Thérèse Raquin

by Emile Zola

  The very next day, Laurent rented a little studio that he had had his eye on for a month, at the bottom of the Rue Mazarine. He did not want to leave his work until he had a bolt-hole where he could spend his days in peace, away from Thérèse. At the end of the fortnight, he said farewell to his colleagues. Grivet was amazed by his departure. A young man, he kept saying, who had such a bright future before him, a young man who, in four years, had risen to a salary that he, Grivet, had taken twenty years to attain! Laurent astonished him even more when he told him that he was going to devote himself to painting.

  At length, the artist moved into his studio. This was a kind of square attic, about five or six metres long and wide. The ceiling sloped abruptly, at a steep angle, with a wide window in it that threw a harsh white light on the floor and the blackish walls. The noise of the street did not reach up to this level. The room, silent, murky, with its window on the sky, seemed like a hole or a burial vault dug into grey clay. Laurent furnished this tomb as best he could. He brought two chairs with tattered cane seats, a table that he had to prop against the wall to prevent it sliding to the floor, an old kitchen cupboard, his paintbox and his old easel. The one luxury item in the place was a huge divan, which he bought from a secondhand dealer for thirty francs.

  He waited for a fortnight without even thinking of picking up a brush. He would arrive between eight and nine o’clock, have a smoke, lie down on the divan and wait for noon, happy that it was morning and he still had long hours of daylight ahead of him. At twelve, he went out for lunch, then hastened back so that he could be alone and not have to look at Thérèse’s pale face any more. In this way he would digest his food, sleep and lounge around until evening. His studio was a haven of peace where he felt calm and unafraid. One day, his wife asked if she could visit this dear refuge. He refused and when, despite this, she came and knocked on the door, he did not open it. That evening, he told her that he had spent the day at the Louvre. He was afraid that Thérèse would bring Camille’s ghost with her.

  Eventually, he grew tired of idleness. He bought a canvas and some paints and set to work. Not having enough money to pay for models, he decided to paint whatever his imagination suggested, without copying from nature. He started a man’s head.

  In any case, he did not shut himself up for too long. He worked for two or three hours every morning and spent his afternoons wandering around Paris and its suburbs. It was when he was returning from one of these long walks that he met, opposite the Institut, a former schoolfriend who had had a fine success at the last Salon, thanks to knowing the right people.

  ‘Why, it’s you!’ the painter exclaimed. ‘Oh, dear, poor Laurent. I’d never have recognized you. You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘I got married,’ Laurent replied, slightly put out.

  ‘Married! You! In that case, I’m not surprised to see you looking a bit odd ... So what are you up to now?’

  ‘I’ve rented a small studio. I paint a little, in the morning.’

  Laurent briefly described his marriage, then outlined his future plans, in an enthusiastic voice. His friend looked at him with an astonishment that Laurent found quite upsetting. The truth was that the painter could not recognize the rough, ordinary lad that he had previously known in Thérèse’s husband. He felt that Laurent was acquiring an air of distinction. His face had thinned down and had a tasteful pallor,1 while the stance of the whole body was more dignified and more relaxed.

  ‘Why, you’re becoming quite an elegant fellow,’ the artist couldn’t help remarking. ‘You look like an ambassador. It’s all the latest style. What school are you with?’

  Laurent found this examination quite painful, but he dared not just walk off abruptly.

  ‘Would you like to come up to my studio for a moment?’ he eventually asked his friend, who would not go away ...

  ‘Indeed, I would,’ the other man replied.

  The painter was unable to account for the changes he saw in his former friend, and was keen to see his studio. He definitely was not going up five floors in order to see Laurent’s new work, which would undoubtedly make him feel sick; all he wanted was to satisfy his curiosity.

