And Étienne, who believed he had known all of human misery, now discovered, in the depths of the earth, unexpected abysses of suffering. He had first thought the miners were workers like any others, badly paid, poorly fed, but living nonetheless. It took the terrible ordeal of the strike for him to see the truth face to face: whole generations descended into the abyss, children who never saw the sun, women bent from their earliest youth, old men finishing their lives consumed in darkness. Every cheek was pallid, every body gnawed; hunger was there, permanent, domestic, passing from fathers to sons like an hereditary disease. And yet, in the mining settlements, in the midst of this distress, he had heard new words being born. The men first spoke of their wages, of the tonnage, of the fines that stripped them bare. Then they had come to debate the very question of capital, asking why a few should thus enjoy, without working, the labor of the rest. One idea shook him and carried him away: justice was not a chimera, justice would come—he already saw it, it was germinating beneath the earth as wheat germinates beneath the snow. Yes, the work was slow, but the work was certain. He remembered his readings, those theories that had at first seemed distant; now he saw them embodied in the people of his pit, in Maheu, the patient, good workman, in Maheude, the crushed mother, in all those simple beings who, without knowing it, were preparing the future. Nothing would be lost. Every suffering endured, every child dead of hunger, every woman fallen from exhaustion would enter into that immense debt the whole world, one day, would pay to the humiliated. For the old world was already cracking; one had only to listen to hear, beneath the mansions of the directors and the cathedrals of the Company, the bowels of the earth rumbling. And when Étienne left Montsou, walking along the road to Paris on a clear April morning, he turned back one last time. The Voreux, which he had thought dead, was breathing again; comrades were going back down, the mine was repopulating, everything was beginning anew. Work was setting out again in the depths, blind and robust, ignorant of its own strength. Étienne thought that from all that multitude set in motion, there would always be someone to cry out the truth, to sow revolt, until men at last came of age and were no longer slaughtered like beasts. He was not defeated. If this strike was crushed, other strikes would rise; if the men of today were broken, their sons would take up the struggle, taught by their fathers' blood. It was merely a thaw in history, and springs would follow. Behind him the immense plain opened out, free beneath the sky. And men were springing up, a black army of vengeance, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing toward the centuries, and whose germination would soon burst the earth asunder. Étienne walked on, his face raised toward the horizon, in that dawn light that was washing the sky. The houses and the trees, the fields and the roads stood out sharp; and it seemed to him that all this, in its new youth, belonged to him like a promise. Yes, life was there, which was not yet done, and which would always spring up again, untiring, from those oppressed races that evil had not been able to kill. He felt a voluptuous release, a growing certainty of the future. They had called him defeated, and yet, in his heart, the flame was not extinguished. From the exhausted pit, from the burned settlement, from the flooded mine, from the dying and the dead, rose that invincible sap which would one day, perhaps soon, yield the terrible and holy harvest. Thus did societies renew their flesh: through the suffering of the poor, fruitful suffering. Étienne, without looking back again, went on his way, growing taller with every step in the light of that endless morning.