Thérèse

The lawyer opened a door. Thérèse Desqueyroux, as she stood in that remote corridor of the law-courts, felt the fog upon her face and inhaled it deeply. She was afraid some one might be waiting for her, and hesitated to go out. A man with his coat collar turned up appeared from the shadow of a plane tree, and she recognised her father.

“All right,” cried the lawyer; “case dismissed”; and, turning to Thérèse, he added, “You can go out now; no one is there.”

She went down the damp steps; the little Square seemed indeed deserted. Her father did not kiss her, did not even look at her. He asked a few questions of Duros, the lawyer, who answered in low tones, as though he were afraid of being overheard. She just managed to catch what they were saying.

“I shall get the official notification to-morrow.”

“I suppose nothing can go wrong now?”

“No, nothing; it’s all over.”

“I suppose after my son-in-law’s statement, it was a certainty?”

“Well, I’m not so sure.... You never can tell.”

“But after he’d said definitely that he had not counted the drops....”

“My dear Larroque, in affairs of this kind the victim’s evidence....”

Here Thérèse broke in; “But there wasn’t any victim.”

“I meant by victim, the victim of his own imprudence, Madame.”

The two men stared at her for a moment as she stood there motionless, wrapped in her cloak, and looked curiously at her expressionless face. She asked where the carriage was; her father had arranged for it to wait on the Budos road, outside the town, so as not to attract attention.

They crossed the Square, where leaves from the plane trees were sticking to the rain-soaked benches. Fortunately the days had grown much shorter: besides, to get to the Budos road, they could go through the most unfrequented streets of the little provincial town. Thérèse walked between the two men (she was nearly half a head taller than either of them), and they began a further discussion as if she had not been there; but finding the intervening feminine presence inconvenient they began unconsciously to elbow her out of the way. She accordingly dropped a little behind, and took the glove off her left hand so as to be able to pick the moss off the ancient stone walls at her side. From time to time a workman on a bicycle, or a trap came past, and she drew close in to the houses to avoid being splashed with mud. But Thérèse was hidden by the gathering dusk, and no one recognised her. The smell of fog and baking bread was for her not merely the usual evening smell of a little town; it was the perfume of the life that had been restored to her at last. She shut her eyes to savour the moist leafy fragrance of the sleeping earth, and tried not to listen to the words of the short bandy-legged gentleman who did not once turn his head towards his daughter. She might have fallen at the roadside and neither he, nor Duros, would have noticed it. They were no longer afraid to raise their voices.

“Monsieur Desqueyroux’s statement was all that could be desired, but there was that prescription,—in point of fact, it was a question of forgery. And it was Doctor Pédemay who had brought the charge....”

“But he withdrew it.”

“I know; but her explanation—this mysterious individual who handed her a prescription....”

Thérèse walked more slowly, not because she was tired, but to get out of earshot of these phrases that had been dinned into her brain for so many weeks; but it was no use. She could not help hearing her father’s raucous accents:

“I told her over and over again that she must try to think of something else.”

He was quite right, he had indeed said so very often. But what was he worrying about now? What he called the honour of the name, was safe: the whole story would have been forgotten by the time of the Senatorial elections, Thérèse thought to herself, as she did her best not to catch up the two men; but in the heat of the discussion, they stopped, gesticulating at each other, half-way down the street.

“My advice to you, Larroque, is to face the thing out: take the offensive in next Sunday’s Semeur: I’ll see about it if you like. Get them to put in a notice headed ‘An Infamous Rumour’ or something like that.”

“I don’t agree with you, my dear fellow: as a matter of fact there is no case to answer, the prosecution obviously had not a leg to stand on; they did not even consult hand-writing experts. I am sure the best thing will be to say nothing, and hush it all up. I will do what is necessary and I won’t spare expense: we can’t afford to have any scandal, for the sake of the family.”

They had walked on again by this time, and Thérèse did not hear Duros’ answer. She inhaled the damp night air once more as though she were afraid of choking; and suddenly there came before her mind the unknown face of her maternal grandmother Julie Bellade: it was indeed unknown, for neither the Larroque nor the Desqueyroux families possessed a single likeness of her, and nothing was known about her except that she had one day disappeared. Thérèse realised that she too might have been wiped out of existence, and later on not even her little daughter Marie would have been allowed to find in an album the likeness of one who had brought her into the world. At that moment Marie was already asleep in a room at Argelouse, where Thérèse would arrive late that evening: she would listen in the darkness to the murmur of that childish slumber; she would lean over the bed and her lips would drink in the sweetness of that sleeping life like a draught of clear water.

The carriage stood waiting by the ditch at the edge of the road; the hood was raised and the two lamps lit up the skinny hind quarters of the horses. Beyond it towered two dark walls of forest. The tops of the lower tiers of pines on either side met overhead, and the road vanished into the darkness under that dim archway. Above it gleamed the sky, fretted by a network of myriad branches.

