Thérèse was entirely mistress of herself. Anne would come back from the Convent at San-Sebastian for the wedding: she and young Deguilhem were to take the offertory. She had asked Thérèse to describe the bridesmaids’ dresses by return of post: in fact, she wanted some patterns, as she said it was to everybody’s interest that she should not choose anything that clashed with the rest. Thérèse had never known such peace, or what she thought was peace: it merely meant that the reptile in her bosom was half asleep and torpid. CHAPTER IV 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 their scents overpowered the incense, that Thérèse felt that she was lost. She had been in a trance when she entered the cage, and at the sound of the heavy door, as it shut behind her, the poor child awoke. Nothing was changed, but she felt that never again would she walk and dream alone. She was embedded in that dreadful family, where she would smoulder like a malignant fire creeping through the heather and setting one pine alight and then another, until the forest is a mass of flaming torches. There was not one face in all that crowded church on which she cared to rest her eyes, except Anne’s: but the girl’s childish glee made Thérèse draw back. Surely Anne must realise that they would be parted that very evening, and not in space alone: but because of what Thérèse must suffer, that inexpiable thing that her body must so soon endure. Anne stayed behind on the shore in the company of those as yet immaculate: Thérèse was to go down among the herd whom use has soiled. As she bent down in the sacristy to kiss the little laughing lips, she became suddenly aware of the insignificance of this creature who had been, for her, the centre of a world of fantastic joys and sorrows: in those few seconds, she measured the infinite disparity between the dark forces in her heart and this pretty powdered face. Long afterwards, at Saint Clair and at B., every one who spoke of those magnificent celebrations (more than a hundred tenants and servants had sat down to eat and drink under the oak trees) always alluded to the fact that the bride (“Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you can’t resist her charm!”) looked ugly, almost repulsive. “She wasn’t like herself,” they would say: “she seemed another person.” To them she merely looked different from usual; and they put it down to the white wedding-dress and the heat. They did not know that it was her real face.