THERESE RAQUIN
CHAPTER XVIII
Therese also had been visited by the spectre of Camille, during this feverish
night.
After over a year of indifference, Laurent's sudden attentions had aroused
her senses. As she tossed herself about in insomnia, she had seen the drowned
man rise up before her; like Laurent she had writhed in terror, and she had said
as he had done, that she would no longer be afraid, that she would no more
experience such sufferings, when she had her sweetheart in her arms.
This man and woman had experienced at the same hour, a sort of nervous
disorder which set them panting with terror. A consanguinity had become
established between them. They shuddered with the same shudder; their hearts in
a kind of poignant friendship, were wrung with the same anguish. From that
moment they had one body and one soul for enjoyment and suffering.
This communion, this mutual penetration is a psychological and physiological
phenomenon which is often found to exist in beings who have been brought into
violent contact by great nervous shocks.
For over a year, Therese and Laurent lightly bore the chain riveted to their
limbs that united them. In the depression succeeding the acute crisis of the
murder, amidst the feelings of disgust, and the need for calm and oblivion that
had followed, these two convicts might fancy they were free, that they were no
longer shackled together by iron fetters. The slackened chain dragged on the
ground. They reposed, they found themselves struck with a sort of delightful
insensibility, they sought to love elsewhere, to live in a state of wise
equilibrium. But from the day when urged forward by events, they came to the
point of again exchanging burning sentences, the chain became violently
strained, and they received such a shock, that they felt themselves for ever
linked to one another.
The day following this first attack of nightmare, Therese secretly set to
work to bring about her marriage with Laurent. It was a difficult task, full of
peril. The sweethearts trembled lest they should commit an imprudence, arouse
suspicions, and too abruptly reveal the interest they had in the death of
Camille.
Convinced that they could not mention marriage themselves, they arranged a
very clever plan which consisted in getting Madame Raquin herself, and the
Thursday evening guests, to offer them what they dared not ask for. It then only
became necessary to convey to these worthy people the idea of remarrying
Therese, and particularly to make them believe that this idea originated with
themselves, and was their own.
The comedy was long and delicate to perform. Therese and Laurent took the
parts adapted to them, and proceeded with extreme prudence, calculating the
slightest gesture, and the least word. At the bottom of their hearts, they were
devoured by a feeling of impatience that stiffened and strained their nerves.
They lived in a state of constant irritation, and it required all their natural
cowardice to compel them to show a smiling and peaceful exterior.
If they yearned to bring the business to an end, it was because they could no
longer remain separate and solitary. Each night, the drowned man visited them,
insomnia stretched them on beds of live coal and turned them over with fiery
tongs. The state of enervation in which they lived, nightly increased the fever
of their blood, which resulted in atrocious hallucinations rising up before
them.
Therese no longer dared enter her room after dusk. She experienced the
keenest anguish, when she had to shut herself until morning in this large
apartment, which became lit-up with strange glimmers, and peopled with phantoms
as soon as the light was out. She ended by leaving her candle burning, and by
preventing herself falling asleep, so as to always have her eyes wide open. But
when fatigue lowered her lids, she saw Camille in the dark, and reopened her
eyes with a start. In the morning she dragged herself about, broken down, having
only slumbered for a few hours at dawn.
As to Laurent, he had decidedly become a poltroon since the night he had
taken fright when passing before the cellar door. Previous to that incident he
had lived with the confidence of a brute; now, at the least sound, he trembled
and turned pale like a little boy. A shudder of terror had suddenly shaken his
limbs, and had clung to him. At night, he suffered even more than Therese; and
fright, in this great, soft, cowardly frame, produced profound laceration to the
feelings. He watched the fall of day with cruel apprehension. On several
occasions, he failed to return home, and passed whole nights walking in the
middle of the deserted streets.
Once he remained beneath a bridge, until morning, while the rain poured down
in torrents; and there, huddled up, half frozen, not daring to rise and ascend
to the quay, he for nearly six hours watched the dirty water running in the
whitish shadow. At times a fit of terror brought him flat down on the damp
ground: under one of the arches of the bridge he seemed to see long lines of
drowned bodies drifting along in the current. When weariness drove him home, he
shut himself in, and double-locked the door. There he struggled until daybreak
amidst frightful attacks of fever.
