Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [66]
Thérèse looked around her and gave a strange smile as she mentally assessed the size of her large bed. She got up and dressed slowly, while waiting for Suzanne, who was to come and help to get her ready for her wedding.
Laurent sat upright in bed. He stayed like that for a few minutes, saying farewell to the attic that he considered so demeaning. At last, he would be leaving this dog’s kennel and have a wife of his own. It was December. He shuddered and stepped down on the tiled floor, telling himself that he would be warm that night.
A week earlier, Mme Raquin, knowing that he was broke, had slipped a purse into his hand containing the sum of five hundred francs, which was all her savings. The young man had accepted it without demur and fitted himself out in new clothes. The old haberdasher’s money had also allowed him to give Thérèse the customary gifts.
The black trousers, the tailcoat and white waistcoat, the fine linen shirt and tie, were laid out on two chairs. Laurent washed and scented his body from a bottle of eau de Cologne, then started to get dressed with minute care. He wanted to look good. While he was attaching his collar, a high, stiff, detachable collar, he felt a sharp pain in his neck. The collar stud slipped from his fingers. He got impatient with it and felt as though the starched material of the collar were cutting into his flesh. He wanted to look and lifted his chin; and it was then that he saw that Camille’s bite was quite red: the collar had grazed the scar. Laurent gritted his teeth and went pale. The sight of this blemish standing out on his neck was upsetting and annoying for him at this particular moment. He screwed up the collar and picked out another, putting it on very carefully. Then he finished dressing. When he went downstairs, his new clothes kept him quite stiff, so that he did not dare turn his head, with his neck imprisoned in starched cloth. At every move he made, a fold in this cloth would pinch the wound that the drowned man’s teeth had bitten into his flesh. He was enduring this kind of sharp pricking when he got into the carriage and went to find Thérèse and take her to the town hall and the church.
On the way, he picked up an employee of the Orléans Railway and Old Michaud, who were to be his witnesses. When they got to the shop, everyone was ready: Grivet and Olivier were there as Thérèse’s witnesses, and Suzanne, all three of them looking at the bride in the way that little girls look at the dolls they have just dressed. Mme Raquin, though she could no longer walk, wanted to go everywhere with her children. They lifted her into a carriage and set off.
Everything went off decently at the town hall and the church. People noticed and approved of the couple’s calm and modest demeanour. They spoke the sacramental ‘yes’ with such feeling that even Grivet was touched. They felt as though they were in a dream. While they stayed quietly sitting or kneeling side by side, wild thoughts were raging through them and tearing them apart. They avoided looking each other in the eye. When they got back into the carriage, they felt more like strangers towards one another than they had before.
It had been decided that the dinner would be a family affair, in a little restaurant on the hills of Belleville.1 The Michauds and Grivet were the only guests. While waiting for six o’clock, the wedding party drove along the boulevards before getting into the eating-house, where a table with seven places had been laid in a yellow-painted room smelling of dust and wine.
The meal was not the jolliest of occasions. The couple were serious and thoughtful. Since that morning, they had been experiencing odd feelings, which they did not try to explain even to themselves. They had been stunned, from the beginning, by the speed of the formalities and of the service that had just united them for ever. Then the long drive along the boulevards had, as it were, rocked them to sleep. They felt that