Thérèse Raquin

by Emile Zola

  That is why Laurent came to shudder at the sight of a dark corner, like a timorous child. This new person, the shivering, haggard being that had just emerged in him out of the thick, brutish peasant, experienced the fears and anxieties of those of nervous temperament. A whole series of events - Therese’s passionate caresses, the feverish drama of the murder and the fearful expectation of sensual pleasure - had driven him more or less insane, keying up his senses and striking his nerves with sudden and repeated blows. Then, inevitably, insomnia had come, bringing with it hallucinations. From then on, Laurent had lapsed into the intolerable existence and endless horror in which he was now entrapped.

  His remorse was purely physical.3 Only his body, his tense nerves and his trembling flesh were afraid of the drowned man. His conscience played no part in his terror: he did not in the slightest regret having killed Camille. When he was feeling calm and the ghost was not there, he would have committed the murder all over again, if he had thought that his interests demanded it. In the daytime, he recovered from his terror, promised himself that he would be strong and upbraided Thérèse, accusing her of upsetting him. In his view, Thérèse was the one who was scared and it was Thérèse alone who caused the dreadful scenes at night in the bedroom. As soon as night fell, as soon as he was shut in with his wife, he came out in a cold sweat and childish terrors assailed him. In this way, he went through periodic crises, nervous attacks that returned every evening and deranged his senses by showing him the grotesque green face of his victim. It was like the onset of a terrifying disease, a sort of hysteria4 of murder: the words ‘illness’ and ‘nervous affliction’ were really the only ones that could properly describe Laurent’s fears. His face became contorted and his limbs stiffened: you could see that his nerves were tensing inside. His physical suffering was frightful, but the soul remained absent. The wretch did not feel a shred of remorse. His passion for Thérèse had infected him with a dreadful malady, that’s all.

  Thérèse, too, was deeply disturbed, but in her it was simply that her original temperament had been greatly over-stimulated. Since the age of ten, she had suffered from nervous disorders, partly as a result of the manner in which she had grown up in the over-heated, nauseous air of little Camille’s sick room. Stormy rages and powerful fluids accumulated within her and were later to erupt as uncontrollable tempests. Laurent had been for her what she was for Laurent: a kind of violent shock. From their first love-making, her dry, sensual temperament had developed with savage energy; from then on, she lived only for passion and, increasingly abandoning herself to the ardent fevers within her, she arrived at a state of unhealthy stupor. She was overwhelmed by events and driven towards madness. In her terror, she reacted in a more womanly way than her new husband. She had vague feelings of remorse and unadmitted regrets. At times, she felt like falling on her knees and pleading with Camille’s ghost, imploring his pity and swearing to appease him with her repentance. Laurent may have noticed these moments of weakness in Thérèse. When they were seized with a common terror, he turned on her and treated her savagely.

  For the first few nights, they could not go to bed. They waited for daylight, sitting in front of the fire or walking backwards and forwards, as on their wedding night. They felt a kind of terrified repugnance at the idea of lying side by side on the bed. By tacit agreement, they avoided kissing and did not even look at the bedclothes, which Thérèse undid in the morning. When tiredness overcame them, they fell asleep for an hour or two in armchairs, only to wake up with a start, aroused by the sinister unfolding of some nightmare. When they did wake up, their limbs stiff and aching, with livid blotches on their faces, shivering with discomfort and cold, they would look at one another with amazement, astonished to see the other there and suffering a strange embarrassment towards each other, ashamed to show their disgust and terror.

  In any case, they struggled against sleep as much as they could. They sat on either side of the fireplace and chatted about this or that, being careful to avoid letting the conversation lapse. There was a wide space between them, opposite the fire. When they turned round, they imagined that Camille had drawn up a chair and was occupying this space, warming his feet with lugubrious derision. The vision that they had had on the wedding night returned every night from then on. This corpse, silent and mocking, who listened in on their discussions, this horribly disfigured corpse, ever present, overwhelmed them with continual feelings of anxiety. They dared not budge, they blinded themselves with staring into the blazing hearth and, when they could no longer resist casting a fearful glance to the side, their eyes, irritated by the burning coals, created the apparition and bathed it in a reddish light.

  Eventually, Laurent refused to sit down, though he did not tell Thérèse why. She realized that this behaviour meant that Laurent must be seeing Camille, as she was, so she announced in her turn that the heat was painful and that she would be better off a short distance away from the fireplace. She pushed her chair over to the foot of the bed and slumped down in it there, while her husband resumed his marching up and down. At times, he would open the window and let the cold January night fill the room with its icy breath. It brought his fever down.

  For a week, the newlyweds spent all night in this way. They dozed off, catching a bit of rest during the day, Thérèse behind the shop counter and Laurent at his desk. At night, they were a prey to pain and fear. And the oddest thing yet was their attitude towards one another. They did not speak a single loving word, they pretended to have forgotten the past, appearing to accept and tolerate each other, like sick people feeling a secret pity for their shared miseries. Both of them hoped to hide their disgust and fear, and neither of the pair seemed to find anything strange in the way they spent their nights, which should have enlightened them about the true state of their minds. When they stayed up until morning, barely speaking to each other and blanching at the slightest sound, they acted as though they imagined this was how all newlyweds behaved in the first days of marriage: it was the clumsy hypocrisy of a couple of mad people.