  When he had climbed the five flights and taken a look at the canvases hanging on the walls, his astonishment increased. There were five studies there, two women’s heads and three men’s, painted with real energy. The technique was sound and solid, each piece standing out against a grey background with magnificent brushstrokes. The artist went over to them eagerly and, in amazement, not even trying to conceal his surprise, asked Laurent:

  ‘Did you do this?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘They’re oil sketches that I’m going to use in a large picture that I’m planning.’

  ‘Come on, no kidding. Are you really the person who painted these things?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’

  The painter did not dare to answer: because these pictures were done by an artist, and you have always been just a base artisan. He stood for a long time in silence in front of them. Admittedly, they were naive, but they had a strangeness about them and such power that they implied the most advanced aesthetic sense. You would have thought they were the product of experience. Never had Laurent’s friend seen sketches exhibiting such high promise. When he had examined the pictures carefully, he turned towards their creator:

  ‘Quite honestly,’ he said, ‘I should not have thought you capable of painting such work. Where did you pick up this talent? It’s not normally something that can be learned.’

  He looked at Laurent, whose voice seemed softer to him, whose every gesture had a sort of grace. He could not guess the catastrophic event that had changed this man, developing a woman’s sensibility in him and giving him sharper, more delicate feelings. Some strange phenomenon had doubtless taken place in the organism of Camille’s murderer. It is difficult for analysis to penetrate such depths. Perhaps Laurent had become an artist as he had become lazy, after the great disruption that had unbalanced his mind and his body. Previously, he had been stifled by the heavy weight of his blood and blinded by the thick vapour of health surrounding him. Now, thinner, quivering, he had the restless vitality, the quick, sharp sensations of persons of a nervous temperament. In the life of terror that he was leading, his thoughts became exaggerated and rose to the ecstasy of genius; the sickness of the spirit, as it were, the neurosis2 that was afflicting his being, was also developing a strangely lucid artistic sensibility in him. Since he’d killed a man, it was as though his flesh had become lighter, his brain, distraught, seemed immense to him, and in this sudden expansion of his ideas he saw exquisite creations and poetic reveries. This is why his hand had suddenly acquired its distinction and his works their beauty, in a moment becoming personal and alive.

  His friend gave up trying to explain the birth of this artist and left with his astonishment undiminished. Before he went, he looked at the pictures once again and told Laurent:

  ‘I have only one criticism to make, which is that all your sketches look alike. Those five heads resemble one another. Even the women have a sort of violent look that makes them seem like men in disguise... Now, if you want to make a picture out of those studies, you’ll have to change some of the faces: your figures can’t all look like members of the same family. People would laugh.’

  He went out and, on the landing, added with a laugh:

  ‘It’s true, my friend, I’m glad to have seen you. Now I can believe in miracles ... Good Lord! You’ve really got it!’

  He went down and Laurent returned to his studio, deeply disturbed. When his friend had remarked that all the heads looked alike, he had quickly turned away to hide the pallor of his face. The fact was that this inescapable resemblance had already struck him. He came back slowly and stood in front of the paintings; and as he looked at them, turning from one to the other, a cold sweat ran down his back.

  ‘He’s right,’ he murmured. ‘They are all alike ... They look like Camille.’

 
; He stepped back and sat down on the divan, unable to take his eyes off the heads in the sketches. The first was an old man with a long white beard, but underneath the beard, the artist could make out Camille’s slender chin. The second showed a young blonde girl, and this girl was looking at him with his victim’s blue eyes. Each of the three other faces had some features of the drowned man. It was like Camille made up as an old man, as a young girl, taking whatever disguise the painter chose to give him, but always keeping the general character of his physiognomy. There was another frightful similarity in the heads, too: they seemed to be suffering, terrified, as though they were all crushed by the same feeling of horror. Each one had a slight fold to the left of the mouth that pulled back the lips and made them grimace. This fold, which Laurent remembered having seen on the drowned man’s convulsed features, marked them with the sign of a foul family bond.

