by Emile Zola
These were sweet and tranquil evenings. In the silence, in the warm, transparent half-light, friendly words passed between those pressed around the table; after dessert they spoke about the dozens of trivial events of the day, their memories of the past and their hopes for the future. Camille loved Laurent as much as such a self-satisfied egotist could love, and Laurent seemed to have an equal affection for him; they would exchange expressions of devotion, considerate gestures and looks of concern. Mme Raquin observed them with placid features, imbued the very air that they breathed with tranquillity, spreading her peace around her children. It looked like a reunion of old acquaintances who knew each other’s inmost thoughts and had total confidence in their friendship.
Thérèse, as still and peaceful as the rest, would study these bourgeois joys and this complacent indolence. And, in her inner depths, she laughed, savagely. Her whole being mocked, while her face retained its cold rigidity. She felt an exquisite pleasure in telling herself that, only a few hours earlier, she had been in the room next door, half naked, her hair loose, lying on Laurent’s chest; she remembered everything about her afternoon of insane desire, went through each detail in her mind’s eye and compared that passionate scene with the lifeless one before her eyes. Oh, how she was deceiving these good folk! And how happy she was to deceive them with such triumphal impudence! It was there, a few feet away, behind that thin partition, that she would greet her man; it was there that she would writhe in the grim throes of adultery. And, for that moment, her lover would become a stranger to her, a friend and colleague of her husband, a kind of imbecile, an intruder who did not have to concern her. This frightful play-acting, this life of deception and this contrast between the burning kisses of daytime and the feigned indifference of evening, made the young woman’s heart pound with new ardour.
When Mme Raquin and Camille went downstairs, for some reason or other, Thérèse would leap up and silently, with savage force, press her lips against those of her lover and stay like that, panting, suffocating, until she heard the wooden stairs creak. Then, with an agile movement, she went back to her place and resumed her grudging scowl. In a calm voice, Laurent carried on the chat he had been having with Camille. It was like a lightning flash of passion, swift, blinding, across a leaden sky.
On Thursdays, the evening would be a little more lively. Laurent was mortally bored on that day of the week and made sure that he did not miss a single meeting; he thought it prudent to be known and respected by Camille’s friends. He had to listen to the ramblings of Grivet and Old Michaud. Michaud would always tell the same stories of murder and theft, while Grivet spoke at the same time about his workmates, his bosses and his department. The young man would take refuge with Olivier and Suzanne, whose brand of idiocy he found less boring. In any case, he was not slow to suggest a game of dominoes.
It was on Thursday evening that Thérèse would settle the day and time of their meetings. In the confusion at the end, when Mme Raquin and Camille were taking their guests to the front door, the young woman would go up to Laurent and whisper to him, squeezing his hand. Sometimes, when everyone’s back was turned, she would even kiss him, from a kind of bravado.
This life of alternating storm and calm lasted for eight months. The lovers lived in a state of complete beatitude. Thérèse was no longer bored and no longer desired anything, while Laurent, sated, cosseted and even plumper, feared nothing except the end of this delightful existence.
IX
One afternoon, when Laurent was about to leave work and hurry off to see Thérèse, who was expecting him, his boss called him in and informed him that in future he was forbidden to go out of the office. He had been having too much time off and the management had decided to sack him if he was away one more time.
Tied to his desk, he was in desperation until the evening. He had to earn his living, he could not afford to lose his job. When evening came, Thérèse’s wrathful look was a torture for him. He had no idea how to explain to his mistress why he had failed in his promise. While Camille was shutting up shop, he quickly went over to the young woman.
‘We can’t see one another any more,’ he whispered. ‘My boss won’t let me out again.’
