Thérèse

The day of the wedding was stifling, and it was on that very day, in the narrow church at Saint Clair, where the women’s whispering drowned the wheezes of the harmonium and their scents overpowered the incense, that Thérèse felt that she was lost. She had been in a trance when she entered the cage, and at the sound of the heavy door, as it shut behind her, the poor child awoke. Nothing was changed, but she felt that never again would she walk and dream alone. She was embedded in that dreadful family, where she would smoulder like a malignant fire creeping through the heather and setting one pine alight and then another, until the forest is a mass of flaming torches. There was not one face in all that crowded church on which she cared to rest her eyes, except Anne’s: but the girl’s childish glee made Thérèse draw back. Surely Anne must realise that they would be parted that very evening, and not in space alone: but because of what Thérèse must suffer, that inexpiable thing that her body must so soon endure. Anne stayed behind on the shore in the company of those as yet immaculate: Thérèse was to go down among the herd whom use has soiled. As she bent down in the sacristy to kiss the little laughing lips, she became suddenly aware of the insignificance of this creature who had been, for her, the centre of a world of fantastic joys and sorrows: in those few seconds, she measured the infinite disparity between the dark forces in her heart and this pretty powdered face.

Long afterwards, at Saint Clair and at B., every one who spoke of those magnificent celebrations (more than a hundred tenants and servants had sat down to eat and drink under the oak trees) always alluded to the fact that the bride (“Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you can’t resist her charm!”) looked ugly, almost repulsive. “She wasn’t like herself,” they would say: “she seemed another person.” To them she merely looked different from usual; and they put it down to the white wedding-dress and the heat. They did not know that it was her real face.

Late in the day of that half-rustic wedding, groups of country people, the girls conspicuous in their gay dresses, made the car of the newly married pair slow down while they cheered them; the road was strewn with acacia blossoms, and they passed a number of country carts pursuing a somewhat zigzag course, driven by certain cheerful fellows who had clearly had a glass or two of wine. As she recalled the night that followed, Thérèse murmured: “It was horrible”: then, correcting herself; “No, not so horrible as all that.”

After all, she did not suffer much while they were travelling in the Italian lakes. She was absorbed in the game of keeping her secret. A fiancé is easily deceived, but a husband—! Any one can tell lies: but physical lying is a different art. It is not given to every one to imitate desire, delight, and the happy lassitude of love. Thérèse discovered how to bend her body to these impersonations, and she took a bitter pleasure in so doing. In that unknown world of sensations, which a man was now compelling her to explore, she could imagine that she, too, might have found a possible happiness. What would it have been like? When we stand before a landscape shrouded in rain and try to picture what it would have looked like in sunshine, so Thérèse became acquainted with desire.

Her young husband Bernard, with his vacant eyes, always worried because the numbers on the pictures did not correspond with those given in Baedeker, content if he had seen the sights in the shortest possible time,—what an easy dupe he was! He was pent up in his pleasures, like those little pigs that are so charming to watch through the palings of their sty, snuffling with satisfaction, in their trough (“I was the trough”: thought Thérèse). He had their hurried, fussy, serious look: he was methodical. “Do you really think we should do that?” ventured Thérèse sometimes, in her stupefaction. He laughed and reassured her: Where had he learnt to classify everything affecting the body,—to distinguish the honest man’s caresses from those of the sadist? He was never in a moment’s doubt. One evening in Paris, where they stopped on their return journey, Bernard ostentatiously left a music-hall at which the performance shocked him: “And to think that foreigners see that! Disgraceful! And that is what they judge by....”

Thérèse marvelled that this modest fellow was the same man whose patient ingenuities of the darkness she would, in less than an hour, have to endure.

“Poor Bernard—no worse than another. But desire transforms the being that lays hands on us into a monster quite unlike himself. Nothing divides us from our accomplice but his frenzy: I have always seen Bernard wallowing in his pleasure: and I,—I lay like one dead, as if this epileptic madman might have risked strangling me if I had moved an inch. More often than not, at the supreme moment, he suddenly realised he was alone; and the dismal ecstasy came abruptly to an end. Bernard retraced his steps and found me lying as if I had been thrown up on a sea shore, cold and with clenched teeth.”