  Laurent realized that he had spent too long looking at Camille in the Morgue. The corpse’s image had been deeply impressed on his mind. And now his hand, without his realizing it, was constantly drawing the lines of this frightful mask, the memory of which followed him around everywhere.

  Gradually, as he lay back on the divan, the painter thought he could see the faces come to life. So there were five Camilles in front of him, five Camilles that his own fingers had endowed with such power and which, through some terrifying mystery, represented every age and every sex. He got up, cut through the canvases and threw them outside. He felt that he would die of fright in his studio if he were to people it himself with portraits of his victim.

  He had just been seized by a feeling of anguish: he was afraid that he could never again draw a head without representing the drowned man. He wanted to find out at once if he was in control of his hand. He put a white canvas on the easel, then with a piece of charcoal, he drew a face with a few lines. The face was like Camille. Laurent quickly rubbed out that sketch and tried another. For more than an hour, he struggled against the inescapable urge that drove his fingers; but with each new attempt, he came back to the head of the drowned man. Much as he exerted his will, avoiding the lines that he knew so well, he would draw these lines despite himself, obeying his rebellious muscles and nerves. At first, he had quickly set down the sketches, then he tried to guide the charcoal slowly. The result was the same: Camille, screwing his face up in pain, kept coming back on the canvas. The artist drew the most varied kinds of head in quick succession — angels, young women with haloes, Roman warriors with their helmets on, blond, pink-cheeked children, or old bandits covered in scars ... Yet always the drowned man was resuscitated, by turns as angel, woman, warrior, child and bandit. So Laurent turned to caricature, exaggerating the features; he made monstrous heads, he invented grotesques ... and all he did was to make the striking portraits of his victim more frightful. Eventually, he tried drawing animals, cats and dogs. The cats and dogs looked vaguely like Camille ...

  A dull fury had overtaken Laurent. He broke the canvas with his fist, thinking with despair of his great painting. Now, he could no longer even consider it. From now on, he knew, he would only draw heads of Camille and, as his friend had said, figures that all looked alike would just make people laugh. He imagined what his work would have been; he saw, on the shoulders of his figures, men and women, the drowned man’s pallid, horrified features; and the strange spectacle that this brought into his head seemed to him so horribly ridiculous that it filled him with despair.

  So he would no longer dare to work, for he would always be afraid of bringing his victim back to life with the slightest stroke of the brush. If he wanted to live in peace at his studio he must never paint there. This idea that his fingers had this unavoidable and unconscious ability to reproduce constantly the face of Camille, made him look with terror at his hand. It seemed to him that the hand no longer belonged to him.

  XXVI

  The stroke that had been threatening Mme Raquin’s health arrived. Suddenly the paralysis, which for several months had been creeping along her limbs, constantly on the point of gripping her entirely, seized her by the throat and immobilized her body. One evening, while she was quietly talking to Laurent and Thérèse, she stopped in the middle of a sentence, open-mouthed ; she felt as though someone were strangling her. When she tried to cry out, to call for help, she could make only harsh croaking noises. Her tongue had been turned to stone, her hands and feet had stiffened. She was rendered dumb and immobile.1

  Thérèse and Laurent got up, terrified by this thunderclap that had struck the old haberdasher down in under five seconds. Seeing her stiff like that, looking at them appealingly, they asked her repeatedly to tell them what was wrong. She could not answer, but kept giving them a look of deep distress. At this, they realized that all that was left before them was a corpse, one that was half living, one that could see and hear them, but could not speak. The catastrophe drove them to despair. Underneath, they cared little about the paralysed woman’s suffering, but wept for themselves, obliged from now on to live for ever alone with each other.

