In the drawing-room, Thérèse was sitting in the dark. There were still
some embers alive under the ashes of the fire. She did not move. Now
that it was too late, stray passages from the confession she had
prepared during her journey, floated to the surface of her mind; but
she could not find fault with herself for not having used it. As a
matter of fact, the story was too well constructed, and had but little
reference to reality. The importance she had chosen to attach to young
Azévédo’s conversation was mere foolishness. As if that could have had
the slightest effect! No, she had obeyed some inner inexorable law: she
had failed to destroy this family, so she herself would be destroyed;
they were right to consider her a monster, but she thought them
monstrous, too. Without appearing to do so they now intended gradually
and methodically to crush her out of existence. Henceforth, this
powerful family machine would be used against her,--because she had not
understood how to dislocate the mechanism, nor get out of reach of its
ruthless wheels. It was useless to look for any reason other than the
fact that they were what they were, and she was herself. “All those
efforts,” she thought, “to wear a mask and a disguise, and impersonate
a wife, which I could only keep up for less than two years, I imagine
other women, no different from me, carry on until they die, saved,
perhaps, by use and wont, drugged by habit, and stupefied into slumber
against the maternal and all-powerful bosom of the Family. But I ... I
... I....”
She got up, opened the window, and felt the chill of dawn. Why not
escape? She had only to get out of the window. Would they pursue her?
Would they again deliver her up to justice? It was a risk worth taking.
Anything was better than the interminable agony. Thérèse had already
drawn up a chair against the window. But she had no money; thousands
of pines were hers, but they were useless: she could not touch a penny
except through Bernard. She could do nothing but take to the moors,
as Daguerre had done, that hunted murderer for whom Thérèse as a child
had felt so much pity. (She remembered the gendarmes whom Balionte had
entertained in the kitchen at Argelouse)--and it was the Desqueyroux
dog who had got on the poor wretch’s track. He had been picked up
half-dead with hunger in the heather; and Thérèse had seen him lying
bound in a haycart. He was said to have died on the ship before he
reached Cayenne. A ship ... a convict settlement.... They were quite
capable of giving her up, as they had said. That evidence that Bernard
pretended he had,--it was a lie, no doubt; unless he had discovered
that package of poisons in the pocket of the old cloak.
Thérèse decided to make certain. She felt her way to the staircase:
as she went up it she saw more clearly, the light of dawn was shining
through the windows above her. There, on the attic landing, was the
cupboard where the old clothes were hanging,--the ones that never
appeared, because they were only used during the shooting season. There
was a deep pocket in that faded mantle: Aunt Clara used to put her
knitting in it in the times when she also used to go out and watch for
the pigeons to come over. Thérèse slipped her hand into it and drew out
the packet sealed with wax:
Chloroform: 10 grammes.
Aconitine: 2 grammes.
Digitaline: 20 centigrammes.
She read the words and figures over again. Death: she had always
had a terror of death. The essential thing was not to contemplate
death,--only to think of the necessary preliminaries: pour out the
water, dissolve the powder, drink it off, lie down on a bed, and close
her eyes: she must not look further than that. Why be more afraid
of the sleep that was death, than of any other sleep? If she was
shivering, it was only because the early morning air was chilly. She
went downstairs again, and stopped at the door of the room in which
Marie slept. The nurse’s snores were like the grunts of an animal.
Thérèse pushed the door back: the growing daylight filtered through the
shutters, and the narrow iron bed gleamed white in the darkness. Two
tiny fists were lying on the sheet: a baby profile was buried in the
pillow. Thérèse recognised that ear; it was a little too large,--just
like her own. They were right, a replica of herself lay there, sunk in
slumber. “I shall go away,--but that part of me remains; a fate that
must be fulfilled to the end, and not one iota omitted.” All manner
of dumb desires and blind inclinations, laws of the blood that none
may escape,--in these she must survive. Thérèse had read of desperate
people carrying off their children to death with them: worthy citizens
let their paper fall, exclaiming “How can such things be possible?”
Because she was a criminal, Thérèse knew too well that they were
possible, and that for very little.... She knelt down, and laid her
lips against a little outstretched hand; she was amazed at something
that surged up from her inmost being, rose up to her eyes, and burned
her cheeks: a few poor tears,--she who never wept!
Thérèse got up, looked at the child once more, then went into her own
room, filled a glass with water, broke the wax seal, and hesitated
between the three packets of poison.
The window was open. The crowing of the cocks seemed to cleave the
mist, which still clung to the pines in transparent strips. The land
lay bathed in the dawn. How could she say farewell to so much light?
What was death? No one knew what it was. Thérèse was not quite certain
that it meant annihilation: she was not sure that there was no one
there. She loathed herself for feeling such terrors; she who did not
hesitate to hurl a fellow-creature into nothingness, was scared of it
herself. How her cowardice humiliated her! If that Being existed (and
in one brief instant she saw before her that dreadful Corpus Christi
procession, that solitary figure weighed down under his golden cape,
the thing that he carried in both hands, and his look of dejection);
since He exists, let Him turn aside the murderous hand before it is too
late; and if it is His will that a poor blind soul should pass that
bourne, let Him give a loving welcome to the criminal whom He created.
Thérèse poured the chloroform into the water: its name was more
familiar to her and made her feel less frightened because it called up
images of sleep. She must be quick: the house was awakening: Balionte
had taken down the shutters in Aunt Clara’s room. What was she shouting
to the deaf woman? The servant usually knew how to make herself
understood by a movement of the lips. A noise of doors and hurried
steps; Thérèse had only just the time to throw a shawl over the table
to hide the poisons. Balionte came in without knocking.
“Ma’m’iselle is dead! I found her dead, on her bed with all her clothes
on. She is cold already.”
* * * * *
In spite of everything, a rosary was placed between the fingers of the
old unbeliever, a crucifix on her breast. Tenants came in, knelt down,
and went out, not without long looks at Thérèse who was standing at
the head of the bed: (“And who knows if it wasn’t she who did it?”)
Bernard had gone to Saint Clair to tell the Family and to make the
necessary arrangements. He must have thought that this accident came
at an opportune moment and would distract people’s attention. Thérèse
looked at the body, the old faithful body that came and lay down in her
path at the very moment she was going to hurl herself to death. Chance:
coincidence? If any one talked about free-will, she used to shrug her
shoulders. People said to each other: “Did you see? She didn’t even
pretend to cry.” Thérèse was speaking silently to her who was no longer
there: she must live, but like a corpse in the hands of those who hate
her. She must try and look no further.
At the funeral Thérèse took her proper place. On the following Sunday,
she entered the church with Bernard who instead of going down the
aisle, as his custom was, ostentatiously walked up the nave. Thérèse
did not raise her crêpe veil until she had reached her place between
her mother-in-law and her husband. She was hidden from the congregation
by a pillar: opposite her was only the choir. She was hemmed in on
every side: the mass of the congregation behind her, Bernard on the
right, Madame de la Trave on the left, only the choir lay before her,
as the arena stretches away in front of the bull when he emerges from
the darkness: that empty space where between two children stood a man,
disguised and muttering, with parted hands.