Thérèse Raquin Page 6

  Thérèse impatiently rejected his books. She preferred to remain idle, staring, her thoughts vaguely wandering. Meanwhile, she remained even-tempered and easygoing; all her will was bent on the effort to make herself into a passive instrument, supremely compliant and self-denying.

  Business was slow. The profits remained steadily the same every month. The clientele was made up of women who worked in the district. Every five minutes, a young woman would come in and buy a few sous’ worth of goods. Thérèse served the customers always with the same words and a mechanical smile on her lips. Mme Raquin was more flexible and talkative; and, to tell the truth, she was the one who attracted and kept the customers.

  For three years, the days went on, one like the next. Camille was not absent from his office for a single day; his mother and his wife hardly left the shop. Thérèse, living in this dank darkness, in this dreary, depressing silence, would see life stretching in front of her, quite empty, bringing her each evening to the same cold bed and each morning to the same featureless day.

  IV

  Once a week, on Thursday evenings, the Raquin family received guests. They would light a big lamp in the dining room and put a kettle on to make tea. It was a whole palaver. This evening stood out from all the rest; it had become one of the family customs - a madly jolly (though respectable) orgy. They would go to bed at eleven.

  In Paris Mme Raquin met up with one of her old friends, police commissioner Michaud, who had been in the force in Vernon for twenty years and lived in the same house as her. So they had got to know one another very well; then, when the widow sold up to go and live in her house by the river, they gradually lost sight of one another. Michaud came up from the provinces a few months later, to enjoy the fifteen hundred francs of his pension peacefully in Paris, in the Rue de Seine. One rainy day, he met his old friend in the Passage du Pont-Neuf and that very same evening, he went round for a meal at the Raquins.

  This was the start of their Thursdays. The retired police commissioner got in the habit of coming regularly once a week. After a while, he brought his son, Olivier, a tall lad of thirty, dry and thin, who had married a rather small, slow, sickly woman. Olivier had a job with a salary of three thousand francs at the Prefecture de Police, which made Camille exceptionally jealous; he was head clerk in the department of security and order. From the very first, Thérèse hated this stiff, cold young man who felt he was honouring the shop in the arcade by bringing along the dryness of his lanky body and the weakness of his poor little wife.

  Camille introduced another guest, a veteran employee of the Orléans Railway. Grivet had served there for twenty years; he was head clerk and earned two thousand one hundred francs. He was the one who handed out the work in Camille’s office and the younger man showed him a degree of respect. In his dreams, he imagined that Grivet would die some day and that he might replace him, after ten years. Grivet was delighted with the welcome Mme Raquin gave him and would come back every week without fail. Six months later, his Thursday visit had become a duty and he would go to the Passage du Pont-Neuf as he went every morning to the office, mechanically, with the instinct of an animal.

  From that time on, the gatherings became delightful. At seven o‘clock, Mme Raquin would light the fire, put the lamp in the middle of the table, place a set of dominoes beside it and wipe the tea service which stood on the dresser. At eight o’clock precisely, Old Michaud and Grivet met in front of the shop, one coming from the Rue de Seine, the other from the Rue Mazarine. They used to come in and the whole family would go up to the first floor. They sat down around the table, waiting for Olivier Michaud and his wife, who always arrived late. When everyone was there, Mme Raquin poured out the tea, Camille emptied the box of dominoes on the oiled tablecloth and everyone settled into the game. Not a sound was heard except the click of dominoes. After each game, the players argued for two or three minutes, then silence fell once more, broken by sharp clicks.

