Thérèse

In the evening Bernard and Thérèse came back to Argelouse to the Desqueyroux house, which had hardly been inhabited for years. The chimneys smoked, the windows did not fasten properly, and the draughts blew under the doors where the rats had gnawed them. But the autumn was so lovely that year, that Thérèse did not at first suffer from these inconveniences. Bernard was out shooting until the evening: no sooner had he come back, than he settled down in the kitchen and took his dinner with the Balions: Thérèse could hear the clatter of forks and the monotonous sound of voices. Night falls quickly in October. She had read the few books she had brought with her over and over again, and she was tired of them. Bernard did not reply to her request that he would send on an order to his bookseller at Bordeaux: he only allowed Thérèse to renew her supply of cigarettes. She sat and stirred the fire ... but the thick resinous smoke made her eyes smart and irritated her throat, which had already been injured by tobacco. No sooner had Balionte fetched away the remains of a hurried meal, than Thérèse put out the lamp and went to bed. How many hours she lay there before sleep came to her deliverance! The silence of Argelouse prevented her sleeping: she preferred the windy nights,—the confused murmur of the pines is full of human kindness. It soothed the turmoil of her mind. The wild nights of the equinox sent her to sleep better than the nights when all was still.

However interminable the evenings seemed, she sometimes came back to the house before dusk had fallen,—either because, at the sight of her, a mother had seized her child by the hand and dragged it roughly back into the farmyard,—or because some herdsman, whose name she knew, had not answered her greeting. Oh, how good it would be to lose herself, to drown herself in the deepest depths of some populous city! At Argelouse, there was not a shepherd that did not know her story (even Aunt Clara’s death was laid to her charge). There was not a threshold that she would have dared to cross: she went out by a back door, and avoided houses; the distant rumble of a cart was enough to make her hurry down a side road. She walked quickly, with the beating heart of a driven bird; and she lay down in the heather to wait until a bicycle had passed.

On Sunday, at Mass at Saint Clair, she did not feel this terror, and was conscious of a respite. Public opinion in the town seemed more favourable. She did not know that her father and the La Traves had depicted her as an innocent victim wounded to death. “We are afraid that the poor girl will never get over it: she refuses to see any one and the doctor says that she must not be opposed. Bernard is constantly with her, but her mind is affected....”

On the last night of October a violent wind from the Atlantic raved among the pines for many hours, and Thérèse lay between sleeping and waking listening to its ocean roar. But at daylight she was awakened by quite another sound of lamentation. She pushed open the shutters and the room was still dark: a dense steady rain streamed down on to the roofs of the out-buildings and the leaves of the oak trees, which had hardly yet begun to fall. Bernard did not go out that day. Thérèse sat smoking; she threw away her cigarette, went out onto the landing, and heard her husband wandering from one room to another on the ground floor: a smell of pipe-smoke reached her room, overpowered that of Thérèse’s light tobacco, and she recognised the smell of her old life. The first day of bad weather.... How many would she have to live through, sitting at the corner of that fire-place by the dying embers? In the corners of the room the paper was peeling off the damp walls, on which could still be seen the marks of the old pictures which Bernard had taken away to adorn the drawing-room at Saint Clair,—and the desolate rusty nails. On the mantelpiece, in frames with a triple border of tortoiseshell, stood photographs as pallid as if the dead they represented had died a second death. Bernard’s father, her grandmother, Bernard himself as a boy, with bobbed hair. There was still the whole day before her which she must spend in that melancholy room; and weeks, and months to follow.

As it began to grow dark, Thérèse could bear it no longer; she opened the door quietly, went downstairs and into the kitchen. There she saw Bernard sitting on a low chair before the fire. He got up suddenly; Balion stopped cleaning a gun; Balionte dropped her knitting. All three of them looked at her with such an expression that she asked:

“Are you afraid of me?”

“Didn’t you know you were forbidden to enter the kitchen?” She did not reply and turned towards the door. Bernard called her back.

“However, as you have come, I should like to tell you that my presence here is no longer necessary. We have been able to work up a good deal of sympathy at Saint Clair; people think you, or pretend to think you, rather neurasthenic. It is understood that you prefer to live alone and that I often come to see you. After this you need not come to Mass.”

She stammered out that she did not mind coming; to which he replied that her likes and dislikes were not in question. The desired result had been obtained:

“And since the Mass means nothing to you....”