Camille came back and Laurent had to go without any further explanation, leaving Thérèse stunned by this abrupt remark. In exasperation, refusing to admit that her pleasure could be denied, she spent a sleepless night devising ridiculous plans for them to meet. The following Thursday, she talked to Laurent for a minute longer. Their anxiety was increased by the fact that they did not even know where to meet so that they could talk it over. The young woman gave her lover a new rendezvous which, for the second time, he failed to keep. From then on, she had only one idea in her mind, which was to see him at all costs.
For a fortnight, Laurent had not been able to go near Thérèse, and he realized how essential the woman had become to him. Indulging his lusts had created new appetites in him, which urgently demanded satisfaction. He no longer felt any awkwardness at his mistress’s love-making, but sought it with the determination of a starving animal. A raging of the blood had infected his flesh and now that his mistress was being taken away from him, his passion burst out with blind fury; he loved her to distraction. Everything in the blossoming of this animal being seemed unconscious: he was obeying his instincts, letting himself be driven by the will of his body. If anyone had told him, a year earlier, that he would be enslaved by a woman, to the point of destroying his peace of mind, he would have burst out laughing. Desire had been working silently inside him, without his realizing it, and had eventually cast him, bound hand and foot, into the savage embraces of Thérèse. Now he was afraid of stepping beyond the bounds of prudence and did not dare come to the Passage du Pont-Neuf in the evenings, fearful that he might do something crazy. He was no longer his own master; his mistress, with her feline sinuosity and nervous flexibility, had gradually insinuated herself into every fibre of his body. He needed that woman to live as one needs to eat and drink.
He would surely have done something foolish had he not received a letter from Thérèse telling him to stay at home the next day. His mistress promised to come and see him at around eight o’clock in the evening.
On leaving the office, he got rid of Camille by saying that he was tired and wanted to go back to bed straight away. After dinner, Thérèse also played a part; she said something about a customer who had left without paying, pretended to be a resolute creditor and announced that she was going to claim her money. The customer lived at Batignolles. Mme Raquin and Camille thought it was a long way to go and that the outcome was uncertain, but they were not excessively surprised and let Thérèse leave quietly.
She hurried to the Port aux Vins, slipping on the greasy pavements and bumping into people on the street in her haste. Her face was damp with sweat and her hands were burning; she was like a drunken woman. She quickly ran up the stairs in the lodging house. On the sixth floor, breathless, through blurred eyes, she saw Laurent leaning over the banisters, waiting for her.
She came into the garret. The space was so small that her wide skirts could hardly fit inside it. She tore off her hat with one hand and leaned against the bed, swooning ...
The skylight was wide open and poured the cool of the evening on to the burning heat of the bed. The lovers stayed for a long time in this hovel, as though at the bottom of a hole. Suddenly, Thérèse heard the clock on La Pitié1 strike ten. She wished she had been deaf. She raised herself painfully off the bed and looked round the garret, which she had not yet examined. She looked for her hat, tied the ribbons and sat down again, saying in a measured voice:
‘I have to go.’
Laurent had come over and was kneeling in front of her. He took her hands.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, without moving.
‘Don’t just say goodbye,’ he insisted. ‘That’s too vague. When will you come back?’
She looked straight in his eyes.
‘Do you want the truth?’ she s
aid. ‘Well, the truth is that I don’t think I shall come back. I don’t have any excuse, I can’t invent one.’
‘So we must say farewell, for good?’
‘No! I don’t want to!’
She spoke the words with a mixture of fury and terror. Then, without knowing what she was saying and without getting up, she added in a quieter voice:
‘I’m leaving.’
Laurent thought. His mind turned to Camille.
‘I’ve got nothing against him,’ he said finally, without saying the man’s name. ‘But he really is too much of a nuisance. Couldn’t you get rid of him for us, send him on a journey somewhere, a long way off?’
‘Oh, yes! Send him on a journey!’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘Do you think a man like that would agree to go on a journey? There’s only one journey from which no one returns ... But he will bury the lot of us. All those types with one foot in the grave never seem to die.’
There was a pause. Laurent remained on his knees, pressed against his mistress, his head leaning on her breast.
