That day, after the midday dinner, Philippe Desmahis walked into the Amour peintre, his portfolio7 under his arm, and brought the citoyen Jean Blaise a plate he had just finished, a stippled8 engraving9 of the Suicide of Robespierre. The artist's picaresque burin had made Robespierre as hideous10 as possible. The French people were not yet satiated with all the memorials which enshrined the horror and opprobrium11 felt for the man who was made scapegoat12 of all the crimes of the Revolution. For all that, the printseller, who knew his public, informed Desmahis that henceforward he was going to give him military subjects to engrave13.
"We shall all be wanting victories and conquests,—swords, waving plumes14, triumphant15 generals. Glory is to be the word. I feel it in me; my heart beats high to hear the exploits of our valiant16 armies. And when I have a feeling, it is seldom all the world doesn't have the same feeling at the same time. What we want is warriors17 and women, Mars and Venus."
"Citoyen Blaise, I have still two or three drawings of Gamelin's by me, which you gave me to engrave. Is it urgent?"
"Not a bit."
"By-the-bye, about Gamelin; yesterday, strolling in the Boulevard du Temple, I saw at a dealer's, who keeps a second-hand18 stall opposite the House of Beaumarchais, all that poor devil's canvases, amongst the rest his Orestes and Electra. The head of Orestes, who's like Gamelin, is really fine, I assure you.... The head and arm are superb.... The man told me he found no difficulty in getting rid of these canvases to artists who want to paint over them.... Poor Gamelin! He might have been a genius of the first order, perhaps, if he hadn't taken to politics."
"He had the soul of a criminal!" replied the citoyen Blaise. "I unmasked him, on this very spot, when his sanguinary instincts were still held in check. He never forgave me.... Oh! he was a choice blackguard."
"You don't defend him, I presume, Desmahis!... There's no defending him."
"No, citoyen Blaise, there's no defending him."
"Times are changed. We can call you Barbaroux now the Convention is recalling the proscribed22.... Now I think of it, Desmahis, engrave me a portrait of Charlotte Corday, will you?"
A woman, a tall, handsome brunette, enveloped23 in furs, entered the shop and bestowed24 on the citoyen Blaise a little discreet25 nod that implied intimacy26. It was Julie Gamelin; but she no longer bore that dishonoured28 name, she preferred to be called the citoyenne widow Chassagne, and wore, under her mantle29, a red tunic30 in honour of the red shirts of the terror. Julie had at first felt a certain repulsion towards évariste's mistress; anything that had come near her brother was odious31 to her. But the citoyenne Blaise, after évariste's death, had found an asylum32 for the unhappy mother in the attics33 of the Amour peintre. Julie had also taken refuge there; then she had got employment again at the fashionable milliner's in the Rue34 des Lombards. Her short hair à la victime, her aristocratic looks, her mourning weeds had won the sympathies of the gilded36 youth. Jean Blaise, whom Rose Thévenin had pretty well thrown over, offered her his homage37, which she accepted. Still Julie was fond of wearing men's clothes, as in the old tragic38 days; she had a fine Muscadin costume made for her and often went, huge baton39 and all complete, to sup at some tavern40 at Sèvres or Meudon with a girl friend, a little assistant in a fashion shop. Inconsolable for the loss of the young noble whose name she bore, this masculine-minded Julie found the only solace41 to her melancholy42 in a savage43 rancour; every time she encountered Jacobins, she would set the passers-by on them, crying "Death, death!" She had small leisure left to give to her mother, who alone in her room told her beads44 all day, too deeply shocked at her boy's tragic death to feel the grief that might have been expected. Rose was now the constant companion of élodie who certainly got on amicably with her step-mothers.
"Where is élodie?" asked the citoyenne Chassagne.
Jean Blaise shook his head; he did not know. He never did know; he made it a point of honour not to.
Julie had come to take her friend with her to see Rose Thévenin at Monceaux, where the actress lived in a little house with an English garden.
At the Conciergerie Rose Thévenin had made the acquaintance of a big army-contractor, the citoyen Montfort. She had been released first, by Jean Blaise's intervention45, and had then procured46 the citoyen Montfort's pardon, who was no sooner at liberty than he started his old trade of provisioning the troops, to which he added speculation47 in building-lots in the Pépinière quarter. The architects Ledoux, Olivier and Wailly were erecting48 pretty houses in that district, and in three months the land had trebled in value. Montfort, since their imprisonment49 together in the Luxembourg, had been Rose Thévenin's lover; he now gave her a little house in the neighbourhood of Tivoli and the Rue du Rocher, which was very expensive,—and cost him nothing, the sale of the adjacent properties having already repaid him several times over. Jean Blaise was a man of the world, so he deemed it best to put up with what he could not hinder; he gave up Mademoiselle Thévenin to Montfort without ceasing to be on friendly terms with her.
