Thérèse Raquin

by Emile Zola

  The paralysed woman no longer attempted to reveal the infamous truth behind the dreary tranquillity of their Thursday evenings. Watching the murderers tearing into one another and guessing the crisis that was bound to erupt one day or another, as the inevitable result of the chain of events, she soon realized that the situation would resolve itself without her help. From then on, she remained calm and allowed the consequences of Camille’s murder, which would kill the murderers in their turn, to take their natural course. She merely begged heaven to leave her enough life to witness the violent outcome that she foresaw. Her last wish was to feast her eyes on the spectacle of the ultimate suffering that would destroy Thérèse and Laurent.

  That evening, Grivet sat down beside her and talked at length, filling in the questions and answers as he usually did. But he could not even get a glance out of her. When half past eleven struck, the guests got up briskly.

  ‘We’re so happy here,’ Grivet said, ‘that we never consider leaving.’

  ‘The fact is,’ Michaud added, ‘that I’m never sleepy here, though my usual bedtime is half past nine.’

  Olivier thought it was time for his little joke.

  ‘You see,’ he said, exhibiting his yellow teeth, ‘there’s a whiff of honesty hereabouts, that’s why we’re so happy.’

  Grivet, annoyed that Olivier had got in first, declaimed with an expansive gesture: ‘This room is the Temple of Peace.’

  Meanwhile, knotting the ribbons on her bonnet, Suzanne said to Thérèse: ‘I’ll be here tomorrow at nine.’

  ‘No,’ the young woman replied, quickly. ‘Don’t come until the afternoon. I’ll probably go out in the morning.’

  She spoke in an odd, anxious voice. She accompanied her guests into the passage; Laurent came down, too, with a lamp in his hand. When they were alone, the couple gave a sigh of relief; they must have been suffering a vague feeling of impatience the whole evening. Since the previous day, they had been in a more sombre mood and were behaving more anxiously. They avoided looking at one another and went back upstairs in silence. Their hands were twitching convulsively and Laurent had to put the lamp down on the table to avoid dropping it.

  Before putting Mme Raquin to bed, they were in the habit of tidying up the dining room, getting a glass of sugar water for the night and coming and going around the cripple, until everything was prepared. But that evening, when they came back up, they sat down for a moment, staring into space and pale-lipped. After a moment’s silence, Laurent seemed to start, as though coming out of a dream, and asked: ‘Well, then! Aren’t we going to bed?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’re going to bed,’ Thérèse replied shivering, as though feeling very cold.

  She got up and took the water jug.

  ‘Leave it!’ her husband shouted, trying to control his voice. ‘I’ll make the sugar water. You look after your aunt.’

  He took the jug out of his wife’s hands and filled a glass with water. Then, half turning away, he emptied the little stone flask into it and added a piece of sugar. While this was going on, Thérèse was crouching in front of the sideboard. She had taken the kitchen knife and was trying to slip it into one of the large pockets hanging from her belt.

  At that moment, the strange sensation that warns one of the approach of danger made the couple instinctively turn round. They looked at one another. Thérèse saw the flask in Laurent’s hands and Laurent saw the silver flash of the knife shining in the folds of Thérèse’s dress. For a few seconds, silently, coldly, they stared at one another, the husband beside the table, the wife crouching next to the sideboard. They understood. Each one felt a cold chill on discovering that they had both had the same thought. As they mutually read their secret plans on their devastated faces, they felt pity and horror for themselves and each other.

  Mme Raquin, sensing that the end was nigh, was watching them with a keen stare.

  And, suddenly, Thérèse and Laurent burst into tears. A supreme crisis overwhelmed them and drove them into each other’s arms, as weak as children. They felt as though something soft and loving had awoken in their breasts. They wept, without speaking, thinking of the degraded life they had led, and that they would continue to lead, if they were cowards enough to go on living. So, remembering the past, they felt so weary and sickened by themselves, that they had a vast need for rest, for oblivion. They looked at each other one last time, with a look of gratitude, considering the knife and the glass of poison. Thérèse took the glass, half emptied it and handed it to Laurent, who finished it in a gulp. It was like a shaft of lightning. They fell, one on top of the other, struck down, finding consolation at last in death. The young woman’s mouth fell against the scar on her husband’s neck left by Camille’s teeth.

