Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [90]
So! Camille had died at the hands of Thérèse and Laurent, and the two of them had plotted their crime in the throes of their shameful adultery! For Mme Raquin, this idea presented such an abyss that she could not adjust to it or grasp it clearly and in detail. She felt only one sensation: that of a dreadful fall. It seemed to her as though she were falling down a cold, black hole. And she thought: ‘I am going to be crushed at the bottom.’
After the first shock, the enormity of the crime seemed unreal to her. Then she felt afraid that she might go mad, once she had become convinced of the adultery and the murder, as she remembered some little events that she had not previously been able to explain. Thérèse and Laurent were indeed Camille’s murderers: Thérèse, whom she had brought up, and Laurent, whom she had loved like a gentle and devoted mother. This idea went round and round in her head like a huge wheel with a deafening noise. She guessed such repulsive details, she plumbed the depths of such profound hypocrisy, she witnessed in her mind such a cruel double game that she wanted to die to escape from the thoughts. One single idea, formulaic and inescapable, crushed her brain with the weight and persistency of a grindstone. She would repeat to herself: ‘My child was killed by my children.’ She could find nothing else to express her despair.
After this sudden change of heart, she looked frantically for a self that she could no longer recognize. She was overwhelmed by the sudden invasion of thoughts of revenge that drove all the goodness out of her life. When the transformation was complete, there was darkness inside her. She felt a new being, pitiless and cruel, being born in her dying flesh, a being that would like to bite into the killers of her son.
Now that she had succumbed to the devastating embrace of paralysis and had realized that she could not leap at the throats of Thérèse and Laurent, whom she dreamed of strangling, she resigned herself to silence and immobility, and large tears fell slowly from her eyes. Nothing was more distressing than this silent, unmoving despair. These tears, running one after another across this dead face, in which not a line moved, this inert, pallid face in which the muscles could not weep and only the eyes sobbed, was the most moving of sights.
Thérèse was overcome with terrified pity.
‘We must put her to bed,’ she said to Laurent, indicating her aunt.
Laurent hastily pushed the cripple into her room. Then he bent down to pick her up in his arms. At that moment, Mme Raquin hoped that some powerful spring would raise her to her feet; she made a supreme effort. God could not allow Laurent to clasp her to his breast; she was sure that thunder would strike him if he showed such monstrous impudence. But no spring drove her and the heavens kept their thunderbolts. She remained there, slumped in the chair, passive, like a bundle of washing. She was grasped, lifted and carried by the murderer. She experienced the horror of feeling herself soft and powerless in the arms of the man who had killed Camille. Her head rolled on to Laurent’s shoulder and she looked at him with eyes made wider by terror and repulsion.
‘Go on, then, have a good look at me,’ he murmured.