Thérèse Raquin Read online

  He was sprawled on the rear bench, with his two elbows on the sides of the skiff, lolling around and showing off. Thérèse gave him an odd look; the jeers of this poor creature were like the crack of a whip stinging her and driving her on. She suddenly jumped into the boat, staying at the bow. Laurent took the oars. The skiff left the bank and proceeded gently towards the islands.

  Dusk was coming. Great shadows fell from the trees and the water was black at the edge. In the middle of the river, there were wide streaks of pale silver. Soon, the boat was in the middle of the Seine. Here, all the sounds from the banks were muted: the shouts and singing were vague and melancholy as they drifted across, with sad, languid notes. The smells of fried food and dust had gone. There was a chill in the air. It was cold.

  Laurent stopped rowing and let the boat drift with the current.

  Rising opposite them was the great reddish mass of the islands. The two banks, dark brown in colour, flecked with grey, were like two broad bands meeting at the horizon. The sky and the water seemed to have been cut out of the same whitish material. Nothing is more painfully calm than dusk in autumn. The daylight pales in the quivering air and the ageing leaves fall from the trees. The countryside, scorched by the burning sun of summer, feels death approaching with the first cold winds; and, in the sky, there are plaintive murmurs of despair. Night falls, bringing shrouds in its shadows.

  The three trippers fell silent. Sitting in the boat as it drifted along with the current, they were watching the last glimmers of light leave the tops of the trees. They were getting closer to the islands. The great reddish masses were darkening and the whole landscape was simplified by the dusk: the Seine, the sky, the islands and the hills were now only brown and grey smudges, merging into a milky fog.

  Camille, who had ended up lying flat with his head over the water, dipped his hands in the river.

  ‘Crikey, it’s cold!’ he exclaimed. ‘It wouldn’t be much fun to take a dive into that stuff!’

  Laurent said nothing. For a while, he had been looking anxiously at both banks. He was sliding his large hands down towards his knees, clenching his teeth. Thérèse, stiff and motionless, her head tilted back a little, waited.

  The boat was about to enter a little channel, dark and narrow, which ran between two islands. From behind one of these, you could hear the muffled singing of a boating party that must have been coming back up the Seine. Beyond that, upstream, the river was clear.

  Then Laurent got up and grasped Camille around the waist. The clerk started to laugh.

  ‘No, don’t! You’re tickling me,’ he said. ‘Stop messing around ... Seriously, you’ll make me fall.’

  Laurent grasped him harder and shook him. Camille turned and saw the terrifying, contorted face of his friend. He could not understand what was going on, but was gripped by a vague sense of terror. He tried to cry out and felt a rough hand around his throat. With the instinct of a struggling animal, he got up on his knees and gripped the side of the boat. For a few seconds, he struggled like that.

  ‘Thérèse! Thérèse!’ he called, in a whistling, half-suffocated voice.

  The young woman watched, gripping a bench in the skiff with both hands as it creaked and swayed on the river. She could not shut her eyes. A terrifying contraction kept them wide open, staring at the dreadful scene of struggle. She was silent and rigid.

  ‘Thérèse! Thérèse!’ the unfortunate victim cried, croaking.

  At this final plea, Thérèse burst into tears. Her nerves broke and the crisis that she had been anticipating threw her shaking into the bottom of the boat. There she stayed, bent double, swooning, lifeless.

  Laurent was still shaking Camille, with one hand gripped around his throat. Eventually, he managed to prise him away from the side of the boat with his other hand. He held him up like a child in his powerful arms. As he bent his head forward, leaving his neck uncovered, his victim, mad with fear and fury, twisted round, bared his teeth and dug them into the neck. And when the murderer, choking back a cry of pain, briskly threw Camille into the river, his teeth took away a piece of flesh.

  He fell into the water with a scream. He came back to the surface two or three more times, giving increasingly muffled cries.

  Laurent did not waste a second. He turned up the collar of his jacket to hide the wound. Then he grasped the swooning Thérèse, turned the skiff over with a kick and let himself fall into the Seine with his mistress in his arms. He supported her in the water, calling for help in a pathetic voice.