The same nightmare returned persistently: he fancied he fell from the ardent
clasp of Therese into the cold, sticky arms of Camille. He dreamt, first of all,
that his sweetheart was stifling him in a warm embrace, and then that the corpse
of the drowned man pressed him to his chest in an ice-like strain. These abrupt
and alternate sensations of voluptuousness and disgust, these successive
contacts of burning love and frigid death, set him panting for breath, and
caused him to shudder and gasp in anguish.
Each day, the terror of the lovers increased, each day their attacks of
nightmare crushed and maddened them the more. They no longer relied on their
kisses to drive away insomnia. By prudence, they did not dare make appointments,
but looked forward to their wedding-day as a day of salvation, to be followed by
an untroubled night.
It was their desire for calm slumber that made them wish for their union.
They had hesitated during the hours of indifference, both being oblivious of the
egotistic and impassioned reasons that had urged them to the crime, and which
were now dispelled. It was in vague despair that they took the supreme
resolution to unite openly. At the bottom of their hearts they were afraid. They
had leant, so to say, one on the other above an unfathomable depth, attracted to
it by its horror. They bent over the abyss together, clinging silently to one
another, while feelings of intense giddiness enfeebled their limbs and gave them
falling madness.
But at the present moment, face to face with their anxious expectation and
timorous desires, they felt the imperative necessity of closing their eyes, and
of dreaming of a future full of amorous felicity and peaceful enjoyment. The
more they trembled one before the other, the better they foresaw the horror of
the abyss to the bottom of which they were about to plunge, and the more they
sought to make promises of happiness to themselves, and to spread out before
their eyes the invincible facts that fatally led them to marriage.
Therese desired her union with Laurent solely because she was afraid and
wanted a companion. She was a prey to nervous attacks that drove her half crazy.
In reality she reasoned but little, she flung herself into love with a mind
upset by the novels she had recently been reading, and a frame irritated by the
cruel insomnia that had kept her awake for several weeks.
Laurent, who was of a stouter constitution, while giving way to his terror
and his desire, had made up his mind to reason out his decision. To thoroughly
prove to himself that his marriage was necessary, that he was at last going to
be perfectly happy, and to drive away the vague fears that beset him, he resumed
all his former calculations.
His father, the peasant of Jeufosse, seemed determined not to die, and
Laurent said to himself that he might have to wait a long time for the
inheritance. He even feared that this inheritance might escape him, and go into
the pockets of one of his cousins, a great big fellow who turned the soil over
to the keen satisfaction of the old boy. And he would remain poor; he would live
the life of a bachelor in a garret, with a bad bed and a worse table. Besides,
he did not contemplate working all his life; already he began to find his office
singularly tedious. The light labour entrusted to him became irksome owing to
his laziness.
The invariable result of these reflections was that supreme happiness
consisted in doing nothing. Then he remembered that if he had drowned Camille,
it was to marry Therese, and work no more. Certainly, the thought of having his
sweetheart all to himself had greatly influenced him in committing the crime,
but he had perhaps been led to it still more, by the hope of taking the place of
Camille, of being looked after in the same way, and of enjoying constant
beatitude. Had passion alone urged him to the deed, he would not have shown such
cowardice and prudence. The truth was that he had sought by murder to assure
himself a calm, indolent life, and the satisfaction of his cravings.
All these thoughts, avowedly or unconsciously, returned to him. To find
encouragement, he repeated that it was time to gather in the harvest anticipated
by the death of Camille, and he spread out before him, the advantages and
blessings of his future existence: he would leave his office, and live in
delicious idleness; he would eat, drink and sleep to his heart's content; he
would have an affectionate wife beside him; and, he would shortly inherit the
40,000 francs and more of Madame Raquin, for the poor old woman was dying,
little by little, every day; in a word, he would carve out for himself the
existence of a happy brute, and would forget everything.
Laurent mentally repeated these ideas at every moment, since his marriage
with Therese had been decided on. He also sought other advantages that would
result therefrom, and felt delighted when he found a new argument, drawn from
his egotism, in favour of his union with the widow of the drowned man. But
however much he forced himself to hope, however much he dreamed of a future full
of idleness and pleasure, he never ceased to feel abrupt shudders that gave his
skin an icy chill, while at moments he continued to experience an anxiety that
stifled his joy in his throat.