  The bodies stayed throughout the night on the dining-room floor, twisted, arched and lit by the streaks of yellowish light cast by the shade of the lamp. And for nearly twelve hours, until the following day around noon, Mme Raquin, silent and unmoving, stared at them where they lay at her feet, unable to have enough of the spectacle, crushing them with her merciless gaze.

  Notes

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1868)

  1 temperament, not character: See Introduction, pp. xxvi-xxvii.

  2 compelled to call their ‘remorse’: See Introduction, p. xxix.

  3 the back stage: The accusation of hypocrisy had been made in similar terms by the Goncourts in the Preface to Germinie Lacerteux: the public, they said, ‘likes saucy little books, the memoirs of whores, bedroom confessions, erotic filth ...’

  4 two or three men who can read, understand and judge a book: Zola is thinking in particular of the critics Hippolyte Taine and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve.

  5 to the background of a novel: Taine, in a letter early in 1868, makes comparisons with Shakespeare, Dickens and Balzac, as well as criticisms which are very similar to the ones that Zola mentions: ‘a book should always be, more or less, a portrait of the whole, a mirror to an entire society ... You need to enlarge your framework and balance your effects.’ (Quoted in the Petits Classiques Larousse edition of Thérèse Raquin (see Further Reading), p. 441 .)

  6 ‘putrid literature’: A reference to the review of Thérèse Raquin in Le Figaro, 23 January 1868, by Louis Ulbach (see Introduction, p. xiii).

  CHAPTER I

  1 Passage du Pont-Neuf... Rue Mazarine ... Rue de Seine: ‘You describe the Passage du Pont-Neuf,’ Sainte-Beuve said in his letter to Zola (10 June 1868). ‘I know this arcade as well as anyone ... [it is] flat, banal, ugly and, above all, narrow, but it does not possess the deeply melancholy colour and the Rembrandtesque shades that you ascribe to it ...’ The arcade in question is on the Left Bank of the Seine, but in 1912 it was rebuilt and renamed Rue Jacques-Callot. The Rue Mazarine, a street leading towards the river, forms a junction with the eastern end of the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The Rue de Seine runs from the Quai Malaquais to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, at right angles to the Passage du Pont-Neuf.

  2 fifteen sous: The unit of currency was the franc, divided into a hundred centimes. A sou was worth five centimes, but in the plural the word was (and still is) commonly used to mean a small amount of money. Five francs was worth about one American dollar or four English shillings (one-fifth of a pound sterling).

  CHAPTER II1 . Vernon: A small town in Normandy on the Seine.

  2 Algeria: The French conquest of Algeria began in 1830 and was more or less complete by the time this novel was written, though, as one can see from the fate of Captain Degans, it was not an entirely safe posting for the army. The country became an important colony with a large population of settlers from around the Mediterranean, and was to remain French until the war of independence (1954-62). It forms the background to travel writings and novels, and is frequently mentioned in nineteenth-century literature.

  CHAPTER III

  1 . the Orléans Railway Company: One of five railway companies in France, set up in 1838, it had its headquarters in the Gare d‘Orléans, now the Gare d’Aus
terlitz, which was rebuilt in 1867-8.

  2 from the Institut to the Jardin des Plantes: The Institut is the building housing the five former royal academies, including the Académie Française. It moved to this building on the Left Bank of the Seine in 1806. The Jardin des Plantes is the botanical garden founded in 1635, which had the great scientist Georges-Louis Buffon (see note 4, below) as superintendent during the eighteenth century, when it was known as the Jardin du Roi. In 1792 it acquired a menagerie and in the following year the Museum of Natural History was set up in the garden, close to the Gare d’Orléans.

