Status Updates From Theresa Raquin

Both of their beings were prepared for violence.

Madame Raquin—clueless, loving, and grieving—is literally orchestrating and financing the marriage of her son's murderers.

So this is love😭😭🎶🎶

Relationship goalzzz🥰

…and lived in cruel indecision. #TheMacbeths

“They exchanged not a word.”

Look at how Zola describes him the moment Camille brings him home from the railway office. He is a peasant's son with massive square shoulders, a thick neck, full cheeks, and a low forehead. He is strong, healthy, and absolutely overflowing with blood—what Zola calls a "sanguine" temperament.

Before the story moves to Paris in Chapter 3, the early life of Thérèse and Camille takes place in Vernon, a small, quiet commune in the Normandy region of northern France, situated along the Seine.
Zola deliberately moves them from the open air of the countryside into the damp, dark, roofed-in alleyway of Paris to make the setting feel as suffocating as a prison cell.