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By Root 863 0

been seized by a feeling of anguish: he was afraid that he could never again draw a head without representing the drowned man. He wanted to find out at once if he was in control of his hand. He put a white canvas on the easel, then with a piece of charcoal, he drew a face with a few lines. The face was like Camille. Laurent quickly rubbed out that sketch and tried another. For more than an hour, he struggled against the inescapable urge that drove his fingers; but with each new attempt, he came back to the head of the drowned man. Much as he exerted his will, avoiding the lines that he knew so well, he would draw these lines despite himself, obeying his rebellious muscles and nerves. At first, he had quickly set down the sketches, then he tried to guide the charcoal slowly. The result was the same: Camille, screwing his face up in pain, kept coming back on the canvas. The artist drew the most varied kinds of head in quick succession — angels, young women with haloes, Roman warriors with their helmets on, blond, pink-cheeked children, or old bandits covered in scars ... Yet always the drowned man was resuscitated, by turns as angel, woman, warrior, child and bandit. So Laurent turned to caricature, exaggerating the features; he made monstrous heads, he invented grotesques ... and all he did was to make the striking portraits of his victim more frightful. Eventually, he tried drawing animals, cats and dogs. The cats and dogs looked vaguely like Camille ...

A dull fury had overtaken Laurent. He broke the canvas with his fist, thinking with despair of his great painting. Now, he could no longer even consider it. From now on, he knew, he would only draw heads of Camille and, as his friend had said, figures that all looked alike would just make people laugh. He imagined what his work would have been; he saw, on the shoulders of his figures, men and women, the drowned man’s pallid, horrified features; and the strange spectacle that this brought into his head seemed to him so horribly ridiculous that it filled him with despair.

So he would no longer dare to work, for he would always be afraid of bringing his victim back to life with the slightest stroke of the brush. If he wanted to live in peace at his studio he must never paint there. This idea that his fingers had this unavoidable and unconscious ability to reproduce constantly the face of Camille, made him look with terror at his hand. It seemed to him that the hand no longer belonged to him.

XXVI

The stroke that had been threatening Mme Raquin’s health arrived. Suddenly the paralysis, which for several months had been creeping along her limbs, constantly on the point of gripping her entirely, seized her by the throat and immobilized her body. One evening, while she was quietly talking to Laurent and Thérèse, she stopped in the middle of a sentence, open-mouthed ; she felt as though someone were strangling her. When she tried to cry out, to call for help, she could make only harsh croaking noises. Her tongue had been turned to stone, her hands and feet had stiffened. She was rendered dumb and immobile.1

Thérèse and Laurent got up, terrified by this thunderclap that had struck the old haberdasher down in under five seconds. Seeing her stiff like that, looking at them appealingly, they asked her repeatedly to tell them what was wrong. She could not answer, but kept giving them a look of deep distress. At this, they realized that all that was left before them was a corpse, one that was half living, one that could see and hear them, but could not speak. The catastrophe drove them to despair. Underneath, they cared little about the paralysed woman’s suffering, but wept for themselves, obliged from now on to live for ever alone with each other.

From that day, the couple’s life became unbearable. They spent agonizing evenings beside the stricken old woman who no longer appeased their terrors with her gentle chattering. She lay in an armchair like a parcel, like a thing, and they were left alone at either end of the table, awkward and uneasy. This corpse no longer kept them