Thérèse Raquin Read online

  ‘Come, come, dear lady,’ Michaud exclaimed, with a hint of impatience. ‘You mustn’t give way to it like that. You’ll make yourself ill.’

  ‘We’re all mortal,’ Grivet remarked.

  ‘Your tears will not bring back your son,’ said Olivier, sententiously.

  ‘Please,’ said Suzanne, ‘don’t upset all of us.’

  And since Mme Raquin was sobbing all the more, unable to hold back her tears, Michaud continued:

  ‘Now, then, come on, be brave. You must realize that we’ve come here to take your mind off it. So, darn it all, let’s not be miserable; let’s try to forget ... We’ll play for two sous a game. There! What do you say?’

  With a supreme effort, the haberdasher swallowed her tears. Perhaps she was aware of the fatuous egotism of her guests. She wiped her eyes, still very upset. The dominoes shook in her poor hands and she could not see through the tears that remained just behind her eyelids.

  They played.

  Laurent and Thérèse had watched this brief scene with a serious and impassive air. The young man was delighted to see their Thursday evenings revived. He eagerly wanted them to take place, knowing that he would need these meetings to reach his goal. And, then, without wondering why, he felt more at ease among these few people that he knew and so dared to look directly at Thérèse.

  The young woman, dressed in black, pale and thoughtful, possessed a beauty that he had not previously seen in her. He was happy to meet her eyes and to see them stop and gaze at his with unblinking courage. Thérèse still belonged to him, body and soul.

  XVI

  Fifteen months went by. The anguish of the first moments was mitigated, and every day brought greater peace and relaxation. Life resumed its course with weary languor, taking on that state of monotonous lethargy that follows a great crisis. And, at the start, Laurent and Thérèse allowed themselves to be carried along by this new life as it transformed them, working away secretly inside them in a way that will have to be analysed very minutely if one is to establish all its phases.

  Soon Laurent was coming back every evening to the shop, as in the past. But he no longer dined there or settled down for a whole evening. He would arrive at half past nine and leave after closing the shop. It appeared as though he was fulfilling a duty by coming in to help the two women. If he neglected this task for one day, he would apologize the next as humbly as a servant. On Thursday, he helped Mme Raquin to light the fire and welcome her guests. He was quietly attentive in a way that charmed the old woman.

  Thérèse would calmly watch him fussing around her. Her face had lost its pallor and she seemed more well, more cheerful and more gentle. Only very occasionally did her mouth twist in a nervous contraction, making two deep lines that gave her a strange expression of pain and terror.

  The two lovers did not try to see one another alone. Neither of them ever asked the other for a meeting and they never exchanged a furtive kiss. It was as though the murder had, for the time being, calmed the lustful fever of their flesh and, in killing Camille, they had managed to assuage the raging and insatiable desire that they had been unable to satisfy in one another’s arms. They experienced in their crime a sensation of gratification so intense that it sickened them and made their embraces repulsive.

  None the less, they could have had a thousand opportunities to lead the very life of free love that they had dreamed about and which had driven them to murder. Mme Raquin, confused and debilitated, was not an obstacle. The house was theirs; they could leave it and go wherever they wished. But love no longer appealed to them, their appetite had faded, and they stayed there, calmly chatting, looking at one another without blushing, without trembling, having apparently forgotten the wild embraces that had bruised their flesh and made their bones crack. They even avoided being alone together; when they were, they could find nothing to say and each of them was afraid of appearing too cold towards the other. When they shook hands, they felt a kind of unease at the touch of their skin.

  Anyway, they both thought they could explain what made them so indifferent and fearful towards one another. They put their coldness down to caution. In their view, this calm and abstinence were the fruit of great wisdom. They claimed that the passivity of their flesh and the sleep in their hearts were voluntary. Moreover, they considered the repugnance and anxiety that they felt as a vague, lingering fear of punishment. Sometimes they would force themselves to hope, trying to recover the ardent dreams of former times, only to be quite amazed when they found that their imaginations were empty. So they clung to the idea of their forthcoming marriage. Once they had reached their goal, with nothing more to fear, belonging to one another, they would rediscover their passion and enjoy the delights that they had imagined. This hope soothed them and prevented them from plumbing the depths of the void that had opened up inside them. They persuaded themselves that they loved one another as they had done in the past and awaited the moment that would make them perfectly happy by uniting them for ever.

