Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [18]
The husband, constantly shivering with fever, would go to bed, while the young woman opened the window to close the shutters. She used to stay there for a few minutes, facing the great black wall with its crude rendering, which rose up and extended beyond the glass roof of the gallery. She would cast a vague glance at this wall and silently go to bed in her turn, with an air of contemptuous indifference.
II
Mme Raquin was a former haberdasher from Vernon.1 For nearly twenty-five years, she had lived in a small shop in that town. A few years after the death of her husband, she had grown tired of it all and sold off the business. Her savings, together with the money from this sale, gave her a capital of forty thousand francs, which she invested, so that it brought in an income of two thousand a year. This would be easily enough for her. She lived a reclusive life, knowing nothing of the agonizing joys and sorrows of this world. She had created an existence of peace and happiness for herself.
For four hundred francs, she rented a little house with a garden running down to the Seine. It was a secluded, private residence that faintly suggested a convent; a narrow path led to this retreat, which was set in the midst of wide meadows. The windows of the house overlooked the river and the empty slopes on the far bank. The good lady, who was now over fifty, buried herself in this solitude and enjoyed days of tranquillity with her son, Camille, and her niece, Thérèse.
Camille was then twenty years old. His mother still spoiled him like a little boy. She loved him because she had fought to keep him alive during a long childhood full of suffering. One after the other, the child had had every fever and every kind of sickness imaginable. For fifteen years, Mme Raquin kept up the struggle against these dreadful illnesses that came one after another to wrench her child away from her. She conquered each one in turn through her patience, her care and her devotion.
When he had grown up and been saved from death, Camille was still trembling from the repeated shocks that had struck him. His growth had been arrested and he remained small and stunted. The movements of his spindly arms and legs were slow and wearisome. His mother loved him all the more for the weakness that bowed him down. She looked with triumphant tenderness on his poor, pale little face and remembered that she had given life to him more than ten times.
In the occasional periods of respite from his suffering, the child attended classes at a commercial school in Vernon. There he learned spelling and arithmetic. His education did not go beyond the four rules of adding, subtraction, multiplication and division, and a very basic knowledge of grammar. Later on, he took lessons in writing and doing accounts. Mme Raquin became very nervous when anyone advised her to send her boy off to boarding school; she knew that he would die if he was away from her, and said that the books would kill him. Camille remained in his ignorance and this ignorance was like an additional weakness in him.
At eighteen, with nothing to do and bored to death in the atmosphere of tender care with which his mother encased him, he took a post as clerk in a cloth merchant’s. He earned sixty francs a month. He had the sort of unquiet spirit that made it unbearable to him to remain idle. He felt calmer, his health was better, when he was doing this mindless task, this clerical job that kept him bent all day over the invoices, over those vast lines of figures, each one of which he spelled out patiently. In the evening, worn out, his head empty, he had a sense of profound enjoyment in the exhaustion that overtook him. He had to row with his mother before she would allow him to enter the cloth merchant’s; she wanted to keep him always beside her, tucked up in a blanket, far from the hazards of life. The young man put his foot down. He demanded work as other children demand toys, not out of any sense of obligation, but by an instinctive, natural need.