Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [104]
‘You’re driving me to the limit,’ he said. ‘You’re making my life unbearable. I’d rather have done with it. We’ll both be tried and condemned. That’s it.’
‘Do you think you’re frightening me?’ his wife shouted. ‘I’m as sick of it as you are. I’m the one who’s going to the police, if you don’t. Oh, yes! I’m ready to follow you to the scaffold, I won’t be such a coward as you. Come on, let’s go to the police station.’
She had got up and was already walking towards the stairs.
‘That’s right,’ Laurent stammered. ‘We’ll go together.’
When they were down in the shop, they looked at one another, anxious and afraid. It felt as though someone had just pinned them to the ground. The few seconds that it had taken to come down the wooden staircase had been enough to show them, in a flash, what would happen if they confessed. At one and the same time, they saw the gendarmes, prison, the assizes and the guillotine — all at once and clearly. In their hearts, they felt weak, they were tempted to fall on their knees and beg each other to stay, not to reveal anything. Fear and confusion kept them there, motionless and silent for two or three minutes. Thérèse was the first to speak and give way.
‘After all,’ she said, ‘it’s very silly of me to argue over the money. You’ll manage to squander it all for me one day or another. I might as well give it to you straight away.’
She made no further attempt to disguise her defeat. She sat down at the counter and signed an order for five thousand francs, which Laurent could cash at a bank. There was no further talk of police commissioners that evening.
As soon as Laurent had the money in his pocket, he got drunk, went out with girls and embarked on a noisy, riotous existence. He spent nights away from home, slept during the day and stayed up late, looking for excitement and trying to escape from reality. All he managed to do was to make himself more depressed. When people were yelling and shouting all around, he could hear the great silence inside him; when a woman was kissing him or when he emptied his glass, he found nothing in his intoxication but melancholy and sadness. He was no longer able to indulge in lust and gluttony: his being had cooled and, as it were, gone hard inside; food and kisses only irritated him. Sickened before he began, he could not manage to arouse his imagination, to excite his senses and his stomach. The more he drove himself to debauchery, the more he suffered, and that was that. Then, when he got home and saw Mme Raquin and Thérèse, his lassitude gave way to frightful attacks of terror. He swore that he would not go out any more, but stick with his suffering, get used to it and overcome it.
Thérèse for her part went out less and less often. For a month, she lived as Laurent did, on the pavements and in cafés. She would come back for a moment in the evening, give Mme Raquin something to eat, put her to bed, then go out again until morning. On one occasion, she and her husband went for four days without seeing one another. Then she felt a profound sense of repulsion and realized that vice was not doing her any more good than the pretence of remorse. In vain had she visited all the lodging-houses of the Latin Quarter, in vain had she led an indecent and dissolute life. Her nerves were shattered; debauchery and physical pleasure no longer gave her a strong enough shock to bring oblivion. She was like one of those drunkards whose palate is burned out and who remains indifferent even to the fire of the strongest liquors. Lust left her unmoved and she no longer sought anything from her lovers except boredom and exhaustion. So she would leave them, telling them that she had no further use for them. She was seized with a desperate laziness that kept her in the house, in a stained petticoat, her hair undone, her face and hands unwashed. She found forgetfulness in filth.
When the two murderers were face to face like this, tired out, having exhausted all means to save themselves from each other, they realized that they no longer had the strength to