Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [78]
For a moment, they let go of one another. They were feeling insurmountable disgust and nervous repulsion. Then, they were not willing to give in, so they clasped one another again in a further embrace and were obliged once more to let go, as though red-hot pins had been stuck into their limbs. In this way, they tried again and again to overcome their disgust and to forget everything by tiring themselves out and exhausting their nerves. Yet every time their nerves were so on edge and so tense, causing them such feelings of exasperation that they might perhaps have died of nervous exhaustion if they had stayed in one another’s arms. This struggle against their own bodies had driven them to the point of madness: they persisted obstinately, determined to overcome. Finally, a sharper crisis broke them with a shock of unimagined violence, and they thought that they were about to collapse in an epileptic fit.
Thrown back to the two sides of the bed, seared and bruised, they began to sob.
And in their sobs, it seemed to them that they could hear the triumphant laugh of the drowned man, as he slid back beneath the sheets, sniggering. They had been unable to drive him out of the bed; they were beaten. Camille was lying quietly between them, while Laurent wept at his impotence and Thérèse shuddered to think that the corpse might get it into its mind to take advantage of its victory and, in its turn, squeeze her in its rotting arms, as her legitimate master. They had made one final effort and, faced with their defeat, they realized that from now on they would not dare to exchange a single kiss. The paroxysm of passionate love that they had tried to reach in order to kill their fear had now plunged them even more deeply into the pit of terror. As they felt the cold of the corpse that, henceforth, would keep them for ever divided, they wept tears of blood and agonizingly wondered what would become of them.
XXIV
As Old Michaud had hoped when he engineered Thérèse’s marriage to Laurent, Thursday evenings resumed, merry as in the old days, after the wedding. With Camille’s death, these soirees had been seriously at risk. The guests had visited this house in mourning only with apprehension and every week were afraid that they would finally be sent away for ever. Michaud and Grivet, who stuck to their habits with the obstinacy of brutes, were appalled at the idea that the door of the shop would eventually close upon them. They told themselves that the old mother and young widow would get up one fine morning and take their grief back to Vernon or somewhere, with the result that, on Thursday evenings, they would find themselves outside on the pavement with nothing to do: they imagined themselves in the arcade, wandering about in a pitiful manner, dreaming of huge domino games. In expectation of these bad days, they took themselves round to the shop with an anxious and conciliatory air, constantly thinking that they might never come here again. For more than a year, they knew this fear, not daring to let themselves have a laugh when confronted by Mme Raquin’s tears and Thérèse’s silence. They no longer felt at home, as they had done in Camille’s day: it was as though they were stealing every evening that they spent round the dining-room table. It was in these desperate circumstances that Old Michaud’s selfishness drove him to the master-stroke of marrying off the drowned man’s widow.
On the Thursday after the wedding, Grivet and Michaud made a triumphal entry. They had won. The dining room belonged to them once more; they no longer feared that someone might drive them away from it. They came in joyfully, they let themselves go, they told all their old jokes one after another. You could see from