Thérèse Raquin

by Emile Zola

  For two days, she refused all food, using the last of her strength to clench her teeth and spit out what they managed to get into her mouth. Thérèse was in despair. She wondered where she could kneel and weep in repentance when her aunt was no longer there. She talked endlessly to her, to convince her that she should live; she wept, she even grew angry, as she had done in the past, opening the paralysed woman’s jaws as one does the jaws of an animal that does not want to be fed. Mme Raquin held firm. The struggle was appalling.

  Laurent maintained an attitude of perfect neutrality and indifference. He was amazed by the violent efforts that Thérèse put into preventing the cripple’s suicide. Now that the old woman’s presence was no longer useful to them, he wanted her to die. He would not have killed her himself, but since she wished for death, he saw no need to deny her the means to achieve her goal.

  ‘Oh, leave her!’ he would shout at his wife. ‘Good riddance. Perhaps we will be happier when she is not here any more.’

  This last remark, which he often repeated in front of her, aroused strange emotions in Mme Raquin. She was afraid that Laurent’s hopes would be fulfilled, and that after her death the couple would enjoy tranquil, happy days. She told herself that it was cowardly to die and that she had no right to go before she had seen the sinister adventure through to its end. Only then could she go down into the shades and tell Camille: ‘You are avenged.’ The thought of suicide began to weigh on her when she suddenly considered the unknowns that she would take into the tomb: there, amid the cold and silence of the earth she would sleep, eternally racked by doubts about the punishment of her tormentors. To sleep properly the sleep of death, she had to lapse into insensibility feeling the sharp joy of revenge; she had to take with her a dream of hatred satisfied, one that she would dream throughout eternity. She took the food that her niece brought her and agreed to carry on living.

  In any case, she saw that the end could not be far away. Every day the couple’s situation became more tense and more unbearable. They were heading quickly towards a crisis that would destroy them both. Day by day, Thérèse and Laurent took up ever more threatening positions towards one another. It was not only at night that their intimacy tortured them: their whole days were spent in crises of self-destructive agony. Everything brought terror and suffering to them. They lived in a hell, wounding one another, making whatever they did and said bitter and cruel, each hoping to drive the other towards the gulf that they could feel before their feet, and falling into it together.

  Both of them had had the idea of separating. Each in turn had dreamed of running away to enjoy some rest far from this Passage du Pont-Neuf where the damp and dirt seemed to have been designed especially for their desolate existence. But they did not dare, they could not escape. The thought of not rending each other apart, of not staying there to suffer and inflict suffering, seemed impossible to them. They were obstinate in their hatred and cruelty. A sort of attraction and repulsion drove them asunder and kept them together at the same time. They felt that peculiar sensation of two people who, after an argument, want to separate, yet keep on coming back to shout fresh insults at one another. Then there were material obstacles to flight: they did not know what to do with the cripple, or what to say to their Thursday guests. If they fled, people might suspect something: they imagined being hunted down and guillotined. So they stayed, out of cowardice; they stayed and grovelled in the horror of their existence.

  When Laurent was not there, during the mornings and afternoons, Thérèse would go from the dining room to the shop, gnawed by anxiety, not knowing how to fill the void that every day sank deeper in her. She was at a loose end when not weeping at Mme Raquin’s feet or being beaten and insulted by her husband. As soon as she was alone in the shop, a sense of despondency overcame her: she would look out numbly at the people going up and down the dirty, black arcade, and become mortally depressed in the depths of this dark tomb stinking of the graveyard. Eventually, she asked Suzanne to come and spend whole days with her, hoping that the presence of this sad creature, all soft and pale, would calm her nerves.

  Suzanne gleefully accepted the offer. She still felt a kind of respectful friendship towards Thérèse, and had long wanted to come and work with her while Olivier was in his office. She brought along her embroidery and took up Mme Raquin’s empty place behind the counter.

  From that day on, Thérèse left her aunt more alone. She went up less often to weep on her knees and kiss her dead cheeks. She had something else to occupy her. She made an effort to listen to Suzanne’s slow chattering on about her family and the trivialities of her monotonous life. It took Thérèse out of herself. She was sometimes surprised to find herself getting interested in some nonsense and would later smile bitterly to herself over it.

