Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [46]
In reality, he was slightly dazed, his body and thoughts weighed down with tiredness. He got home and slept deeply. As he slept, little nervous twitches flicked across his face.
XIII
The next day, Laurent woke up feeling bright and cheerful. He had slept well. The cold air coming through the window sent the sluggish blood coursing in his veins. His could hardly remember what had happened the previous evening. Had it not been for the burning sensation on his neck, he might have thought that he had gone to bed at ten o’clock after a calm evening. Camille’s bite was like a hot iron on his skin; when he considered the pain that this injury was causing him, he deeply resented it. It was as though a dozen pins were gradually piercing his flesh.
He turned down his shirt collar and looked at the wound in a tawdry, fifteen-sou mirror hanging on the wall. The wound was a red hole, as wide as a small coin. The skin had been torn off and the flesh was visible, pinkish, with black patches. Trails of blood had run down as far as the shoulder in slender threads, congealing as they went. The bite stood out on the white neck in dull, powerful brown; it was on the right, below the ear. Leaning back and craning his neck, Laurent looked, as the greenish mirror gave his face a frightful grimace.
He splashed water over it, pleased with the results of his examination, telling himself that the wound would heal over in a few days. Then he dressed and went to his office, calmly, as usual. He described the accident in a voice full of feeling. When his colleagues read the account in the press, he became a real hero. For a week, this was the only subject of conversation for the staff of the Orléans Railway: they were quite proud that one of their fellow workers had been drowned. Grivet held forth at length on the folly of venturing into the midst of the river when you can so easily watch the Seine go by as you cross one of its bridges.
Laurent had one vague source of unease. It had not been possible to confirm Camille’s death officially. Thérèse’s husband was certainly dead, but his murderer would like his body to have been recovered so that a formal certificate could be made out. They had looked in vain for the drowned man’s corpse on the day after the accident; it was considered that it must have gone down into one of the holes under the banks of the islands. Scavengers were already actively searching the river in order to collect the bounty.
Laurent made it his business to go by the Morgue1 every morning on his way to the office. He had sworn to look after everything himself. Despite a revulsion that made him feel sick and despite the shudders that would sometimes pass through him, he went regularly for more than a week to examine the faces of all the drowned people laid out on the slabs.
When he went in, he was sickened by a stale smell, a smell of washed flesh, and cold draughts blew across his skin. His clothes hung against his shoulders, as though weighed down by the humidity of the walls. He would go directly to the window that separates the spectators from the bodies, and press his pale face against the glass, looking. In front of him were the ranks of grey slabs on which, here and there, naked bodies stood out as patches of green and yellow, white and red. Some bodies kept their virginal flesh in the rigidity of death, while others seemed like heaps of bloody, rotten meat. At the end, against the wall, hung pitiful rags: skirts and trousers, grimacing against the bare plaster. At first, Laurent saw only the general greyness of stones and walls, spotted with red and black from the clothes and the corpses. There was a tinkling of running water.
Bit by bit he could distinguish the bodies. He proceeded from one to the next. Only drowned men interested him; when there were several bodies swollen and blue from the water, he looked eagerly at them, trying to recognize Camille. Often the flesh was peeling off their faces in shreds, the bones had broken