  3 Port aux Vins: Situated on the Quai Saint-Bernard, where wine was offloaded on its way to the wine market, the Halle aux Vins, was in the area between the Rue Jussieu and the Quai Saint-Bernard, now occupied by the Faculty of Sciences of the Universities of Paris VI and VII.

  4 Buffon: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88) (see note 2, above), was also the author of a 36-volume natural history covering cosmology, geology, zoology and botany, which was virtually an encyclopaedia of the scientific knowledge of his time.

  5 the History of the Consulate and the Empire by Thiers and Lamartine’s History of the Girondins: The historian Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was the author of authoritative works on both the Revolution and the period of Napoleon I’s rule. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) published his history of the revolutionary faction of the Girondins in 1847. Both men were opponents of the regime of Napoleon III.

  CHAPTER V1 Jeufosse: A small town built around an island upriver from Vernon.

  2 sanguine beauty: From the start, Zola stresses that Laurent’s temperament is sanguine (as opposed to bilious, nervous or lymphatic (see Introduction, p. xxvi)). The physical description of Laurent corresponds to a person of sanguine type and the association of the colour red with him reinforces it.

  CHAPTER VI

  1 . Rue Saint-Victor: The Rue Saint-Victor runs across the angle formed by the meeting of the Rue Monge and the Rue des Écoles. Zola had a room in the Rue Saint-Victor during his first years in Paris.

  2 gloria: A sugared coffee or tea with brandy or rum.

  CHAPTER VII

  1 called each other ‘tu’: Using the familiar second-person singular form of the verb.

  2 a sort of diabolical trance: For the first time, the cat François is given some of the sinister attributes that make him such a memorable presence in the novel.

  CHAPTER IX

  1 La Pitié: The Hospice de la Pitié in the Rue Lacépède was not far from the Rue Saint-Victor. It was built in 1612, originally as a hostel for the homeless, and was later used as an orphanage. In 1809, it became a general hospital attached to the Hôtel-Dieu, staffed by the nuns of Sainte-Marthe. It was demolished in 1912.

  CHAPTER XI

  1 Saint-Ouen or Asnières: Two towns north of Paris on the Seine, which were popular sites for weekend/day excursions. A number of painters also worked or relaxed here, including Édouard Manet.

  2 fortifications: Paris was surrounded by an inner city wall, which chiefly served for customs purposes and to mark the administrative boundary of the city. In 1840, under Louis-Philippe, the fortifications were rebuilt both as a protection for the city and to mark its boundary, along the line of the present boulevards extérieurs. Beyond them was a so-called military zone, which was wasteland that no one was allowed to build on.

  3 aspens and oaks: François-Marie Mourad, in his edition of the novel (see Further Reading), points out the similarities between the landscape described here and Édouard Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe, as well as other paintings, including Claude Monet’s study for a painting, also called Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (pp. 376-8).

  4 the Tuileries: The gardens in Paris laid out by Le Nôtre in 1649, a classic example of a French formal garden, usually opposed to the more ‘natural’ style favoured by the English. It is not clear why Camille should think of the Tuileries as an English garden (though a painting by Manet, La Musique aux Tuileries (1862), does show a crowded scene in a relatively informal, almost wood-land setting).

  CHAPTER XIII

  1 the Morgue: Situated after 1863 at the eastern point of the Île Saint-Louis, where it was moved from the end of the Pont Saint-Michel, on the Île de la Cite, where it was to be found at the time when the novel is set. Here unidentified bodies were kept for three days, behind a glass screen, under cold running water, to delay the process of decay. The description in Adolphe Joanne’s Paris illustré en 1878 (Paris: Hachette, 1878), pp. 921-4, corresponds well to that given by Zola in the novel. Joanne concludes by sayingdespite the horror of the spectacle and the customary respect of the people of Paris for death, it is not unusual to find a more or less solid crowd in the Morgue of men, women and children from the lower ranks of society. When the newspapers announce the discovery of some crime, curious people arrive in large numbers, making a queue from morning until evening that sometimes reaches the number of between 1,000 and 1,500 persons.

