After the La Traves had brought Anne back, defeated, to Saint Clair Thérèse had not left Argelouse until just before her baby was born. She knew the silence of the place only too well during those interminable November nights. A letter addressed to Jean Azévédo had remained unanswered. He doubtless considered that this country-bred creature was not worth the trouble of a correspondence. In the first place, a pregnant woman is never an agreeable recollection. Perhaps, at a distance, this foolish fellow, who would have been captivated by poses and sham complications, thought her dull. But what could he understand of that deceptive simplicity of mind, that frank expression, those bold unhesitating gestures? In point of fact, he believed her capable, like little Anne, of taking him at his word, and leaving everything for his sake. Jean Azévédo mistrusted women who surrendered too soon to give the assailant time to raise the siege. Nothing dismayed him so much as victory, and the fruits of victory. Yet Thérèse made an effort to live in this young man’s world: but some books which Jean admired, and which she had got from Bordeaux, she could not understand. How empty her life was! She was not to be asked to work at baby-linen: “That was not her business,” Madame de la Trave used to say. Many women die in childbirth in the country. Thérèse made Aunt Clara cry by assuring her that she would end like her mother, that she was certain she would not escape. She did not fail to add that she was content to die: which was untrue! She had never longed so ardently to live: nor had Bernard ever displayed so much solicitude for her. “He was not concerned about me, but about what I carried within me. He used to say, in his dreadful accent: ‘Have some more soup ... don’t eat any fish ... you have walked enough to-day....’ I did not care: I was no more touched than a foreign nurse might be who is pampered for the quality of her milk. The La Traves revered in me a sacred vessel: the mould which held their offspring; there was not a doubt that, if necessity arose, they would have sacrificed me to the life I held within me. I lost the feeling of individual existence. I was nothing more than the branch that bore the fruit which, in the family’s opinion, was all that counted.”
“Until the end of December we had to live in darkness. And as if the darkness of the pines were not enough, rain unceasing encompassed the gloomy house with its myriad moving rods. When the only road to Saint Clair threatened to become impassable, I was conveyed into the town, where the house was hardly less dark than that of Argelouse. The old plane trees on the Square still defended their leaves against the gusts of wind and rain. Aunt Clara, who could not live anywhere but at Argelouse, was not able to look after me: but she often made the journey, in any sort of weather, in her rustic dog-cart, and brought me all those little dainties that I used to be so fond of as a girl, and that she thought I still liked, little grey balls of rye and honey, called miques: and the cake that goes by the name of fougasse or roumadjade. I only saw Anne at meals, and she never spoke to me now: resigned, so it would seem, and broken, she had lost all her youthful freshness at a blow. Her hair, drawn too far back, revealed ugly pallid ears. The Deguilhem boy’s name was not mentioned, but Madame de la Trave asserted that if Anne did not yet say yes, neither did she say no. Ah! Jean had judged her rightly: it had not taken long to bridle her and break her in. Bernard was not so well because he had begun to drink aperitifs again.
“What did these creatures round me talk about? They discussed the clergyman a great deal, I remember (we lived opposite the presbytery). They wondered, for instance, ‘why he had crossed the Square six times in the course of the day, and each time he had had to come back a different way.’”
As a result of certain remarks of Jean Azévédo, Thérèse paid a little more attention to the priest, who was still young, and not on good terms with his parishioners who found him stand-offish: “He’s not the kind we want here”: In the course of his rare visits to the La Traves, Thérèse noticed his white temples and high forehead. He had no friends. How did he spend his evenings? Why had he chosen this life? “He is very punctilious,” said Madame de la Trave: “He prays every evening: but he is wanting in unction. I don’t think he is genuinely devout. He doesn’t really do anything in the Parish.” She deplored the fact that he had given up the Church Lads’ Brigade: and the parents complained that he did not go with the children to the football-field. “It’s all very well for him to be buried in his books, but a Parish soon goes to pieces.” Thérèse used to go to church to hear him preach (“My dear, you’ve decided to go just when your condition would have excused you”). The Curé’s sermons, which dealt with dogma or morals, were impersonal. But Thérèse was struck by an intonation, a gesture, or a word that seemed specially significant.... Ah! perhaps he could have helped her to unravel the confusion of her soul: unlike the rest, his also had been a tragic rôle: to his own inner solitude was added the isolation that the cassock brings upon its wearer. What comfort did he draw from those daily rites? Thérèse would have liked to have been present at Mass during the week when, with no other witness but a choir-boy, he bent muttering over a piece of bread. But such a proceeding would have seemed odd to her family and the neighbours, who would have raised the cry of “Conversion.”
Much as Thérèse suffered at that time, it was just after the birth of the child that she began to find life really unendurable. There was no outward sign of this, no scene between Bernard and herself: and she behaved with more deference to her parents-in-law than her husband himself. There lay the tragedy: there had been no reason for a rupture: it was impossible to conceive an event that would have prevented things taking the course that led to death. Misunderstanding presupposes some common ground of conflict; but Thérèse never came into contact with Bernard and still less with her parents-in-law; their words barely reached her: she hardly conceived it necessary to answer them. Had they even a vocabulary in common? They attached a different meaning to the most unimportant words. 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. “She’s not like me in the least,” she would insist. “Look at her dark skin, and jet-black eyes: you can see from my photographs I was pale when I was a baby.”
She would not have it that Marie was like her. She refused to possess anything in common with this flesh that had now parted company with her own. People began to be aware that she was not exactly remarkable for her maternal affection. But Madame de la Trave maintained that she loved her daughter in her own way: “Of course we can’t expect her to bathe the child or change her napkins: that wouldn’t be like her: but I have seen her sit for a whole evening by the cradle, not smoking, so as to watch the baby asleep.... Besides, we have a very reliable nurse: and then Anne is there. Ah! She’ll make a wonderful little mother....” It was true that, since a child had come into the house, Anne had begun to live again. A cradle always attracts women: but Anne especially loved to look after the infant. So as to have freer access to her, she had made peace with Thérèse, though nothing remained of their old affection but certain familiarities of address. The girl particularly dreaded Thérèse’s maternal jealousy: “The child knows me better than her mother: she laughs as soon as she sees me. The other day, I had her in my arms; she began to scream as soon as Thérèse wanted to take her. She likes me so much better that I feel quite embarrassed sometimes....”