People who don't know this forgotten heath don't know what silence is: it surrounds the house, as if solidified in this deep mass of forest where nothing more lives, save a hooting owl (we believe we heard, in the night, our long restrained sob) 
Family!
At the funeral, Thérèse occupied her pew. On the next Sunday, she penetrated into the church with Bernard who, instead of passing along the aisle, following his habit, traversed ostensibly the nave. Thérèse waited till she had taken her seat between her mother-in-law and her husband to lift up her crape veil. A pillar hid her from the congregation; in front of her, there was nothing but the choir. Surrounded on all sides: the crowd behind, Bernard on her left, madame de la Trave on her right, and that only is open to her, as the arena to the bull coming from the night: this empty space, where, between two children, a disguised man is standing, whispering, his arms a little apart.
She was passing, alone, through a tunnel, vertiginously.
The stifling wedding day, in the narrow church of Saint-Clair, this day was when Thérèse felt stray. She had sleepwalked into the cage and, at the slamming shut of the heavy door suddenly the miserable child awoke. Nothing had changed.
Family! Thérèse let her cigarette go out; with a fixed glaze, she stared at this cage with innumerable living bars, this cage lined with ears and eyes, where immobile, crouching, her chin on her knees, she would wait to die.
How many hours did she remain lying, without the deliverance of sleep! The silence of Argelouse prevented her sleeping: she preferred the nights of wind, this indefinite moaning of treetops conceals a human tenderness. Thérèse abandoned herself to this rocking. The troubled nights of equinox lulled better than the quiet nights.
She strove to recover her nocturnal imaginations; besides, there was no more noise in Argelouse, and the afternoon was barely less dark than the night. On these the shortest days of the year, the dense rain unifies the time, merges the hours; one twilight joins another within the immutable silence. But Thérèse had no desire for sleep and her dreams became more vivid; with method, she looked back in her past for forgotten faces, for mouths she had cherished from afar, for indistinct bodies that fortuitous encounters had brought near her innocent body. 
A being was in her life, thanks to whom the rest of the world seemed meaningless; someone that no one in her circle would know; a very humble, very obscure creature; but the whole existence of Thérèse revolved about this sun visible only to her eyes, and whose heat warmed only her flesh. This body against her body, light as it might be, hindered her breathing; but she preferred to remain breathless rather than to move it away. She rises, barefooted; opens the window; the darkness is not cold, but how to imagine that one day it might not rain? (and Thérèse makes the gesture of embracing, and she clasps her left shoulder with her right hand, - and the nails of her left hand thrust into her right shoulder.)
Then the scene faded, blurred away, and nothing remained but an arbour, a bench facing the sea. Thérèse, seated, rested her head on a shoulder, rose at the calling of the bell for the meal, entered the dark arbour and someone was walking beside her, who suddenly embraced her with both arms, drew her. A kiss, she thinks, must halt the course of time; she imagines that there are infinite seconds in love. She imagines so, she will never know. 
On the last night of October, a furious wind, coming from the Atlantic, relentlessly tormented the tops of the trees, and Thérèse, in a half sleep, lay and listened to the thunder of the sea. But at daybreak, she awoke to a different. She pushed the shutters, and the room remained dark; a minute rain, was densely streaming down the outbuilding tiles, down the still thick foliage of the oaks. 
The first day of bad weather ... How many of them should she live by this dying fire? In the corners the mildew loosened the paper.
This last evening before going back home, they went to bed at nine o'clock. Thérèse swallowed a tablet, but she awaited too hard the sleep for it to come. For an instant, her mind sank till Bernard, in an incomprehensible muttering, turned over; so she felt against her this large burning body; she pushed it back and, in order not to suffer its fire, she lied on the extreme edge of the bed; but after some minutes, he rolled back towards her as if the flesh within him survived the absent mind and even in sleep, he hunted confusedly for his accustomed prey. With a brutal hand, which did not wake him though, she pushed him back again ... But desire transforms the approaching being into a monster unlike him. Nothing separates us from our accomplice more than his frenzy: I have always seen Bernard sinking into pleasure, - and I was playing dead, as if this madman, this epileptic, at the least movement might have strangled me. Most often, on the verge of his last joy, he suddenly discovered his solitude, the dreary harassment stopped. Bernard retraced his steps and found me as if washed ashore, my teeth clenched, cold. 
