- Now we jump back in time to get some backstory on the characters.
- After her husband's death, Mme Raquin gives up the haberdashery shop and moves to Vernon. She lavishes (focuses) all her attention on her son Camille, who is a very sickly and weak child.
- One day, Mme Raquin's brother, Captain Degans, arrives from Algeria with his baby daughter, Thérèse.
- Thérèse's Algerian mother died during childbirth.
- So Captain Degans dumps the baby in Mme Raquin's arms and immediately returns to Africa. Of course, he's later killed—how could we define good novel if not "orphan for a protagonist"?—and Mme Raquin's left to raise Thérèse, along with her own son, Camille.
- Camille's sick all the time, which his kind of stifling to Thérèse. She never gets to do anything fun. She is full of energy and passion.
- At least that's what we're told. But she hides it under a mask of indifference.
- At eighteen, Camille decides to get a job because he also finds his home stifling. Well, his mother, really. She's always fussing over him, because he's sick.
- Years pass and Mme Raquin decides that Camille and Thérèse will marry. (That's fine, we guess.)
- On the night before the wedding, Mme Raquin finally tells Thérèse about her father and mother.
- Instead of retiring to her own room that night, Thérèse goes into Camille's room. This is the only time she's ever broken her daily routine.
- Gulp.