Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [52]
Never had Thérèse known such peace of mind. She was certainly a better person: all the implacable willpower in her being was relaxed.
At night, alone in her bed, she felt happy. She could no longer sense the thin face and puny body of Camille beside her, inflaming her flesh and plaguing her with unsatisfied desires. For herself, she became a little girl again, a virgin under her white curtains, peaceful amid the silence and the darkness. She liked her huge, rather cold room, with its high ceiling, its dark corners and its scents of the cloister. She had even come to like the great black wall outside her window; one whole summer, every evening, she would stay looking for hours on end at the grey stones of this wall and the narrow slivers of starry sky outlined by the chimneys and the roofs. She would think of Laurent only when a nightmare woke her up with a start; and then, sitting bolt upright, shaking and with staring eyes, she would wrap her nightdress around her and tell herself that she would not suffer from these sudden terrors if she had a man lying beside her. She thought of her lover as being like a dog that would guard and protect her. Her cool, calm skin felt no shudder of desire.
By day, in the shop, she took an interest in things around her; she came out of herself, no longer living in a state of dumb rebellion, wrapped up in thoughts of hatred and vengeance. She was bored by day-dreaming; she needed to act and to see. From morning to night, she watched the people who went through the arcade, entertained by the noise and the comings and goings. She became inquisitive and chatty, in short, a woman, for up to then she had only ever acted and thought like a man.
From her observations, she noticed a young man, a student, who lived in rented accommodation near by and came past the shop several times a day. He had a pale beauty, with the long hair of a poet and an officer’s moustache. Thérèse thought him distinguished. She was in love with him for a week, like a boarding-school girl. She read novels and compared this young man to Laurent, finding the latter quite coarse and heavy. Reading novels opened horizons that were new to her; until now, she had loved only with her blood and her nerves; now she started to love with her head. Then, one day, the student vanished; no doubt, he had moved house. Thérèse forgot him in a matter of hours.
She subscribed to a lending library and became passionately fond of all the heroes of the stories that she read. This sudden love of reading had a considerable influence on her temperament. 1 She acquired a nervous sensibility which made her laugh or cry for no reason. The equilibrium that had started to be achieved inside her was shattered. She fell into a sort of vague reverie. At times, she was shaken by thoughts of Camille and she remembered Laurent with new desire, but full of fear and misgiving. So she relapsed into her mood of anxiety; sometimes she tried to find some way of marrying her lover that very moment, at others she thought of running away or never seeing him again. When novels talked to her about chastity and honour, they set up a kind of barrier between her instincts and her will. She was still the unmanageable creature that wanted to wrestle with the Seine and had thrown herself head first into adultery; but she became aware of goodness and gentleness, she understood the soft features and lifeless attitude of Olivier’s wife, and she knew that she could not kill her husband and be happy. As a result, she could no longer see clearly inside herself and she lived in a state of cruel uncertainty.
Laurent, for his part, went through various phases of calm and excitement. At first, he enjoyed a feeling of profound tranquillity, as though he had been relieved of a huge weight. At times, he would wonder in astonishment: it was as though he had had a bad dream and he asked himself whether it was really true that he had thrown Camille into the water and seen his corpse on a slab in the Morgue. He was uncommonly surprised by the memory of his crime.