Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [102]
The weather was mild and the young woman walked slowly, her head a little thrown back, her hair hanging down her back. Men who had looked at her as she came towards them turned round to see her from behind. She went down the Rue de l’École-de-Médecine.1 Laurent was terrified: he knew that there was a police station somewhere around here and thought to himself that there was no longer any doubt about it, his wife was definitely going to turn him in. So he vowed to rush over and grab her if she went through the door of the police station, to beg her, beat her and force her to keep silent. At one street corner, she looked at a constable going past, and Laurent dreaded seeing her go up to the man, so he hid in a doorway, fearful suddenly that he would be arrested on the spot if he showed himself. For him, the walk was a real torment: while his wife was sauntering along the pavement in the sunshine, carefree and shameless, her skirts trailing, here he was following her, pale and trembling, thinking that it was all over, there was no escape, he was for the guillotine. Every step she took seemed to him a step nearer his punishment. Fear gave him a sort of blind certainty, which every one of the young woman’s actions only served to increase. He followed her, going where she went, as a man goes to the scaffold.
Suddenly, coming out on to the former Place Saint-Michel, Thérèse headed towards a café that was then on the corner of the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince.2 She sat down in the middle of a group of women and students at one of the tables on the street. She greeted all these people as friends, shaking their hands. Then she ordered an absinthe.
She appeared to be at her ease, talking to a young, fair-haired man who had probably been waiting there some time for her. Two girls came and leaned over the table where she was sitting, and started to talk familiarly to her in their husky voices. Around her were women smoking cigarettes and men kissing women openly on the street, in front of passers-by who did not even bother to turn round. Laurent, standing motionless under a doorway on the far side of the street, could hear their coarse laughs and swear words.
When Thérèse had finished her absinthe, she got up, took the arm of the fair-haired man and set off down the Rue de la Harpe. Laurent followed them to the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. There, he saw them go into a lodging-house. He stayed there in the middle of the street looking up towards the front of the house. His wife appeared for a moment at an open window on the second floor; then he thought he could see the fair-haired young man’s hands taking her around the waist. The window clanged shut.
Laurent understood. Without waiting any longer, he set off calmly, happy and reassured.
‘Huh!’ he said, as he walked back towards the Seine. ‘That’s better. This way at least she has something to do and won’t get up to mischief. She’s a lot smarter than I am.’
What astonished him was that he had not been the first to have the idea of relapsing into vice. He could have found a cure there for his terrors. He had not thought of it, because his flesh was dead and he no longer felt the slightest desire for debauchery. His wife’s infidelity left him entirely unmoved; he experienced no revulsion of the blood or the nerves at the idea of her in the arms of another man. On the contrary, it