The Beast Within - Emile Zola [177]
In the distance she heard the rumble of an approaching stopping train from Paris. When the engine’s headlamp eventually passed in front of the window, the room was lit up as if by a flash of lightning or a sudden burst of flame.
‘Eighteen minutes past one,’ she thought. ‘Another seven hours! They will pass here at sixteen minutes past eight, tomorrow morning.’
For the past few months, waiting for this particular train once a week had become an obsession. She knew that the Friday-morning express was always driven by Jacques and that it would also be carrying Séverine, on her weekly trip to Paris. She was consumed with jealousy; all week long she waited for the moment the train went by, when she could look out for them and see them, and picture them in Paris, happy in each other’s arms. How she hated seeing the train fly past, wishing she could cling on to the last carriage and be carried away to Paris herself! It seemed to her as if the wheels of the train were cutting her heart to pieces. She felt so hurt that one night she had hidden herself in her room to write to the police. If she could get this woman arrested, her troubles would be at an end. She had once seen Séverine at La Croix-de-Maufras and knew that she had been one of Grandmorin’s mistresses. All she had to do was inform the authorities, and Séverine would be brought to trial. When she attempted to put pen to paper, however, the words wouldn’t come. She wondered whether the police would even listen to her. These high-up people were all in it together. She might well end up being put in prison herself, as had happened to Cabuche. No! If she sought revenge, she would do it on her own; she needed help from no one. Flore thought of revenge not as it was usually understood - hurting someone in order to remedy the hurt done to oneself - but as a final solution, a cataclysm, in which all was destroyed as if by lightning. She was a proud girl, physically stronger and more handsome than her rival, and was convinced that she had as much right to be loved as her. On her solitary excursions into the wild countryside near by, her long blonde hair flying freely in the wind, she wished she could take hold of her and settle the dispute like two maiden warriors, face to face in the depths of a forest. She had never been taken by a man. She was a match for any of them. She was indomitable. Victory would always be hers.
The idea had suddenly occurred to her the week before; it had struck her like a bolt from the blue. In order to stop them going past her house every week, in order to stop them going to Paris together, she must kill them. It was not something she had thought out; it was simply a crude, instinctive urge to get rid of them. When she had a thorn stuck in her finger she pulled it out; she would have cut her finger off if she’d had to. She must kill them. She must kill them the next time they went past. She must wreck the train, drag a beam of wood across the track, lift one of the rails, smash everything to pieces, destroy it. Jacques would be driving the locomotive; he couldn’t get off it. He would be crushed. His mistress always travelled in the leading carriage in order to be close to him; so she wouldn’t escape either. As for everyone else, the never-ending stream of passengers, she didn’t even give them