One letter from Anne and one only: the child did not care about writing;—but, it so happened that there was not a line that Thérèse did not read with pleasure. A letter is far less an expression of our real sentiments than of those we ought to feel if our letter is to be welcome. Anne complained that she could not go in the direction of Vilméja since young Azévédo had come; she had seen his wheeled chair among the ferns; consumptives made her shudder.

Thérèse read the letter over and over again and did not expect any others: so she was much surprised when they got their letters (the day after the interrupted evening at the music-hall) to recognise Anne de la Trave’s writing on three envelopes. Various “Postes Restantes” had sent this bundle of letters on to Paris, for they had not stopped at several places on their programme: “they were in a hurry,” Bernard said, “to get back to their nest”; but the real reason was that they could not endure each other any longer. He was dying of boredom away from his guns, his dogs, and the inn, where the bitters and pomegranate syrup tasted better than anywhere else; and he was sick of this cold mocking woman who never seemed to be enjoying herself and could not talk about anything interesting!... Thérèse wanted to get back to Saint Clair, like a convict, who has grown tired of his temporary cell, becomes curious about the island in which the remainder of his life is to be spent. Thérèse had carefully deciphered the date stamped on each of the three envelopes; and she was just opening the first when Bernard uttered an exclamation, shouted several words which she did not catch, for the window was open, and as their hotel was at a street corner the motor-buses changed gears immediately outside. He had stopped shaving to read a letter from his mother. Thérèse could still see his “cellular” vest and his muscular bare arms: the pale skin, and then the sudden coarse crimson of the neck and face. The July morning was already heavy with sulphurous heat: the smoky sunshine made the house fronts opposite, beyond the balcony, look grimier still. He had come up to Thérèse, and shouted: “This is too much. Your little friend Anne is going it! Who’d have said that my young sister....” And as Thérèse looked at him questioningly:

“She’s fallen in love with the Azévédo boy: can you believe it? Yes, really; that consumptive fellow for whom they were enlarging Vilméja.... She says she’ll wait until she’s of age.... Mother says she is completely mad. I only hope the Deguilhems don’t know anything about it. Young Deguilhem would be quite capable of giving up the marriage altogether. Have you got letters from her? Now we shall know all about it then: aren’t you going to open them?”

“I want to read them in order. Besides, I couldn’t show them to you.”

This was just like her: she complicated everything. However, the essential point was that she should bring the girl to her senses again.

“My parents are relying on you. She’ll do anything you tell her.... Oh yes, she will.... You can save the situation.”

While she was dressing, he would go out to send a telegram and book two seats on the Southern Express: and she might begin to pack the trunks.

“Why aren’t you reading the child’s letters? What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting till you have gone.”

Long after he had shut the door Thérèse had remained lying on the sofa smoking cigarettes, and staring at the great letters of blackened gilt, fixed to the balcony opposite: then she had torn open the first envelope. No: it could not be that sweet little fool, that light-headed little Convent girl who had conceived these words of flame. It could not be that chilly little heart,—for such it was, and Thérèse ought to know!—which had poured forth that Song of Songs, that long ecstatic lamentation of a woman possessed, of a body almost stricken down with joy, from the first encounter.

If Bernard had come back into the room that minute, he would have noticed that the woman sitting on the bed was not his wife, but some one he did not know, a strange and nameless creature. She threw away her cigarette, and tore open a second envelope.

Thérèse opened the third envelope: only a brief scrawl.

Thérèse read no further. As she slipped the sheet into the envelope, she saw a photograph inside it that she had not noticed; she stood near the window and examined the face: it was that of a youth whose head, owing to his thick hair, seemed too large for him. Thérèse recognized the place where the photograph had been taken: an embankment on which Jean Azévédo stood up like David (behind him was a stretch of heath on which sheep were pasturing). His coat was over his arm: and his shirt a little open ... (“the last caress allowed”). Thérèse raised her eyes and was amazed at the reflection of her face in the mirror. It cost her an effort to unclench her teeth and swallow. She rubbed her temples and forehead with eau-de-Cologne.