  Never had Thérèse known such peace of mind. She was certainly a better person: all the implacable willpower in her being was relaxed.

  At night, alone in her bed, she felt happy. She could no longer sense the thin face and puny body of Camille beside her, inflaming her flesh and plaguing her with unsatisfied desires. For herself, she became a little girl again, a virgin under her white curtains, peaceful amid the silence and the darkness. She liked her huge, rather cold room, with its high ceiling, its dark corners and its scents of the cloister. She had even come to like the great black wall outside her window; one whole summer, every evening, she would stay looking for hours on end at the grey stones of this wall and the narrow slivers of starry sky outlined by the chimneys and the roofs. She would think of Laurent only when a nightmare woke her up with a start; and then, sitting bolt upright, shaking and with staring eyes, she would wrap her nightdress around her and tell herself that she would not suffer from these sudden terrors if she had a man lying beside her. She thought of her lover as being like a dog that would guard and protect her. Her cool, calm skin felt no shudder of desire.

  By day, in the shop, she took an interest in things around her; she came out of herself, no longer living in a state of dumb rebellion, wrapped up in thoughts of hatred and vengeance. She was bored by day-dreaming; she needed to act and to see. From morning to night, she watched the people who went through the arcade, entertained by the noise and the comings and goings. She became inquisitive and chatty, in short, a woman, for up to then she had only ever acted and thought like a man.

  From her observations, she noticed a young man, a student, who lived in rented accommodation near by and came past the shop several times a day. He had a pale beauty, with the long hair of a poet and an officer’s moustache. Thérèse thought him distinguished. She was in love with him for a week, like a boarding-school girl. She read novels and compared this young man to Laurent, finding the latter quite coarse and heavy. Reading novels opened horizons that were new to her; until now, she had loved only with her blood and her nerves; now she started to love with her head. Then, one day, the student vanished; no doubt, he had moved house. Thérèse forgot him in a matter of hours.

  She subscribed to a lending library and became passionately fond of all the heroes of the stories that she read. This sudden love of reading had a considerable influence on her temperament. 1 She acquired a nervous sensibility which made her laugh or cry for no reason. The equilibrium that had started to be achieved inside her was shattered. She fell into a sort of vague reverie. At times, she was shaken by thoughts of Camille and she remembered Laurent with new desire, but full of fear and misgiving. So she relapsed into her mood of anxiety; sometimes she tried to find some way of marrying her lover that very moment, at others she thought of running away or never seeing him again. When novels talked to her about chastity and honour, they set up a kind of barrier between her instincts and her will. She was still the unmanageable creature that wanted to wrestle with the Seine and had thr
own herself head first into adultery; but she became aware of goodness and gentleness, she understood the soft features and lifeless attitude of Olivier’s wife, and she knew that she could not kill her husband and be happy. As a result, she could no longer see clearly inside herself and she lived in a state of cruel uncertainty.

  Laurent, for his part, went through various phases of calm and excitement. At first, he enjoyed a feeling of profound tranquillity, as though he had been relieved of a huge weight. At times, he would wonder in astonishment: it was as though he had had a bad dream and he asked himself whether it was really true that he had thrown Camille into the water and seen his corpse on a slab in the Morgue. He was uncommonly surprised by the memory of his crime. Never would he have considered himself capable of a murder. All his caution and his cowardice shuddered when it occurred to him that his crime might have been discovered and he might have been guillotined. He felt the cold edge of the blade on his neck. While he was doing it, he had gone straight ahead, with the obstinacy and blindness of an animal. Now he turned round and, seeing the abyss that he had crossed, was seized by a dizzying sense of terror.

