The following Thursday, the evening party at the Raquins, as the guests
continued to term the household of their hosts, was particularly merry.
It was prolonged until half-past eleven, and as Grivet withdrew, he
declared that he had never passed such a pleasant time.
Suzanne, who was not very well, never ceased talking to Thérèse of her
pain and joy. Thérèse appeared to listen to her with great interest,
her eyes fixed, her lips pinched, her head, at moments, bending forward;
while her lowering eyelids cast a cloud over the whole of her face.
Laurent, for his part, gave uninterrupted attention to the tales of old
Michaud and Olivier. These gentlemen never paused, and it was only with
difficulty that Grivet succeeded in getting in a word edgeways between
a couple of sentences of father and son. He had a certain respect
for these two men whom he considered good talkers. On that particular
evening, a gossip having taken the place of the usual game, he naively
blurted out that the conversation of the former commissary of police
amused him almost as much as dominoes.
During the four years, or thereabouts, that the Michauds and Grivet had
been in the habit of passing the Thursday evenings at the Raquins’, they
had not once felt fatigued at these monotonous evenings that returned
with enervating regularity. Never had they for an instant suspected the
drama that was being performed in this house, so peaceful and harmonious
when they entered it. Olivier, with the jest of a person connected with
the police, was in the habit of remarking that the dining-room savoured
of the honest man. Grivet, so as to have his say, had called the place
the Temple of Peace.
Latterly, on two or three different occasions, Thérèse explained the
bruises disfiguring her face, by telling the guests she had fallen down.
But none of them, for that matter, would have recognised the marks of
the fist of Laurent; they were convinced as to their hosts being a model
pair, replete with sweetness and love.
The paralysed woman had not made any fresh attempt to reveal to them
the infamy concealed behind the dreary tranquillity of the Thursday
evenings. An eye-witness of the tortures of the murderers, and
foreseeing the crisis which would burst out, one day or another, brought
on by the fatal succession of events, she at length understood that
there was no necessity for her intervention. And from that moment, she
remained in the background allowing the consequences of the murder of
Camille, which were to kill the assassins in their turn, to take their
course. She only prayed heaven, to grant her sufficient life to enable
her to be present at the violent catastrophe she foresaw; her only
remaining desire was to feast her eyes on the supreme suffering that
would undo Thérèse and Laurent.
On this particular evening, Grivet went and seated himself beside her,
and talked for a long time, he, as usual, asking the questions and
supplying the answers himself. But he failed to get even a glance from
her. When half-past eleven struck, the guests quickly rose to their
feet.
“We are so comfortable with you,” said Grivet, “that no one ever thinks
of leaving.”
“The fact is,” remarked Michaud by way of supporting the old clerk, “I
never feel drowsy here, although I generally go to bed at nine o’clock.”
Olivier thought this a capital opportunity for introducing his little
joke.
“You see,” said he, displaying his yellow teeth, “this apartment savours
of honest people: that is why we are so comfortable here.”
Grivet, annoyed at being forestalled, began to declaim with an emphatic
gesture:
“This room is the Temple of Peace!”
In the meanwhile, Suzanne, who was putting on her hat, remarked to
Thérèse:
“I will come to-morrow morning at nine o’clock.”
“No,” hastened to answer the young woman in a strange, troubled tone,
“don’t come until the afternoon I have an engagement in the morning.”
She accompanied the guests into the arcade, and Laurent also went down
with a lamp in his hand. As soon as the married couple were alone,
both heaved a sigh of relief. They must have been devoured by secret
impatience all the evening. Since the previous day they had become more
sombre, more anxious in presence of one another. They avoided looking at
each other, and returned in silence to the dining-room. Their hands gave
slight convulsive twitches, and Laurent was obliged to place the lamp on
the table, to avoid letting it fall.
Before putting Madame Raquin to bed they were in the habit of setting
the dining-room in order, of preparing a glass of sugar and water
for the night, of moving hither and thither about the invalid, until
everything was ready.
When they got upstairs on this particular occasion, they sat down an
instant with pale lips, and eyes gazing vaguely before them. Laurent was
the first to break silence:
“Well! Aren’t we going to bed?” he inquired, as if he had just started
from a dream.
“Yes, yes, we are going to bed,” answered Thérèse, shivering as though
she felt a violent chill.
She rose and grasped the water decanter.
“Let it be,” exclaimed her husband, in a voice that he endeavoured to
render natural, “I will prepare the sugar and water. You attend to your
aunt.”
He took the decanter of water from the hands of his wife and poured out
a glassful. Then, turning half round, he emptied the contents of the
small stoneware flagon into the glass at the same time as he dropped a
lump of sugar into it. In the meanwhile, Thérèse had bent down before
the sideboard, and grasping the kitchen knife sought to slip it into one
of the large pockets hanging from her waist.
At the same moment, a strange sensation which comes as a warning note
of danger, made the married couple instinctively turn their heads. They
looked at one another. Thérèse perceived the flagon in the hands of
Laurent, and the latter caught sight of the flash of the blade in the
folds of the skirt of his wife.
For a few seconds they examined each other, mute and frigid, the husband
near the table, the wife stooping down before the sideboard. And they
understood. Each of them turned icy cold, on perceiving that both
had the same thought. And they were overcome with pity and horror
at mutually reading the secret design of the other on their agitated
countenances.
Madame Raquin, feeling the catastrophe near at hand, watched them with
piercing, fixed eyes.
Thérèse and Laurent, all at once, burst into sobs. A supreme crisis
undid them, cast them into the arms of one another, as weak as children.
It seemed to them as if something tender and sweet had awakened in their
breasts. They wept, without uttering a word, thinking of the vile life
they had led, and would still lead, if they were cowardly enough to
live.
Then, at the recollection of the past, they felt so fatigued and
disgusted with themselves, that they experienced a huge desire for
repose, for nothingness. They exchanged a final look, a look of
thankfulness, in presence of the knife and glass of poison. Thérèse took
the glass, half emptied it, and handed it to Laurent who drank off the
remainder of the contents at one draught. The result was like lightning.
The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation,
at last, in death. The mouth of the young woman rested on the scar that
the teeth of Camille had left on the neck of her husband.
The corpses lay all night, spread out contorted, on the dining-room
floor, lit up by the yellow gleams from the lamp, which the shade cast
upon them. And for nearly twelve hours, in fact until the following day
at about noon, Madame Raquin, rigid and mute, contemplated them at her
feet, overwhelming them with her heavy gaze, and unable to sufficiently
gorge her eyes with the hideous sight.
AFTERWORD
The idea of the plot of “Thérèse Raquin,” according to M. Paul Alexis,
Zola’s biographer, came from a novel called “La Venus de Gordes”
contributed to the “Figaro” by Adolphe Belot and Ernest Daudet--the
brother of Alphonse Daudet--in collaboration. In this story the authors
dealt with the murder of a man by his wife and her paramour, followed by
the trial of the murderers at the assizes. Zola, in noticing the book in
the “Figaro,” when it arrived for review, pointed out that a much more
powerful story might be written on the same subject by invoking divine
instead of human justice. For instance, showing the two murderers safe
from earthly consequences, yet separated by the pool of blood between
them, haunted by their crime, and detesting one another for the deed
done together.
It then occurred to Zola to write the tale on these lines himself.
Convinced that the idea was good, he elaborated it with the greatest
care and all the skill at his command, the result being that he produced
a volume which proved his first genuine success, and which is still
considered by many to be his very best book.
EDWARD VIZETELLY
SURBITON, 1 December, 1901.