Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [60]
In this way they longed for their union with all the desire they felt within them to have a night’s tranquil sleep. During the period of indifference, they had wavered, each forgetting the arguments of selfishness and desire which had, as it were, faded, after having driven the two of them to murder. Now the fever was burning them again and, behind their desire and their selfishness, they rediscovered the reasons that had originally made them decide to kill Camille, in order to taste the joys that, to their minds, a legitimate marriage would surely procure them. And yet, it was with a feeling of vague despair that they took the final decision to get married openly. Deep inside, they were scared. Their desire trembled. They leaned over one another, so to speak, as over an abyss that held a horrible fascination for them; each of them bent above the other’s being, clinging on silently, while sharp, delicious waves of vertigo relaxed their grip and gave them the urge to let go. But confronted with the present moment, with their anxious waiting and their fearful desires, they felt an overwhelming need to close their eyes and dream of a future of affectionate happiness and quiet pleasures. The more they trembled at the sight of one another, the more they guessed the horror of the chasm into which they were about to plunge, the more they tried also to make promises of happiness to themselves and set out the unavoidable arguments that were leading them, inevitably, to marry.
Thérèse wanted to get married solely because she was afraid and her organism demanded Laurent’s violent embrace.1 She was suffering from a nervous crisis that made her almost mad. In truth, she was not thinking reasonably, but flinging herself into passion, her mind distracted by the romances that she had been reading and her flesh aroused by the cruel nights of insomnia that had been keeping her awake for several weeks now.
Laurent, whose temperament was more stolid, tried to rationalize his decision, even as he was giving way to his terrors and his desires. To prove that his marriage really was necessary and that he would finally be quite happy, and to dispel the vague fears that were getting a grip on him, he reworked all his earlier arguments. His father, the peasant in Jeufosse, obstinately refused to die, so he told himself that the inheritance could be a long time in coming. He was even afraid that this inheritance might escape him altogether and end up in the pockets of one of his cousins, a large lad who farmed the land, much to the satisfaction of Old Laurent. In which case, he would remain poor and live without a wife, in a garret, sleeping badly and eating worse still. In any case, he was counting on not having to work all his life. He was starting to get singularly bored with his office, where even the light duties assigned to him became a heavy burden on his laziness. Whenever he thought about it, he came to the conclusion that the supreme happiness was to do nothing. Then he recalled that he had drowned Camille in order to marry Thérèse and then do nothing afterwards. Certainly, the desire to have his mistress to himself alone had played a large part in the idea of his crime, but he had perhaps been led to murder still more by the hope of putting himself in Camille’s place, of being looked after as he was and enjoying unending bliss. If he had been driven by passion alone, he would not have shown such cowardice and caution. The truth was that, through this killing, he had sought to guarantee a tranquil and idle life for himself and the satisfaction of all his appetites. All these ideas, whether he was conscious of them or not, came back into his mind. To encourage himself, he kept thinking that it was now time to profit from Camille’s death as he had planned. He set out in his mind the advantages and pleasures of his future life: he would leave his office, and live in a state of delightful idleness; he would eat, drink and sleep to his heart’s content; he would have constantly at hand a passionate woman who would