THÉRÈSE
[Illustration: _Thérèse_
_By_
FRANCOIS
MAURIAC
_New York_
_Boni & Liveright_
_1928_]
THÉRÈSE BY FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
TRANSLATED BY ERIC SUTTON
COPYRIGHT 1928 BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
Lord have pity, O have pity on those who
know not what they do. O Creator of the
world, can there be any in whom the image
of humanity is destroyed, even in the eyes
of Him, who alone knows why they exist, HOW
THEY HAVE MADE THEMSELVES WHAT THEY ARE,
and how they could have made themselves
otherwise.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
_I shall be told, Thérèse, that you do not exist, but I know you do,
for I have been watching you for years, and I have often stopped you
and unmasked you as you passed me by._
_When I was young, I remember seeing your little white thin-lipped
face, as you stood in a stifling Assize Court, at the mercy of lawyers
not half so pitiless as the fine ladies who had come to see your agony._
_Later on, I found you in the drawing-room of a country house, looking
drawn and pale, bored by the attentions of your aged parents and your
simple-minded husband. “But what can be the matter with her?” said
they: “she has everything she can possibly want.”_
_Since then, I have so often admired you as you passed that strong hand
of yours so wearily across your firm broad brow. I have so often seen
you prowling, like a wild animal, back and forwards behind the living
bars of the family in which you are imprisoned, watching me with your
evil melancholy eyes._
_Many will be surprised that I have been able to conceive a creature
yet more odious than all my other heroines. Why, they ask, do I never
write about good kind people in whose hearts there is no secret? Alas!
where there is no secret there is no story; and I know the secrets of
those hearts that are tainted with the clay that covers them._
_I could have wished, Thérèse, that sorrow should bring you to God; and
I have long wanted you to be worthy of the name of Saint Locusta. But
many, though they believe in the downfall and redemption of our poor
tormented souls, would have cried “Sacrilege.”_
_I can only hope that on that street where I bid you farewell you are
not alone._
THÉRÈSE
THÉRÈSE
CHAPTER I
The lawyer opened a door. Thérèse Desqueyroux, as she stood in that
remote corridor of the law-courts, felt the fog upon her face and
inhaled it deeply. She was afraid some one might be waiting for her,
and hesitated to go out. A man with his coat collar turned up appeared
from the shadow of a plane tree, and she recognised her father.
“All right,” cried the lawyer; “case dismissed”; and, turning to
Thérèse, he added, “You can go out now; no one is there.”
She went down the damp steps; the little Square seemed indeed deserted.
Her father did not kiss her, did not even look at her. He asked a few
questions of Duros, the lawyer, who answered in low tones, as though he
were afraid of being overheard. She just managed to catch what they
were saying.
“I shall get the official notification to-morrow.”
“I suppose nothing can go wrong now?”
“No, nothing; it’s all over.”
“I suppose after my son-in-law’s statement, it was a certainty?”
“Well, I’m not so sure.... You never can tell.”
“But after he’d said definitely that he had not counted the drops....”
“My dear Larroque, in affairs of this kind the victim’s evidence....”
Here Thérèse broke in; “But there wasn’t any victim.”
“I meant by victim, the victim of his own imprudence, Madame.”
The two men stared at her for a moment as she stood there motionless,
wrapped in her cloak, and looked curiously at her expressionless
face. She asked where the carriage was; her father had arranged for
it to wait on the Budos road, outside the town, so as not to attract
attention.
They crossed the Square, where leaves from the plane trees were
sticking to the rain-soaked benches. Fortunately the days had grown
much shorter: besides, to get to the Budos road, they could go through
the most unfrequented streets of the little provincial town. Thérèse
walked between the two men (she was nearly half a head taller than
either of them), and they began a further discussion as if she had not
been there; but finding the intervening feminine presence inconvenient
they began unconsciously to elbow her out of the way. She accordingly
dropped a little behind, and took the glove off her left hand so as to
be able to pick the moss off the ancient stone walls at her side. From
time to time a workman on a bicycle, or a trap came past, and she drew
close in to the houses to avoid being splashed with mud. But Thérèse
was hidden by the gathering dusk, and no one recognised her. The smell
of fog and baking bread was for her not merely the usual evening smell
of a little town; it was the perfume of the life that had been restored
to her at last. She shut her eyes to savour the moist leafy fragrance
of the sleeping earth, and tried not to listen to the words of the
short bandy-legged gentleman who did not once turn his head towards his
daughter. She might have fallen at the roadside and neither he, nor
Duros, would have noticed it. They were no longer afraid to raise their
voices.
