Thérèse Raquin

by Emile Zola

  The young man went on, more uneasy and more anxious:

  ‘We’ve managed it, Thérèse, we’ve overcome all the obstacles and we belong to one another ... The future is ours, isn’t it? A future of quiet happiness and satisfied love ... Camille is gone ...’

  Laurent paused, his throat dry, choking, unable to continue. Camille’s name had been like a blow in the stomach for Thérèse. The two murderers looked at each other, pale, haggard and shaking. The yellow light from the fire was still flickering on the walls and ceiling, the warm scent of roses hung in the air and the crackling of the firewood broke the silence with its dry little sounds.

  Their memories were unleashed. Once Camille’s ghost had been raised, he came to sit between the two newlyweds, opposite the blazing fire. Thérèse and Laurent could sense the cold, damp smell of the drowned man in the hot air that they breathed. They felt that there was a corpse beside them and they looked carefully at each other without daring to move. And now the whole dreadful story of their crime unfolded in their minds. The victim’s name was enough to fill them with the past and force them to relive the horror of the killing. They looked at one another without opening their mouths, both having the same nightmare, at the same time, and both reading the same cruel story in each other’s eyes. This terrified exchange of looks, and the silent account of the murder that they were about to give each other, caused them a feeling of acute, intolerable apprehension. Their fraught nerves threatened to break: they might easily cry out or even come to blows. To drive the memories away, Laurent violently subdued the horrified fascination that held him in the grasp of Thérèse’s eyes and walked a few steps around the room. He took off his boots and put on some slippers. Then he came back and sat beside the fire, trying to talk about things of no importance.

  Thérèse understood what he wanted. She made an effort to answer his questions. They chatted about this and that. They forced themselves to make idle conversation. Laurent said it was hot in the room; Thérèse replied that there was, however, a draught coming under the little door to the staircase. And they suddenly turned towards the little door with a shudder. The man quickly started to talk about the roses, the fire, anything he could see. The young woman made an effort, answering in monosyllables, so as not to let the conversation flag. They had drawn away from one another, trying to forget who they were and to treat each other as strangers brought together by chance.

  Yet, despite themselves, by some strange phenomenon, even while they were speaking these empty words, each of them guessed the thoughts that the other was concealing beneath these commonplaces. They could not stop thinking about Camille. Their eyes carried on with the story of the past and their looks held a coherent, silent conversation beneath the aimlessly wandering one that they were speaking aloud. The words that they randomly uttered did not hang together, but contradicted themselves; their whole beings were concentrated on the silent exchange of memories. When Laurent spoke about the roses or the fire, of one thing or another, Thérèse perfectly well understood that he was reminding her of the struggle in the boat and the dull thud as Camille hit the water; and when Thérèse replied ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to some insignificant question, Laurent realized that she was telling him that she did, or did not, recall some detail of the crime. So they talked, unreservedly, without needing words, while speaking of something else. And since, in any case, they were not aware of the words that they were speaking, they followed their secret thoughts, sentence by sentence, and could easily have switched to telling their secret thoughts out loud, without ceasing to understand one another. Bit by bit, this sort of divination, and the persistence with which their memories constantly presented them with the image of Camille, started to drive them mad. They realized that they were following each other’s thoughts, and that if they did not stop, the words would come of their own accord into their mouths and name the drowned man and describe the murder. So they clenched their teeth and ceased their conversation.

  In the heavy silence that followed, the two murderers kept on discussing their victim. It seemed to them that their looks were penetrating each other’s flesh and driving in sharp, clear statements. At times, they thought they could hear one another speaking aloud; their senses were distorted and sight became a kind of hearing, strange and fine; so clearly could they read their thoughts on the other’s face, that these thoughts acquired a strange, resonant sound that shook their whole bodies. They could not have heard one another more clearly had they each screamed in a deafening voice: ‘We killed Camille and his corpse is lying there between us, turning our limbs to ice.’ And their frightful confession continued, ever more visible, ever more resounding, in the calm, damp air of the room.

