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By Root 932 0

had this quality, Camille loved her in that way. Always Camille, always these sad remarks mourning the death of Camille. Thérèse used all her venom to intensify the cruelty of this torture that she was inflicting on Laurent in order to protect herself. She went into the most intimate details and described the trivial events of her youth with sighs of nostalgia, in this way mingling the memory of the drowned man with every act of her daily routine. The body, which was already haunting the house, was now brought into it openly. It sat on the chairs or at the table, lay down on the bed, and used the furniture or whatever else was lying around. Laurent could not pick up a fork, a brush or anything without Thérèse letting him know that Camille had touched it before him. Constantly running up against the man he had killed, the murderer came to feel an odd sensation that almost drove him mad: through being so often compared to Camille and using things that Camille had used, he came to think that he was Camille; he identified with his victim. His brain was bursting, so he would rush at his wife to make her be quiet, so as not to hear the words that were driving him insane. All their rows would end in blows.

XXX

The time came when it occurred to Mme Raquin to let herself die of hunger in order to escape the agony that she had to endure. Her resistance was at an end; she could no longer bear the torment imposed on her by the continual presence of the murderers and she dreamed of finding an end to all her suffering in death. Every day, when Thérèse kissed her, and when Laurent took her in his arms and carried her like a child, her pain intensified. She made up her mind to escape from these caresses and embraces which aroused such horrible repugnance in her. Since she was no longer fully enough alive to revenge her son, she preferred to be entirely dead and leave the killers with nothing except a body, devoid of feeling, which they could treat as they wished.

For two days, she refused all food, using the last of her strength to clench her teeth and spit out what they managed to get into her mouth. Thérèse was in despair. She wondered where she could kneel and weep in repentance when her aunt was no longer there. She talked endlessly to her, to convince her that she should live; she wept, she even grew angry, as she had done in the past, opening the paralysed woman’s jaws as one does the jaws of an animal that does not want to be fed. Mme Raquin held firm. The struggle was appalling.

Laurent maintained an attitude of perfect neutrality and indifference. He was amazed by the violent efforts that Thérèse put into preventing the cripple’s suicide. Now that the old woman’s presence was no longer useful to them, he wanted her to die. He would not have killed her himself, but since she wished for death, he saw no need to deny her the means to achieve her goal.

‘Oh, leave her!’ he would shout at his wife. ‘Good riddance. Perhaps we will be happier when she is not here any more.’

This last remark, which he often repeated in front of her, aroused strange emotions in Mme Raquin. She was afraid that Laurent’s hopes would be fulfilled, and that after her death the couple would enjoy tranquil, happy days. She told herself that it was cowardly to die and that she had no right to go before she had seen the sinister adventure through to its end. Only then could she go down into the shades and tell Camille: ‘You are avenged.’ The thought of suicide began to weigh on her when she suddenly considered the unknowns that she would take into the tomb: there, amid the cold and silence of the earth she would sleep, eternally racked by doubts about the punishment of her tormentors. To sleep properly the sleep of death, she had to lapse into insensibility feeling the sharp joy of revenge; she had to take with her a dream of hatred satisfied, one that she would dream throughout eternity. She took the food that her niece brought her and agreed to carry on living.

In any case, she saw that the end could not be far away. Every day the couple’s situation