“Monsieur Desqueyroux’s statement was all that could be desired, but
there was that prescription,--in point of fact, it was a question of
forgery. And it was Doctor Pédemay who had brought the charge....”
“But he withdrew it.”
“I know; but her explanation--this mysterious individual who handed her
a prescription....”
Thérèse walked more slowly, not because she was tired, but to get out
of earshot of these phrases that had been dinned into her brain for so
many weeks; but it was no use. She could not help hearing her father’s
raucous accents:
“I told her over and over again that she _must_ try to think of
something else.”
He was quite right, he had indeed said so very often. But what was he
worrying about now? What he called the honour of the name, was safe:
the whole story would have been forgotten by the time of the Senatorial
elections, Thérèse thought to herself, as she did her best not to
catch up the two men; but in the heat of the discussion, they stopped,
gesticulating at each other, half-way down the street.
“My advice to you, Larroque, is to face the thing out: take the
offensive in next Sunday’s _Semeur_: I’ll see about it if you like. Get
them to put in a notice headed ‘An Infamous Rumour’ or something like
that.”
“I don’t agree with you, my dear fellow: as a matter of fact there is
no case to answer, the prosecution obviously had not a leg to stand
on; they did not even consult hand-writing experts. I am sure the
best thing will be to say nothing, and hush it all up. I will do what
is necessary and I won’t spare expense: we can’t afford to have any
scandal, for the sake of the family.”
They had walked on again by this time, and Thérèse did not hear Duros’
answer. She inhaled the damp night air once more as though she were
afraid of choking; and suddenly there came before her mind the unknown
face of her maternal grandmother Julie Bellade: it was indeed unknown,
for neither the Larroque nor the Desqueyroux families possessed a
single likeness of her, and nothing was known about her except that she
had one day disappeared. Thérèse realised that she too might have been
wiped out of existence, and later on not even her little daughter Marie
would have been allowed to find in an album the likeness of one who had
brought her into the world. At that moment Marie was already asleep in
a room at Argelouse, where Thérèse would arrive late that evening: she
would listen in the darkness to the murmur of that childish slumber;
she would lean over the bed and her lips would drink in the sweetness
of that sleeping life like a draught of clear water.
The carriage stood waiting by the ditch at the edge of the road; the
hood was raised and the two lamps lit up the skinny hind quarters of
the horses. Beyond it towered two dark walls of forest. The tops of
the lower tiers of pines on either side met overhead, and the road
vanished into the darkness under that dim archway. Above it gleamed
the sky, fretted by a network of myriad branches.
The coachman watched Thérèse with greedy curiosity. When she asked him
if they would get to Nizan station in time to catch the last train, he
said they would if they started at once.
“I shall not need to trouble you again, Gardère.”
“Has Madame no more business here, then?”
She shook her head, while the man still devoured her with his eyes.
Would she be looked at like that for the rest of her life?
“Well, are you glad?” asked her father. He seemed at last to have
noticed her presence. Thérèse glanced at that sallow bilious
countenance, those cheeks bristling with a coarse growth of
whitish-yellow hair, so painfully distinct in the light of the carriage
lamps.
“I have suffered so much,--I am worn out ...” she began, in low tones;
but she soon relapsed into silence. It was no use talking; he was not
listening, he was not even looking at her. He cared very little about
Thérèse’s feelings. One thing and one thing only mattered to him; his
upward progress to the Senate might be impeded and even endangered by
this wretched daughter of his: all women, in his opinion, were either
hysterical or stupid. Fortunately her name was no longer Larroque: she
was a Desqueyroux. Now that they had managed to avoid a trial at the
Assizes, he breathed again: but it would be difficult to prevent his
enemies keeping the wound open. He would go and see the Prefect the
very next day. Thank Heaven, he could do what he liked with the Editor
of the _Lande Conservatrice_. There was that story about those little
girls!... He took Thérèse’s arm:
“Get in at once, you’ve no time to lose.”
