Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [19]
Thérèse was then eighteen years old. One day, sixteen years earlier, when Mme Raquin was still a haberdasher, her brother, Captain Degans, brought a little girl to her in his arms. He was back from Algeria.2
‘Here’s a child; you’re its aunt,’ he told her, with a smile. ‘Her mother is dead ... I don’t know what to do with her. I’m letting you have her.’
The haberdasher took the child, smiled at her and kissed her ruddy cheeks. Degans stayed at Vernon for three days. His sister hardly asked him any questions about the girl that he was giving her. She had a vague notion that the dear little thing had been born in Oran and that her mother was a native woman of great beauty. An hour before he left, the captain handed over a birth certificate in which Thérèse was recognized by him as his child and bore his name. He left and they never saw him again. A few years later, he was killed in Africa.
Thérèse grew up sleeping in the same bed as Camille and wrapped in the warm tenderness of her aunt. She had an iron constitution and was treated like a sickly child, sharing her cousin’s medicine and kept in the warm atmosphere of the sick boy’s room. She stayed for hours crouching in front of the fire, lost in thought, staring straight into the flames without blinking. This convalescent life that was imposed on her drove her back into herself. She became accustomed to speaking in a low voice, walking along quietly, and staying silent and motionless on a chair, looking blankly with wide-open eyes. Yet, when she did raise an arm or take a step, there was a feline suppleness in her, a mass of energy and passion dormant within her torpid frame. One day, her cousin had fallen over in a faint. She picked him up and carried him off brusquely, this sudden outburst of strength putting large patches of red on her face. The cloistered life that she led and the debilitating regime imposed on her could not weaken her sturdy, slender body, but her face did assume a pale, slightly yellowish tint, and she became almost ugly through being kept from daylight. Sometimes, she would go to the window and look at the houses opposite across which the sun cast its golden rays.
When Mme Raquin sold her business and retired to the little house by the water, Thérèse felt secret shivers of joy run through her. Her aunt had so often told her: ‘Don’t make a fuss, keep quiet,’ that she carefully kept all her natural impulses concealed deep inside. She had an immense capacity for coolness and an appearance of calm that hid violent fits of passion. She felt herself to be constantly in her cousin’s room, beside this dying child; she had the gentle manner, stillness, placidity and stammering voice of an old woman. When she saw the garden, the pale river and the huge green slopes rising up on the horizon, she had a mad impulse to run around, shouting. She felt her heart beat furiously in her breast; but not a muscle moved on her face and she merely smiled when her aunt asked her whether she liked this new home.
So life improved for her. She had the same suppleness of movement, the same calm and indifferent expression: she was still the child brought up in the bed of an invalid. But inside, she lived an ardent and passionate existence. When she was alone, in the long grass by the river, she lay flat on her stomach like an animal, her eyes dark and wide, her body flexed, ready to pounce. And she would stay there for hours on end, thinking of nothing, with the sun burning into her, delighted at