Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola; Robin Buss

Author:Émile Zola; Robin Buss
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: classics
ISBN: 9780140449440
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1901-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

XVIII

Thérèse, too, had been visited by the ghost of Camille in that night of fever.

She had been suddenly aroused by Laurent’s ardent plea for them to meet, after more than a year of indifference. Her flesh began to ache when, lying in bed alone, she considered that the wedding was soon to take place. And then, struggling in the throes of insomnia, she saw the drowned man rise up in front of her. Like Laurent, she had twisted around in a frenzy of desire and horror and, like him, told herself that she would no longer be afraid, no longer experience such suffering, when she held her lover between her arms.

At the same moment, this man and this woman had felt a kind of failing of the nerves, which brought them back, gasping and terrified, to their terrible love. An affinity of blood and lust had been established between them. They shuddered the same shudders, and their hearts, in a sort of agonizing fellowship, ached with the same terror. From then on, they had only one body and one soul to feel pleasure and pain. This community, this mutual interpenetration, is a psychological and physiological fact that often occurs between those who are thrown violently together by great nervous shocks.

For more than a year, Thérèse and Laurent carried the chain lightly that was clamped to their limbs, binding them together. In the mental collapse that followed the acute crisis of the murder, in the feelings of disgust and the need for calm and forgetting that came after that, the two prisoners could imagine that they were free and that no iron link bound them together. The chain lay slack on the ground, while they rested, stricken with a kind of happy stupor, and tried to find love elsewhere, to lead sensibly balanced lives. But on the day when circumstances drove them once more to exchange words of desire, the chain suddenly tightened and they experienced such a shock that they felt attached to one another for ever.

The very next day, Thérèse started her campaign, working away in secret to bring about her marriage to Laurent. The task was a difficult one, fraught with danger. The lovers were afraid that they might do something rash and awake suspicion by revealing too suddenly what they had had to gain from Camille’s death. Realizing that they could not talk about marriage, they devised a very sensible plan that consisted in getting Mme Raquin and the Thursday evening guests to offer them what they dare not ask for themselves. Their one idea from now on was to get the idea of Thérèse’s remarriage into the heads of these good people and above all to make them think that the idea originated with themselves and was theirs alone.

The play-acting involved was long and delicate. Both Thérèse and Laurent had taken on the role that suited them and they went forward with extreme caution, weighing every little word and gesture. Underneath, they were consumed by an impatience that wore and stretched their nerves.

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