  Laurent and Thérèse had begun the silent story on the day of their first meeting in the shop. Then the memories came one by one, in chronological order: they told each other about the hours of pleasure, the moments of uncertainty and anger, and the dreadful instant of the murder. This is when they clenched their teeth and stopped talking about trivial matters, through fear of suddenly naming Camille without wanting to. But their thoughts did not stop, taking them afterwards into the anxiety and the fearful time of waiting that followed the murder. So it was that they came to think of the drowned man’s body lying on a slab in the Morgue. In his look, Laurent told Thérèse about his horror and Thérèse, driven to the limit, forced by some iron hand to open her lips, suddenly continued the conversation aloud:

  ‘Did you see him in the Morgue?’ she asked Laurent, without naming Camille.

  Laurent seemed to be expecting the question. He had read it a moment earlier on the young woman’s white face.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, in a choked voice.

  The murderers shuddered. They drew closer to the fire and reached out their hands towards the flame, as though an icy draught had suddenly passed through the warm room. They stayed there for a moment in silence, crouching, curled up. Then Thérèse went on softly:

  ‘Did he seem to have suffered a lot?’

  Laurent could not reply. He made a horrified gesture, as though putting aside some ghastly vision. He got up, went over to the bed, them came back wildly, walking towards Thérèse with his arms open.

  ‘Kiss me,’ he said, offering her his neck.

  Thérèse had got up, looking pale1 in her nightclothes. She was leaning back, with one elbow resting on the marble mantelpiece. She looked at Laurent’s neck. She had just noticed a pink patch on the white skin. A rush of blood to his head made the patch larger and coloured it a fiery red.

  ‘Kiss me, kiss me,’ Laurent repeated, his face and neck burning.

  The young woman bent her head further back, to avoid his kiss, and, putting the end of one finger on Camille’s bite, asked her husband:

  ‘What’s this? I didn’t know you had a scar there.’

  Laurent felt as though Thérèse’s finger was making a hole in his throat. As it touched him, he quickly started back, with a soft cry of pain.

  ‘That ...’ he stammered. ‘That...’

  He hesitated, but could not lie and told her the truth in spite of himself.

  ‘Camille bit me, you know, in the boat. It’s nothing, it’s healed ... Kiss me, kiss me.’

  The wretch held out his burning neck. He wanted Thérèse to kiss him on the scar, counting on the woman’s kiss to calm the thousand stings piercing his flesh. With his chin up, advancing his neck, he offered himself. Thérèse, almost lying back on the mantelpiece, made a gesture of extreme distaste and exclaimed in a pleading voice:

  ‘Oh, no! Not there! There’s blood on it.’

  She fell back into the low chair, trembling and holding her head in her hands. Laurent was stunned. He lowered his chin and looked vaguely at Thérèse. Then, suddenly, he grasped her head in his large hands with the ferocity of a wild animal and pressed her lips against his neck, on Camille’s bite. For a moment, he kept the woman’s head crushed against him. Thérèse did not struggle, but gave dull cries, stifling against L
aurent’s neck. When she could get away from his grip, she wiped her mouth savagely and spat into the fireplace. She had not spoken a word.

  Ashamed at his brutality, Laurent began to walk slowly, between the bed and the window. Only the pain, the horrible smarting pain, had made him demand a kiss from Thérèse, and when Thérèse’s lips had proved to be cold against his burning scar, he suffered even more. This kiss, obtained by violence, had broken him. The shock had been so painful that nothing in the world would have made him want another of the same. And he looked at the wife with whom he would have to live, who was shuddering, bent over the fire, with her back turned towards him. He kept thinking that he no longer loved this woman and that she no longer loved him. For almost an hour, Thérèse stayed slumped in her chair while Laurent walked backwards and forwards, in silence. Each of them was admitting, in terror, that their passion had died, that they had killed their desire for one another when they killed Camille. The fire gently died down and a great, pink mass of embers glowed in the grate. Little by little, the heat in the room had become suffocating and the flowers were fading, weighing on the thick air with their heavy scents.

  Suddenly, Laurent thought he experienced a hallucination. As he was turning to go from the window back to the bed, he saw Camille, in a corner plunged in shadow between the fireplace and the wardrobe. His victim’s face was greenish in colour and convulsed, as it had been on the slab in the Morgue. He stayed, rooted to the spot, faint and supporting himself on a piece of furniture. Hearing his dull moan, Thérèse looked up.

  ‘There!’ Laurent said in a terrified voice. ‘There!’

