“The Beast-Man” (1888) is Émile Zola’s seventeenth novel from the Rougon-Macquart series, devoted to members of one family living during the years of the Second Empire—the era of Napoleon III’s dictatorship.
This is a noir novel—a kind of hard-boiled crime story—and at the same time a book describing the French railway of the nineteenth century. The main character, Jacques Lantier, is the son of Gervaise Macquart (the heroine of the novel “L’Assommoir”) and her lover Auguste Lantier. He works as a train driver, operating a locomotive that he affectionately calls Lison. Jacques hides from everyone his mental illness: he wants to possess a woman and then kill her. Only work can distract his thoughts from the desired murder…