise so many
tears." Jacques Lantier, the chief character in this _Bête Humaine_,
this _Human Animal_ which I have ventured to call the _Monomaniac_, is
one of their children. It is he who is the monomaniac. His monomania
consists in an irresistible prurience for murder, and his victims
must be women, just like that baneful criminal who was performing his
hideous exploits in the streets of the city of London in utter defiance
of the police, about the time M. Zola sat down to pen this remarkable
novel, and from whom, maybe, he partly took the idea.

Every woman