Anne need not have felt embarrassed. At that moment in her life, Thérèse felt as aloof from her daughter as from everything else. She saw human beings and inanimate things, her own body and even her mind, like a mirage or vapour suspended outside her. In this void, Bernard alone assumed a dreadful reality: his corpulence, his nasal voice, his peremptory tone, his self-satisfaction. If she could only get away.... But how? And where? Thérèse was overcome by the first heat of summer. She had not the slightest presentiment of what she was about to do. What did happen that year? She could not remember a single incident, a single quarrel: she remembered having loathed her husband more than usual, on the day of Corpus Christi, when she watched the procession through the half-closed shutters. Bernard was almost the only man behind the canopy. The village had become a desert in a few moments, just as if there had been a lion, not a lamb, let loose in the streets.... People went behind doors so as not to be obliged to take their hats off or fall on their knees. Once the danger had passed, the doors began to open one by one. Thérèse observed the Curé, who was walking with his eyes nearly shut, carrying the strange object in both his hands. His lips moved: to whom was he speaking with that dejected air? And immediately behind him walked Bernard, “doing his duty as usual.”
Weeks followed without a drop of rain. Bernard lived in terror of fires, and his heart was troubling him again. More than twelve hundred acres had been burnt in the Louchat district: “If the wind had been in the north my Balisac pines would have been done for.” Thérèse waited for some blow to fall from that unchanging sky. It would never rain any more.... One day the whole forest round them would burst into crackling flames, and even the town would not escape. How is it that the villages in the Landes country are never burnt down? She thought it unfair that the flames should always fall upon the pines and never on the human population. At home, there were endless discussions on the causes of the disaster: a cigarette-end very likely, or perhaps some one had done it for revenge? Thérèse dreamt that she got up one night, went into the forest where the undergrowth was thickest, threw away her cigarette, and waited until the sky of dawn was darkened with vast clouds of smoke.... But she banished the thought, for love of the pines was in her blood: it was not upon the trees that her hatred lay.
The time had now come when she must face the act she had committed. What explanation should she give to Bernard? She could only remind him, point by point, how the thing happened. It was the day of the great fire at Mano. Various men came into the dining-room where the family were having a hasty lunch. Some said that the fire seemed a very long way from Saint Clair: others insisted that the tocsin should be rung. The torrid air was full of the smell of burning resin and the face of the sun looked dull and tarnished. Thérèse saw Bernard once more, sitting with his head turned, listening to Balion’s report, and his strong hairy hand poised absent-mindedly above the glass as the “Fowler’s drops” fell into the water. He swallowed the physic at a gulp before Thérèse, who was stupefied with the heat, had thought to warn him that he had doubled his usual dose. Every one but herself had left the table; she stayed on, cracking almonds, indifferent, untouched by all this anxiety, without interest in the tragedy, as indeed in any tragedy that was not her own. The tocsin did not ring. Bernard came back at last: “For once you were right not to be anxious: the fire is over towards Mano.... Have I taken my drops?” he asked, and without waiting for the answer he began again to pour them out into his glass. She said nothing, no doubt from laziness or fatigue; what was her intention in that instant? “I couldn’t have really meant not to answer.”
And yet that night, when Doctor Pédemay questioned her on the incidents of the day, as she stood by Bernard’s bedside, where he lay vomiting and groaning, she did not mention what she had seen at table. It would, however, have been easy, without compromising herself, to have reminded the doctor about the arsenic which Bernard was taking. She might have said something of this sort: “I did not think about it at the moment.... We were all distracted by the fire ... but I would swear, now, that he took a double dose....” She remained dumb: she did not even feel moved to speak. The deed which during lunch had been unwitting began then to emerge from the depths of her being,—as yet incomplete, but half-endured with consciousness.
After the doctor’s departure she had watched Bernard as he lay asleep at last: she thought to herself: “There is nothing to prove it was that; it may be an attack of appendicitis, though there were no other symptoms ... or an attack of gastric influenza.” But Bernard was up again two days later. “It looks as if it must have been that.” Thérèse would not have sworn to it; she would like to have been sure. “Yes, I had no sort of feeling of being at the mercy of a horrible temptation: it was merely a matter of curiosity rather dangerous to satisfy. The first day on which I poured the ‘Fowler’s drops’ into his glass, before he came into the room, I remember saying to myself: ‘Just once, so as to make quite sure.... I shall know if it was that which made him ill. Just once and no more.’”
The train slowed down, whistled for some time, and then moved on again. Two or three lights in the distance: Saint Clair station. But Thérèse’s self-examination was at an end: she had taken the plunge and the dark waters had closed over her head. What followed was murder, and Bernard knew as much about it as she did: the sudden recurrence of his trouble, and Thérèse watching over him day and night, although she seemed at the end of her strength and incapable of swallowing anything, so much so that he persuaded her to try the Fowler treatment, and she got a prescription from Doctor Pédemay! Poor Doctor! He was astonished by the greenish liquid that Bernard brought up: he would not have believed that there could be such a discrepancy between an invalid’s pulse and his temperature: he had many times observed, in cases of para-typhoid, a regular pulse, notwithstanding a high degree of fever;—but what could be the meaning of this violent pulse with a temperature below the normal?... Gastric influenza, no doubt (influenza covers everything).