Then the lawyer, perhaps out of malice, or possibly not liking to let
Thérèse go without saying a word to her, asked if she was going back
to Monsieur Bernard Desqueyroux that very evening. As she replied,
“Of course I am; my husband is expecting me,” she realised for the
first time since she had left the Law Courts that she would, in fact,
in a few hours, cross the threshold of the room in which her husband
was lying, still rather ill, and that this was the beginning of an
indefinite succession of days through which she must live in this man’s
company.
She had been staying with her father, just outside the little town,
while the case had been under investigation, but she had, of course,
often made this journey; on the previous occasions, however, she had
been intent upon the necessity for giving her husband an exact account
of what had happened, and her mind was full of Duros’ last words of
advice, as she had got into the carriage, on the answers Monsieur
Desqueyroux was to make when he was again questioned. Thérèse had then
felt no distress or awkwardness at finding herself face to face once
more with the sick man: what they had to consider was not what had
really happened, but what they had better say, or not say. Husband and
wife had never been so closely united as they were by the preparation
of this defence,--drawn together across the infant body of their little
daughter Marie. They concocted, for the judge’s benefit, a simple and
coherent story, calculated to convince that logical mind. She used
to get into the same carriage that was waiting for her this evening:
but to-night she dreaded the end of that journey through the darkness
which in those days she had found so tedious. She remembered how, the
moment she got into the carriage, she longed to be back in that room at
Argelouse, and she used to go over in her mind the instructions she was
to pass on to her husband: he was to be sure, for instance, to say that
she had told him one evening about that prescription which an unknown
man had asked her to take to the chemist’s, on the pretext that he did
not like to go himself because he owed money there,--but Duros did not
advise that Bernard should go so far as to pretend that he remembered
remonstrating with his wife for doing such a foolish thing.
Now that the nightmare had been exorcised, what would Bernard and
Thérèse talk about that evening? She saw in her mind’s eye the
desolate house in which he was awaiting her: she pictured the bed
in the centre of that stone-floored room, and the lamp, turned low,
standing on a table among a litter of newspapers and medicine bottles.
The house-dogs, awakened by the noise of the carriage, bark and are
quiet: and then the silence would descend once more, the awful silence
of those nights when the wretched Bernard lay racked by frightful
paroxysms of vomiting. Thérèse tried to imagine the first moment, not
far distant now, when their eyes would meet; and then the ensuing
night, the next day, the day after, and the weeks to come, in that
house at Argelouse, where they would no longer need to compose a
presentable version of the drama they had lived. There would be nothing
now between them,--except what had really been there, really, and in
very truth. Thérèse lost her nerve, and stammered, turning towards the
lawyer,--though her words were intended for the older man:
“I expect to stay a few days with Monsieur Desqueyroux, and then, if he
goes on improving, I shall come back to my father.”
“Not a bit of it, my dear,” said Monsieur Larroque, and as Gardère
began to fidget on his seat, he added, lowering his voice: “Have you
taken leave of your senses? You can’t possibly leave your husband at
such a time. You must be inseparable,--inseparable, I tell you, for the
rest of your lives.”
“Of course, father: what could I have been thinking of? Then you will
come to Argelouse?”
“But I shall expect you over for the fair on Thursdays as usual,
Thérèse. You will go on coming as you always did.”
She must surely understand that any departure from existing usages
would be fatal. She must realise that, once and for all. He felt sure
he could depend upon her, she had done the family enough harm already.
“You must do exactly what your husband tells you, and then you won’t go
far wrong.”
And he hurried her into the carriage.
Thérèse noticed the lawyer’s outstretched hand, with its coarse dark
nails:
“All’s well that ends well,” said he, and indeed he really meant it.
If the case had gone any further he would not have got much out of it.
The family would have called in Maître Peyrecave of the Bordeaux Bar:
so everything was for the best.