She opened her mouth, seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He would not give way, lest a word or a gesture of hers might compromise a success so quick and so unexpected. She asked how Marie was. He said she was very well, and that she was leaving to-morrow for Beaulieu with Anne and Madame de la Trave. He was going to spend a few weeks there himself; two months at the most. He opened the door and stood aside for Thérèse to pass.

In the dark dawn she heard Balion harnessing the horses; then Bernard’s voice, the trampling of hooves, and the rattle of the departing carriage. And then the rain,—on the roofs, on the clouded window-panes, on the desolate fields, on fifty miles of moor and marsh, on the shifting sanddunes by the sea shore, and on the sea.

Thérèse lit a cigarette from the one she had just finished. About four o’clock she put on a mackintosh and went out into the rain. But the darkness frightened her and she came back to her room. The fire was out, and as she was shivering, she went to bed. About seven o’clock Balionte brought her up an egg, fried, on a slice of ham, but she would not eat it; the taste of fat had begun to make her feel sick! Never anything but potted meat or ham. Balionte said that she had nothing better to give her: Monsieur Bernard had forbidden her to have game. She complained that Thérèse made her go up and down stairs for nothing (she had something the matter with her heart and her legs were swollen). The work was really too much for her; she only did it for Monsieur Bernard’s sake.

Thérèse was feverish that night, and in her abnormally clear imagination she evolved a complete existence in Paris: she saw once more the restaurant in the Bois where she had been; this time she was not with Bernard, but with Jean Azévédo and some young women. She put down her tortoiseshell cigarette case on the table, and talked frankly and freely, to the faint accompaniment of an orchestra. She could see the circle of admiring faces, listening eagerly but without astonishment. One woman said: “That is so like me.... I have felt that, too.” A literary man took her aside, and said: “You ought to write down everything that comes into your head; we will publish it in our review and call it ‘The Diary of a Woman of To-day.’”

A young man who was desperately in love with her, took her home in his car. They were driving back along the Avenue du Bois; she felt no emotion whatever, but she took a certain pleasure in the agonised young body close beside her. “No, not this evening,” she said to him. “I’m dining with a friend this evening.” “What about to-morrow evening?” “I can’t to-morrow either.” “Are your evenings never free?” “Hardly ever ... I might almost say never.”

There was one being in her life who made the rest of the world seem insignificant; some one unknown to any one in her circle; very humble and obscure; but Thérèse’s whole existence revolved round this sun whom she alone could see, and whose warmth reached no other flesh but hers. The murmur of Paris was like the wind in the pines. This body that lay so close to hers, light as it was, prevented her breathing; but she would sooner stifle than send him away. (And Thérèse made the gesture of an embrace—she clasped her left shoulder with her right hand and drove the nails of her left hand into her right shoulder.)

She got up, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the window; the night outside was not cold; but she could hardly bring herself to imagine that a day must come when it would rain no more. If she had had any money she would have escaped to Paris, gone straight to Jean Azévédo and confided in him; he would know how to get her work. If she could only be a woman alone in Paris, earning her living and dependent on no one...! Oh to be without a family! She would choose her own people as she pleased,—the tie should not be one of blood, but of the mind, and even of the flesh as well; she would discover her true relations, however few and scattered they might be.... She went to sleep at last, with the window open. The cold damp dawn awoke her; her teeth chattered, and she could not bring herself to get up and shut the window,—she could not even put out her arms and draw up the bedclothes.

That day she did not get up or even do her hair. She swallowed a few mouthfuls of potted meat and drank some coffee so as to be able to smoke,—tobacco on an empty stomach did not agree with her. She tried to recapture her imaginings of the night; and, indeed, at Argelouse the day was almost as quiet and as dark as the night. In these days, the shortest in the year, time disappears under the pall of rain, and one hour melts into the next; dusk passes into dusk in unalterable silence. But Thérèse had no desire for sleep, and her dreams became more and more vivid; she searched her past methodically for forgotten faces, lips that she had loved from afar, vague forms that casual encounters, or the chances of the night, had brought into contact with her young body. She moulded an image of happiness, invented an imaginary joy, and used all the fragments of her experience to build up an impossible love.

“She never gets up now, and she leaves her potted meat and her bread,” said Balionte to Balion some time after this: “but she finishes the bottle fast enough. She’d drink as much as you’d let her have, she would. And then she burns the sheets with her cigarettes. She’ll end by setting the house on fire. She smokes so much that her fingers and nails are all yellow, just as if she’d dipped them in arnica. It’s a shame, so it is!—those sheets were woven at home.... She won’t get clean ones very often, I can tell you.”

