Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [73]
‘Don’t hurt him!’
Her cry gave him an odd feeling and a ridiculous idea came into his head:
‘Camille has entered into the cat,’ he thought. ‘I must kill this animal. It looks human.’
He did not kick it, afraid that François would speak to him with Camille’s voice. Then he remembered how Thérèse had joked, when they were lovers and the cat had seen them kissing; so it occurred to him that the cat knew too much and had to be thrown out of the window. But he did not have the courage to carry this through. Franqois was still in an aggressive posture: with his claws out and his back arched by some vague annoyance, it was following its enemy’s slightest movement with proud imperturbability. Laurent was upset by the metallic shine of its eyes. He hastily opened the dining-room door and the cat ran out with a sharp miaow.
Thérèse had sat down again in front of the dead fire. Laurent resumed his pacing from the bed to the window. And that is how they waited for daylight. They did not think to go to bed together: their flesh and their hearts were quite dead. They had only one desire: to get out of this room that was stifling them. They had a real sense of unease at being shut in together, breathing the same air. They would have liked to have someone else there, to interrupt their tête-à-tête and free them from the cruelly embarrassing situation of being together without speaking and unable to revive their passion for each other. The long silences tortured them, silences full of bitter, desperate sighs and unspoken accusations that they could clearly hear in the still air.
At last, day came, dirty, whitish, bringing a biting cold.
When the room was filled with pale light, Laurent shivered, but felt calmer. He looked straight at Camille’s portrait and saw it for what it was, ordinary, childish. With a shrug, he took it down, calling himself an idiot. Thérèse had got up and was undoing the bed, to deceive her aunt and make her think they had spent a joyful night together.
‘Now then,’ Laurent said roughly. ‘I hope we’re going to get some sleep tonight. This childishness can’t continue.’
Thérèse gave him a serious, penetrating look.
‘You understand?’ he went on. ‘I didn’t get married so that I would have sleepless nights. We’re behaving like children. It was you who upset me, with your supernatural airs. Tonight, try to be jolly and not to put the wind up me.’
He forced a laugh, without knowing why he was laughing.
‘I’ll try,’ Thérèse said, in a dull voice.
That is how Thérèse and Laurent spent their wedding night.
XXII
The following nights were even more anguished. The murderers had wanted to be together at night, to ward off the drowned man; yet, by some strange effect, since being together they had feared him even more. They exasperated one another, they got on each other’s nerves, they suffered ghastly crises of terror and agony when they exchanged a simple word or a look. At the merest conversation, the slightest private exchange between them, they saw red, they flew into a rage.
Thérèse’s dry, nervous character had reacted in an odd way with the stolid, sanguine character of Laurent. Previously, in the days of their passion, this contrast in temperament had made this man and woman into a powerfully linked couple by establishing a sort of balance between them and, so to speak, complementing their organisms. The lover contributed his blood and the mistress her nerves, and so they lived in one another, each needing the other’s kisses to regulate the mechanism of their being. But the equilibrium had been disturbed and Thérèse’s over-excited nerves had taken control. Suddenly, Laurent found himself plunged into a state of nervous erethism;1 under the influence of her fervent nature, his own temperament had gradually become that of a girl suffering from an acute neurosis. It would be interesting to study the changes that are sometimes produced in certain organisms as a result of