“She knows that joy ... what about me, why shouldn’t I know it too?” The photograph lay on the table: she caught the glitter of a pin beside it.

“I did that. I actually did that.” ... In the jolting train, now moving faster down a gradient, Thérèse said slowly to herself: “It is two years ago since, in that hotel bedroom, I picked up the pin and ran it through the boy’s photograph in the region of the heart,—not violently, but coolly, as if I was doing something quite ordinary;—and then I threw the photograph down the lavatory; and pulled the plug.”

When Bernard came back he had remarked how serious she looked, like some one who has been thinking something over, and decided what to do. But she ought not to smoke so much, he said: she was poisoning herself. Thérèse said that too much importance should not be attached to a young girl’s fancies. She promised to bring her to a right view of things. Bernard wanted Thérèse to reassure him,—full of the joy of feeling the return tickets in his pockets; and more especially gratified that his family had already asked for his wife’s help. He announced that, cost what it might, for the last luncheon on their trip they would go to some restaurant in the Bois. In the taxi he talked about his plans for the shooting season; he was in a hurry to try the dog that Balion was breaking in for him. His mother wrote that since the mare had been fired she did not limp any more.

There were not yet many people in the restaurant, where the innumerable waiters made them nervous. Thérèse still remembered the smell—a blend of geraniums and vinegar. Bernard had never tasted Hock (“Good Lord, they don’t give it away: still, Christmas only comes once a year!”). Bernard’s broad shoulders prevented Thérèse seeing much of the room. Behind the great plate-glass windows, motor-cars slid up and stopped, more silently than in a film. She watched what she knew to be the temporal muscles moving behind Bernard’s ears. After the first few glasses he got flushed: for some weeks now this handsome cavalier from the country had had no means of working off his daily ration of food and drink. She did not hate him but how she longed to be alone to think about her pain and find exactly where it lay. She simply wished he was somewhere else, so that she might no longer have to force herself to eat and smile, compose her face, and veil the fire that must be blazing in her eyes: so that her mind might dwell freely on her mysterious despair.... Some one has escaped from the desert island where you thought to have her with you till the end; she crosses the abyss that divides you from the world and is gone;—to another planet, ... and yet: No.... Who has ever been able to do that? Anne was always one of those who were content with life as it came: it was a changeling whose sleeping head Thérèse had watched lying on her lap, in their solitary holidays together: she had never known the real Anne de la Trave, the one who was now meeting Jean Azévédo in the deserted shooting-hut between Saint Clair and Argelouse.

“What is the matter? You aren’t eating. You mustn’t leave anything: it would be a shame considering the price it costs. Is it the heat? You aren’t going to faint, I hope. Or perhaps you’re feeling sick ... already?”

She smiled ... with her lips only. She said she was thinking about Anne’s adventure (she had to talk about Anne). And as Bernard said he was not bothering himself any longer now that she had the matter in hand, his wife asked him why his parents were opposed to the marriage. He thought she was laughing at him, and begged her not to begin her paradoxes.

“In the first place, you know very well they are Jews: Mother knew his grandfather, the one who refused to be baptised.”

But Thérèse pretended that these Portuguese-Jewish names were the oldest in Bordeaux:

“The Azévédos were great people when our ancestors were miserable shepherds, shivering with fever by their marshes.”

“Look here, Thérèse: don’t argue for the pleasure of arguing: all Jews are the same ... and besides they’re a degenerate family—consumptive to the marrow, everybody knows it.”

She lit a cigarette with a gesture that had always offended Bernard:

“Well, then, tell me what your grandfather, and your great-grandfather died of. When you married me did you bother to enquire what illness carried off my mother? Don’t you suppose that we should find enough consumptives and syphilitics among our ancestors to poison the universe?”

“You go too far, Thérèse, let me tell you. Even when you’re joking and trying to get a rise out of me, you ought to respect the family.”