  2 like a necklace of shadow: Several writers have commented on the similarity of this description of the hanged girl to Manet’s painting Olympia (where the girl is wearing a black velvet choker around her neck).

  CHAPTER XVI

  1 her temperament: At the start, Thérèse appears to be passive by nature. Her affair with Laurent has brought out her repressed, passionate nature, while the aftermath of Camille’s death is accentuating the nervous element in her.

  2 the Salon: The official exhibition of painting and sculpture (see Introduction, p. xix).

  3 Bacchante: A female follower of the god Bacchus, whose devotees were driven mad by wine. This theme from classical mythology would be a typical motif for a painting at the Salon.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  1 her organism demanded Laurent’s violent embrace: Thérèse, with her nervous temperament, needs the complement of Laurent’s animal and sanguine one.

  CHAPTER XX

  1 Belleville: A working-class district in the north-east of Paris.

  2 the Code: Weddings in France may consist in a religious service, but must include a civil ceremony, conducted by the Mayor of the commune or arrondissement in which they take place. As part of the ceremony, the Mayor reads out the sections of the Civil Code relating to marriage.

  CHAPTER XXI

  1 looking pale: Zola continues to insist on Thérèse’s pale colouring, characteristic of a person of nervous temperament.

  CHAPTER XXII

  1 nervous erethism: A medical term meaning a state of nervous hysteria or overexcitement. The use of such medical vocabulary shows Zola trying to back up his study of character with the latest scientific understanding of human psychology. As he shows here, temperament was not thought to be fixed: after the shock of Camille’s murder, Laurent’s sanguine nature is becoming more nervous, like Thérèse’s, while she is moving into a state of hysterical hyper-nervousness.

  2 a time of perfect living: The ideal situation for an individual was to achieve a balance between the temperaments, especially between the nervous and sanguine elements in his or her nature.

  3 His remorse was purely physical: Zola, who was a non-believer, was keen to emphasize that the Christian idea of conscience had no part to play in the story: the awful terrors experienced by Laurent and Thérèse are not a result of Christian remorse, but a physiological reaction to circumstances, including fear of the consequences of their crime.

  4 hysteria: Another medical term, to describe an affliction that was particularly associated at the time with women. Thérèse has communicated her feminine disease to Laurent and he has become more of a ‘woman’ now that his sanguine temperament has been altered to a nervous one.

  CHAPTER XXV

  1 . a tasteful pallor: Another sign of the change in Laurent’s temperament is that he has lost his ruddy, sanguine complexion, as well as his fleshy face and coarse manner.

  2 neurosis: Zola subscribed to the belief that art came from a kind of disorder of the nervous system.

/>   CHAPTER XXVI

  1 dumb and immobile: Mme Raquin recalls the paralysed M. Noirtier in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5), who also plays a key role in the mechanics of the plot of that novel, even though he cannot move or speak. In Noirtier’s case, however, he has a willing and sensitive interpreter in the person of his niece, to whom he communicates by moving his eyebrow.

  2 buried... under two or three metres of soil: Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, including ‘The Premature Burial’, were translated into French by Charles Baudelaire between 1848 and 1865. The American writer became even more popular in France than in his own country. His interest in morbid psychological states provided a link between the Gothic novel of the Romantic period and the taste for the macabre in the ‘decadent’ later years of the century.

  CHAPTER XXX

  1 cold of the instrument on his neck: Reminding him of the blade of the guillotine.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  1 Rue de l‘École-de-Médecine: The street that more or less continues the line of the Rue Mazarine on the far side of what is now the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

  2 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince: The streets in this part of Paris were changing as a result of Haussmann’s rebuilding programme, but it is clear that Thérèse has turned up the Boulevard Saint-Michel and headed towards the Luxembourg Gardens.

  3 ‘You’re a ...’: The missing word presumably is ‘pimp’.