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By Root 1327 0

He tried not to think about it. It was beyond him. The doorway to such horrors was best left unopened. Sometimes as he lay in her arms the thought of what she had done would suddenly come back to him. She had murdered; he had read it in her eyes as they sat together on the park bench in the Square des Batignolles. But he wanted to know no more. Séverine, on the other hand, seemed more and more anxious to tell him all that had happened. Sometimes, when she held him tight, he felt that she was bursting and gasping to tell him her secret, that her only reason for wanting to give herself was to find relief from the thing that was choking her. A violent tremor would run through her body and cause her breast to heave; confused sighs broke from her lips, and her voice faded away as she reached her ecstasy. Was she trying to speak to him? Seized with panic, he would quickly press his lips to hers and silence her confession with a kiss. Why let this thing come between them? Who could tell how it might change their love for each other? He sensed danger; the thought of her recounting the gruesome details of her crime to him made him shudder. She no doubt guessed what he was thinking because she would lie beside him and run her hands over him gently, lovingly, wanting only to love him and to be loved in return. And then they would make love, madly, passionately, and lie fainting in each other’s arms.

Since the summer, Roubaud had put on a lot of weight. Whereas Séverine seemed to be regaining the vivacity and freshness of the twenty-year-old girl she was, he seemed to be growing older and more sullen. As Séverine said, he had changed a lot in four months. He was still on good terms with Jacques, shaking his hand, inviting him back to the flat and never happier than when he joined them for a meal. But Jacques’s company was no longer enough to satisfy him. He would often go out as soon as he had finished eating, sometimes leaving Jacques alone with his wife, on the pretext that it was stuffy indoors and that he needed to get some fresh air. The truth was that he was now in the habit of visiting a little café on the Cours Napoléon, where he used to meet Monsieur Cauche, the safety officer. He didn’t drink much, bar the occasional tot of rum, but he had developed a liking for cards. It was becoming something of an obsession. It was only when he had the cards in his hand and was absorbed in endless rounds of piquet that he forgot his troubles and became more cheerful. Monsieur Cauche, who was an inveterate gambler, had insisted they play for money, and the stakes had now risen to a hundred sous4 a game. This was a side of himself that Roubaud had never been aware of. He became completely carried away by the idea of winning a fortune, by the mania for making money, which can so take hold of a man that he will stake his job and his livelihood on a throw of the dice. So far his work had not suffered. He would go off to the cafe as soon as he was free, and if he wasn’t on duty he wouldn’t get back home until two or three in the morning. His wife didn’t complain, although she objected to him always coming back in a worse mood than when he’d left, for he was extraordinarily unlucky and ended up running into debt.

Then came the first quarrel. Although she had not yet come to hate him, Séverine was finding Roubaud more and more difficult to put up with. She felt as if he were a weight bearing down on her whole life; but for the constant burden of his presence, she would have been free and happy. She had no regrets about deceiving him. After all, it was his fault; hadn’t he more or less forced her into it? As they gradually drifted apart, they each tried to overcome the disruption in their lives, seeking consolation or distraction in their own different ways. If he had his cards, she was entitled to have a lover. But what really annoyed her, what she simply could not come to terms with, was finding herself short of money as a result of his continual losses. Her housekeeping money was now being squandered at the café on the Cours Napoléon, and she