Julie had not been long at the Amour peintre before élodie came down to her in the shop, looking like a fashion plate. Under her mantle, despite the rigours of the season, she wore nothing but her white frock; her face was even paler than of old, and her figure thinner; her looks were languishing50, and her whole person breathed voluptuous51 invitation.
The two women set off for Rose Thévenin's, who was expecting them. Desmahis accompanied them; the actress was consulting him about the decoration of her new house and he was in love with élodie, who had by this time half made up her mind to let him sigh no more in vain. When the party came near Monceaux, where the victims of the Place de la Révolution lay buried under a layer of lime:
"It is all very well in the cold weather," remarked Julie; "but in the spring the exhalations from the ground there will poison half the town."
Rose Thévenin received her two friends in a drawing-room furnished à l'antique, the sofas and armchairs of which were designed by David. Roman bas-reliefs, copied in monochrome, adorned52 the walls above statues, busts53 and candelabra of imitation bronze. She wore a curled wig55 of a straw colour. At that date wigs56 were all the rage; it was quite common to include half a dozen, a dozen, a dozen and a half in a bride's trousseau. A gown à la Cyprienne moulded her body like a sheath. Throwing a cloak over her shoulders, she led her two friends and the engraver57 into the garden, which Ledoux was laying out for her, but which as yet was a chaos58 of leafless trees and plaster. She showed them, however, Fingal's grotto59, a gothic chapel60 with a bell, a temple, a torrent61.
"There," she said, pointing to a clump62 of firs, "I should like to raise a cenotaph to the memory of the unfortunate Brotteaux des Ilettes. I was not indifferent to him; he was a lovable man. The monsters slaughtered63 him; I bewailed his fate. Desmahis, you shall design me an urn35 on a column."
Then she added almost without a pause:
"It is heart-breaking.... I wanted to give a ball this week; but all the fiddles64 are engaged three weeks in advance. There is dancing every night at the citoyenne Tallien's."
After dinner Mademoiselle Thévenin's carriage took the three friends and Desmahis to the Théatre Feydeau. All that was most elegant in Paris was gathered in the house—the women with hair dressed à l'antique or à la victime, in very low dresses, purple or white and spangled with gold, the men wearing very tall black collars and the chin disappearing in enormous white cravats65.
The bill announced Phèdre and the Chien du Jardinier,—The Gardener's Dog. With one voice the audience demanded the hymn66 dear to the muscadins and the gilded youth, the Réveil du peuple,—The Awakening67 of the People.
The curtain rose and a little man, short and fat, took the stage; it was the celebrated68 Lays. He sang in his fine tenor69 voice:
Peuple fran?ais, peuple de frères!...
Such storms of applause broke out as set the lustres of the chandelier jingling70. Then some murmurs71 made themselves heard, and the voice of a citizen in a round hat answered from the pit with the hymn of the Marseillaise:
Allons, enfants de la patrie....
The voice was drowned by howls, and shouts were raised:
"Down with the Terrorists! Death to the Jacobins!"
Lays was recalled and sang a second time over the hymn of the Thermidorians.
Peuple fran?ais, peuple de frères!...
In every play-house was to be seen the bust54 of Marat, surmounting72 a column or raised on a pedestal; at the Théatre Feydeau this bust stood on a dwarf73 pillar on the "prompt" side, against the masonry-framing in the stage.
While the orchestra was playing the Overture74 of Phèdre et Hippolyte, a young Muscadin, pointing his cane75 at the bust, shouted:
"Down with Marat!"—and the whole house took up the cry: "Down with Marat! Down with Marat!"
"It is a black shame that bust should still be there!"
"The infamous77 Marat lords it everywhere, to our dishonour27! His busts are as many as the heads he wanted to cut off."
"Tiger!"
Suddenly an elegantly dressed spectator clambers on to the edge of his box, pushes the bust, oversets it. The plaster head falls in shivers on the musicians' heads amid the cheers of the audience, who spring to their feet and strike up the Réveil du Peuple:
Peuple fran?ais, peuple de frères!...
Among the most enthusiastic singers élodie recognized the handsome dragoon, the little lawyer's clerk, Henry, her first love.
