Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

First published: 1867, serial, as Un Mariage d’amour; 1867, book (English translation, 1881)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of plot: Early 1860’s

Locale: Paris

Principal characters

• Madame Raquin, a widow and the owner of a dry-goods shop
• Camille, the only son of Madame Raquin
• Thérèse, the niece of Madame Raquin
• Laurent, a childhood friend of Camille
• Michaud, a retired police commissioner and the friend of Madame Raquin

The Story:

A dramatic story of murder and adultery takes place in Paris among a small group of people from the same town in Normandy, Vernon, northwest of Paris. The group’s unifying link is Madame Raquin, a widow about sixty years old, who owns a small dry-goods shop on a dark, narrow street in Paris. She previously owned a dry-goods shop in Vernon, but, after her husband dies, she sells the business and retires. At the demand of her frail, sickly, but ambitious son, Camille, then twenty-two years old and married to his cousin Thérèse, Madame Raquin is compelled to move the family to Paris. She finds a tiny shop that she can afford with family living quarters above it. Madame Raquin and Thérèse run the shop together, while Camille finds employment in a railroad company office, where he hopes to rise to a high administrative post.

Thérèse is the child of Madame Raquin’s brother, a French army captain, serving in Algeria. One day, the brother, Captain Degans, appears in Vernon and presents his sister with a two-year-old baby girl, saying that the child’s mother, a native Algerian of great beauty, died and that he is unable to care for the child himself. Captain Degans leaves with his sister a certificate affirming that he is the father of this child born out of wedlock and that she bears his name. Her African heritage gives Thérèse a high-strung, emotionally intense nature, but growing up in Vernon with her aunt and her cousin, she develops a self-protective mask of reserved docility. She shows little emotion but willingly does whatever is asked of her to guarantee acceptance from her aunt. Two years younger than Camille, she is raised as his sibling, and when Madame Raquin announces her hope that the two will marry, Thérèse makes no objection, though she has no real affection—or even respect—for this small, delicate, insecure young man who is to become her husband.

The emotional dynamics among the Raquin threesome has to lead to trouble, even though they are, at first, isolated in Paris, living on an obscure little street seldom used except as a convenient shortcut from one lively Paris thoroughfare to another. To remedy this isolated feeling, the Raquins begin inviting company to their home every Thursday evening. Madame Raquin runs into an old acquaintance from Vernon, a retired commissioner of police named Michaud. Michaud comes to the Thursday evenings, accompanied by his son and daughter-in-law. Camille invites an older man, Camille’s superior at the railroad office, whose job Camille hopes one day to inherit. The Thursday evenings are mostly spent in playing dominoes, but Thérèse finds the company boring and often spends much of the evening by herself in the shop downstairs.

One Thursday, Camille brings a new guest home, triumphantly declaring that this is Laurent, a schoolmate and friend of his youth in Vernon, whom he recognized, even though Laurent grew into a tall, robust, and darkly handsome young man. Thérèse shows immediate interest in the new Thursday guest but quickly resumes her mask of indifference before the other guests. Laurent, however, notices her momentary reaction. The inevitable result follows in a matter of weeks: They become lovers. The fateful drama then begins to unfold.

The lovers are quickly thwarted by the lack of opportunities to meet. Laurent first comes to the dry-goods shop in the middle of the day, at Thérèse’s suggestion, but that proves impossible as a regular arrangement. Madame Raquin is always there, and Laurent cannot regularly absent himself from work. They cannot meet in the evenings at Laurent’s place, since Thérèse has no plausible pretext for going out alone. This frustration soon tempts the lovers to consider eliminating Camille. Because Camille fears water and cannot swim, Laurent devises a scheme to throw Camille out of a boat during a Sunday excursion. At a suitable moment, Laurent seizes the frail Camille. To Laurent’s surprise, however, Camille fights back savagely and manages to sink his teeth into Laurent’s neck, leaving a horrible wound, before Camille is thrown into the water. Laurent then capsizes the boat to make it look like an accident, and he and Thérèse are soon rescued. Laurent then shrewdly persuades Michaud, the retired police commissioner, to report the “accident” properly and to tell Madame Raquin what happened. As a result, no suspicions are ever raised that a murder occurred.

After Camille is duly buried, life resumes its normal course, including the usual Thursday evenings. Laurent and Thérèse carefully regulate their public behavior to show no trace of their passion for each other and bide their time as agreed. Eventually, Michaud persuades Madame Raquin that the best remedy for Thérèse’s constant melancholy is to marry Laurent. For Michaud, this is merely a device by which he can guarantee for himself the continuation of the Thursday evenings. For Thérèse and Laurent, however, it is the opportunity they need, and the marriage is quickly arranged.

Unhappily, the marriage solves nothing for them. To their mutual shock and dismay, Thérèse and Laurent find that they cannot make love, because the “ghost” of Camille is always present and visible in the bed between them, and they cannot rid themselves of his spectral presence. Their relationship becomes so strained that the lovers take to quarreling bitterly, each accusing the other of bad faith. To add to the horror, Madame Raquin suffers a stroke that leaves her paralyzed and unable to speak, but she overhears the quarrels, learns unmistakably of Camille’s murder, and fervently seeks the means, in her helpless state, of denouncing the culprits. She fails, but Thérèse and Laurent can tell by her demeanor that she now knows the truth. That causes the relationship between Thérèse and Laurent to become irretrievably poisoned. Each plots the murder of the other, seeking liberation from the bond of guilt. Abruptly recognizing their own madness, the lovers tacitly agree to a suicide pact, sharing the poison Laurent prepared for the murder of Thérèse. As the lovers collapse and die, Madame Raquin watches their fall with grimly avid satisfaction.

Bibliography

Brooks, Peter. “Zola’s Combustion Chamber.” In Realist Vision. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Zola’s novels are among the works of literature and art examined in this study of the realist tradition in France and England during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Brown, Frederick. Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. A detailed and extensive biography of Zola that discusses his fiction and the intellectual life of France, of which he was an important part. Shows how Zola’s naturalism was developed out of the intellectual and political ferment of his time; argues that this naturalism was a highly studied and artificial approach to reality.

Grant, Elliott M. Émile Zola. New York: Twayne, 1966. A solidly researched account of Zola’s life and works, including excellent pages on Thérèse Raquin.

Hemmings, F. W. J. Émile Zola. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. One of the best critical studies of Zola’s literary career. The section devoted to Thérèse Raquin is especially insightful.

Lapp, J. C. Zola Before the “Rougon-Macquart.” Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1964. Offers the most detailed study of Thérèse Raquin, written from the perspective of its place in the early development of Zola’s literary career, before he became famous.

Nelson, Brian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of essays, including discussions of Zola and the nineteenth century; his depiction of society, sex, and gender; and “Thérèse Raquin: Animal Passion and the Brutality of Reading” by Susan Harrow. Includes a summary of Zola’s novels, a family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts, a bibliography, and an index.

Walker, Phillip. Zola. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Well-written general study of Zola’s writings, especially perceptive about his use of symbols and myths.

Wilson, Angus. Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels. Rev. ed. London: Secker and Warburg, 1965. Readable analytical study, written by a practicing novelist.