  Soon tiredness overcame them to such an extent that, one evening, they decided to lie down on the bed. They did not get undressed, but threw themselves fully clothed on the quilt, fearful that they might touch one another’s bare skin. It seemed to them that they would get a painful shock from the slightest contact. Then, when they had dozed off like that for two nights in a restless sleep, they risked taking off their clothes and slipping between the sheets. But they stayed far away from one another and were careful not to touch by mistake. Thérèse went to bed first and got into the far side, against the wall. Laurent waited until she was settled down, then carefully stretched himself out on the front of the bed, right on the edge. There was a wide gap between them. This was where the body of Camille lay.

  When the two murderers were under the same sheet and shut their eyes, they would imagine they could feel the damp corpse of their victim spread out in the middle of the bed, sending a chill through their flesh. It was like some grotesque barrier between them. They were seized by feverish delirium and the barrier would become an actual one for them; they would touch the body, they would see it lying like a greenish, rotten lump of meat and they would breathe in the repulsive odour of this heap of human decay. All their senses shared in the hallucination, making their sensations unbearably acute. The presence of this foul bedfellow would keep them motionless, silent and rigid with fear. At times, Laurent would consider violently grasping Thérèse in his arms, but he dared not move, telling himself that if he were to reach out an arm he would surely grasp a handful of Camille’s soft flesh. At that, he would imagine that the drowned man had just lain down between them, to prevent them from touching one another. Eventually, he realized that Camille was jealous.

  Occasionally, however, they would try to exchange a timid kiss to see what happened. The young man would tease his wife, demanding that she kiss him. But their lips were so cold that death appeared to have come between their mouths. They would feel nausea;
Thérèse shuddered in horror and Laurent, who could hear her teeth chatter, would lose his temper with her.

  ‘Why are you trembling?’ he would shout. ‘Are you afraid of Camille, then? Come on, the poor fellow can’t feel his bones any longer.’

  The pair of them avoided admitting the cause of their anxieties. When either of them imagined seeing the drowned man’s pallid face before them, they would shut their eyes and enclose themselves in terror, not daring to talk to the other about the vision, for fear of inducing a still more frightful attack. When Laurent, driven to the end of his tether, accused Thérèse in a desperate fury of being afraid of Camille, the name, spoken aloud, would make the horror more intense. The murderer would lose his head.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he spluttered, speaking to her. ‘You’re afraid of Camille ... I can see that, for God’s sake! You’re crazy, you don’t have an ounce of courage. Huh! You can sleep easy. Do you think your first husband will come and pull your feet because I’m in bed with you?’

  This idea, the suggestion that the drowned man might come and pull their feet, made Laurent’s hair stand on end. He went on, still more savagely, tearing into himself.

  ‘I’ll have to take you to the cemetery one night. We’ll open Camille’s coffin and you’ll see what a heap of rotten meat he is! Then perhaps you won’t be afraid of him any more ... Come on, he doesn’t know we pushed him in the water.’

  Thérèse was moaning softly, with her head under the sheet.

  ‘We pushed him in the water because he was in our way,’ her husband went on. ‘And we’d do it again, wouldn’t we? Don’t be such a baby. Be strong. It’s silly to let this get in the way of our happiness. Don’t you see, dear, when we’re dead ourselves, we won’t be any more or less happy under the ground because we chucked an idiot into the Seine, and will have been free to enjoy our love, which is to our benefit ... Come on, give me a kiss.’

  The young woman kissed him, icy cold and frantic, and he was shivering as much as she was.

  For more than a fortnight, Laurent wondered what he could do to kill Camille off again. He had thrown the man in the water and still he was not sufficiently dead, but came back every night to lie at Thérèse’s side. Even when the murderers thought they had completed the killing and could indulge the sweet pleasures of their love, the victim would return to chill their marriage bed. Thérèse was not a widow: Laurent found himself married to a wife who already had a drowned man as her husband.

  XXIII

  Little by little, Laurent lapsed into raging madness. He determined to drive Camille out of his bed. At first, he had gone to sleep fully clothed, then he avoided touching Thérèse. Finally, in a desperate fury, he tried to clasp his wife to his breast and crush her rather than abandon her to his victim’s ghost. It was a supreme gesture of brutal defiance.

  In short, only the hope that Thérèse’s kisses would cure his insomnia had induced him to share a bed with the young woman. And when he found himself in her bedroom, as the master, his flesh, rent by still more frightful agonies, did not even consider trying the cure. For three weeks, he remained in a state of apparent devastation, forgetting that he had done everything to possess Thérèse and, now that he did possess her, being unable to touch her without increasing his agony.