  The oarsmen, whose singing they had heard behind the island, rowed swiftly towards them. They realized that a disaster had taken place: they set about rescuing Thérèse, lying her down on a bench, and Laurent, who began to lament the death of his friend. He jumped back in the water, looked for Camille in places where he could not be, came back weeping, wringing his hands and tearing out his hair. The oarsmen tried to calm him and console him.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he cried. ‘I shouldn’t have let the poor lad dance around and shake the boat as he did ... Suddenly, we were all three of us on the same side, and we capsized. As he was falling, he called out to me to save his wife ...’

  As always happens, there were two or three young people among the oarsmen who claimed to have witnessed the accident.

  ‘We saw it clearly,’ they said. ‘Heavens, you know, a boat is not as solid as a dance floor ... Oh, this poor little woman, it’ll be frightful for her when she comes round!’

  They picked up their oars, took the skiff in tow and brought Thérèse and Laurent to the restaurant, where the dinner was waiting. In a few minutes, all of Saint-Ouen knew about the accident. The oarsmen described it as though they were eyewitnesses. A sympathetic crowd gathered around the cabaret.

  The restaurant owner and his wife were good people, who made some spare clothes available to the shipwrecked pair. When Thérèse revived, she had a nervous crisis and burst into terrible sobs. She had to be put to bed. Nature was assisting in the sinister piece of play-acting that had just taken place.

  When the young woman was calmer, Laurent entrusted her to the care of the restaurant owners. He wanted to go back to Paris alone, to tell Mme Raquin the dreadful news, softening the blow as much as possible. The truth was that he was mistrustful of Thérèse’s nervous excitement. He wanted to give her time to think things over and learn her part.

  It was the oarsmen who ate Camille’s dinner.

  XII

  In the dark corner of the public omnibus taking him back to Paris, Laurent put the final touches to his plan. He was almost certain of getting away with it. He was filled with a heavy, anxious feeling of joy, joy at having accomplished the crime. When they got to the Barrière de Clichy, he took a cab and told the driver to take him to Old Michaud’s house in the Rue de Seine. It was nine o’clock in the evening.

  He found the retired police commissioner at dinner, together with Olivier and Suzanne. He had come here in order to cover himself, in the event of anyone suspecting him, and to avoid having to announce the frightful news to Mme Raquin alone. He found the idea of doing that oddly repugnant; he was expecting such despair that he was afraid he could not produce enough tears for his part; and then, the mother’s grief weighed on him, though when it came down to it, he was not much concerned.

  When Michaud saw him come in wearing coarse clothes a few sizes too small, he looked questioningly at him. Laurent told him what had happened, in a breaking voice, as though breathless with grief and tiredness.

  ‘I came to you,’ he said, in the end, ‘because I didn’t know what to do about those two poor women who have suffered such a cruel blow. I didn’t dare to go to the mother by myself. I beg you, come with me.’

  As he spoke, Olivier was staring hard at him, with a directness that he found very disconcerting. The murderer had plunged, head first, among these policemen, in a bold move that ought to save him. But he could not help shuddering as he felt their eyes fixed on him; where there was only amazement and pity, he
saw suspicion. Suzanne, the most frail and palest of them, was on the point of swooning. Olivier, terrified by the idea of death, though his heart was in fact quite indifferent, made a pained grimace of surprise as he examined Laurent’s face, though without the slightest suspicion of the sinister truth. As for Old Michaud, he gave exclamations of horror, commiseration and amazement; he twisted around on his chair, clasped his hands and raised his eyes heavenwards.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ he said, in a strangled voice. ‘Oh, my God, what a dreadful thing! You go out and you die, like that, all at once. It’s frightful ... And that poor Madame Raquin, the mother, what are we to tell her? You were quite right to come and fetch us ... We’ll go with you.’

  He got up, walked about the room, shuffling as he looked for his cane and his hat; then, as he hurried around, got Laurent to repeat the full story of the disaster, punctuating each remark with an exclamation.