  He stretched out his hand, pointing to the dark corner in which he could see Camille’s sinister face. Thérèse, seized with the same terror, came over and pressed herself to him.

  ‘It’s his portrait,’ she muttered, in a whisper, as though the painted face of her husband could hear what she was saying.

  ‘His portrait?’ Laurent said, his hair standing on end.

  ‘Yes, you know, the painting you did. My aunt was going to have it in her room from today. She must have forgotten to take it down.’

  ‘Of course, his portrait ...’

  For a time, the murderer did not recognize the picture. He was so disturbed by it that he forgot that he had himself drawn the clumsy outlines of those features and filled in the dirty colours that now appalled him. Terror made him see the canvas as it really was: crude, badly composed and muddy, showing the grimacing face of a corpse against its black background. His work astonished him and crushed him with its atrocious ugliness. Worst of all were the two white eyes swimming in their soft, yellowish sockets, which precisely reminded him of the decaying eyes of the drowned man in the Morgue. For a moment, he could not catch his breath, thinking that Thérèse was lying to reassure him. Then he made out the frame and became a little calmer.

  ‘Go and take him down,’ he said softly to the young woman.

  ‘No, no! I’m too afraid!’ she replied, shuddering.

  Laurent himself started to shake again. At times, the frame vanished and all he could see were the two white eyes staring hard at him.

  ‘I beg you,’ he said again, imploring her. ‘Go and take him down.’

  ‘No, no!’

  ‘We’ll turn him to the wall and then we won’t be afraid.’

  ‘No, I can’t do it.’

  The murderer, cowardly and grovelling, pushed the young woman towards the picture, hiding behind her so as to escape the drowned man’s gaze. She dodged away and he decided to take the plunge: he went over to the painting and reached up, feeling for the nail. But the look of the portrait was so devastating, so foul and so unremitting, that Laurent, after trying to outstare it, had to admit defeat and shrank back, muttering: ‘No, Thérèse, you’re right. We can’t do it ... Your aunt will take it down tomorrow.’

  He went back to walking up and down, hanging his head and feeling that the portrait was watching him, following him with its eyes. From time to time, he could not resist taking a look towards it, and then, in the depths of the shadow, he would still see the dead, flat stare of the drowned man. The thought that Camille was there, in a corner, keeping an eye on him, and present on his wedding night, examining the two of them, Thérèse and himself, made Laurent completely mad with terror and despair.

  One event, which would have brought a smile to anyone else’s lips, drove him entirely out of his mind. When he was in front of the fireplace, he heard a sort of scratching noise. The blood drained from his face: he thought that the scratching was coming from the portrait and that Camille was getting down out of his frame. Then he realized that the noise was coming from the little door leading to the staircase. He looked at Thérèse, who was again seized by fear.

  ‘There’s someone on the stairs,’ he murmured. ‘Who can be coming through there?’

  The young woman said nothing. Both of them were thinking about the drowned man and an icy sweat broke out on their brows. They fled to the back of the room, expecting to see the door open suddenly and the corpse of Camille fall through it on to the floor. The noise continued, sharper and less regular, so that it seemed to them that their victim was scratching at the wood with his fingernails, trying to get in. For more than five minutes, they did not dare move. Finally, there was a miaow. Laurent went across and saw Mme Raquin’s tabby cat, which had been shut into the bedroom by mistake and was trying to get out by scraping the little door with its claws. François was afraid of Laurent. In a bound, he leaped on to a chair, then, his hair on end and paws stiff, he gave his new master a hard, cruel stare. The young man did not like cats and François almost scared him. In this moment of fear and anguish, he thought the cat was going to leap at his face, to avenge Camille. The creature must know everything: there were thoughts behind those round, oddly dilated eyes. Laurent looked down, away from this animal’s stare. He was about to give François a kick, when Thérèse shouted:

  ‘Don’t hurt him!’

  Her cry gave him an odd feeling and a ridiculous idea came into his head:

  ‘Camille has entered into the cat,’ he thought. ‘I must kill this animal. It looks human.’

