Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [21]
‘I’ve never got in the way of your plans,’ he told her. ‘I’ve married my cousin, I’ve taken all the medicines you gave me. Now, the least you can do is to allow me one wish and see it from my point of view ... We’ll leave at the end of the month.’
Mme Raquin did not sleep that night. Camille’s decision was turning her life upside down and she tried desperately to see how she could right it. Little by little, she calmed down. She told herself that the young couple might have children and that, if that happened, her small capital would not be enough. She had to make more money, go back into business, find a lucrative employment for Thérèse. By the next morning, she had grown accustomed to the idea of leaving and drawn up her plans for a new life.
Over breakfast, she was quite merry.
‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ she told her children. ‘I’ll go to Paris tomorrow. I’ll look for a little haberdasher’s business and Thérèse and I will go back to selling needles and thread. It will keep us occupied. As for you, Camille, you can do what you like: you can stroll around in the sunshine, or find yourself a job.’
‘I’ll find a job,’ the young man replied.
The truth was that only a silly ambition had driven Camille to leave Vernon. He wanted to be an employee in a large department; he blushed with pleasure when he imagined himself in the middle of a huge office, with glazed cotton sleeves and a pen behind his ear.
Thérèse was not consulted. She had always shown such passive obedience that her aunt and her husband no longer bothered to ask her opinion. She went where they went, she did what they did, without complaint, without reproach, without even seeming to realize that anything had altered.
Mme Raquin came to Paris and went directly to the Passage du Pont-Neuf. An old spinster in Vernon had directed her to a relative who had a haberdashery business in the arcade which she wanted to dispose of. Being an experienced haberdasher, Mme Raquin found the shop rather small and a bit dark; but as she was crossing Paris, she had been horrified by the noise in the streets and the richness of the window displays, while this narrow passage with its modest shop fronts reminded her of her old shop, which had been so quiet and so peaceful. She could imagine herself still in the provinces; she breathed again, thinking that her dear children would be happy in this backwater. The cheapness of the business decided her; it was on offer for two thousand francs. The rent of the shop and the first floor was only twelve hundred francs. Mme Raquin, who had nearly four thousand francs in savings, calculated that she could pay the purchase price and the first year’s rent without breaking into her capital. Camille’s wages and the profits from the haberdashery would be enough, she thought, to cover everyday expenses. In that way she would not draw any further on her income and would allow the capital to grow for the benefit of her grandchildren.
She returned to Vernon radiant, saying that she had found a pearl, a charming corner in the centre of Paris. Little by little, after a few days, as she chatted about it in the evening, the damp, dark shop in the arcade became a palace; in memory, she saw it as spacious, wide and quiet, full of a thousand inestimable qualities.
‘Oh, my dear Thérèse!’ she said. ‘You see how happy we shall be in that spot! There are three fine rooms upstairs ... The arcade is full of people ... We’ll create some delightful displays ... Be sure of it, we won’t get bored.’
There was no end to it. All her business instincts were reawakened and she prepared Thérèse with advice on selling, buying and all the little tricks of the retail trade. At length, the family left its house on the banks of the Seine and the same evening settled into the Passage du Pont-Neuf.
When Thérèse entered the shop where she was to spend her life from then on, she felt as though she were going down into the