  The excess of his suffering brought him out of this numbness. In the first moment of stupor, in the strange desperation of the wedding night, he had managed to overlook the reasons that had driven him to marry. But with the repeated attacks of his bad dreams, he was invaded by a dull irritation that overcame his cowardice and restored his memory. He recalled that he had married to drive away his nightmares by clasping his wife tightly to him. So he seized Thérèse in his arms, one night, taking the risk of crossing over the drowned man’s corpse, and dragged her violently towards him.

  The young woman, too, was at the end of her tether. She would have flung herself into the flames if she had thought that the flames would purify her flesh and deliver her from her distress. She responded to Laurent’s grasp, deciding to burn in the caresses of this man or else to find solace in them.

  They locked into a frightful embrace. Pain and terror took the place of desire. When their limbs touched, it seemed to them that they had fallen against burning coals. They gave a cry and pressed more tightly together, so as to leave no place between their bodies for the drowned man. Yet they could still feel Camille’s shredded flesh, foully squeezed between them, freezing their skin in places, even while the rest of their bodies was burning.

  Their kisses were fearfully cruel. Thérèse’s lips sought out Camille’s bite on Laurent’s stiff, swollen neck and she fixed her mouth on it with savage passion. Here was the open wound; once this was healed, the murderers could sleep easy. The young woman knew this, trying to cauterize the place with the fire of her kisses. But her lips burned and Laurent pushed her away harshly, with a dull moan: it felt to him as though a red-hot iron had been placed on his neck. Crazed, Thérèse persisted: she wanted to kiss the scar again, feeling a bitter pleasure in putting her mouth against this skin in which Camille’s teeth had sunk. For a moment, she thought of biting her husband on the spot, removing a large piece of flesh and making a new, deeper wound which would take away the mark of the old one. Then, she thought, she would no longer go pale if she saw the mark of her own teeth. But Laurent protected his neck against her kisses. The wound smarted too much; he pushed her back each time as she reached out her lips. And so they fought, groaning and struggling in the horror of their embrace.

  They realized that they were only increasing their own suffering. However much they exhausted themselves, frightfully grasping one another, they cried out with pain, they burned and bruised each other, but they could not calm their shattered nerves. Every embrace served only to sharpen their disgust. Even as they were exchanging these dreadful kisses, they were prey to a variety of hallucinations: they imagined that the drowned man was pulling on their feet and violently shaking the bed.

  For a moment, they let go of one another. They were feeling insurmountable disgust and nervous repulsion. Then, they were not willing to give in, so they clasped one another again in a further embrace and were obliged once more to let go, as though red-hot pins had been stuck into their limbs. In this way, they tried again and again to overcome their disgust and to forget everything by tiring themselves out and exhausting their nerves. Yet every time their nerves were so on edge and so tense, causing them such feelings of exasperation that they might perhaps have died of nervous exhaustion if they had stayed in one another’s arms. This struggle against their own bodies had driven them to the point of madness: they persisted obstinately, determined to overcome. Finally, a sharper crisis broke them with a shock of unimagined violence, and they thought that they were about to collapse in an epileptic fit.

  Thrown back to the two sides of the bed, seared and bruised, they began to sob.

  And in their sobs, it seemed to them that they could hear the triumphant laugh of the drowned man, as he slid back beneath the sheets, sniggering. They had been unable to drive him out of the bed; they were beaten. Camille was lying quietly between them, while Laurent wept at his impotence and Thérèse shuddered to think that the corpse might get it into its mind to take advantage of its victory and, in its turn, squeeze her in its rotting arms, as her legitimate master. They had made one final effort and, faced with their defeat, they realized that from now on they would not dare to exchange a single kiss. The paroxysm of passionate love that they had tried to reach in order to kill their fear had now plunged them even more deeply into the pit of terror. As they felt the cold of the corpse that, henceforth, would keep them for ever divided, they wept tears of blood and agonizingly wondered what would become of them.

  XXIV

  As Old Michaud had hoped when he engineered Thérèse’s marriage to Laurent, Thursday evenings resumed, merry as in the old days, after the wedding. With Camille’s death, these soirees had been seriously at risk. The guests had visited thi
s house in mourning only with apprehension and every week were afraid that they would finally be sent away for ever. Michaud and Grivet, who stuck to their habits with the obstinacy of brutes, were appalled at the idea that the door of the shop would eventually close upon them. They told themselves that the old mother and young widow would get up one fine morning and take their grief back to Vernon or somewhere, with the result that, on Thursday evenings, they would find themselves outside on the pavement with nothing to do: they imagined themselves in the arcade, wandering about in a pitiful manner, dreaming of huge domino games. In expectation of these bad days, they took themselves round to the shop with an anxious and conciliatory air, constantly thinking that they might never come here again. For more than a year, they knew this fear, not daring to let themselves have a laugh when confronted by Mme Raquin’s tears and Thérèse’s silence. They no longer felt at home, as they had done in Camille’s day: it was as though they were stealing every evening that they spent round the dining-room table. It was in these desperate circumstances that Old Michaud’s selfishness drove him to the master-stroke of marrying off the drowned man’s widow.