  Little by little, she lost all the customers who used to come to the shop. Since her aunt had become immobilized upstairs in her chair, she let the shop go to the dogs, abandoning the goods to dust and damp. There was a smell of mould about the place, cobwebs hung from the ceiling and the floor was hardly ever brushed. Apart from that, what drove the customers away was the strange manner in which Thérèse would sometimes greet them. When she was upstairs, being beaten by Laurent or seized by a fit of terror, and the bell on the shop door tinkled imperiously, she would have to go down, almost without taking the time to tie up her hair and wipe away her tears. On such occasions she would serve the waiting customer brusquely and often not even take the trouble to serve her, shouting down from the top of the wooden staircase that she no longer had whatever the customer wanted. This offhand treatment was not calculated to retain the clientele. The little girls who worked in the district were used to the gentle manners of Mme Raquin and took themselves elsewhere when they got Thérèse’s rough treatment and mad looks. And when Thérèse took Suzanne in with her, the exodus was complete: the two young women did not want to be disturbed in their gossiping and made sure they drove off the last few customers who were still bothering to turn up. From then on the haberdashery business no longer contributed a single sou to the household budget and they had to break into the capital of forty or so thousand francs.

  Sometimes, Thérèse would go out for a whole afternoon at a time. No one knew where she went. She must have taken on Suzanne not only to keep her company but also to keep shop while she was away. In the evening, when she came back exhausted, her eyelids black with fatigue, she would find Olivier’s little wife hunched behind the counter, smiling a vague smile and sitting exactly as she had left her five hours earlier.

  Five months after her wedding, Thérèse had a scare. She became convinced that she was pregnant. The idea of having a child by Laurent appalled her, though she could not explain why. She was vaguely afraid that she might give birth to a drowned baby. She thought she could feel the cold of a soft, rotting corpse in her womb. She wanted at any cost to get rid of this child that was chilling her and which she could not carry any longer. She said nothing to her husband, but one day, after she had severely provoked him, he began to kick her and she offered him her belly. She let him kick her almost to death and the next day she had a miscarriage.

  Laurent, for his part, was leading a dreadful existence. The days seemed unbearably long to him, each one bringing the same anxieties, the same heavy tedium, which would settle on him at particular moments with a deadening monotony and punctuality. He dragged himself through life, horrified every evening by the memory of the last day and anticipation of the next. He knew that from now on all his days would be alike and each would bring the same suffering. He could see the weeks, months and years awaiting him, dark and pitiless, coming one after another to settle on him and stifle him. When there is no hope for the future, the present acquires a vile, bitter taste. There was no rebellion left in Laurent; he slumped and gave himself up to the void that was already starting to possess his being. The idleness was killing him. First thing in the morning, he would go out, wandering aimlessly, sickened by the thought of doing the same thing as he
had done the day before, and forced despite himself to repeat it. He would go to his studio, from force of habit, obsessively. This grey-walled room, out of which you could see only an empty square of sky, filled him with melancholy sadness. He would fling himself down on the divan, his arms dangling and his thoughts leaden. In any case, he did not dare to touch a brush now. He had made some fresh attempts and Camille’s face had always sniggered at him from the canvas. To avoid lapsing into insanity, he eventually threw his box of paints into a corner and abandoned himself to the most utter laziness. He found this imposed idleness incredibly hard to bear.

  In the afternoon, he would rack his brains to think of something to do. He would spend half an hour on the pavement in the Rue Mazarine wondering about it, hesitating between the various forms of entertainment that he might choose. He rejected the idea of going back to his studio and would always decide to go down the Rue Guénégaud, then walk along the banks of the Seine. So until evening he would carry straight on, in a daze, shivering suddenly from time to time when he looked at the river. Whether he was in his studio or in the street, he felt the same oppression. The next day, he would start all over again, spending the morning on his divan and, in the afternoon, wandering along the river bank. This had lasted for months and could go on for years.

