Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [101]
Finally, one evening, François was staring so hard at Laurent that the latter, driven to exasperation, decided that enough was enough. He opened wide the dining-room window and went over to grasp the cat by the skin of its neck. Mme Raquin understood, and two large tears ran down her cheeks. The cat started to snarl and hiss, stiffening itself and trying to turn round to bite Laurent’s hand. But he did not let go. He whirled the cat around his head a couple of times, then smashed it as hard as he could against the great black wall opposite. François struck it and, his back broken, fell on to the glass roof of the arcade. Throughout the whole of that night, the wretched animal dragged itself along the gutter, its spine fractured, making harsh miaowing noises. That night, Mme Raquin mourned François almost as much as she had done Camille, and Thérèse had a dreadful nervous crisis. The cat’s moans in the darkness under their windows were quite sinister.
Soon Laurent had new things to worry him. He was disturbed by certain changes that he noted in his wife’s attitude.
Thérèse became sombre and taciturn. She no longer smothered Mme Raquin with her repentance and her grateful kisses, but instead resumed her old attitude of cold cruelty and self-centred indifference towards the paralysed woman. It was as though she had tried remorse and, when that failed to relieve her pain, had turned towards other remedies. No doubt her sadness came from her inability to find peace in her life. She looked at the cripple with a sort of contempt, like some useless object that could not even serve to console her any longer. She attended to her as little as possible, short of letting her die of hunger. From that moment on, she dragged herself around the house, silent and depressed; and she started to go out more often, staying away as many as four or five times a week.
These changes surprised and alarmed Laurent. He thought that remorse was taking a new form in Thérèse and coming out as this bored melancholy that he noticed in her. This boredom seemed to him far more disquieting than the despairing chatter that she had previously heaped on him. She no longer said anything, she did not argue with him, she seemed to keep everything locked up deep inside her. He would have preferred to hear her exhausting her suffering than to see her turned in on herself in this way. He was afraid that the anxiety would one day be too much for her and that, to relieve her feelings, she would go and tell everything to a priest or a magistrate.
At this, Thérèse’s frequent excursions took on a disturbing meaning for him. He thought that she must be looking for a confidant outside and was preparing to betray him. Twice, he tried to follow her, but lost her in the street. He began to keep watch on her once again. An obsession took hold of him: Thérèse was going to reveal everything, pushed to extremes by her suffering, and he had to gag her, to stifle the confession in her throat.
XXXI
One morning, Laurent, instead of going up to his studio, settled down at a wine shop, which occupied one of the corners of the Rue Guénégaud, opposite the arcade. From there he began to study the people who were coming out on to the pavement of the Rue Mazarine. He was looking out for Thérèse. The evening before, the young woman had said that she would be going out early and that she would probably not be back until evening.
Laurent waited a full half-hour.