She added that she was perfectly willing to sweep the room or to make the bed: it was the creature’s fault for pretending to be ill and not getting up. It was not worth Balionte’s trouble, with her swollen legs and all, to carry up jugs of hot water; she found them in the evening standing at the bedroom door where she had put them in the morning.

Thérèse’s thoughts began to be less absorbed in the unknown being that she had evoked for her delight; she grew weary of her happiness, and sated with imaginary pleasure, so she conceived another way of escape.

All manner of people knelt about her humble bed; a child of Argelouse, one of those who ran away when she came near, was brought dying into Thérèse’s room; she laid her nicotine-stained fingers on him, and he got up cured.

She had other and less exalted dreams. She planned a house by the seaside, saw in her mind’s eye the garden, and the terrace, arranged the rooms, chose each piece of furniture one by one, tried to make up her mind where she would put what she had brought from Saint Clair, and argued with herself over the choice of materials. Then the scene would fade, the outlines grew confused, and nothing was left but an arbour and a bench beside the sea. And there Thérèse was sitting, her head against the shoulder of one who sat beside her; she got up, as the bell rang for dinner, and went into the darkened arbour with some one walking at her side who suddenly flung his arms about her and drew her to him. A kiss, she thought, must bring time to a standstill; she imagined that in love there must be seconds that last for ever. So she imagined; but she would never know. Once more she sees the white house and the well; she hears the harsh voice of the pump; the courtyard is full of the fragrance of heliotrope; dinner will be a rest before the joys of the evening and the night, which she dares not conceive, for they pass so far beyond the powers of the human heart. Thus, the love of which Thérèse, of all women, had been utterly frustrated, possessed and pervaded all her being. She could hardly hear Balionte’s hoarse cries. The old creature was trying to convey to her that Monsieur Bernard would come back from the South one day or another without letting them know. And what would he say when he saw that room? It was little better than a pig-sty! Madame must get up whether she liked it or not.

As she sat on the bed, Thérèse stared with amazement at her skeleton-like legs, and her feet looked enormous. Balionte wrapped her in a dressing-gown and pushed her into an arm-chair. She reached out for the cigarettes, but her hand dropped nerveless at her side. A cold sunlight came through the open window. Balionte bustled about with a broom in her hand, breathing heavily and grumbling to herself,—Balionte who must have had a good heart, because it was always said that every Christmas the death of the pig which she had been fattening made her cry. She could not bear Thérèse not to answer her: in her eyes silence was an insult, a mark of contempt. But Thérèse was no longer mistress of her speech. When she felt against her body the coolness of the clean sheets, she thought she had said, “Thank you,” though as a matter of fact she had not uttered a word. “You won’t burn these, I think,” said Balionte to her sharply as she left the room. Thérèse was afraid that she had taken away the cigarettes and put out her hand towards the table: they were gone. How could she live without smoking? She could not exist without the constant touch of these small, dry, warm objects against her fingers. She must have their odour always in her nostrils, and fill the room with the fragrant mist that she had inhaled and ejected from her lips. Balionte would not come back until the evening; a whole afternoon without tobacco! She closed her eyes and her yellow fingers moved mechanically as though they held a cigarette.

At seven o’clock Balionte came in with a candle, and put the tray on the table: milk, coffee, and a piece of bread. “So you don’t want anything else?” And she waited maliciously for Thérèse to ask for her cigarettes; but Thérèse’s face was turned steadfastly to the wall and she did not move.

Doubtless Balionte had neglected to shut the window properly: a gust of wind blew it open, and the cold night air filled the room. Thérèse could not rouse herself to throw off the bedclothes, get up, and run barefooted to the window. She lay, motionless, huddled up, the sheets drawn up to her eyes, and the icy breath only touched her forehead and her eyelids. Argelouse was full of the vast murmur of the pines, their noise was like the noise of the ocean, but it did not seem to break the silence of that place. Thérèse reflected that if she meant to make a friend of pain, she should not have buried herself beneath the bedclothes. She tried to push them back a little, but could not bear the cold for more than a few seconds. She tried again, and endured a little longer,—and so on, as if it had been a game. Thus, though it was not deliberate, physical pain became her occupation and—who knows?—her reason for existing in the world.