The coachman watched Thérèse with greedy curiosity. When she asked him if they would get to Nizan station in time to catch the last train, he said they would if they started at once.

“I shall not need to trouble you again, Gardère.”

“Has Madame no more business here, then?”

She shook her head, while the man still devoured her with his eyes. Would she be looked at like that for the rest of her life?

“Well, are you glad?” asked her father. He seemed at last to have noticed her presence. Thérèse glanced at that sallow bilious countenance, those cheeks bristling with a coarse growth of whitish-yellow hair, so painfully distinct in the light of the carriage lamps.

“I have suffered so much,—I am worn out ...” she began, in low tones; but she soon relapsed into silence. It was no use talking; he was not listening, he was not even looking at her. He cared very little about Thérèse’s feelings. One thing and one thing only mattered to him; his upward progress to the Senate might be impeded and even endangered by this wretched daughter of his: all women, in his opinion, were either hysterical or stupid. Fortunately her name was no longer Larroque: she was a Desqueyroux. Now that they had managed to avoid a trial at the Assizes, he breathed again: but it would be difficult to prevent his enemies keeping the wound open. He would go and see the Prefect the very next day. Thank Heaven, he could do what he liked with the Editor of the Lande Conservatrice. There was that story about those little girls!... He took Thérèse’s arm:

“Get in at once, you’ve no time to lose.”

Then the lawyer, perhaps out of malice, or possibly not liking to let Thérèse go without saying a word to her, asked if she was going back to Monsieur Bernard Desqueyroux that very evening. As she replied, “Of course I am; my husband is expecting me,” she realised for the first time since she had left the Law Courts that she would, in fact, in a few hours, cross the threshold of the room in which her husband was lying, still rather ill, and that this was the beginning of an indefinite succession of days through which she must live in this man’s company.

She had been staying with her father, just outside the little town, while the case had been under investigation, but she had, of course, often made this journey; on the previous occasions, however, she had been intent upon the necessity for giving her husband an exact account of what had happened, and her mind was full of Duros’ last words of advice, as she had got into the carriage, on the answers Monsieur Desqueyroux was to make when he was again questioned. Thérèse had then felt no distress or awkwardness at finding herself face to face once more with the sick man: what they had to consider was not what had really happened, but what they had better say, or not say. Husband and wife had never been so closely united as they were by the preparation of this defence,—drawn together across the infant body of their little daughter Marie. They concocted, for the judge’s benefit, a simple and coherent story, calculated to convince that logical mind. She used to get into the same carriage that was waiting for her this evening: but to-night she dreaded the end of that journey through the darkness which in those days she had found so tedious. She remembered how, the moment she got into the carriage, she longed to be back in that room at Argelouse, and she used to go over in her mind the instructions she was to pass on to her husband: he was to be sure, for instance, to say that she had told him one evening about that prescription which an unknown man had asked her to take to the chemist’s, on the pretext that he did not like to go himself because he owed money there,—but Duros did not advise that Bernard should go so far as to pretend that he remembered remonstrating with his wife for doing such a foolish thing.

Now that the nightmare had been exorcised, what would Bernard and Thérèse talk about that evening? She saw in her mind’s eye the desolate house in which he was awaiting her: she pictured the bed in the centre of that stone-floored room, and the lamp, turned low, standing on a table among a litter of newspapers and medicine bottles. The house-dogs, awakened by the noise of the carriage, bark and are quiet: and then the silence would descend once more, the awful silence of those nights when the wretched Bernard lay racked by frightful paroxysms of vomiting. Thérèse tried to imagine the first moment, not far distant now, when their eyes would meet; and then the ensuing night, the next day, the day after, and the weeks to come, in that house at Argelouse, where they would no longer need to compose a presentable version of the drama they had lived. There would be nothing now between them,—except what had really been there, really, and in very truth. Thérèse lost her nerve, and stammered, turning towards the lawyer,—though her words were intended for the older man:

“I expect to stay a few days with Monsieur Desqueyroux, and then, if he goes on improving, I shall come back to my father.”

“Not a bit of it, my dear,” said Monsieur Larroque, and as Gardère began to fidget on his seat, he added, lowering his voice: “Have you taken leave of your senses? You can’t possibly leave your husband at such a time. You must be inseparable,—inseparable, I tell you, for the rest of your lives.”

“Of course, father: what could I have been thinking of? Then you will come to Argelouse?”

“But I shall expect you over for the fair on Thursdays as usual, Thérèse. You will go on coming as you always did.”

She must surely understand that any departure from existing usages would be fatal. She must realise that, once and for all. He felt sure he could depend upon her, she had done the family enough harm already.

“You must do exactly what your husband tells you, and then you won’t go far wrong.”

And he hurried her into the carriage.

Thérèse noticed the lawyer’s outstretched hand, with its coarse dark nails:

“All’s well that ends well,” said he, and indeed he really meant it. If the case had gone any further he would not have got much out of it. The family would have called in Maître Peyrecave of the Bordeaux Bar: so everything was for the best.