Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [48]
One day, Laurent saw one of these ladies standing a few paces back from the window, pressing a cambric handkerchief to her nostrils. She was wearing a delightful grey silk skirt with a large, black lace mantelet. She had a veil over her face and her gloved hands seemed quite small and delicate. There was a gentle scent of violets around her. She was looking at a corpse. On a slab, a short distance away, was the body of a hefty lad, a builder who had died instantly when he fell off some scaffolding. He had a barrel chest, short, thick muscles and greasy, white flesh; death had made a marble statue of him. The lady was examining him, turning him round, as it were, with her eyes, weighing him up, engrossed by the sight of this man. She raised a corner of her veil, took another look, and left.
From time to time, gangs of kids would come in, children aged between twelve and fifteen, running along the window and stopping only by women’s bodies. They would put their hands on the glass and stare impudently at the naked breasts. They would nudge one another and make crude remarks, learning about vice in the school of death. It is in the Morgue that young street urchins have their first mistress.
After a week of this, Laurent was sickened by it. At night, he would dream about the bodies he had seen that morning. This daily dose of suffering and disgust that he imposed on himself eventually disturbed him so much that he decided to make only two more visits. The next day, on coming into the Morgue, he felt a vicious blow in his chest: opposite him, on a slab, Camille was staring at him, lying on his back with his head raised and his eyes half open.
The murderer slowly went over to the window as though drawn by a magnet, unable to take his eyes off his victim. He was not in pain, but he did feel a great inner chill and a slight tingling on his skin. He would have expected to shake more. He stayed motionless for five whole minutes, lost in unconscious contemplation, involuntarily marking in the depths of his memory all the frightful lines and foul colours of the scene before his eyes.
Camille was hideous. He had spent a fortnight in the water. His face still seemed firm and stiff, the features were preserved, but the skin had taken on a muddy, yellowish tint. The head, thin and bony, slightly puffy, was twisted into a grimace; it was leaning a bit to one side, the hair stuck to the temples, the eyelids raised, revealing the pallid globe of the eyes; the lips were twisted, drawn to one side of the mouth, giving a horrible sneer; the blackish tip of the tongue was visible between the whiteness of the teeth. This head, tanned and stretched, was even more terrifying in its pain and horror since it retained an appearance of humanity. The body seemed like a heap of decayed flesh; it had been horribly battered. You could tell that the arms were no longer joined to it; the shoulder blades were breaking through the skin. The ribs stood out on the greenish chest as black lines. The left side, open and broken, had a gaping hole surrounded by dark-red strips. The whole torso was decayed; the legs were more solid, stretched out, spotted with repulsive blotches. The feet were falling off.
Laurent looked at Camille. He had never seen such a horrifying drowned body. More than that: the corpse had a skimped look, a shrunken, mean appearance; it was huddled up in its own decay; it amounted to just a small heap. You might have guessed that this was a clerk on twelve hundred francs, sickly and stupid, whose mother had fed him on herbal teas. This meagre body, which had grown up between warm blankets, was shivering on its cold marble.
When Laurent did manage to tear himself away from the poignant curiosity