Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [30]
‘For heaven’s sake!’ he would whisper to Thérèse. ‘Don’t make such a racket. Mme Raquin will come up.’
‘Pooh!’ she would reply, with a laugh. ‘You’re always scared. She’s stuck behind the counter, what would she be coming up here for? She’d be too afraid that someone would rob her. Anyway, let her come if she wants. You can hide ... I don’t give a damn about her. I love you.’
Laurent did not find this speech the least bit reassuring. Passion had not yet subdued his sly peasant caution. But soon habit induced him, without too much anxiety, to accept the boldness of these meetings in broad daylight, in Camille’s room, just feet away from the old haberdasher. His mistress kept telling him that danger spared those who confronted it directly, and she was right. The lovers could never have found a safer place than this room where no one thought to look for them. There, they would satisfy their desires, amazingly undisturbed.
One day, however, Mme Raquin did come up, concerned that her niece might be ill. The young woman had been upstairs for almost three hours. She was foolhardy enough not even to bolt the door which led off the dining room to the bedroom.
When Laurent heard the old woman’s heavy footsteps coming up the wooden staircase, he panicked and hurriedly looked for his waistcoat and hat. Thérèse started to laugh at the funny face he was making. She seized his arm and thrust him down, into a corner at the foot of the bed, telling him in a quiet, calm voice:
‘Stay there and don’t move.’
She threw the man’s clothing that was lying around over him and on top of it all spread a white petticoat that she had taken off herself. All this she did with measured, careful gestures, not losing any of her calm. Then she lay down in the bed, her hair untidy, half naked, still flushed and shaking.
Mme Raquin gently opened the door and came over to the bed, walking as softly as she could. The younger woman pretended to be asleep. Laurent was sweating under the white petticoat.
‘Thérèse, are you ill, child?’ the haberdasher asked, in a voice full of concern.
Thérèse opened her eyes, yawned, turned round and replied in a pained voice that she had a terrible migraine. She begged her aunt to let her sleep. The old woman left as she had come, without a sound.
The two lovers, laughing silently, kissed with violent passion.
‘You see!’ Thérèse said triumphantly. ‘We’ve nothing to fear here. All these people are blind. They are not in love.’
Another day, the young woman had an odd idea. Sometimes she would rave, behaving as though she were mad.
The tabby cat, François, was sitting on his bottom right in the middle of the room. Solemn and motionless, he was looking at the two lovers with wide-open eyes. He seemed to be examining them carefully, without blinking, lost in a sort of diabolical trance.2
‘Look at François,’ Thérèse said to Laurent. ‘You’d think he understood and that he was going to tell Camille everything this evening. Why, wouldn’t it be odd if he were to start speaking in the shop one of these days? He could tell some fine stories about us.’
The young woman was exceptionally amused by the idea that François might speak. Laurent looked at the cat’s large green eyes and felt a shudder run through him.
‘Here’s what he’d do,’ Thérèse went on. ‘He’d stand up and, pointing at me with one paw and at you with the other, he’d exclaim: “Monsieur and Madame here were kissing one another very hard in the bedroom; they didn’t bother about me, but since their criminal affair disgusts me, I beg you to have both of them thrown into gaol, and then they won’t disturb my afternoon sleep again.”’
Thérèse joked like a child, miming the cat, extending her hands like claws and moving her shoulders with