Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [53]
‘I must certainly have been drunk,’ he thought. ‘That woman intoxicated me with her caresses. Good Lord, what an idiot, what a madman I was! I was risking the scaffold by doing that ... Well, in the end it turned out all right; but if I had the time again, I’d never do it.’
Laurent lapsed into inactivity, becoming more feeble, more cowardly and more cautious than ever. He got fat and lazy. No one who looked at this great body, slumped in on itself, seeming to have no bones or nerves, would have thought to accuse him of violence and cruelty.
He went back to his old ways. For several months, he was a model employee, carrying out his duties in a perfectly mechanical way. In the evenings, he dined in an eating-house in the Rue Saint-Victor, cutting his bread into small slices, chewing slowly, dragging out his meal as long as possible. Then he pushed his chair back, leaned against the wall and smoked his pipe. He looked like some fat married man. In the daytime, he thought about nothing; at night, he slept a deep and dreamless sleep. With his face pink and plump, his belly full and his head empty, he was happy.
His flesh seemed dead and his mind hardly ever turned to Thérèse. At times he did think about her as one thinks about a woman whom one is to marry later on, in some indeterminate future. He waited patiently for the time of his marriage, forgetting the woman, but dreaming of the new position he would then acquire. He would leave the office, he would do some amateur painting and he would stroll around. Every evening, such thoughts brought him back to the shop in the arcade, despite the vague sense of unease that he felt as he went in.
One Sunday, feeling bored and not knowing what to do, he went round to see his old schoolfriend, the young painter with whom he had shared a room for a long time. The artist was working on a painting that he intended to send to the Salon:2 it showed a naked Bacchante3 stretched out on a piece of drapery. At the back of the studio, the model, a woman, was lying, her head bent back, her upper body twisted and her hip raised. Now and then, she would laugh, sticking out her chest, extending her arms and stretching, to relieve the stiffness. Laurent, sitting opposite her, watched her, smoking and talking to his friend. The sight made his heart pound and set his nerves on edge. He stayed until evening and took the woman home with him. He kept her as his mistress for nearly a year. The poor girl began to love him, considering him a handsome fellow. In the morning, she would leave, go and model all day, then come back regularly every evening at the same time. With the money that she earned, she would feed, dress and maintain herself, so she did not cost Laurent a penny, and he was not bothered where she came from or what she might have done. This woman brought a further element of balance into his life; he took her for granted, as a useful and necessary object that kept his body quiet and healthy. He never knew whether he loved her and it never occurred to him that he was being unfaithful to Thérèse. He just felt more fat and contented. That was all.
Meanwhile, Thérèse’s period of mourning was over. The young woman would put on bright dresses and one evening Laurent happened to find her younger-looking and prettier. But he still felt a certain uneasiness with her; for some time she had seemed excitable and full of strange whims, laughing or becoming sad for no reason. When he saw her wavering, it worried him, because he partly guessed her inner turmoil. He started to hesitate, horribly afraid that he would upset his tranquil existence: he was living