‘I had a dream,’ he said. ‘I wanted to spend a whole night with you, to go to sleep in your arms and wake up the next morning to your kisses. I want to be your husband ... Do you understand?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Thérèse answered, trembling.
She suddenly leaned over Laurent’s face, covering it with kisses. The laces on her hat caught on the young man’s rough beard; she had forgotten that she was dressed and that she would crease her clothes. She was sobbing, panting as she murmured between her tears.
‘Don’t say such things,’ she said. ‘Don’t say such things, because I won’t have the strength to leave you, I’ll stay here ... You should give me courage. Tell me that we’ll see one another again. It’s true, isn’t it: you do need me? One day we’ll find a way of living together, won’t we?’
‘So come back, come back tomorrow,’ Laurent insisted, his trembling hands stroking her waist.
‘But I can’t come back ... I told you, I don’t have any excuse.’
She was wringing her hands. She continued:
‘It’s not the scandal that bothers me! If you like, when I get home, I’ll tell Camille that you are my lover and I’ll come back here to sleep ... I’m worried about you. I don’t want to upset your life, I want to make you happy.’
The young man’s instinctive caution came to the fore.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t behave like children. Now, if your husband were to die ...’
‘If my husband were to die,’ Thérèse repeated slowly.
‘We would get married, we wouldn’t fear a thing, we would revel in our love ... What a good, sweet life it would be!’
She was sitting up now, her cheeks pale, looking with dark eyes at her lover. Her lips were twitching.
‘People do die sometimes,’ she murmured, at length. ‘Only, it’s dangerous for those who survive.’
Laurent said nothing.
‘You see,’ she went on, ‘all the usual methods are no good.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m not a fool, I want to love you in peace. I was just thinking that accidents do happen every day, that a foot can slip or a tile fall off the roof ... Do you understand? In that last case, only the wind is to blame.’
His voice was strange. He gave a smile and added, in a caressing tone:
‘Now then, don’t worry, we’ll love one another, we shall live together happily ... Since you can’t come here, I’ll arrange it somehow ... If we should stay without seeing one another for several months, don’t forget me, but know that I am working for our happiness.’
He put his arms around Thérèse as she was opening the door to go.
‘You are mine, aren’t you?’ he went on. ‘Swear to me that you will give yourself to me entirely, at any time, whenever I want — ’
‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘I belong to you. Do what you wish with me.’
They stayed there for a moment, fierce, wild and silent. Then Thérèse roughly tore herself away from him and, without turning round, left the attic and went down the stairs. Laurent listened to the sound of her receding footsteps.
When the sound had died away, he went back into his little room and lay down. The bedclothes were warm. He felt suffocated in this narrow cage, which Thérèse had left full of the heat of her passion. He seemed to be still breathing something of her, she had been there, leaving behind a pervasive scent of herself, a smell of violets; but now all he had to press in his arms was his mistress’s intangible ghost, present all around him; he was in a fever of reviving, unsatisfied desire. He did not close the window, but lay on his back, his arms bare and his hands unclenched, drinking in the cool air, while pondering it all as he gazed at the square of dark blue outlined above him by the skylight.
Until daybreak, he turned the same idea over in his mind. Before Thérèse came, he had not considered the murder of Camille. It was under pressure of events, annoyed at the idea of not seeing his mistress again, that he had spoken about the man’s death. And, at that, a new corner of his unconscious being had come to light. In the passion of adultery, he had begun to dream about killing.
Now, calmer, alone in the peace of night, he was reviewing the notion of murder. The idea of death, uttered in desperation between two kisses, came back keenly, relentlessly. Driven by insomnia, aroused by the pungent scents that Thérèse had left behind, he devised traps, working out what could go wrong and enumerating all the benefits to be derived from becoming a murderer.
