Thérèse

In the drawing-room, Thérèse was sitting in the dark. There were still some embers alive under the ashes of the fire. She did not move. Now that it was too late, stray passages from the confession she had prepared during her journey, floated to the surface of her mind; but she could not find fault with herself for not having used it. As a matter of fact, the story was too well constructed, and had but little reference to reality. The importance she had chosen to attach to young Azévédo’s conversation was mere foolishness. As if that could have had the slightest effect! No, she had obeyed some inner inexorable law: she had failed to destroy this family, so she herself would be destroyed; they were right to consider her a monster, but she thought them monstrous, too. Without appearing to do so they now intended gradually and methodically to crush her out of existence. Henceforth, this powerful family machine would be used against her,—because she had not understood how to dislocate the mechanism, nor get out of reach of its ruthless wheels. It was useless to look for any reason other than the fact that they were what they were, and she was herself. “All those efforts,” she thought, “to wear a mask and a disguise, and impersonate a wife, which I could only keep up for less than two years, I imagine other women, no different from me, carry on until they die, saved, perhaps, by use and wont, drugged by habit, and stupefied into slumber against the maternal and all-powerful bosom of the Family. But I ... I ... I....”

She got up, opened the window, and felt the chill of dawn. Why not escape? She had only to get out of the window. Would they pursue her? Would they again deliver her up to justice? It was a risk worth taking. Anything was better than the interminable agony. Thérèse had already drawn up a chair against the window. But she had no money; thousands of pines were hers, but they were useless: she could not touch a penny except through Bernard. She could do nothing but take to the moors, as Daguerre had done, that hunted murderer for whom Thérèse as a child had felt so much pity. (She remembered the gendarmes whom Balionte had entertained in the kitchen at Argelouse)—and it was the Desqueyroux dog who had got on the poor wretch’s track. He had been picked up half-dead with hunger in the heather; and Thérèse had seen him lying bound in a haycart. He was said to have died on the ship before he reached Cayenne. A ship ... a convict settlement.... They were quite capable of giving her up, as they had said. That evidence that Bernard pretended he had,—it was a lie, no doubt; unless he had discovered that package of poisons in the pocket of the old cloak.

Thérèse decided to make certain. She felt her way to the staircase: as she went up it she saw more clearly, the light of dawn was shining through the windows above her. There, on the attic landing, was the cupboard where the old clothes were hanging,—the ones that never appeared, because they were only used during the shooting season. There was a deep pocket in that faded mantle: Aunt Clara used to put her knitting in it in the times when she also used to go out and watch for the pigeons to come over. Thérèse slipped her hand into it and drew out the packet sealed with wax:

• Chloroform: 10 grammes.
• Aconitine: 2 grammes.
• Digitaline: 20 centigrammes.

She read the words and figures over again. Death: she had always had a terror of death. The essential thing was not to contemplate death,—only to think of the necessary preliminaries: pour out the water, dissolve the powder, drink it off, lie down on a bed, and close her eyes: she must not look further than that. Why be more afraid of the sleep that was death, than of any other sleep? If she was shivering, it was only because the early morning air was chilly. She went downstairs again, and stopped at the door of the room in which Marie slept. The nurse’s snores were like the grunts of an animal. Thérèse pushed the door back: the growing daylight filtered through the shutters, and the narrow iron bed gleamed white in the darkness. Two tiny fists were lying on the sheet: a baby profile was buried in the pillow. Thérèse recognised that ear; it was a little too large,—just like her own. They were right, a replica of herself lay there, sunk in slumber. “I shall go away,—but that part of me remains; a fate that must be fulfilled to the end, and not one iota omitted.” All manner of dumb desires and blind inclinations, laws of the blood that none may escape,—in these she must survive. Thérèse had read of desperate people carrying off their children to death with them: worthy citizens let their paper fall, exclaiming “How can such things be possible?” Because she was a criminal, Thérèse knew too well that they were possible, and that for very little.... She knelt down, and laid her lips against a little outstretched hand; she was amazed at something that surged up from her inmost being, rose up to her eyes, and burned her cheeks: a few poor tears,—she who never wept!

Thérèse got up, looked at the child once more, then went into her own room, filled a glass with water, broke the wax seal, and hesitated between the three packets of poison.

The window was open. The crowing of the cocks seemed to cleave the mist, which still clung to the pines in transparent strips. The land lay bathed in the dawn. How could she say farewell to so much light? What was death? No one knew what it was. Thérèse was not quite certain that it meant annihilation: she was not sure that there was no one there. She loathed herself for feeling such terrors; she who did not hesitate to hurl a fellow-creature into nothingness, was scared of it herself. How her cowardice humiliated her! If that Being existed (and in one brief instant she saw before her that dreadful Corpus Christi procession, that solitary figure weighed down under his golden cape, the thing that he carried in both hands, and his look of dejection); since He exists, let Him turn aside the murderous hand before it is too late; and if it is His will that a poor blind soul should pass that bourne, let Him give a loving welcome to the criminal whom He created.

Thérèse poured the chloroform into the water: its name was more familiar to her and made her feel less frightened because it called up images of sleep. She must be quick: the house was awakening: Balionte had taken down the shutters in Aunt Clara’s room. What was she shouting to the deaf woman? The servant usually knew how to make herself understood by a movement of the lips. A noise of doors and hurried steps; Thérèse had only just the time to throw a shawl over the table to hide the poisons. Balionte came in without knocking.

“Ma’m’iselle is dead! I found her dead, on her bed with all her clothes on. She is cold already.”

In spite of everything, a rosary was placed between the fingers of the old unbeliever, a crucifix on her breast. Tenants came in, knelt down, and went out, not without long looks at Thérèse who was standing at the head of the bed: (“And who knows if it wasn’t she who did it?”) Bernard had gone to Saint Clair to tell the Family and to make the necessary arrangements. He must have thought that this accident came at an opportune moment and would distract people’s attention. Thérèse looked at the body, the old faithful body that came and lay down in her path at the very moment she was going to hurl herself to death. Chance: coincidence? If any one talked about free-will, she used to shrug her shoulders. People said to each other: “Did you see? She didn’t even pretend to cry.” Thérèse was speaking silently to her who was no longer there: she must live, but like a corpse in the hands of those who hate her. She must try and look no further.

At the funeral Thérèse took her proper place. On the following Sunday, she entered the church with Bernard who instead of going down the aisle, as his custom was, ostentatiously walked up the nave. Thérèse did not raise her crêpe veil until she had reached her place between her mother-in-law and her husband. She was hidden from the congregation by a pillar: opposite her was only the choir. She was hemmed in on every side: the mass of the congregation behind her, Bernard on the right, Madame de la Trave on the left, only the choir lay before her, as the arena stretches away in front of the bull when he emerges from the darkness: that empty space where between two children stood a man, disguised and muttering, with parted hands.