  ‘I must certainly have been drunk,’ he thought. ‘That woman intoxicated me with her caresses. Good Lord, what an idiot, what a madman I was! I was risking the scaffold by doing that ... Well, in the end it turned out all right; but if I had the time again, I’d never do it.’

  Laurent lapsed into inactivity, becoming more feeble, more cowardly and more cautious than ever. He got fat and lazy. No one who looked at this great body, slumped in on itself, seeming to have no bones or nerves, would have thought to accuse him of violence and cruelty.

  He went back to his old ways. For several months, he was a model employee, carrying out his duties in a perfectly mechanical way. In the evenings, he dined in an eating-house in the Rue Saint-Victor, cutting his bread into small slices, chewing slowly, dragging out his meal as long as possible. Then he pushed his chair back, leaned against the wall and smoked his pipe. He looked like some fat married man. In the daytime, he thought about nothing; at night, he slept a deep and dreamless sleep. With his face pink and plump, his belly full and his head empty, he was happy.

  His flesh seemed dead and his mind hardly ever turned to Thérèse. At times he did think about her as one thinks about a woman whom one is to marry later on, in some indeterminate future. He waited patiently for the time of his marriage, forgetting the woman, but dreaming of the new position he would then acquire. He would leave the office, he would do some amateur painting and he would stroll around. Every evening, such thoughts brought him back to the shop in the arcade, despite the vague sense of unease that he felt as he went in.

  One Sunday, feeling bored and not knowing what to do, he went round to see his old schoolfriend, the young painter with whom he had shared a room for a long time. The artist was working on a painting that he intended to send to the Salon:2 it showed a naked Bacchante3 stretched out on a piece of drapery. At the back of the studio, the model, a woman, was lying, her head bent back, her upper body twisted and her hip raised. Now and then, she would laugh, sticking out her chest, extending her arms and stretching, to relieve the stiffness. Laurent, sitting opposite her, watched her, smoking and talking to his friend. The sight made his heart pound and set his nerves on edge. He stayed until evening and took the woman home with him. He kept her as his mistress for nearly a year. The poor girl began to love him, considering him a handsome fellow. In the morning, she would leave, go and model all day, then come back regularly every evening at the same time. With the money that she earned, she would feed, dress and maintain herself, so she did not cost Laurent a penny, and he was not bothered where she came from or what she might have done. This woman brought a further element of balance into his life; he took her for granted, as a useful and necessary object that kept his body quiet and healthy. He never knew whether he loved her and it never occurred to him that he was being unfaithful to Thérèse. He just felt more fat and contented. That was all.

  Meanwhile, Thérèse’s period of mourning was over. The young woman would put on bright dresses and one evening Laurent happened to find her younger-looking and prettier. But he still felt a certain uneasiness with her; for some time she had seemed excitable and full of strange whims, laughing or becoming sad for no reason. When he saw her wavering, it worried him, because he partly guessed her inner turmoil. He started to hesitate, horribly afraid that he would upset his tranquil existence: he was living peacefully, sensibly catering for his needs, and he was scared to risk this balance by tying himself to a woman whose passion had already driven him mad. In any case, he did not reason these things out, he instinctively felt the upheaval that it would create in him if he were to have Thérèse.

  The first shock that struck him, shaking him out of his complacency, was the idea that he would at last have to think about marriage. It was now almost fifteen months since Camille died. For a short while, Laurent considered not marrying at all, dumping Thérèse and keeping the model, whose undemanding and inexpensive love was quite enough for him. Then, it occurred to him that he could not have killed a man for nothing; when he recalled his crime and the dreadful effort that he had made to gain sole possession of this woman who now disturbed him so much, he felt that the murder would become useless and horrible if he did not marry her. It seemed ludicrous to him to throw a man in the water so that you could steal his widow, to wait fifteen months, and after that to make up one’s mind to live with some girl who hawked her body round all the artists’ studios ... He smiled at the notion. In any event, was he not bound to Thérèse by ties of blood and horror? He felt her somehow crying out and twisting inside him, he belonged to her. He was afraid of his accomplice; perhaps, if he did not marry her, she would go and confess everything to the Law, for revenge and out of jealousy. These ideas were pounding in his head. Once again, he was stricken with fever.

