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By Root 884 0

it happens, they were acting impulsively, without taking many precautions; they were only vaguely thinking about the probable consequences of a murder committed without taking into consideration the need for flight and protection against repercussions. They felt an imperious need to kill one another and obeyed this need like wild animals. They would not have given themselves up for their first crime, which they had so skilfully concealed, yet they were risking the guillotine by committing a second one and not even considering how to hide it. They were not even aware of this contradiction in their behaviour. They told themselves simply that if they did manage to escape, they would go and live abroad after taking all the money. Over a period of a fortnight to three weeks, Thérèse had withdrawn the few thousand francs that remained of her dowry and was keeping them locked up in a drawer, which Laurent knew about. They did not for an instant consider what would happen to Mme Raquin.

A few weeks earlier, Laurent had met one of his old school-friends, who was now an assistant to a famous chemist much concerned with toxicology. This friend had shown him round the laboratory where he worked, pointing out the equipment and identifying the drugs. One evening, when he had made up his mind to murder and Thérèse was drinking a glass of sugar water in front of him, Laurent remembered having seen a little stone flask in the laboratory containing prussic acid. Recalling what the young assistant had told him about the terrible effects of this poison, which strikes its victims down, leaving few traces, he decided that this was the poison he needed. The next day, he managed to get away, went to see his friend and, while his back was turned, stole the little stone flask.

The same day, Thérèse took advantage of Laurent’s absence to sharpen a large kitchen knife that they used to crush sugar and which was quite blunt. She hid the knife in a corner of the sideboard.

XXXII

The following Thursday, the evening at the Raquins’ (as their guests continued to call the family), was an especially merry one. It went on until half past eleven. As he was leaving, Grivet said that he had never spent such an agreeable few hours.

Suzanne, who was pregnant, spoke constantly to Thérèse about her pains and joys. Thérèse appeared to be listening with much interest; with staring eyes and tight lips, she would bend her head forward from time to time and her lowered eyelids cast a shadow across her whole face. Laurent for his part was paying close attention to the stories of Old Michaud and Olivier. These gentlemen had an unfailing fund of anecdotes and Grivet managed only with difficulty to get a word in between two sentences from the father and son. In any case, he had some respect for them and considered them good talkers. That evening, talk had replaced games and he gauchely announced that he found the former police commissioner’s conversation almost as amusing as a game of dominoes.

In the more than four years that the Michauds and Grivet had spent Thursday evenings at the Raquins‘, they had not once grown tired of these monotonous evenings, which returned with infuriating regularity. As they entered, they had never for a moment suspected the drama that was being played out in this house, so peaceful and so mild. Olivier would commonly remark, in a policeman’s joke, that the dining room had ‘a whiff of honesty’ about it. Grivet, not to be outdone, called it the Temple of Peace. Recently, on two or three occasions, Thérèse had explained the bruises on her face by telling her guests that she had fallen over. In any case, none of them would have recognized the signs of Laurent’s fist. They were convinced that their hosts’ family was a model one, all sweetness and love.

The paralysed woman no longer attempted to reveal the infamous truth behind the dreary tranquillity of their Thursday evenings. Watching the murderers tearing into one another and guessing the crisis that was bound to erupt one day or another, as the inevitable result of the chain of events,