  Thérèse played with an unconcern that irritated Camille. She used to pick up François, the big tabby cat that Mme Raquin had brought with her from Vernon, and stroke him with one hand while putting down her dominoes with the other. Thursday evenings were torture for her and she often complained of not feeling well, of having a bad headache, in order to avoid playing, so that she could sit by idly and half asleep. With one elbow on the table and her cheek resting on the palm of her hand, she would watch her aunt’s and her husband’s guests, seeing them through a kind of smoky yellow mist that came out of the lamp. All these faces drove her crazy. She looked from one to the other with feelings of profound disgust and dull irritation. Old Michaud had a pallid complexion with red blotches: the dead face of an old man in his second childhood. Grivet had the narrow mask, round eyes and thin lips of a halfwit. Olivier, whose cheekbones protruded, gravely bore a stiff, insignificant head on his ridiculous body. As for Suzanne, Olivier’s wife, she was quite pale, with dull eyes, white lips and a soft face. And Thérèse could not see a single human, not a living creature, among these grotesque and sinister beings with whom she was shut up. At times she would suffer hallucinations, thinking that she was buried in a vault together with mechanical bodies whose heads moved and whose arms and legs waved when their strings were pulled. The heavy atmosphere of the dining room stifled her, and the eerie silence and yellowish glow of the lamp filled her with a vague sense of terror, an inexpressible feeling of anxiety.

  Downstairs, on the front door, they had put a bell which gave a high-pitched tinkle as customers came in. Thérèse kept her ears open and when the bell rang she would hurry down, relieved and happy to get out of the dining room. She took her time serving the customer. When she was alone again, she would sit behind the counter and stay there for as long as possible, apprehensive of going back upstairs and feeling real joy at not having Grivet and Olivier in front of her. The damp air of the shop calmed the fever that burned her hands, and she slipped back into the solemn reverie that was her habitual state of being.

  But she could not stay like this for long. Camille would be annoyed by her absence. He could not understand how anyone might prefer the shop to the dining room on a Thursday evening, so he would lean over the banisters and look around for his wife.

  ‘Hey, there!’ he would shout. ‘What are you doing? Why don’t you come back up? Grivet is having the devil’s own luck. He’s just won again.’

  The young woman would get up painfully and return to her place opposite Old Michaud, whose drooping lips would form into a repulsive smile. And from then until eleven o’clock, she used to stay slumped in her chair, looking at Francois as he lay in her arms, so as not to see these paper dolls grimacing around her.

  V

  One Thursday, when he got home from the office, Camille brought with him a tall, square-shouldered young fellow, whom he pushed into the shop with a familiar pat on the back.

  ‘Mother,’ he asked Mme Raquin, showing the lad to her, ‘do you recognize this gentleman?’

  The old shopkeeper looked at the tall fellow and rummaged around in her memory, but found nothing. Thérèse observed the scene placidly.

  ‘What!’ Camille continued. ‘You don’t recognize Laurent, little Laurent, the son of Old Laurent, who has those fine fields of wheat over near Jeufosse?1 Don’t you remember? I used to go to school with him. He’d come to fetch me in the morning, as he left the house of his uncle, our neighbour, and you would give him bread and jam.’

  Mme Raquin suddenly remembered little Laurent, who seemed to her to have grown up considerably; it was at least twenty years since she had seen him last. She tried to make up for her astonishment with a flood of memories and some quite maternal endearments. Laurent had sat down and was smiling serenely. He spoke out clearly and examined his surroundings with a calm and relaxed expression.

  ‘Just imagine,’ Camille said, ‘this joker has been working at the Orléans Railway Station for eighteen months, and it was not until this evening that we met and recognized one another. That’s how big an
d important the office is!’

  The young man said this wide-eyed, pursing his lips, so proud was he to be a humble cog in such a huge mechanism. He went on, shaking his head:

  ‘Oh, but he’s well off, this one. He’s done his studies and he’s earning fifteen hundred francs already. His father sent him to boarding school where he did law and learned how to paint. Isn’t that right, Laurent? You must stay for dinner ...’

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ Laurent said, without further ado.

