by Emile Zola
And then he had the idea of seducing her with the help of his flute. On warm evenings, he started to play once more. He left the two casements open, and in the darkness he played his oldest tunes, pastorales as sweet and innocent as little girls dancing in a ring. He played notes that were sustained and tremulous, fading away one after the other in simple cadences, like lovelorn ladies of olden days, twirling their skirts. He would choose moonless nights; the square was pitch black, no one knew where such a sweet melody was coming from as it floated past the sleeping houses on the gentle wings of a nocturnal bird. And, on the very first evening, he was startled to see Thérèse as she prepared for bed coming to the window all in white, and leaning there, surprised to recognise this music she had already heard the day she arrived.
‘Just listen, Françoise,’ she said in her grave voice, turning to the interior of the room. ‘It’s not a bird.’
‘Oh!’ replied an old woman, of whom Julien could make out only the shadow, ‘it must be a travelling player having a good time on the outskirts of town – he sounds a long way off.’
‘Yes, a long way off,’ repeated the girl, after a silence, as she bathed her bare arms in the freshness of the night air.
From then on, every evening, Julien started to play louder. His lips swelled the sound, his feverish desire passed into the old flute of yellow wood. And Thérèse, who listened every evening, was astonished to hear this living music, whose phrases, fluttering from rooftop to rooftop, waited until nightfall before launching on their way towards her. She had the strong impression that the serenade was marching towards her window, she sometimes stood on tiptoes as if to see over the houses. Then, one night, the music broke out so close to her that she felt its breath on her skin; she guessed it was coming from the square, one of those old houses wrapped in sleep. Julien was blowing with the full strength of his passion, the flute was vibrating with crystal chimes. The shadows emboldened him to such an extent that he hoped to bring her to him by the force of his song. And Thérèse did indeed lean forward, as if drawn out and conquered.
‘Come back in,’ said the voice of the old lady. ‘It’s a thundery night, you’ll have nightmares.’
That night, Julien couldn’t sleep. He was sure Thérèse had guessed at his presence, had perhaps even seen him. And he tossed and turned feverishly on his bed, wondering whether or not to show himself the following day. To be sure, it would be ridiculous for him to go on hiding. But he decided that he wouldn’t make an appearance, and he was at his window, at six o’clock, putting his flute back in its case, when Thérèse’s shutters abruptly opened.
The girl, who never got up before eight, appeared wearing a dressing-gown, and leaned out of the window, her hair twisted on the nape of her neck. Julien remained thunderstruck, staring straight across at her, unable to turn away; meanwhile his hands clumsily and unsuccessfully tried to take his flute apart. Thérèse was examining him, too, with an unblinking, queenly gaze. She seemed for an instant to study his big-boned frame, his huge, rough-hewn body, his whole ugly appearance, that of a timid giant. And she was no longer the feverish child he had seen the night before; she was haughty and very white, with her black eyes and her red lips. When she had made up her mind about him, with the tranquil deliberation she would have brought to deciding whether or not she liked a dog she saw in the street, she passed sentence on him with a light pout; then, turning her back unhurriedly on him, she closed the window.
Julien, his legs turned to jelly, collapsed into his armchair. And broken words emerged from his lips.
‘Oh God! She doesn’t like me… And I love her, I’m going to die of love!’
He put his head in his hands, he burst into tears. And why on earth had he shown himself? When you are a clodhopper, you hide away, you don’t go round frightening the girls. He cursed himself, furious at his ugliness. Shouldn’t he have continued to play the flute in the darkness, like a night bird that seduces his listeners’ hearts with its song, and must never appear in daylight if it wishes to please? He would have still been for her a sweet music, nothing but the old melody of a mysterious love. She would have adored him without knowing him, like a Prince Charming come from afar to expire with love beneath her window. But, stupid oaf that he was, he had broken the spell. Now she knew he was as thickset as an ox at the plough, and never again would she like his music!
So it turned out: he repeatedly played his tenderest tunes, chose warm nights balmy with the odour of the foliage: it was all in vain, Thérèse wouldn’t listen, didn’t hear. She came and went in her room, leaned at the window as if he hadn’t been right opposite, expressing his love in humble little notes. One day, she even exclaimed: ‘Good God, that out-of-tune flute is getting on my nerves!’