  He did not kick it, afraid that François would speak to him with Camille’s voice. Then he remembered how Thérèse had joked, when they were lovers and the cat had seen them kissing; so it occurred to him that the cat knew too much and had to be thrown out of the window. But he did not have the courage to carry this through. Franqois was still in an aggressive posture: with his claws out and his back arched by some vague annoyance, it was following its enemy’s slightest movement with proud imperturbability. Laurent was upset by the metallic shine of its eyes. He hastily opened the dining-room door and the cat ran out with a sharp miaow.

  Thérèse had sat down again in front of the dead fire. Laurent resumed his pacing from the bed to the window. And that is how they waited for daylight. They did not think to go to bed together: their flesh and their hearts were quite dead. They had only one desire: to get out of this room that was stifling them. They had a real sense of unease at being shut in together, breathing the same air. They would have liked to have someone else there, to interrupt their tête-à-tête and free them from the cruelly embarrassing situation of being together without speaking and unable to revive their passion for each other. The long silences tortured them, silences full of bitter, desperate sighs and unspoken accusations that they could clearly hear in the still air.

  At last, day came, dirty, whitish, bringing a biting cold.

  When the room was filled with pale light, Laurent shivered, but felt calmer. He looked straight at Camille’s portrait and saw it for what it was, ordinary, childish. With a shrug, he took it down, calling himself an idiot. Thérèse had got up and was undoing the bed, to deceive her aunt and make her think they had spent a joyful night together.

  ‘Now then,’ Laurent said roughly. ‘I hope we’re going to get some sleep tonight. This childishness can’t continue.’

  Th
érèse gave him a serious, penetrating look.

  ‘You understand?’ he went on. ‘I didn’t get married so that I would have sleepless nights. We’re behaving like children. It was you who upset me, with your supernatural airs. Tonight, try to be jolly and not to put the wind up me.’

  He forced a laugh, without knowing why he was laughing.

  ‘I’ll try,’ Thérèse said, in a dull voice.

  That is how Thérèse and Laurent spent their wedding night.

  XXII

  The following nights were even more anguished. The murderers had wanted to be together at night, to ward off the drowned man; yet, by some strange effect, since being together they had feared him even more. They exasperated one another, they got on each other’s nerves, they suffered ghastly crises of terror and agony when they exchanged a simple word or a look. At the merest conversation, the slightest private exchange between them, they saw red, they flew into a rage.

  Thérèse’s dry, nervous character had reacted in an odd way with the stolid, sanguine character of Laurent. Previously, in the days of their passion, this contrast in temperament had made this man and woman into a powerfully linked couple by establishing a sort of balance between them and, so to speak, complementing their organisms. The lover contributed his blood and the mistress her nerves, and so they lived in one another, each needing the other’s kisses to regulate the mechanism of their being. But the equilibrium had been disturbed and Thérèse’s over-excited nerves had taken control. Suddenly, Laurent found himself plunged into a state of nervous erethism;1 under the influence of her fervent nature, his own temperament had gradually become that of a girl suffering from an acute neurosis. It would be interesting to study the changes that are sometimes produced in certain organisms as a result of particular circumstances. These changes, which derive from the flesh, are rapidly communicated to the brain and to the entire being.

  Before knowing Thérèse, Laurent had the ponderousness, the prudent calm and sanguine outlook of a peasant’s son. He slept, ate and drank like an animal. At every moment, in every circumstance of his daily life, he breathed easily and placidly, content with himself and somewhat dulled by his own bulk. Hardly at all did he feel the occasional stirring in the depths of his stolid flesh. But Thérèse had developed those stirrings into frightful shudders. In this great body, soft and flabby, she had nurtured a nervous system of astonishing sensibility. Laurent had formerly enjoyed life through his blood rather than his nerves; now his senses became less crude. At his mistress’s first kiss, he had suddenly been made aware of a life of the emotions that was quite new and moving for him. This life increased his sensual pleasure tenfold and gave such an intense nature to his joy that at first he was made virtually mad by it, and abandoned himself wildly to extremes of intoxication that his sanguine temperament had never given him. Then, he underwent a strange internal process: his nerves developed and came to dominate the sanguine element in him, this fact by itself changing his character. He lost his calm and his heaviness, no longer living a half-awake existence. A time came when the nerves and the blood balanced each other out, and this was a profoundly pleasurable moment, a time of perfect living.2 Then the nerves dominated and he fell into the paroxysms that rack unbalanced minds and bodies.