  He took off his hat and settled down in the shop. Mme Raquin hurried away to attend to her saucepans. Thérèse, who had not spoken a word, was looking at the newcomer. She had never before seen a real man. Laurent amazed her: he was tall, strong and fresh-faced. She looked with a kind of awe at his low forehead with its rough black hair, at his plump cheeks, his red lips and his regular features with their sanguine beauty.2 Her gaze paused for a moment on his neck, a broad, short neck, thick and powerful. Then she became absorbed in the contemplation of the large hands resting on his knees; their fingers were squared off and the closed fist, which must be huge, could have stunned a bull. Laurent came of true peasant stock, with a somewhat heavy manner, rounded back, slow, studied movements and a calm, stubborn look about him. You could sense the swelling, well-developed muscles beneath his clothes, and the whole body, with its thick, firm flesh. Thérèse examined him curiously from his hands to his face, feeling a little shudder pass through her when she reached his bull’s neck.

  Camille got out his volumes of Buffon and his ten-centime instalments, to show his friend that he, too, was working. Then, as though replying to a question that he had been asking himself for a few minutes, he said: ‘But, Laurent, you must know my wife? Don’t you remember the little cousin who used to play with us, in Vernon?’

  ‘I recognized Madame straight away,’ Laurent replied, staring Thérèse in the eyes.

  The young woman felt somehow uneasy beneath this direct gaze, which seemed to penetrate right inside her. She gave a forced smile and exchanged a few words with Laurent and her husband, then hurried off to join her aunt. She was not comfortable.

  They sat down to dinner. From the soup onwards, Camille thought he should look after his friend.

  ‘How is your father?’ he asked.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Laurent replied. ‘We fell out. We haven’t written to one another for five years.’

  ‘Well, I never!’ the clerk exclaimed, amazed by this monstrous behaviour.

  ‘Yes, the dear man has his own ideas about things ... As he is always in dispute with his neighbours, he sent me off to boarding school, imagining that he would later have me as a lawyer who could win all his suits for him. Oh, Old Laurent only has useful ambitions! He wants to take advantage of every notion, however idiotic!’

  ‘But didn’t you want to be a lawyer?’ Camille asked, still more amazed.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ his friend answered, with a laugh. ‘For two years, I pretended to be attending lectures so that I could collect the grant of twelve hundred francs that my father was giving me. I lived with one of my friends from school who’s a painter and I started to paint as well. It was fun; it’s a jolly business, not too tiring. We used to smoke and lark around all day long.’

  The Raquin family stared in astonishment.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Laurent went on, ‘it couldn’t last. The old man learned that I had been lying to him and stopped my hundred francs a month just like that, telling me to come back and till the earth like him. So I tried to paint religious pictures, but it’s not a good market. When it became clear to me that I would starve to death, I said to hell with art and looked for a job ... My father’s sure to die one of these days, and I’m waiting until he does so that I can live without working.’

  Laurent spoke quite calmly. In a few words, he had just made a quite typical statement that entirely summed up his character. Underneath, he was lazy, with strong appetites and a well-defined urge to seek easy, lasting pleasures. His great, powerful body asked for nothing better than to lie idle, wallowing in constant indolence and gratification. He would have liked to eat well, sleep long and fully satisfy his desires, without moving from the spot or running the risk of exhausting himself in any way.

  He had been appalled at the prospect of becoming a lawyer and shuddered at the idea of tilling the soil. He had thrown himself into art, hoping to find it a profession for the idle: the brush seemed a light tool to handle and he also believed that success would come easily. He dreamed of a life of fleshly pleasures, cheaply purchased, a life full of women, of resting on sofas, eating and getting drunk. The dream lasted as long as Old Laurent kept on supplying the readies; but when the young man, who was thirty by then, saw poverty looming, he started to think. He had no stomach for privation; he would not have gone through a single day without food for the greater glory of art. As he said, he let painting go to hell as soon as he realized that it would never satisfy his large appetites. His first attempts had been worse than mediocre: his peasant’s eye observed Nature as awkward and dirty; his canvases, muddy, badly composed and grimacing, were beneath criticism. In any event, his artistic ambition did not extend far and he was not too depressed when he had to put down his brushes. His only real regret was at leaving his schoolfriend’s studio, a huge studio in which he had lounged about so self-indulgently for four or five years. He did still miss the women who came there to pose, whose favours were within reach of his purse. This world of animal pleasures had left him with urgent lusts. None the less, he did enjoy his job as a clerk; where his basic needs were concerned, he lived very well, liking the routine work which took little out of him and lulled his mind. Only two things got on his nerves: the lack of women and the food in eighteen-sou restaurants which did not satisfy the cravings of his greedy stomach.