  Meanwhile, the model left him abruptly. One Sunday, she failed to return; no doubt she had found warmer and more comfortable digs. Laurent was only mildly put out, but he had grown accustomed to having a woman lying beside him at night and he suddenly felt there was a gap in his life. A week later, his nerves could bear it no longer. He went back to the shop in the arcade for whole evenings on end, once more looking at Thérèse with eyes that glinted occasionally. The young woman, who was excited by long hours with her books, returned his gaze with languid and surrendering eyes.

  In this way, both of them found their way back to anguish and desire, after a long year of waiting in a state of disgust and indifference. One evening as he was closing the shop, Laurent stopped Thérèse in the passageway.

  ‘Would you like me to come to your room this evening?’ he asked, in a passionate voice.

  The young woman threw up her hands in horror.

  ‘No, no, let’s wait,’ she said. ‘We must be careful.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting long enough, I think,’ said Laurent. ‘I’m fed up, I want you.’

  Thérèse looked at him wildly. The blood rushed to her hands and to her face. She seemed to hesitate, then said abruptly:

  ‘Let’s get married. I’ll be yours.’

  XVII

  Laurent left the Passage, anxious in his mind and uneasy in his body. Thérèse’s warm breath and her compliance had brought back all the keen urges of earlier times. He went down to the river and walked along with his hat in his hand, so that he could get the full benefit of the fresh air on his face.

  When he reached Rue Saint-Victor, he paused at the entrance to his lodgings, afraid to go up, afraid of being alone. An inexplicable, childish terror made him dread that he might find a man hiding in his garret. He had never suffered from such faint-heartedness. He did not even try to argue against the strange fit of trembling that came over him. He went into a wine shop and stayed there for an hour, mechanically drinking large glasses of wine. He thought of Thérèse and felt cross with the young woman because she had not wanted to have him that same night in her room
and it occurred to him that he would not have been afraid had he been with her.

  They closed the wine shop and showed him the door. He came back to ask for some matches. The concierge in his house was on the first floor. Laurent had a long alleyway to go down and a few steps to go up before he could take his candle. This alleyway and small flight of stairs, horribly black, appalled him. Normally, he went through the darkness here quite happily. This evening, he did not dare ring; he thought that there might be some murderers, hiding in a particular recess formed by the entrance to the cellar, who would suddenly leap out at his throat as he went by. Finally, he rang, lit a match and made up his mind to venture into the alleyway. The match went out. He stayed motionless, panting, not daring to run, striking the matches on the damp wall so nervously that his hand shook. He thought he could hear voices and the sound of footsteps in front of him. The matches broke in his fingers. He managed to light one. The sulphur began to boil and catch on the wood, but so slowly that it increased Laurent’s terror: in the pale, bluish light from the sulphur, in the lights flickering around, he imagined he could see monstrous shapes. Then the match fizzed, and the light became white and clear. Relieved, Laurent went forward cautiously, taking care not to let the light go out. When he should have walked past the cellar, he pressed against the opposite wall; the cellar was a mass of darkness that scared him. Then he went quickly up the few steps to the concierge’s lodge and thought he was saved when he had his candle. He went more slowly up the other floors, holding his candle high and lighting every corner that he had to walk past. Those huge, strange shapes that come and go when you are in a staircase with a light filled him with a vague sense of unease as they swiftly rose up and disappeared in front of him.

  When he got upstairs, he opened his door and quickly shut himself inside. The first thing he did was to look under his bed and to search the room thoroughly, to make sure that no one was hidden in it. He closed the skylight, thinking that someone could easily come down through there. When he had taken these precautions, he felt calmer and got undressed, amazed at his own faint-heartedness. Eventually, he smiled, calling himself a baby. He had never been timid and could not explain this sudden rush of fear.