Then, in despair, he flung his flute into the back of a drawer and played no more.
It has to be said that young Colombel also made fun of Julien. One day, as he was going to his office, he had seen Julien at his window, studying one of his pieces, and every time he passed by on the square, he laughed maliciously. Julien knew that the lawyer’s clerk received invitations to the Marsanne house, and it broke his heart – not that he was jealous of that little pipsqueak, but because he would have given his right arm to be there for an hour in his place. The young man’s mother, Françoise, who had been with the family for years, now looked after Thérèse, whom she had nursed. The noble lady and the little peasant boy had, once upon a time, grown up together, and it seemed natural for them to have kept up something of their old camaraderie. This did not make Julien suffer any the less, however, when he met Colombel in the street, with his pinched, thin-lipped smile. His revulsion grew the day he realised that the little pipsqueak was not bad looking: he had a round head like a cat’s, but finely featured, impishly attractive, with green eyes and a sparse beard curling down his snug little chin. Ah! if only he could have got him up against the wall of one of the ramparts, how he would have made him pay dearly for the happiness he enjoyed in seeing Thérèse at her home!
A year went by. Julien was deeply unhappy. He now lived entirely for Thérèse. His heart was imprisoned in that glacial grand house, opposite which he was dying away for clumsiness and love. As soon as he had a free moment, he would spend it there, his eyes fastened to the stretch of grey wall, on which he knew every last patch of moss. He had done all he could, for months on end, to keep his eyes sharp and his ears pricked, he still knew nothing of the inner life of that solemn house into which he projected his whole being. Vague noises, flickers of light left him feeling perplexed. Were they throwing a party, or had someone died? He didn’t know, life was on the other side of the house. He would dream as his fancy took him, depending on his moods, grave or gay: Thérèse and Colombel romping noisily, the girl going for a stroll beneath the chestnut trees, balls in which she was twirled in the dancers’ arms, sudden occasions of grief that would lead her to sit weeping in dark rooms. Or perhaps all he heard were the light footsteps of the Marquis and Marquise trotting like mice across the old polished floors. And, in his ignorance, he always saw only one window, Thérèse’s, piercing that mysterious wall. The girl would appear there, every day, more silent than the stones, but her appearance never gave him the slightest grounds for hope. She threw him into consternation, so unknown and distant did she remain.
Julien’s times of greatest happiness came when the window stayed open. Then he could see into the corners of her room, while she was out. It took him six months to discover that the bed was on the left, an alcove bed, with pink silk curtains. Then, after another six months, he realised that opposite the bed was a Louis-Quinze chest of drawers topped by a mirror in a china frame. Opposite that, he could make out the white marble fireplace. This bedroom was the paradise he dreamt of.
His love did not spare him immense struggles. He would hide away for weeks, ashamed at his ugliness. Then he would be filled with rage. He needed to stretch his bulky limbs, to impose on her the sight of his pitted face burning with fever. Then he woul
d spend weeks at the window, wearing her out with the sight of him. Twice, he even blew her ardent kisses, with all the brutality of shy people when they are driven mad by daring.
Thérèse didn’t even lose her temper. When he was hidden, he could see her coming and going with her royal demeanour, and when he forced her to see him, she maintained the same attitude, only even more haughty and frigid. He never caught her losing her self-control. If her eyes happened to encounter him, she made no haste to look away. When he heard people in the post office say that Mlle de Marsanne was deeply pious and charitable, he would sometimes protest violently to himself. No, no! she was completely irreligious, she loved blood for she had blood on her lips, and the pallor of her face came from her contempt for the world. Then he would weep for having insulted her, and beg her for forgiveness, as if she were a saint enfolded in the purity of her wings.
