The sun stood high in the calm sky on this morning of immense joy, as the good town of Marchiennes held its celebration. On the square, a brass band played itself breathless, while from every side the country people came flocking, and carts arrived one after another. Lanterns had just been hung from the façades of the town hall, and an old man, a former miner, stood nearby, staring without yet understanding, amid the children at play.

It was Étienne who was leaving. After the trial, at which he had been acquitted for lack of evidence, he had gone back to work at the pit, but the days grew worse and worse, the great cold having halted the works, and the Company had dismissed him, along with a batch of miners it was thus ridding itself of without stirring up the country. For eight days he had stayed at Rasseneur's, unable to bring himself to go. That morning, at last, he had risen and set out for Paris, where a letter from Pluchart was calling him, promising him work. His knapsack, slung on his back, weighed almost nothing, so small was it, holding a spare shirt and his papers. He wore his black cloth jacket, whose coal dust never came out, and beneath his new hat his face was still pale, his reddish beard bleached by eight weeks in prison.

The road sloped downward, crossed the Vandame road, and he stopped involuntarily at the spot from which the whole plain lay open. It was there he had often waited for Catherine at dusk. He looked back, deep into his eyes. The Voreux, with its black buildings, its broken winding gear, loomed faintly in the mist. The other pits succeeded one another in the distance—Madeleine, Victoire, Saint-Thomas—all extinguished, all dead, with the silence of tombs. And over this buried world the countryside lay at rest, the immense plain across which the rising sun slid like a stream of blood. He could make out the settlement of Deux-Cent-Quarante, the Maheude house shut up, the two houses in the middle abandoned, the disorder of places where death had passed. Over there was Montsou, whose blast furnaces smoked; farther on he guessed at Marchiennes, drowned in the immensity. What he saw above all were the settlements, to the horizon, scattered in the green of beets and wheat, peopled with those he knew, the women he had seen, the children whose faces he remembered. The people were rising like a rising tide, to overflow the civilized world, whose earth, torn open, had nourished it and now vomited it up as a sea gives back its dead. Soon, would this flood of men, this tide of men, overflow the whole earth?

Then, in a vision, he saw the Voreux swell, gape open, swallow men by the mouthful. Souvarine, whose grave he did not even know, had passed like death itself. Chaval lay below, Catherine was stifling beside him, and he, he was alive, he was escaping, and suddenly the guilt of living when they were dead crushed him. He would have liked, as in the old days, to have stayed below, buried there, while a whole people above rose up. But he had to live, to carry the word, to proclaim the future. The voice of a new generation was rising, and he would go on to Paris, and push the word farther still, until justice at last was done.

Three o'clock rang out at Marchiennes. He walked on, and the thought came to him that by evening he would be in Paris. As he walked, his youth came back to him, the need to live, not to die before seeing justice triumph. Ah, if only he could have, like old Bonnemort, who now belonged to the dead! He himself still lived, and he had to rise, carry the day over to tomorrow. He thought of the life he was going to lead, the hard life of the exiles of labor, that of miners who rise before daybreak and return only at night. A new strength lifted him, the certainty of an age to come. Was it not the truth, this religion of justice that men had sought for so many centuries? Some morning, no doubt, the world would be young again, and men, at last delivered from the weight of evil and injustice, would walk upright, without chains.

Beneath his feet the road climbed, and he moved away from the plain where the pits were dying. The sun, higher and higher, spread its light. The fields, the meadows, the gardens of Marchiennes, everything was waking, while the bells rang out in peace. He walked on until nightfall, with a great need for movement, chest broadened, steps heavy, weary, but upright. And before him he saw the crowd growing, the tide rising, always rising, the black tide of miners, swollen with every generation, overflowing like a sea that must cover everything. And across the plain, above the black rooftops of the settlements, what he beheld was the future, the immense future whose promise he had believed he glimpsed. The April day was ending, an April day, one of those days from which, like a seed, the coming summer is born. A life was going to germinate, a germination of peoples, a black, avenging army germinating slowly in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the century to come, and whose germination would soon burst the earth asunder.