  Sometimes it occurred to Laurent that he had killed Camille in order to enjoy a life of leisure, and he was quite astonished, now that he did have nothing to do, to be enduring such misery. He would have liked to oblige himself to be happy. He would prove to himself that he had no reason to suffer, that he had just achieved the height of happiness, which consists in folding one’s arms, and that he was an idiot not to indulge tranquilly in such bliss. But his arguments collapsed in the face of reality. Inside, he was forced to admit that idleness made his sufferings even worse, leaving him every moment of his life to think about his despair and experience its incurable bitterness. Laziness, the animal existence that he had dreamed of, was his punishment. There were times when he eagerly longed for some occupation that would take him out of himself. Then he would let himself go and abandon himself to the dull fate that bound his limbs, all the better to crush him.

  In truth, he felt some release only when he was beating Thérèse in the evenings. This gave him relief from the dull ache inside.

  His worst suffering, one that was both mental and physical, came from the bite that Camille had inflicted on his neck. There were times when he imagined that this scar covered his whole body. If he did manage to forget the past, he would seem to feel a sharp pricking, which brought the murder back to his flesh and into his mind. He could not stand in front of a mirror without seeing the phenomenon that he had so often noticed, one that never failed to terrify him: the emotion that he felt would have the effect of bringing the blood up to his neck, making the scar purple and causing it to eat into his flesh. This sort of living wound that he had on him, which would awake, redden and gnaw at the slightest hint of anxiety, terrified and tortured him. He came to believe that the drowned man’s teeth had buried some creature there that was devouring him. He felt that the piece of his neck with the scar on it no longer belonged to his body; it was like some alien flesh that had been stuck on in that place, like poisoned meat rotting his own muscles away. In this way he carried the living, devouring memory of his crime everywhere with him. When he used to beat Thérèse, she would try to scratch him on that spot; sometimes her nails would dig into it, making him scream with pain. Usually, she would sob when she saw the bite, to make it even more unbearable for Laurent. Her whole revenge for his brutality towards her was to torment him with the help of that bite.

  Often when he was shaving he had been tempted to cut into his neck in order to remove the marks of the drowned man’s teeth. Looking into the mirror, when he lifted up his chin and saw the red mark under the white shaving soap, he would be seized with sudden fury and bring the razor quickly across, ready to cut into the living flesh. But the cold of the instrument on his neck1 always brought him back to his senses. He would feel faint and have to sit down and wait until his cowardice had been appeased enough for him to continue shaving.

  In the evening, he would emerge from his lethargy only to launch into an outburst of blind, puerile anger. When he was tired of quarrelling with Thérèse and beating her, he would kick out at the wall, like a child, looking for something to break. This would relieve his feelings. He had a particular loathing of François, the tabby cat, who as soon as he came in would take refuge on the paralysed woman’s lap. If Laurent had not yet killed it, this was only because he did not dare to pick it up. The cat would look at him with large, round eyes, staring diabolically. It was these eyes, constantly settled on him, that drove the young man mad: he wondered what they meant, these eyes, forever looking in his direction, and in the end he really got the wind up and imagined some ridiculous things. When he was sitting at the table he would abruptly turn round at any time, in the midst of a quarrel or a long silence, to see François’s look examining him in this serious, implacable manner, then he would go pale and lose his head. He was on the point of yelling: ‘Hey! Say something! Tell me what you want, for once.’ When he managed to tread on a paw or on the cat’s tail, he did so with savage joy, but then the poor creature’s miaowing filled him with a vague sense of horror, as though he had heard a person cry out in pain. Laurent was literally afraid of François, especially since the cat had taken to living on the old woman’s knees, as though inside an impregnable fortress from which he could fix his green eyes with impunity on his enemy, Camille’s murderer, who found some resemblance between the cat and the paralysed woman. He told himself that the cat, like Mme Raquin, knew about the crime and would denounce him some day if he were ever to speak.