  From that day, the couple’s life became unbearable. They spent agonizing evenings beside the stricken old woman who no longer appeased their terrors with her gentle chattering. She lay in an armchair like a parcel, like a thing, and they were left alone at either end of the table, awkward and uneasy. This corpse no longer kept them apart; from time to time they forgot about it and treated it like part of the furniture. And then their terrors of the night gripped them and the dining room became, like the bedroom, a place of horror in which the spectre of Camille loomed. This meant that they suffered for four or five additional hours every day. As soon as evening came, they shuddered, lowering the shade on the lamp to avoid seeing one another and trying to believe that Mme Raquin would speak and so remind them of her presence. If they kept her, if they did not get rid of her, it was because her eyes still lived and at times they would feel some relief in looking at them moving and shining.

  They always put the old cripple in the full light of the lamp so that her face would be fully lit and they would constantly have it in front of them. For other people, this soft, pale face would have been an unbearable sight, but they felt such a need for company that they rested their eyes on her with real joy. It was like the decayed mask of a dead woman, with two living eyes in it: the eyes alone moved, rapidly turning in their sockets, while the cheeks and mouth looked as though they were petrified, possessing a horrifying immobility. When Mme Raquin abandoned herself to sleep, lowering her eyelids, her face, now entirely white and silent, was truly that of a corpse. Thérèse and Laurent, feeling that there was no longer anyone with them, would make a noise until the paralysed woman opened her eyes and looked at them. In this way, they forced her to stay awake.

  They used to consider her a distraction to bring them out of their bad dreams. Now that she was an invalid, she had to be looked after like a child. The care that they lavished on her took their minds off their obsessions. In the morning, Laurent would get her up, carry her to her chair; in the evening he would put her back into her bed. She was still heavy and it took all his strength to lift her carefully in his arms and carry her. He was also the one who pushed her chair around. Her other needs were looked after by Thérèse: she was the one who dressed the cripple, fed her and tried to understand her every wish. For a few days, Mme Raquin could still use her hands, so she was able to write on a slate and ask for what she needed; then her hands died and she was unable to lift up or hold a pencil. All that was left after that was the language of the eyes and her niece had to guess what she wanted. The young woman devoted herself to the cruel task of sick-nurse: it kept her body and mind occupied and did her a lot of good.

  So that they would not have to stay alone together, the couple would push the poor old woman’s chair into the dining room early in the morning. They brought her in with them, as though she were essential to their existence. She had to watch their meals and listen to all their conversations. They pretended not to understand when she showed
that she wished to go back to her room. She was useful only in preventing them from having to endure each other’s company; she had no right to live by herself. At eight o‘clock, Laurent went to his studio and Thérèse down to the shop, so the paralysed woman stayed alone in the dining room until noon; then, after lunch, she was alone again until six o’clock. Often, during the day, her niece would come up and busy herself around her, making sure that she had everything she needed. Friends of the family could not praise the goodness of Thérèse and Laurent too highly.

  The Thursday evening gatherings continued and the cripple was present, as in the past. Her chair was brought over to the table and from eight o’clock until eleven, she kept her eyes open, fixing each of the guests in turn with her penetrating gaze. For the first few days, Old Michaud and Grivet were a little put out by this corpse of their old friend. They were not sure how they ought to look; they were not very much grieved, but they wondered what was precisely the correct degree of sadness to be exhibited in the circumstances. Should they address themselves to this dead face, or should they rather take no notice of it? Little by little, they adopted the solution of treating Mme Raquin as though nothing had happened to her. Eventually, they came to pretend that they were quite unaware of her condition. They chatted with her, putting the questions and replying to them, laughing for her and for themselves and never allowing the rigid expression on her face to disconcert them. It was an odd sight: these men seemed to be talking sensibly to a statue, as little girls talk to their dolls. The paralysed woman sat stiff and silent in front of them while they talked on, with lots of gestures, having very animated conversations with her. Michaud and Grivet congratulated themselves on their excellent behaviour. In this way, they thought they were showing good manners while additionally avoiding the awkwardness of the conventional expressions of sympathy. Mme Raquin must be flattered to see that she was treated as a healthy person and, because of that, they could enjoy themselves in her presence without the slightest scruple.