Throughout this first year, day followed on after day without bringing any change. When summer returned, he experienced a peculiar sensation: Thérèse seemed to him to be walking in another atmosphere. There were the same little events as before, the shutters were pushed open each morning and closed again in the evening, there were the regular appearances at the usual hours; but a new spirit emanated from her room. Thérèse was paler, taller. One feverish day he took the risk of blowing her a third kiss from his fevered fingertips. She looked at him fixedly, her gravity disconcerting, without leaving the window. He was the one to withdraw, his face flushed.
There was only one new development, towards the end of the summer – one that shook him to the depths of his being, even though it was the simplest little thing imaginable. Almost every day, at dusk, Thérèse’s casement, which had been left half-open, would be violently slammed shut, making the wooden panels and the window catch clatter. This bang would make Julien jump in painful trepidation; and he was left tormented with anxiety, his heart bruised, without being able to say why. After this abrupt detonation, the house relapsed into such a deathly quiet that the silence made him afraid. For a long time, he was unable to make out whose arm it was slamming the window shut like that; but, one evening, he caught sight of Thérèse’s pale hands; she it was twisting the window catch to with such impatient fury. And when, an hour later, she reopened the window, but slowly this time, with a dignified deliberation, she seemed weary, leaning for a moment on the window sill; then she would walk up and down in her immaculate room, attending to girlish little occupations. Julien was left standing vacantly, and the continual scrape of the window catch echoed in his ears.
One grey, mild autumn evening, the catch gave a terrible squeal. Julien shuddered, and involuntary tears fell from his eyes, as he looked over at the gloomy house immersed in the shadows of twilight. It had rained that morning, the half-bare chestnut trees were giving off an odour of death.
But Julien continued to wait for the window to reopen. And suddenly it did reopen, just as violently as it had closed. Thérèse appeared. She was completely white, her eyes wide open, her hair hanging loose round her neck. She stood there at the window, she put her ten fingers to her red lips, and blew Julien a kiss.
Distraught, he pressed his fists to his chest, as if to ask whether this kiss was meant for him.
Then Thérèse thought he was withdrawing. She leaned out further, again set her ten fingers to her red lips, and blew him a second kiss, and then a third. It was as if she were returning the young man’s three kisses. He stood there gaping. It was a clear evening, he could see her distinctly outlined in the window’s shadowy frame.
When she thought she had won him, she glanced down into the small square. And, in a strained voice: ‘Come,’ she said simply.
He came. He went downstairs, walked over to the house. As he was looking up, the front door half opened, that door which had been locked and bolted for perhaps half a century, and whose hinged leaves had been bound together by moss. But he walked along in a stupor, no longer surprised at anything. The moment he went in, the door closed behind him, and he was led along by a small icy hand. He went upstairs, along a corridor, across a first room, and finally found himself in a bedroom that he recognised. It was paradise, the room with the pink silk curtains. The daylight was dwindling away slowly and gently. He was tempted to fall to his knees. But Thérèse was standing bolt upright in front of him, her hands tightly clasped, so full of resolve that she managed to repress the shudders that were running up and down her.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked in a low voice.
‘Oh yes! Oh yes!’ he stammered.
But she signalled him not to waste his breath on useless babble. She resumed, in a haughty tone that seemed to make her words natural and chaste as they came from her girlish lips: ‘If I gave myself to you, you’d do anything, wouldn’t you?’
Unable to reply, he folded his hands together. For a kiss from her, he would sell his soul.
‘Well, I’ve got a favour to ask you.’
As he remained dumb, she broke out into sudden violence, feeling utterly exhausted and sensing that she might soon run out of courage. She cried, ‘Look, we’ve got to swear to it first… I swear to keep my side of the bargain… Go on, you swear too!’
‘Oh, I swear! Oh, whatever you want!’ he said, in a moment of total self-abandonment.
The pure clean smell of the room made his senses swim. The curtains round the alcove were drawn to, and the mere thought of her virginal bed, in the soft shadow of pink silk, threw him into a religious ecstasy. Then, with her suddenly brutal hands, she tore apart the curtains and revealed the alcove, into which the twilight shed a sinister gleam. The bed was in disorder, the sheets trailing down, a pillow that had fallen to the ground seemed dented by tooth marks. And, in the midst of the crumpled lace, lay the body of a man, barefoot, sprawling sideways.