  All four of them went downstairs. At the entrance to the Passage du Pont-Neuf, Michaud stopped Laurent.

  ‘Don’t come in,’ he said. ‘Your presence would be a kind of brutal announcement — just what we want to avoid ... The poor mother would suspect something wrong and force the truth out of us sooner than we would like. Wait here for us.’

  The murderer was relieved by this arrangement: he had been trembling at the idea of going inside the shop. Calm descended on him and he began to step on and off the pavement, walking easily backwards and forwards. At times, he forgot what was going on and looked in the shop windows, hummed to himself and turned round to stare after women as they went past. He stayed for a full half-hour like this in the street, his nerve returning more and more.

  He had not eaten since the morning. He had a sudden feeling of hunger, went into a pastry shop and stuffed himself with cakes.

  In the shop in the arcade, a heart-rending scene was taking place. Even though Old Michaud did his best, with friendly words, making every attempt to soften the blow, there came a moment when Mme Raquin realized that something dreadful had happened to her son, whereupon she demanded to know the truth, in a fury of despair, a violent fit of tears and cries that overcame her old friend’s resistance. When she did learn the truth, her grief was tragic. She heaved with sobs, great shudders threw her body backwards and she suffered a mad seizure of horror and anguish. She remained gasping for breath, from time to time giving out a piercing cry in the aching depths of her sorrow. She would have thrown herself on the ground, if Suzanne had not seized her by the waist and wept on her knees, looking up towards her with her pale face. Olivier and his father remained standing, irritated and silent, turning away from this spectacle which affected them in a way unpleasantly threatening to their self-esteem.

  The poor mother saw her son tumbled along in the murky waters of the Seine, his body stiff and horribly swollen; and, at the same time, she saw him as a little baby in his cot, when she used to defend him from death as it tried to claim him. She had brought him into the world more than ten times and she loved him for all the love she had shown him in the previous thirty years. And now he had died far away from her, all of a sudden, in cold, dirty water, like a dog. She remembered the warm blankets that she used to wrap around him. How much care, what a warm childhood, how many endearments and expressions of affection — all this, only to see him one day miserably drowned! At this thought, Mme Raquin felt her throat tightening and hoped that she was about to die, stifled by so much grief.

  Old Michaud hurried out. He left Suzanne with the haberdasher and went back with Olivier to look for Laurent, so that they could go directly to Saint-Ouen.

  On the way, they barely exchanged a couple of words. Each had retreated into a corner of the cab which was shaking them along over the cobbles. They stayed silent and unmoving in the depth of the shadows that filled the carriage. From time to time, the swift ray of a gas lamp threw a flash of light across their faces. The dreadful event that had brought them together enveloped them in a sort of melancholy dejection.

  When they finally reached the restaurant on the river bank, they found Thérèse lying down, her hands and head burning with fever. The café owner told them quietly that the young lady was running a high temperature. The truth was that Thérèse, feeling weak and cowardly, was afraid that she would have a fit and confess to the murder, so she had decided to fall ill. She remained fiercely mute, keeping her lips and eyelids tight closed and refusing to see anyone, because she was afraid to speak. With the bedclothes up to her chin and her face half buried in the pillow, she curled up like a baby and listened anxiously to everything that was being said around her. And, in the reddish light that filtered through her closed eyelids, she could still see Camille and Laurent struggling at the edge of the boat and her husband, pale, frightful, taller than life, rising straight up out of the muddy water. This inescapable vision fuelled the fever in her blood.

  Old Michaud tried to talk to her, to console her. She shrugged him off, turned round and started to sob again.

  ‘Leave her, Monsieur,’ said the restaurant owner. ‘She shivers at the slightest noise. What she surely needs, you see, is rest.’

