Therese

A really first class murder story. The play tells of Therese Raquin, her husband Camille, her mother-in-law and her artist lover. It is set in the Paris of 1875. Camille, the husband, is a milliner, a prig and a complainer, and not nearly as interesting as the family border, the artist. So Therese and the artist fake an accident on a Sunday outing in a canoe and come back home and tell the old lady her son is gone. She accepts the story and is pleased, when, after a year, Therese and the artist marry. But the wedding makes no honeymoon for the the guilty lovers - for the dead Camille is forever between them. Everything - every turn of conversation - leads to Camille, and with shortened tempers they begin mutual recriminations. The old lady overhears - and the shock of realizing that her son was murdered makes her a paralytic, unable to talk, able to move only her eyes. But she finally communicates the story to the Inspector of Police through the medium of some dominoes.