He positively gobbled with annoyance, trying to be impressive and, at the same time, not to look foolish. But she persisted:

“Really, our families make me laugh: they’re too ridiculous. They’re terribly shocked when a thing like this is publicly known, but they’re quite indifferent to all the horrors no one talks about.... Why, you yourself use the expression ‘secret diseases,’ don’t you? Surely the diseases most dangerous to the race are just precisely those. Our families never think of them, though they are so very clever at bundling anything unpleasant out of sight. If it wasn’t for the servants we should know nothing about them: fortunately there are the servants....”

“I shan’t answer you. When you start off like this, the best thing to do is to wait until you’ve finished. With me, it doesn’t matter so very much. But it won’t do at all at home, you know. We don’t make jokes about the family.”

The family! Thérèse let her cigarette go out. With staring eyes, she saw before her that cage with its innumerable and living bars, a cage set with ears and eyes, in which she would crouch motionless, her chin on her knees, and her arms clasping her legs, and wait for death.

“Come, come, Thérèse, don’t look like that: if you could see yourself....”

She smiled and put on her mask again.

“I wasn’t serious ... how silly you are, darling.” But when Bernard tried to come near to her in the taxi, she evaded him and kept him off.

The last evening before they returned home, they went to bed at nine o’clock. Thérèse took a cachet, but she was too impatient for sleep and it would not come. For an instant, her mind began to sink beneath the surface when Bernard, with unintelligible mumblings, turned over; and she felt his great fiery body against her own. She pushed it from her and, shrinking from that odious warmth, she lay on the extreme edge of the bed: but after a few minutes, he again rolled towards her as if the flesh in him survived his absent spirit and, even in sleep, fumbled for its accustomed prey. She again thrust him back, roughly this time, but he did not wake.... Oh! if she could push him away once and for all, hurl him out of bed into the darkness!

Through the Paris night, the motor-horns answered each other like the dogs and cocks at Argelouse when the moon is up. Not a breath of air rose from the street. Thérèse turned on a lamp and, with her elbow on the pillow, looked at this motionless being asleep beside her—her twenty-seven-year-old husband: he had pushed aside the bed-clothes, and she could not hear him breathing. His tumbled hair straggled over his smooth young forehead. He slept, like Adam, naked and unashamed, a deep and seemingly eternal sleep. The woman threw the sheet over him, got out of bed, looked for one of the letters that she had only half-read, and brought it to the lamp.

Thérèse opened the window, tore up the letters into tiny pieces, bending out over the stone abyss through which, in that hour before the dawn, rumbled a solitary dung-cart. The scraps of paper fluttered down, and came to rest on the balconies of the lower storeys.

That odour of herbage that she could smell—she wondered from what countryside it had blown hither to this asphalt desert? She pictured the splash of her crushed body on the pavement, surrounded by an eddy of policemen and loiterers.... (“You’re too imaginative to kill yourself, Thérèse!”) In truth, she did not want to die; there was a task before her now—not of vengeance or of hatred; but that little fool away at Saint Clair, who thought happiness possible, must learn, like Thérèse, that happiness does not exist. If they possess nothing else in common, let them at least have this: boredom, no rational occupation, nothing to look forward to but the sordid daily round,—irremediable solitude.

The dawn lit up the roofs; she rejoined her motionless companion on the bed; but the moment she lay down beside him he drew nearer.

She awoke, clear-headed and self-possessed. What were these wandering desires? Her family had asked for her help and she would do as they wished; then she could not go astray. Thérèse agreed with Bernard when he said that if Anne missed the Deguilhem marriage it would be a disaster. The Deguilhems did not belong to their world: the grandfather had been a shepherd.... Yes, but they had the finest pines in the district: and, after all, Anne was not particularly well off: she had nothing to expect from her father except the vines in the marsh, near Langon—which were under water one year out of two. Anne must on no account miss the Deguilhem marriage. The smell of chocolate in the room upset Thérèse; this slight feeling of sickness confirmed other signs: she was going to have a baby already. “Much better to have it at once,” said Bernard, “and then we won’t have to think anything more about it.” And he eyed respectfully the woman who bore within her the sole owner of innumerable pines.