Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [71]
‘Did he seem to have suffered a lot?’
Laurent could not reply. He made a horrified gesture, as though putting aside some ghastly vision. He got up, went over to the bed, them came back wildly, walking towards Thérèse with his arms open.
‘Kiss me,’ he said, offering her his neck.
Thérèse had got up, looking pale1 in her nightclothes. She was leaning back, with one elbow resting on the marble mantelpiece. She looked at Laurent’s neck. She had just noticed a pink patch on the white skin. A rush of blood to his head made the patch larger and coloured it a fiery red.
‘Kiss me, kiss me,’ Laurent repeated, his face and neck burning.
The young woman bent her head further back, to avoid his kiss, and, putting the end of one finger on Camille’s bite, asked her husband:
‘What’s this? I didn’t know you had a scar there.’
Laurent felt as though Thérèse’s finger was making a hole in his throat. As it touched him, he quickly started back, with a soft cry of pain.
‘That ...’ he stammered. ‘That...’
He hesitated, but could not lie and told her the truth in spite of himself.
‘Camille bit me, you know, in the boat. It’s nothing, it’s healed ... Kiss me, kiss me.’
The wretch held out his burning neck. He wanted Thérèse to kiss him on the scar, counting on the woman’s kiss to calm the thousand stings piercing his flesh. With his chin up, advancing his neck, he offered himself. Thérèse, almost lying back on the mantelpiece, made a gesture of extreme distaste and exclaimed in a pleading voice:
‘Oh, no! Not there! There’s blood on it.’
She fell back into the low chair, trembling and holding her head in her hands. Laurent was stunned. He lowered his chin and looked vaguely at Thérèse. Then, suddenly, he grasped her head in his large hands with the ferocity of a wild animal and pressed her lips against his neck, on Camille’s bite. For a moment, he kept the woman’s head crushed against him. Thérèse did not struggle, but gave dull cries, stifling against Laurent’s neck. When she could get away from his grip, she wiped her mouth savagely and spat into the fireplace. She had not spoken a word.
Ashamed at his brutality, Laurent began to walk slowly, between the bed and the window. Only the pain, the horrible smarting pain, had made him demand a kiss from Thérèse, and when Thérèse’s lips had proved to be cold against his burning scar, he suffered even more. This kiss, obtained by violence, had broken him. The shock had been so painful that nothing in the world would have made him want another of the same. And he looked at the wife with whom he would have to live, who was shuddering, bent over the fire, with her back turned towards him. He kept thinking that he no longer loved this woman and that she no longer loved him. For almost an hour, Thérèse stayed slumped in her chair while Laurent walked backwards and forwards, in silence. Each of them was admitting, in terror, that their passion had died, that they had killed their desire for one another when they killed Camille. The fire gently died down and a great, pink mass of embers glowed in the grate. Little by little, the heat in the room had become suffocating and the flowers were fading, weighing on the thick air with their heavy scents.
Suddenly, Laurent thought he experienced a hallucination. As he was turning to go from the window back to the bed, he saw Camille, in a corner plunged in shadow between the fireplace and the wardrobe. His victim’s face was greenish in colour and convulsed, as it had been on the slab in the Morgue. He stayed, rooted to the spot, faint and supporting himself on a piece of furniture. Hearing his dull moan, Thérèse looked up.
‘There!’ Laurent said in a terrified voice. ‘There!’
He stretched out his hand, pointing to the dark corner in which he could see Camille’s sinister face. Thérèse, seized with the same terror, came over and pressed herself to him.
‘It’s his portrait,’ she