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Then, suddenly, Étienne made up his mind. Perhaps he imagined he’d caught another glimpse of Catherine’s bright eyes, up there at the entry to the village. Or perhaps it was the wind of revolt beginning to blow from the direction of Le Voreux. He could not tell. He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle; and he thought angrily of those ‘people’ Bonnemort had told him about, and of the squat and sated deity to whom ten thousand starving men and women daily offered up their flesh without ever knowing who or what this god might be.
‘But how can they put the wages up? Wage levels are fixed by the iron law of the irreducible minimum,4 the amount which is just sufficient for the workers to be able to eat stale bread and make babies…If the amount falls too low, the workers die and the demand for new men pushes it up again. If it goes up too high, the surplus supply of labour pushes it down again…The point of equilibrium is the empty stomach, life imprisonment in the house of hunger.’
But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored. Were all citizens not equal since the Revolution?
Now that God was dead, justice would be the means of human happiness, ushering in the age of equality and the brotherhood of man.
It’s all very well your complaining about the rich, but when good fortune brings you money, you simply don’t have the courage of your convictions to give it back to the poor…You will never deserve to be happy while you still have things you call your own or while your hatred of the bourgeoisie is still no more than a desperate desire to be bourgeois yourselves.’
New men were starting into life, a black army of vengeance slowly germinating in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come; and soon this germination would tear the earth apart.