  Camille listened to him and looked at him with naïve astonishment. This feeble boy, whose soft, prostrate body had never felt a shudder of desire, childishly imagined the studio life that his friend was describing. He conjured up the spectacle of those women exhibiting their naked flesh. He questioned Laurent about it.

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘were there really women who took off their blouses in front of you like that?’

  ‘Certainly there were,’ Laurent replied, with a smile, looking at Thérèse, who had gone quite pale.

  ‘It must give you an odd feeling,’ Camille went on, with a childish titter. ‘I’d be embarrassed. The first time, you must have wondered where to look.’

  Laurent had opened up one of his large hands and was looking closely at the palm. His fingers trembled slightly and a flush of red rose to his cheeks.

  ‘The first time,’ he repeated, as though talking to himself, ‘I think I found it quite natural ... It’s great fun, that art game; just a pity it doesn’t pay ... As my model I had a redhead who was quite adorable: firm, gleaming flesh, superb bosom and hips as wide — ’

  Laurent looked up and saw Thérèse in front of him, silent and motionless. The young woman was staring at him intently. Her eyes, dull black, looked like two bottomless pits, and there were glimpses of pinkness shining in her mouth through half-open lips. She seemed to be hunched and gathered into herself; she was listening.

  Laurent looked alternately from Thérèse to Camille. The former painter suppressed a smile. He concluded his sentence with a gesture, a wide, voluptuous gesture that the young woman followed with her eyes. They were at the dessert and Mme Raquin had gone downstairs to attend to a customer.

  When the table had been cleared, Laurent, who had been thoughtful for a moment or two, suddenly turned to Camille.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I must paint your portrait.’

  Mme Raquin and her son were delighted by this idea. Thérèse remained silent.

  ‘It’s summer,’ Laurent went on. ‘So, as we get out of the office at four, I’ll come here and you can pose for me for two hours, in the evening. It will take a week.’

  ‘That’s it!’
said Camille, blushing with pleasure. ‘You can have dinner with us. I’ll have my hair curled and put on a black topcoat.’

  The clock struck eight. Grivet and Michaud arrived. Olivier and Suzanne came behind them.

  Camille introduced his friend to the company. Grivet pursed his lips. He disliked Laurent, because in his view he had been promoted too fast. In any case, it was no trivial matter bringing in a new guest. The Raquins’ circle could not make way for a newcomer without a little show of disapproval.

  Laurent behaved himself. He understood the situation and wanted to be liked, to be accepted at once. He told stories, cheered them all up with his loud laugh and even won over Grivet himself.

  That evening, Thérèse made no attempt to go down to the shop. She stayed on her chair until eleven, playing and chatting, avoiding Laurent’s eye; anyway, he took no notice of her. The young man’s sanguine nature, his resonant voice, his hearty laughter and the sharp, strong smells that he emitted disturbed the young woman and plunged her into a kind of nervous anxiety.

  VII

  From the start, the lovers considered their relationship to be necessary, inevitable and entirely natural. At their first meeting, they called each other ‘tu’1 and kissed without awkwardness or blushing, as though they had been intimate for several years. They settled easily into their new situation, quite calmly and shamelessly.

  They arranged meetings. Since Thérèse could not go out, it was decided that Laurent would go to her. In a precise, self-assured voice, the young woman explained what she had worked out. They would meet in the couple’s bedroom. The lover would arrive through the alleyway that led into the arcade and Thérèse would open the staircase door to him. In the meantime, Camille would be in his office and Mme Raquin down below in the shop. It was a bold plan and bound to succeed.