François Mauriac

“ Balionte’s slippers still shuffled about the kitchen; then she brought in the candlesticks. After that, silence: the silence of Argelouse. People who do not know those deserted moors do not know what silence is: it encircles the house as if embodied in that thick mass of forest in which nothing lives, except from time to time a hooting owl (we seem to be listening in the night to the sound of the sob we dare not utter) . ”

“ Argelouse is literally one of the ends of the earth,—one of those places beyond which you cannot go; in those parts they call them “Quartiers.” A few farms, with no church or cemetery, scattered round a field of rye, over five miles from the market-town of Saint Clair, with which it is connected by a single road in very bad repair. This road, such as it is, fades away beyond Argelouse into sandy tracks: and thence, until the sea, there is nothing but fifty miles of marshes, lagoons, young pines, and sandy heath; and by the end of winter the very sheep look as grey as that bleak landscape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indeed, would Bernard even listen to her? He paced the long, low, damp room, and the flooring, which was rotting here and there, creaked beneath his steps. He did not look at his wife,—he was bursting with a speech he had long since prepared. And Thérèse, too, knew what she was going to say. The simplest solution is always the one we never think of. She would say, ‘I am going to disappear, Bernard. Don’t worry about me. I will go out into the night at once, if you like. I am not afraid of the forest or the darkness. They know me: we know each other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When, with many precautions, Thérèse’s attempt on his life had been disclosed to him in the nursing-home, his self-possession, which had been so highly commended, had cost him but little effort. Nothing seems really serious to those who are incapable of love; because he was without love, Bernard had only felt the sort of tremulous joy that follows an escape from great danger: the sort of sensation a man might have who had been told that he has lived for years, without knowing it, in the company of a homicidal maniac. ”

“ If Thérèse was ever tempted into saying something she really meant, the family had agreed, once and for all, that the poor child could not resist a paradox. “I pretend not to hear,” Madame de la Trave used to say: “and if she persists, not to take any notice. She knows it’s no good trying it on us.”
None the less, Madame de la Trave found it hard to tolerate Thérèse’s affectation of hating people to exclaim over her likeness to little Marie. The usual cries of “She’s the very image of you!...” produced violent reactions which she could not always conceal. ”

“ It is easy enough to be witty, he said: you have only to say exactly the opposite to what is sensible. But she was wrong to waste her efforts on him: she had better save herself for her interview with young Azévédo. “You know he is going to leave Vilméja about the middle of October?”
At Villandraut, the station before Saint Clair, Thérèse thought: “How shall I persuade Bernard that I was never in love with that young man? He will certainly believe I adored him. Like every one who knows nothing about love, he imagines that a crime like mine could only be a crime of passion.” ”

“ There is nothing humiliating about having married a criminal when one has the last word. Besides, a bachelor life is no bad thing, and the proximity of death had marvellously increased in him his taste for landed property, shooting, motor-cars, and things to eat and drink;—for life, in short.
Thérèse remained standing before the window: she could catch a glimpse of white gravel, and smell the chrysanthemums, which were protected from the cattle by wire-netting. ”

“ But how can one tie oneself down, Madame? Each minute should bring its own joy,—and a different one.’
“This combination of intelligence and the greed of a young animal in one and the same being seemed so strange to me that I listened without interrupting him. Yes, I was certainly fascinated: cheaply enough, in all conscience, but I was. I remember the trampling of hooves, the tinkling of bells, the wild cries of the shepherds which announced the approach of a herd of cattle. ”

“ Thérèse smiled at the caricature of Bernard that she drew in her mind: she reflected that he was, in point of fact, better than most of the young men she could have married. The women of those moorlands by the sea are much superior to the men, who see no one but each other after they have left school and hardly ever lose their boorishness. Their hearts are in their country, and in spirit they never leave it. ”

“ A smoky oil lamp lit up the plaster walls of the Nizan station and a carriage outside it: and all about them gathered the encompassing darkness. A train standing in the station whistled and hooted dismally. Gardère took Thérèse’s bag and again stared at her greedily. His wife must have told him to watch carefully how she was looking and behaving. For the benefit of Monsieur Larroque’s coachman Thérèse instinctively assumed that smile that made people say: “Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you cannot resist her charm.” ”

“ We stopped at the edge, the furthest edge of the last caress, but because he wanted to, not because I insisted; it is really he who resists me, and I who long to reach those unknown limits the mere approach to which, he often tells me, is beyond all joys there are: but he won’t go any further: he is proud of being able to stop where he says others cannot help letting themselves go.”
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She was awakened by the throbbing engines of a motor-car; she recognised Bernard’s voice in the entrance-hall and also Madame de la Trave’s. When Balionte, completely out of breath, had pushed open the door without knocking, Thérèse was already standing up before the mirror. She was putting rouge on her cheeks and lips. “I must not frighten the poor young man,” she said to herself. ”

“ On Bernard’s advice Thérèse took long walks: “Exercise is the best digestive,” he would say.
She was no longer afraid of Argelouse: it seemed as though the pines were moving further off, opening their ranks, and signalling to her to make her escape.
One evening Bernard had said to her: “I am only asking you to wait until Anne’s marriage: we must be seen in company once more by the whole neighbourhood: after that you will be free.” She had not been able to sleep during the following night: her joy made her restless and her eyes would not close. ”

“ However, politics were quite enough to make them all lose their tempers; though they all, whether they belonged to the Right or the Left, were in full agreement on this essential principle: “Property is the only good thing in the world, and the ownership of land is the only thing worth living for. Must we give up anything and, if so, how much?”
Thérèse, “who had property in her blood,” was quite willing for the question to be put in that cynical way, but she hated the pretences under which the Larroques and the La Traves masked their common greed. ”

“ He always knew, in every sort of situation, what was due to the family. You, in the agony of your remorse, Thérèse, are preparing [Pg 116] a long appeal: but only men with no principles can listen to a reason that is not their own. Bernard will laugh at your arguments: “I know what I have to do.” He always knows what he has to do. If he sometimes hesitates, he says: “The family have discussed it and we have decided that....” How can you doubt that he has prepared his sentence: Your destiny is fixed for ever: you may as well go to sleep. ”

“ How could she lie and wait for sleep beside this great carcass whose snorings sometimes turned to choking agony? Thank God, he no longer came near her,—he thought love-making the most dangerous of all activities for his heart. The cocks of dawn brought the farms to life. The Angelus of Saint Clair tinkled in the east wind; Thérèse’s eyes at last closed. ”

“ He thought I should never stand that stifling atmosphere: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘at the vast level frozen surface under which every soul in this place is embedded: sometimes it cracks and you can see the dark water beneath: some one has struggled and disappeared; the ice sets again.... Yet here, too, each one is born with his own law within him: here, too, each man’s destiny is his alone ”

“ Men like him, mighty eaters, sprung from a lazy and overfed race, have only the appearance of strength. A pine tree planted in a manured field shoots up quickly: but very soon the heart of the tree grows rotten, and it must be cut down in the height of its strength. “It’s nerves”: people would say to Bernard: but he himself felt the flaw in the metal. ”

“ 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. ”