ally on her lisp. Madame
Raquin displayed a more unbending, a more gossipy disposition, and, to
tell the truth, it was she who attracted and retained the customers.

For three years, days followed days and resembled one another. Camille
did not once absent himself from his office. His mother and wife hardly
ever left the shop. Therese, residing in damp obscurity, in gloomy,
crushing silence, saw life expand before her in all its nakedness, each
night bringing the same cold couch, and each morn the same empty day.

CHAPTER IV

One day out of seven, on the Thursday evening, the Raquin family
received their friends. They lit a large lamp in the dining-room, and
put water on the fire to make tea. There was quite a set out. This
particular evening emerged in bold relief from the others. It had become
one of the customs of the family, who regarded it in the light of a
middle-class orgie full of giddy gaiety. They did not retire to rest
until eleven o'clock at night.

At Paris Madame Raquin had found one of her old friends, the commissary
of police Michaud, who had held a post at Vernon for twenty years,
lodging in the same house as the mercer. A narrow intimacy had thus been
established between them; then, when the widow had sold her business to
go and reside in the house beside the river, they had little by little
lost sight of one another. Michaud left the provinces a few months
later, and came to live peacefully in Paris, Rue de Seine, on his
pension of 1,500 francs. One rainy day, he met his old friend in the
Arcade of the Pont Neuf, and the same evening dined with the family.

The Thursday receptions began in this way: the former commissary of
police got into the habit of calling on the Raquins regularly once a
week. After a while he came accompanied by his son Olivier, a great
fellow of thirty, dry and thin, who had married a very little woman,
slow and sickly. This Olivier held the post of head clerk in the section
of order and security at the Prefecture of Police, worth 3,000 francs a
year, which made Camille feel particularly jealous. From the first day
he made his appearance, Therese detested this cold, rigid individual,
who imagined he honoured the shop in the arcade by making a display of
his great shrivelled-up frame, and the exhausted condition of his poor
little wife.

Camille introduced another guest, an old clerk at the Orleans Railway,
named Grivet, who had been twenty years in the service of the c