‘There,’ she explained in a choked voice, ‘that man was my lover… I pushed him, he fell over, I just don’t know. Anyway, he’s dead… And you’ve got to take him away. Do you understand?… That’s all, yes, that’s all. That’s what you must do!’
3
While still a little girl, Thérèse de Marsanne took Colombel for her stooge. He was barely six months older than she was, and Françoise, his mother, had ended up bottle-feeding him, so as to give her own milk to Thérèse. Later on, having grown up in the household, he took on a vague position somewhere between servant boy and playmate for the little girl.
Thérèse was an enfant terrible. It wasn’t that she was a noisy tomboy. She maintained, on the contrary, a singular gravity, which led to her being considered a well brought-up young lady by the visitors to whom she would curtsey so charmingly. But she had strange whims: she would suddenly burst out into inarticulate cries, and stamp her feet in a wild tantrum when she was alone; or she would lie on her back in the middle of one of the garden paths, and stay there, stretched out, obstinately refusing to get up, despite the punishments they sometimes decided to mete out to her.
No one could ever tell what she was thinking. Already, in those big childish eyes of hers, she extinguished every spark of life; and, in place of those clear mirrors where the souls of little girls can be seen so clearly, she had two dark holes, deep and black as ink, in which it was impossible to read.
At the age of six, she started to torture Colombel. He was small and puny. So she would lead him to the bottom of the garden, under the chestnut trees, to a place well hidden by the shade of the leaves, and leap on his back, forcing him to carry her. She straddled him for hour-long rides round a wide clump in the middle. She clasped him round the neck, digging her heels repeatedly into his ribs, giving him no chance to draw breath. He was the horse, she the fine lady. When, overcome by dizziness, he seemed on the point of collapse, she would bite his ear until she drew blood, squeezing him so fiercely that her small fingernails pierced his flesh. And on they galloped, this cruel six-year-old queen riding through the trees, her hair streaming in the wind, on the back of the boy she was using as her steed.
Later, when they
were with her parents, she would pinch him, and forbid him to cry out, under the permanent threat of having him thrown out onto the streets if he said anything about their little games. In this way they led a sort of secret life, a shared existence, which changed when they were in company. When they were alone, she treated him as a toy, often feeling the urge to break him open, curious to find out what was inside. Was she not a marquise, did she not see people at her feet the whole time? Since she had been given a little man to play with, she was at perfect liberty to do with him what her fancy dictated. And when she got bored of tyrannising Colombel far from people’s eyes, she would give herself the added and even more intense pleasure of dealing him a hefty kick or sticking a pin in his arm in the midst of a big group of visitors, while hypnotising him with her dark eyes so he would not so much as flinch.
Colombel put up with this martyr’s life, despite moments of mute revolt which left him trembling, his eyes downcast, struggling to overcome the temptation of strangling his young mistress. But he himself was sly by temperament. He had no great objection to being beaten. He derived a sour enjoyment from it, and sometimes arranged things so he would get pricked, waiting for the needle to enter his flesh with a shudder of fierce satisfaction; and then he would become absorbed in the delightful prospect of getting his own back. In any case, he was already taking his revenge, deliberately falling onto hard stones and dragging Thérèse down with him, unafraid of breaking a limb, and all too pleased when she picked up bumps and grazes. If he didn’t cry out when she pinched him in company, it was so no one would intervene between them. It was their business, that was all, a quarrel from which he intended to emerge the victor later on.
Meanwhile, however, the Marquis was worried by his daughter’s violent manners. People said that she resembled one of her uncles, who had led a life fraught with terrible adventures, and who had died murdered in a den of vice in some out-of-the-way suburb. Indeed, a seam of tragedy ran through the whole history of the Marsanne family; every so often, their members were born with a strange malady, despite their dignified and haughty lineage; and this malady was like an outbreak of madness, a perverse emotional disorder, an upwelling of scum which seemed for a while to rid the family of the impurity. So the Marquis thought it wise to submit Thérèse to a strict education, and he placed her in a convent, where he hoped the discipline would make her more tractable. She stayed there until she was eighteen.
