At Paris, later on, he took part in the Communist rising, and was condemned to death. He was respited, and transported to Noumea, where he married, and became father of a little girl. Le Docteur Pascal.
LANTIER (JACQUES), the second son of Gervaise Macquart and Auguste Lantier, was born at Plassans in 1844. He was six years old when his parents went to Paris with his brothers, Claude and Etienne, leaving him with his godmother, Aunt Phasie, who sent him to the School of Arts and Crafts. After two years passed on the Orleans Railway, he became an engineer of the first-class on the Western Railway. At twenty-six he was a tall, handsome man, with dark hair and a clear complexion. From childhood he had suffered from a complaint which the doctors did not understand, a pain in the head, behind the ears, accompanied by fever and an intense melancholy, which tempted him to hide like a suffering animal. When about sixteen years of age he became affected by a curious form of insanity, the desire to murder any woman of whom he became fond. “On each occasion it seemed like a sudden outburst of blind rage, an ever-recurring thirst to avenge some very ancient offence, the exact recollection of which escaped him. Did it date from so far back, from the harm women had done to his race, from the rancour laid up from male to male since the first deceptions in the depths of the caverns?” Even with his cousin Flore, who loved him from childhood, the same terrible instinct arose, and could only be stilled by flight.
By chance, Jacques was a momentary witness of the murder of President Grandmorin, and when suspicion fell upon the Roubauds he came to be of opinion that it was well-founded, a belief which was confirmed by a subsequent confession to him by Severine. This avowal by Severine placed her in his mind in a different category from all other woman; she had killed, and was a person sacred and apart, a woman he could love without his lust for blood being evoked. At the request of Severine, Jacques promised to kill Roubaud, her husband, whom she had come to hate; but, though all the preparations were made, it was Severine herself whom he killed, in an accession of that homicidal rage which he imagined he had conquered. He escaped all suspicion, and calmly allowed Roubaud and Cabuche to be punished for the crime. In order to see whether the murder of Severine had cured him of his blood lust, he made love to Philomene Sauvagnat, thereby arousing the jealousy of her lover, Pecqueux, who was stoker on the engine driven by Lantier. A quarrel between the two men on the footplate of the engine resulted in both of them falling off, and being cut in pieces beneath the wheels. La Bete Humaine.