Claude's Confession

by Émile Zola

Laurence, impassible, her eyes open, stared at the wall. My voice did not appear to reach her. She sat there as mute, as dead, as if she had been in the midst of thick darkness, in the midst of profound silence. Her hard forehead, her cold and tightly closed lips, announced her firm resolution not to listen, not to reply.

Then, I felt a keen desire to obtain a word from this woman. I would have given my blood to hear the sound of Laurence's voice; all my being went out towards her, conjured her, begged her with clasped hands, to speak, to utter but a single syllable. I wept at her silence; a sort of vague uneasiness gained upon me as she became more sullen, more impenetrable. I felt myself gliding towards madness, towards a fixed idea; I had imperious need of a response; I made superhuman efforts, uttered prayers and threats, to obtain the satisfaction of this need which was devouring me. I multiplied my questions, emphasized my demands and changed the form of my interrogations, rendering them more urgent; I had recourse to all my gentleness, to all my violence, imploring, ordering, speaking in a caressing and submissive tone, then allowing myself to be carried away by anger, and afterwards making myself more humble, more insinuating still. Laurence, without a quiver, without a glance, seemed to ignore my presence. All my will, all my furious desire, to make her speak broke against the pitiless deafness of this creature who refused to listen to me.

This woman was escaping from me. I saw an insurmountable barrier between her and me. I held her form tightly clasped, I felt that form abandon itself with disdain to my embrace. But I could not open that soul and take possession of it; the heart and the mind had hidden themselves away; I pressed only a lifeless rag, so weary, so dull, that it was as nothing in my arms. And I loved this limp rag, I wished to keep it. I clung with despair to the sole creature who remained to me in the world, I exacted that she should belong to me, I had the fury of a miser when I thought that I was about to be robbed of her and that she was quite willing to allow herself to be stolen. I rebelled, I summoned all my strength to defend my own. And I was pressing a corpse to my bosom, an unknown thing which was a stranger to me and which I could not understand. Oh! brothers, you are ignorant of this suffering, of these bursts of love for an inanimate statue, of this cold resistance on the part of an adored being, of this silence in answer to so many sobs, of this voluntary death which might love, which one supplicates with all his eloquence and which loves not.

When my voice failed me, when I despaired of ever animating Laurence, I laid my head upon her breast, my ear against her heart. There, leaning on this woman, my eyes open, staring at the wick of the candle which was burning to a coal, I spent the night in thinking. I heard the rattle in Marie's throat, broken by fits of coughing, which came to me through the partition, lulling my thoughts.

I thought. I listened to the regular beating of Laurence's heart. I knew that nothing was there but a wave of blood; I said to myself that I was following in their rhythm the sounds of a well regulated machine, and that the voice which reached me was only the ticking of an unconscious clock, obeying a mere spring. And, nevertheless, I was disturbed; I would have liked to take the machine apart, to search out and study its most minute pieces; I thought seriously, in my delirium, of opening the breast upon which my head reposed, of removing the heart that I might see why it beat so gently and so regularly.

Marie's rattle continued, and Laurence's heart beat almost in my head. On hearing these two sounds, which were sometimes mingled together and made but one, I thought of life.

I know not why an insatiable longing for innocence pursues me in my abasement. I have constantly in my brain the thought of immaculate purity, lofty, inaccessible, and this thought awakens more biting in the depths of each of my fits of despair.

While I leaned my head upon Laurence's faded bosom, I said to myself that woman was born for a single love.

There is the truth, the only possible marriage. My soul is so exacting that it wishes all the creature it loves, in her infancy, in her sleep, in her entire life. It goes so far as to accuse dreams, so far as to declare that a sweetheart is guilty who has received in a vision the kiss of a shadowy adorer.

All young girls, even the purest and most sincere, have been the recipients of attentions from the phantom lovers of their dreams; those demons have held them in their arms, have made their innocent flesh quiver, have given them the first caresses. Hence, when they find husbands, they are no longer innocent, they no longer possess holy ignorance.