In that springtime of their betrothal they were walking along the sandy road that leads from Argelouse to Vilméja. The dead leaves on the oak trees still stained the pure azure of the sky: the ground was strewn with dead ferns, and the acid green of the new shoots could be seen here and there above the surface. “Mind your cigarette,” said Bernard, “you might very well start a fire: the soil is quite dried up.”
She asked him whether it was true that ferns contained prussic acid: Bernard said he did not know whether they contained enough to poison any one, and enquired affectionately whether she wanted to die: and she laughed. He expressed the hope that she would try and be more natural: and Thérèse remembered that she had shut her eyes, while two great hands clasped her small head, and a voice said in her ear: “There are still some notions inside this that shouldn’t be there.” And she answered: “Then you must get rid of them, Bernard.”
They watched the builders adding another room to the farm-house at Vilméja. The owners, who came from Bordeaux, wanted to get it ready for their youngest son who, they were told, had got consumption and could not last long. His sister had gone the same way. Bernard looked on the Azévédos with the utmost contempt. “They swear by all that’s holy,” said he, “that they are not of Jewish extraction, but you have only got to look at them! Consumption, too, and Heaven knows what else.”
Thérèse was entirely mistress of herself. Anne would come back from the Convent at San-Sebastian for the wedding: she and young Deguilhem were to take the offertory. She had asked Thérèse to describe the bridesmaids’ dresses by return of post: in fact, she wanted some patterns, as she said it was to everybody’s interest that she should not choose anything that clashed with the rest. Thérèse had never known such peace, or what she thought was peace: it merely meant that the reptile in her bosom was half asleep and torpid.
CHAPTER IV
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....”