Thérèse

The lawyer opened a door. Thérèse Desqueyroux, as she stood in that remote corridor of the law-courts, felt the fog upon her face and inhaled it deeply. She was afraid some one...

Thérèse loved the musty leathery smell of old carriages: and she did not mind having left her cigarettes behind, for she hated smoking in the dark. The carriage lamps lit up the...

Argelouse is literally one of the ends of the earth,--one of those places beyond which you cannot go; in those parts they call them “_Quartiers_.” A few farms, with no church or...

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 thei...

Thérèse measured with her eye the distance that her thought had traversed; could she get Bernard to follow her so far? She did not dare to hope that he would consent to move so...

It was strange that Thérèse only remembered the days that followed the departure of Anne and of the La Traves as of a period of torpor. At Argelouse, where it had been agreed th...

Bernard was on the door-step waiting for Thérèse to return: “There’s nothing wrong with me at all,” he shouted, as soon as he saw her dress in the darkness: “Can you imagine tha...

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 to...

Saint Clair, at last. No one recognised Thérèse as she got out of the carriage. While Balion was giving up her tickets she went round outside the station through some stacks of...

In the drawing-room, Thérèse was sitting in the dark. There were still some embers alive under the ashes of the fire. She did not move. Now that it was too late, stray passages...

In the evening Bernard and Thérèse came back to Argelouse to the Desqueyroux house, which had hardly been inhabited for years. The chimneys smoked, the windows did not fasten pr...

As Thérèse did not take the envelope that she held out, Balionte pressed it on her: Monsieur had surely said when he was coming back, and she must know, so as to have everything...

On a warm morning in March, about ten o’clock, the stream of humanity had begun to move, and was already surging against the Café de la Paix outside which Bernard and Thérèse we...