Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [89]
Every day, her eyes took on a more penetrating softness and clarity. She had reached the point where she used her eyes like a hand and a mouth, to ask for things and to say ‘thank you’; and so, in some strange and endearing way, she made up for the faculties that she lacked. The looks that she gave had a celestial beauty, in the midst of a face on which the flesh hung soft and contorted. Since the time when her twisted, unmoving lips had lost the power to smile, she had smiled with her eyes, with delightful tenderness. Moist lights shone and dawn rays emerged from them. Nothing was more remarkable than these eyes laughing like lips in that dead face: the lower part of the face remained dreary and wan, while the upper part was divinely lit. It was for her dear children, especially, that she would put all her gratitude and all the feeling in her soul into a simple glance. When, morning and evening, Laurent took her in his arms to move her, she thanked him lovingly with looks full of tender affection.
So she lived for several weeks, awaiting death and thinking herself safe from any further disaster. She thought that she had paid her debt of suffering. She was wrong. One evening she was smitten by a dreadful blow.
Even though Thérèse and Laurent put her between them in the full light of day, she was no longer enough alive to keep them apart and protect them against their anguish. When they forgot that she was there, that she could see and hear, madness overcame them, Camille rose before them and they tried to drive him away. Then they would stammer, let slip confessions without meaning to, remarks that eventually revealed everything to Mme Raquin. Laurent had a sort of fit in which he spoke like a man in a trance. Suddenly, the paralysed woman understood.
A frightful grimace passed across her face and she experienced such a shock that Thérèse thought she was going to leap up and scream. Then she lapsed back into a state of complete rigidity. This sort of shock was all the more terrifying since it seemed to have galvanized a corpse. For an instant feeling returned to her, then vanished, leaving the cripple more haggard and pallid than ever. Her eyes, which were usually so soft, had become hard and black like pieces of metal.
Never had despair struck any being so hard. The awful truth burned the crippled woman’s eyes like a flash of lightning and entered into her with the finality of a thunderclap. If she could have got up, released the cry of horror that was rising in her throat and cursed the murderers of her son, she would have suffered less. But now that she had heard everything and understood everything, she was forced to remain motionless and silent, keeping the explosion of her pain inside her. It seemed to her that Thérèse and Laurent had tied her up and pinned her to her chair to prevent her from leaping out at them, and that they were taking a horrible delight in repeating: ‘We killed Camille,’ after putting a gag on her mouth to stifle her sobs. Terror and torment raged within her, but found no way out. She made superhuman efforts to lift the weight that was oppressing her, to unblock her throat and clear the way for the flood of her despair. But it was in vain that she struggled with the last of her energy: she felt her tongue cold against her palate and could not tear herself away from death. She was held rigid by the powerlessness of a corpse. Her feelings were like those of a man who has fallen into a lethargy and is being buried alive: gagged by the fetters of his own flesh, he hears the dull thud of spadefuls of sand above his head.
The ravages in her heart were still worse. She felt as though something inside her had collapsed. She was crushed. Her whole life was destroyed, all her charity, all her kindness, all her care had been brutally knocked over and trampled underfoot. She had led a life of affection and gentleness and now, in her last hours, when she was about to take her belief in the simple goodness of life into the grave with her, a voice was shouting