At four o’clock they started to go down. Dansaert, who was presiding in person at the controller’s desk in the lamp depot, registered the name of each workman who presented himself and had him given a lamp. He accepted everyone, making no comment, keeping...
On Sunday Étienne escaped from the village as soon as night had fallen. A very bright, star-spangled sky lit the earth with a dusky blue glow. He went down towards the canal and walked slowly, following the bank up towards Marchiennes. It was his...
For two days it had been snowing; then that morning it had stopped, and the whole vast white carpet was frozen solid; thus this black country with its inky roads, whose walls and trees were covered in coal-dust, was white all over, absolutely white,...
They met at Le Plan-des-Dames, in a great clearing* recently opened by some tree-fellers. It stretched away in a gentle slope, surrounded by a high thicket of lofty beeches, whose regular line of straight trunks made a white colonnade, speckled green with...
Towards the middle of August, Étienne moved in with the Maheus, after Zacharie had married and was able to obtain an empty house in the village from the Company for Philomène and her two children; and, at first, the young man felt...
The Grégoires’ property, La Piolaine, was situated two kilometres to the east of Montsou, on the Joiselle road. It was a large square house of no particular style, built at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Of the vast lands which had originally depended...
Amid the fields of wheat and sugar-beet, mining village number Two Hundred and Forty* slumbered in the depths of night. You could just detect the bulk of the four massive blocks of small back-to-back houses, running geometrically in parallel lines like a...
And in this fashion the group made off over the bare plain, white with frost beneath the pale winter sun, spilling over the sides of the road on to the beetfields.
By the time they had reached La Fourche-aux-Bœufs, Étienne had taken charge. Without anyone...
In the early morning, since before daylight, a tremor had been running through the villages, a tremor which had now become a rumbling which traversed the highways and the whole countryside. But they couldn’t depart when they had planned, for they had heard the...
Jeanlin was better now, and able to walk again; but his bones were so badly set that he limped with both legs, and he was quite a sight to behold, waddling like a duck, but still scuttling around as fast as ever, and still...