  Downstairs, in the dining room, a policeman was taking statements about the accident. Michaud and his son came down, followed by Laurent. Once Olivier let it be known that he was an important official at the Prefecture, everything was over in ten minutes. The oarsmen were still there, giving minute details of the drowning, describing how the three trippers had fallen in and claiming to be eyewitnesses. If Olivier and his father had had the slightest suspicion, it would have disappeared as soon as they heard these statements. But they had not for a moment doubted Laurent’s honesty. On the contrary, they described him to the policeman as the victim’s best friend, and they were at pains to insist that the official report should include the fact that the young man had jumped into the water to save Camille Raquin. The following day, the newspapers described the event with a wealth of details: the despairing mother, the inconsolable widow, the noble, courageous friend ... it was all there, in the report which did the rounds of the Parisian papers, then finally got buried in the provincial press.

  When the taking of the statements was finished, Laurent felt a wave of warm joy filling his flesh with new life. From the time when the victim had buried his teeth into his neck, it was as though he had been stiffened, acting mechanically, according to a plan laid down long in advance. He was possessed by the sole instinct of self-preservation which dictated his words and advised him how to act. Now, with the certainty that he would get away with it, the blood started to flow through his veins with sweet tranquillity. The police had gone past his crime and seen nothing; they were fooled, they had just acquitted him. He was saved. At this thought, he felt a sweat of pleasure along the length of his body, and a warmth that restored free movement to his limbs and to his mind. He continued in his role as the grieving friend with incomparable skill and self-assurance. Underneath, he felt an animal satisfaction; he thought of Thérèse, lying in the room upstairs.

  ‘We can’t leave that poor young woman here,’ he said to Michaud. ‘She may be in danger of serious illness, we really must take her back to Paris ... Come on, we’ll persuade her to come with us.’

  Upstairs, he himself spoke to Thérèse, begging her to get up and let them take her to the Passage du Pont-Neuf. When she heard the sound of his voice, she shuddered, opened her eyes wide and looked at him. She was haggard and trembling. Painfully and without answering, she sat up. The men left the room, leaving her alone with the restaurant owner’s wife. When she was dressed, she came unsteadily down the stairs and got into the cab, supported by Olivier.

  No one spoke during the journey. Laurent, with supreme daring and insolence, slid one hand along the young woman’s skirts and grasped her fingers. He was sitting opposite her, in the shifting shadows. He could not see her face, which she kept sunk on her breast. When he had taken her hand, he pressed it strongly and kept it in his until they reached Rue Mazarine. He felt her hand tremble, but she
did not take it away; on the contrary, she squeezed his quickly a few times. And, one held in the other, the hands burned, the damp palms stuck together and the clenched fingers bruised one another whenever the cab shook. It seemed to Laurent and Thérèse that the blood of the other was flowing into their chests through their joined hands; their fists became the burning hearth on which their life seethed. Wrapped in the darkness and the desolate silence around them, this furious squeezing of hands was like a crushing weight bearing down on Camille’s head to keep it under the water.

  When the cab stopped, Michaud and his son were the first to get down. Laurent leaned over towards his mistress and softly murmured: ‘Be strong, Thérèse. We have a long time to wait. Remember...’

  The young woman had still not spoken. She opened her lips for the first time since her husband’s death.

  ‘Oh, I’ll remember!’ she said, trembling, in a voice as soft as a sigh.

  Olivier gave her his hand, to help her down. This time, Laurent went as far as the shop. Mme Raquin was lying down, in the throes of delirium. Thérèse dragged herself to her own bed and Suzanne hardly had time to undress her. Feeling reassured and seeing that everything was working out as he hoped, Laurent left. He went slowly back to his dingy attic in the Rue Saint-Victor.

  It was after midnight. A cool breeze was blowing down the silent, empty streets. The young man could hear nothing but the regular sound of his footsteps on the stone pavements. The cool air filled him with a sense of well-being, while the silence and the dark gave him brief sensations of pleasure. He strolled along ...

  At last, he was done with his crime. He had killed Camille. All that was finished business and would not be spoken about again. He would live quietly and wait until he could take possession of Thérèse. He had sometimes found the idea of the murder oppressive; but now that the murder was accomplished, his chest felt lighter, he breathed freely and he was cured of the sufferings imposed by hesitation and fear.