Mimicking joy, happy tiredness, is not given to everyone. Thérèse learned how to submit her body to these deceptions and she tasted thus a bitter pleasure. This unknown world of sensations into which she was forced by a man, her imagination helped her to conceive that for her too there might be a possible happiness - but what happiness? As in front of a landscape shrouded in rain, we visualize how it would have been in the sun, so did Thérèse discover the delights of flesh.
At the gloomy break of day, she heard Balion harnessing up. Again the voice of Bernard, the pawing on the ground, the sleigh jolting away. At last the rain upon the tiles, upon the misted windows, upon the deserted field, upon a hundred kilometers of heath and marshes, upon the last shifting dunes, upon the Ocean. Thérèse lit a cigarette from the one she had just finished smoking. About four o'clock, she put on an oilskin, plunged into the rain. Darkness frightened her, she returned to her room. The fire was gone, and as she was shivering, she went to bed.
If Bernard had come back at this minute into the room, he would have realized that this woman seated on the bed was not her wife, but a being unknown to him, a strange and nameless creature. She threw away her cigarette and opened a second envelope.
 " She knows this joy ... and me, then? and me ? why not me ? "
then she had opened the first envelope. No, no; it was not this convent schoolgirl who had invented these words of fire. It could not be from this dry heart - for she had a dry heart, Thérèse did know! - that had sprung this song of songs, this long happy wail of a possessed woman, of a flesh almost dead with joy, from the first contact.
Thérèse opened the window, tore the letters into tiny fragments, leaning out over the abyss of stone which resounded, in this hour before dawn, with a single tipcart. The fragments of paper whirled down, landing on the balconies of the lower floors. The odor of greenery smelled by the young woman, what countryside sent it to this desert of asphalt? She imagined the stain of her body crushed on the pavement - and around this stir of policemen, of prowlers. Too much imagination to kill yourself Thérèse. Actually, she did not wish to die; an urgent work demanded her, not of vengeance nor of hate: but this little fool, far away in Saint-Clair, that believed happiness was possible, she had to know, as Thérèse, that happiness did not exist. If nothing else, that at least they must have in common: boredom, the absence of any high task, of any superior duty, the impossibility of expecting anything but the low daily habits, - a confinement without consolation.
And suddenly awoke in her the unknown face of Julie Bellade, her maternal grandmother - unknown: one might have sought in vain at the Larroque's or at the Desqueyroux's a portrait, a daguerreotype, a photograph of this woman about whom no one knew anything, except she was gone one day. Thérèse imagines that so she might have been erased, annihilated.
The window was open; the cocks were ripping the mist to diaphanous tatters retained by the branches of the pine trees. Countryside drenched in dawn. How to renounce so much light? What is death? No one knows what death is. Thérèse is not certain of nothingness. Thérèse is not absolutely sure there is no one. Thérèse loathes herself for feeling such a terror. She, who didn't hesitate to push another towards it, rears at nothingness. 
Thérèse did no longer dread solitude. It was enough for her to remain still: as her body, laid down on the southern heath, would have attracted the ants, the dogs, here already she forebode around her flesh an obscure agitation, a rustle.
Balionte had certainly neglected to fasten the window: a gust of wind blew it open, and the cold of the night filled the room. Thérèse lacked the courage to throw back the covers, to get up, to run, barefooted to the window. Her body huddled, the sheet drawn up to her eyes, she remained motionless receiving the icy breath only on her eyes and forehead. The immense murmur of the pines filled Argelouse, but in spite of this ocean sound, it was nonetheless the silence of Argelouse. Thérèse considered that if she had liked suffering, she would not have sank so deep into her covers. She tried to push them off a little, could only remain some seconds exposed to the cold. Then, she managed to leave them off longer, as if in a game. Without a deliberate will, her sorrow was also becoming her occupation, and - who knows? the sole reason for her existence.