  Finally, one evening, François was staring so hard at Laurent that the latter, driven to exasperation, decided that enough was enough. He opened wide the dining-room window and went over to grasp the cat by the skin of its neck. Mme Raquin understood, and two large tears ran down her cheeks. The cat started to snarl and hiss, stiffening itself and trying to turn round to bite Laurent’s hand. But he did not let go. He whirled the cat around his head a couple of times, then smashed it as hard as he could against the great black wall opposite. François struck it and, his back broken, fell on to the glass roof of the arcade. Throughout the whole of that night, the wretched animal dragged itself along the gutter, its spine fractured, making harsh miaowing noises. That night, Mme Raquin mourned François almost as much as she had done Camille, and Thérèse had a dreadful nervous crisis. The cat’s moans in the darkness under their windows were quite sinister.

  Soon Laurent had new things to worry him. He was disturbed by certain changes that he noted in his wife’s attitude.

  Thérèse became sombre and taciturn. She no longer smothered Mme Raquin with her repentance and her grateful kisses, but instead resumed her old attitude of cold cruelty and self-centred indifference towards the paralysed woman. It was as though she had tried remorse and, when that failed to relieve her pain, had turned towards other remedies. No doubt her sadness came from her inability to find peace in her life. She looked at the cripple with a sort of contempt, like some useless object that could not even serve to console her any longer. She attended to her as little as possible, short of letting her die of hunger. From that moment on, she dragged herself around the house, silent and depressed; and she started to go out more often, staying away as many as four or five times a week.

  These changes surprised and alarmed Laurent. He thought that remorse was taking a new form in Thérèse and coming out as this bored melancholy that he noticed in her. This boredom seemed to him far more disquieting than the despairing chatter that she had previously heaped on him. She no longer said anything, she did not argue with him, she seemed to keep everything locked up deep inside her. He would have preferred to hear her exhausting her suffering than to see her turned in on herself in this way. He was afraid that the anxiety would one day be too much for
her and that, to relieve her feelings, she would go and tell everything to a priest or a magistrate.

  At this, Thérèse’s frequent excursions took on a disturbing meaning for him. He thought that she must be looking for a confidant outside and was preparing to betray him. Twice, he tried to follow her, but lost her in the street. He began to keep watch on her once again. An obsession took hold of him: Thérèse was going to reveal everything, pushed to extremes by her suffering, and he had to gag her, to stifle the confession in her throat.

  XXXI

  One morning, Laurent, instead of going up to his studio, settled down at a wine shop, which occupied one of the corners of the Rue Guénégaud, opposite the arcade. From there he began to study the people who were coming out on to the pavement of the Rue Mazarine. He was looking out for Thérèse. The evening before, the young woman had said that she would be going out early and that she would probably not be back until evening.

  Laurent waited a full half-hour. He knew that his wife always took the Rue Mazarine, but for a moment he was afraid that she had evaded him by going down the Rue de Seine. He thought of going back to the arcade and hiding in the alleyway right beside the house. Just as he was getting impatient, he saw Thérèse quickly emerging from the arcade. She was dressed in light colours and, for the first time, he noticed that she was done up like a street-walker, with a long train. She was mincing along the pavement in a provocative manner, looking at the men and lifting up the front of her skirt, taking it in her hands, so that she was showing the front of her legs, her laced boots and her white stockings. She went up the Rue Mazarine. Laurent followed.

  The weather was mild and the young woman walked slowly, her head a little thrown back, her hair hanging down her back. Men who had looked at her as she came towards them turned round to see her from behind. She went down the Rue de l’École-de-Médecine.1 Laurent was terrified: he knew that there was a police station somewhere around here and thought to himself that there was no longer any doubt about it, his wife was definitely going to turn him in. So he vowed to rush over and grab her if she went through the door of the police station, to beg her, beat her and force her to keep silent. At one street corner, she looked at a constable going past, and Laurent dreaded seeing her go up to the man, so he hid in a doorway, fearful suddenly that he would be arrested on the spot if he showed himself. For him, the walk was a real torment: while his wife was sauntering along the pavement in the sunshine, carefree and shameless, her skirts trailing, here he was following her, pale and trembling, thinking that it was all over, there was no escape, he was for the guillotine. Every step she took seemed to him a step nearer his punishment. Fear gave him a sort of blind certainty, which every one of the young woman’s actions only served to increase. He followed her, going where she went, as a man goes to the scaffold.