After the performance the gallant Desmahis called a cabriolet and escorted the citoyenne Blaise back to the Amour peintre.
In the carriage the artist took élodie's hand between his:
"You know, élodie, I love you?"
"I know it, because you love all women."
"I love them in you."
She smiled:
"I should be assuming a heavy task, spite of the wigs black, blonde and red, that are the rage, if I undertook to be all women, all sorts of women, for you."
"élodie, I swear...."
"What! oaths, citoyen Desmahis? Either you have a deal of simplicity80, or you credit me with overmuch."
Desmahis had not a word to say, and she hugged herself over the triumph of having reduced her witty81 admirer to silence.
At the corner of the Rue de la Loi they heard singing and shouting and saw shadows flitting round a brazier of live coals. It was a band of young bloods who had just come out of the Théatre Fran?ais and were burning a guy representing the Friend of the People.
In the Rue Honoré the coachman struck his cocked hat against a burlesque82 effigy83 of Marat swinging from the cord of a street lantern.
The fellow, heartened by the incident, turned round to his fares and told them how, only last night, the tripe-seller in the Rue Montorgueil had smeared84 blood over Marat's head, declaring: "That's the stuff he liked," and how some little scamps of ten had thrown the bust into the sewer85, and how the spectators had hit the nail on the head, shouting:
"That's the Panthéon for him!"
Meanwhile, from every eating-house and restaurateur's voices could be heard singing:
Peuple fran?ais, peuple de frères!...
"Good-bye," said élodie, jumping out of the cabriolet.
But Desmahis begged so hard, he was so tenderly urgent and spoke86 so sweetly, that she had not the heart to leave him at the door.
"It is late," she said; "you must only stay an instant."
In the blue chamber87 she threw off her mantle and appeared in her white gown à l'antique, which displayed all the warm fulness of her shape.
"You are cold, perhaps," she said, "I will light the fire; it is already laid."
She struck the flint and put a lighted match to the fire.
Philippe took her in his arms with the gentleness that bespeaks88 strength, and she felt a strange, delicious thrill. She was already yielding beneath his kisses when she snatched herself from his arms, crying:
"Let me be."
Slowly she uncoiled her hair before the chimney-glass; then she looked mournfully at the ring she wore on the ring-finger of her left hand, a little silver ring on which the face of Marat, all worn and battered89, could no longer be made out. She looked at it till the tears confused her sight, took it off softly and tossed it into the flames.
Then, her face shining with tears and smiles, transfigured with tenderness and passion, she threw herself into Philippe's arms.
The night was far advanced when the citoyenne Blaise opened the outer door of the flat for her lover and whispered to him in the darkness:
"Good-bye, sweetheart! It is the hour my father will be coming home. If you hear a noise on the stairs, go up quick to the higher floor and don't come down till all danger is over of your being seen. To have the street-door opened, give three raps on the concierge's window. Good-bye, my life, good-bye, my soul!"
The last dying embers were glowing on the hearth90 when élodie, tired and happy, dropped her head on the pillow.
THE END
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收听单词发音
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1
encumbered
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| v.妨碍，阻碍，拖累( encumber的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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kennels
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| n.主人外出时的小动物寄养处，养狗场；狗窝( kennel的名词复数 )；养狗场 | |
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pumpkin
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| n.南瓜 | |
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horrid
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| adj.可怕的；令人惊恐的；恐怖的；极讨厌的 | |
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tyrant
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| n.暴君，专制的君主，残暴的人 | |
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conspiracy
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| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
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7
portfolio
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| n.公事包；文件夹；大臣及部长职位 | |
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8
stippled
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| v.加点、绘斑，加粒( stipple的过去式和过去分词 )；（把油漆、水泥等的表面）弄粗糙 | |
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9
engraving
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| n.版画；雕刻（作品）；雕刻艺术；镌版术v.在（硬物）上雕刻（字，画等）( engrave的现在分词 )；将某事物深深印在（记忆或头脑中） | |
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10
hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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opprobrium
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| n.耻辱，责难 | |
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12
scapegoat
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| n.替罪的羔羊，替人顶罪者；v.使…成为替罪羊 | |
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engrave
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| vt.（在...上）雕刻，使铭记，使牢记 | |
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14
plumes
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| 羽毛( plume的名词复数 )； 羽毛饰； 羽毛状物； 升上空中的羽状物 | |
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15
triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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16
valiant
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| adj.勇敢的，英勇的；n.勇士，勇敢的人 | |
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17
warriors
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| 武士，勇士，战士( warrior的名词复数 ) | |
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18
second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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fanatics
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| 狂热者，入迷者( fanatic的名词复数 ) | |
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gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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21
amicably
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| adv.友善地 | |
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22
proscribed
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| v.正式宣布（某事物）有危险或被禁止( proscribe的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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23
enveloped
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| v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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24
bestowed
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| 赠给，授予( bestow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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25
discreet
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| adj.(言行)谨慎的；慎重的；有判断力的 | |
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26
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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27
dishonour
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| n./vt.拒付（支票、汇票、票据等）；vt.凌辱，使丢脸；n.不名誉，耻辱，不光彩 | |
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28
dishonoured
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| a.不光彩的，不名誉的 | |
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29
mantle
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| n.斗篷，覆罩之物，罩子；v.罩住，覆盖，脸红 | |
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tunic
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| n.束腰外衣 | |
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odious