He had everything to gain from the crime. He told himself that his father, the peasant in Jeufosse, was never going to die; he might have to spend another ten years working in the department, eating in cheap restaurants and living, without a wife, in an attic. The idea infuriated him. On the other hand, with Camille dead, he would marry Thérèse, become the heir to Mme Raquin, resign from his job and stroll around in the sunshine. It pleased him to imagine this lazy existence; he could already see himself as a man of leisure, eating and sleeping, waiting patiently for his father to die. And when reality invaded his dream, he bumped into Camille and clenched his fists, as though to strike him down.
Laurent wanted Thérèse. He wanted her for himself alone, always within reach. If he did not get rid of the husband, the wife would elude him. She had told him that she could not come back. He would happily have kidnapped her and carried her off somewhere, but then they would both die of hunger. There was less risk in killing the husband. There would be no scandal, he would just push a man out of the way in order to take his place. With his brutal peasant reasoning, he considered this solution both an excellent and a natural one. It was in fact his innate prudence that suggested adopting this quick expedient.
He lay sprawling on his bed, flat on his belly, pressing his damp face into the pillow where Thérèse’s chignon had spread. He grasped the material between his dry lips and drank in the faint scents still clinging to it; and he stayed there, breathless, panting, watching strips of fire cross his closed eyelids. He was wondering how he could kill Camille. Then, when he was out of breath, he would suddenly turn round until he was lying on his back, eyes wide open, with the cold air from the window full on his face, as he stared up at the stars and at the bluish square of sky, seeking for advice on murder, a plan for how to kill.
Nothing came to him. As he had told his mistress, he was not a child or an idiot. He did not want to use a dagger or poison. He needed a sly, cunning sort of crime, one that involved no danger, a kind of sinister snuffing out, without screams or terror — a simple disappearance. Even though he was shaken and driven forward by passion, his whole being imperiously demanded caution. He was too much of a coward, too much of a sensualist, to risk his own tranquillity. He was killing in order to live in peace and happiness.
Little by little, sleep overcame him. The cold air had driven the warm, sweet-smelling ghost of Thérèse out of the attic. Exhausted, calmed, Laurent allowed a kind of vague, gentle numbnes
s to sweep over him. As he was falling asleep, he decided to wait for a suitable opportunity, and his mind, growing drowsier and drowsier, cradled him with the thought: ‘I shall kill him, I shall kill him.’ In five minutes, he was at rest, breathing with untroubled regularity.
Thérèse had got home at eleven. She arrived at the Passage du Pont-Neuf, her head burning and her mind racing, without any knowledge of the journey she had taken. Her ears were so full of the words she had heard that she felt as though she had just come down the stairs from Laurent’s room. She found Mme Raquin and Camille anxious and full of concern. She answered all their questions curtly, telling them that she had had a useless journey and stayed for an hour waiting for an omnibus.
When she got into bed, the clothes felt cold and damp. Her limbs, still burning, shivered in repulsion. Camille soon went to sleep and for a long time Thérèse looked at the pale face idiotically resting on the pillow, with its mouth open. She moved away from him and felt an urge to stick her clenched fist into that mouth.
X
Almost three weeks went by. Laurent came back to the shop every evening. He seemed weary, as though sick. There was a faint, bluish circle around his eyes, while his lips were pale and cracked. But otherwise, he still had his usual heavy passivity about him; he looked Camille straight in the face and behaved in the same open, friendly way. Mme Raquin spoiled the family friend even more, seeing him relapse into a sort of dull fever.
Thérèse had resumed her dumb, sullen look. She was more unmoving, more impenetrable and more passive than ever. It seemed that Laurent did not exist for her; she hardly glanced at him, spoke to him only occasionally and treated him with utter indifference. Mme Raquin, whose good nature was pained by this attitude, would sometimes tell the young man: ‘Take no notice of my niece’s coldness. Her face looks unfriendly, I know, but her heart is warm with every kind of affection and devotion.’