The true _bête humaine_, Jacques Lantier, possesses the anatomical characters of the born criminal; "his thick black locks were curled, like his moustaches, so heavy and dark that they increased greatly the natural paleness of his complexion." Moreover, the inclination to crime in him was justified by inheritance. And this passion for murder which supplants the sensual passion is truly intoxicating. Where the author has gone astray is where he makes Jacques find pleasure for a considerable time with Séverine without any thought of murder; while these unfortunates, at least all that I have studied, do not experience sexual pleasure except in murder. On the other hand, the vertigo of epileptic amnesia which Zola often causes Jacques to suffer, is based on fact and actually accords with the most recent observations: "He had finally found himself on the brink of the Seine without being able to explain to himself how. That of which he retained a very clear impression, was of having thrown from the top of the bank the knife that his hand held clutched in his pocket. Then he knew no more, stupefied and absent of mind, out of which the other, and the knife too, had entirely vanished.... He was in his narrow chamber in the Rue Cardinet, fallen across his bed, fully dressed. Instinct had brought him back there, as a worn out dog crawls to his kennel. Besides he remembered neither having ascended the stairs, nor of having slept. He awoke from a heavy sleep, scared to re-enter abruptly into possession of himself, as after a profound fainting fit. Perhaps he had slept three hours, perhaps three days." Never have I found a more perfect description of that which I have termed criminal, epileptoid vertigo. But here again is a mistake of fact arising from a velleity not content with knowledge. It is that the novelist several times explains these bloodthirsty sexual instincts by a peculiar kind of atavism: the tendency, namely, to avenge the evil that women had done to his race; the spite accumulated from male to male since the first deceit in the depths of caverns. This is an error of fact. Primitive women have never done wrong to men. More feeble than men, they have always been their victims. These bloodthirsty sexual instincts are explained by a quite different atavism, which goes back to inferior animals, to the conflict between the males for the conquest of the female, who remained for the strongest; and by the blows that were inflicted on the woman in order to reduce her to conjugal slavery, conflicts of which traces still remain in Roman history (the Rape of the Sabines), and in the nuptial rites of almost all European countries, and in those of New Zealand, where the husband knocks down his wife before carrying her off to the matrimonial bed.