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| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
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asylum
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| n.避难所，庇护所，避难 | |
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attics
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| n. 阁楼 | |
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rue
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| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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urn
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| n.（有座脚的）瓮；坟墓；骨灰瓮 | |
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gilded
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| a.镀金的，富有的 | |
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homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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38
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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baton
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| n.乐队用指挥杖 | |
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40
tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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41
solace
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| n.安慰；v.使快乐；vt.安慰(物)，缓和 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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43
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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44
beads
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| n.（空心）小珠子( bead的名词复数 )；水珠；珠子项链 | |
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45
intervention
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| n.介入，干涉，干预 | |
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46
procured
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| v.（努力）取得， （设法）获得( procure的过去式和过去分词 )；拉皮条 | |
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47
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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48
erecting
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| v.使直立，竖起( erect的现在分词 )；建立 | |
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49
imprisonment
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| n.关押，监禁，坐牢 | |
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50
languishing
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| a. 衰弱下去的 | |
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51
voluptuous
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| adj.肉欲的，骄奢淫逸的 | |
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52
adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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53
busts
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| 半身雕塑像( bust的名词复数 )； 妇女的胸部； 胸围； 突击搜捕 | |
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54
bust
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| vt.打破；vi.爆裂；n.半身像；胸部 | |
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55
wig
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| n.假发 | |
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56
wigs
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| n.假发，法官帽( wig的名词复数 ) | |
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57
engraver
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| n.雕刻师，雕工 | |
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58
chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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59
grotto
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| n.洞穴 | |
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60
chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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61
torrent
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| n.激流，洪流；爆发，(话语等的)连发 | |
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clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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63
slaughtered
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| v.屠杀，杀戮，屠宰( slaughter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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64
fiddles
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| n.小提琴( fiddle的名词复数 )；欺诈；（需要运用手指功夫的）细巧活动；当第二把手v.伪造( fiddle的第三人称单数 )；篡改；骗取；修理或稍作改动 | |
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65
cravats
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| n.（系在衬衫衣领里面的）男式围巾( cravat的名词复数 ) | |
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66
hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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67
awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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68
celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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69
tenor
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| n.男高音（歌手），次中音（乐器），要旨，大意 | |
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70
jingling
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| 叮当声 | |
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71
murmurs
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| n.低沉、连续而不清的声音( murmur的名词复数 )；低语声；怨言；嘀咕 | |
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72
surmounting
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| 战胜( surmount的现在分词 )； 克服（困难）； 居于…之上； 在…顶上 | |
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73
dwarf
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| n.矮子，侏儒，矮小的动植物；vt.使…矮小 | |
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74
overture
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| n.前奏曲、序曲，提议，提案，初步交涉 | |
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75
cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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76
uproar
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| n.骚动，喧嚣，鼎沸 | |
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77
infamous
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| adj.声名狼藉的，臭名昭著的，邪恶的 | |
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78
toad
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| n.蟾蜍，癞蛤蟆 | |
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79
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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80
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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81
witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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82
burlesque
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| v.嘲弄，戏仿；n.嘲弄，取笑，滑稽模仿 | |
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83
effigy
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| n.肖像 | |
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84
smeared
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| 弄脏； 玷污； 涂抹； 擦上 | |
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85
sewer
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| n.排水沟，下水道 | |
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86
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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87
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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88
bespeaks
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| v.预定( bespeak的第三人称单数 )；订（货）；证明；预先请求 | |
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89
battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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90
hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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