先讀課文﹕
The Lady of the Camellias《茶花女》
by Alexandre Dumas Jr.
Chapter 1
IT is my considered view that no one can invent fictional characters without
first having made a lengthy study of people, just as it is impossible for
anyone to speak a language that has not been properly mastered.
Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must 'make do with' [這種用
法都是應該學的] telling a tale.
I therefore invite the reader to believe that this story is true. All
the characters who appear in it, with the exception of the heroine, are
still living. [這句是說那個女主角已經死了﹐不是說女主角沒有其人]
I would further add that there are reliable witnesses in Paris for most
of the particulars which I bring together here, and they could vouch for
their accuracy should my word not be enough. [should是倒裝句﹐等于 if --
should----] By a singular turn of events, I alone was able to write them
down since I alone was privy to the very last details without which it would
have been quite impossible to piece together a full and satisfying account.
It was in this way that these particulars came to my knowledge.
On the 12th day of March, 1847, in the rue Laffitte 路名, I happened
upon 碰巧看到 a large yellow notice announcing a sale of furniture and valuable
curios. An estate was to be disposed of, the owner having died. The notice
did not name the dead person, but the sale was to be held at 9 rue d'Antin
on the 16th, between noon and five o'clock.
The notice also stated that the apartments and contents could be viewed
on the 13th and 14th.
I have always been interested in curios. I promised myself I would not
miss this opportunity, if not of actually buying, then at least of looking.
The following day, I directed my steps towards 9 rue d'Antin.
It was early, and yet a good crowd of visitors had already gathered
in the apartment, men for the most part, but also a number of ladies who,
though dressed in velvet and wearing Indian shawls, and all with their own
elegant broughams standing at the door, were examining the riches set out
before them with astonished, even admiring eyes.
After a while, I quite saw the reason for their admiration and astonishment,
for having begun myself to look around I had no difficulty in recognizing
that I was in the apartment of a kept woman. Now if there is one thing that
ladies of fashion desire to see above all else, and there were society ladies
present, it is the rooms occupied by those women who have carriages which
spatter their own with mud every day of the week, who have their boxes 包
廂 at the Opera or the Theatre-Italien just as they do, and indeed next
to theirs, and who display for all Paris to see the insolent opulence of
their beauty, diamonds and shameless conduct.
The woman in whose apartments I now found myself was dead: the most
virtuous of ladies were thus able to go everywhere, even into the bedroom.
Death had purified the air of this glittering den of iniquity, and in any
case they could always say, if they needed the excuse, that they had done
no more than come to a sale without knowing whose rooms these were. I had
read the notices, they had wanted to view what the notices advertised and
mark out their selections in advance. It could not have been simpler, though
this did not prevent them from looking through these splendid things for
traces of the secret life of a courtesan of which they had doubtless been
given very strange accounts.
Unfortunately, the mysteries had died with the goddess, and in spite
of their best endeavours these good ladies found only what had been put
up for sale since the time of death, and could detect nothing of what had
been sold while the occupant had been alive.
But there was certainly rich booty to be had. The furniture was superb.
Rosewood and Buhl-work pieces, Severs vases and blue china porcelain, Dresden
figurines, satins, velvet and lace, everything in fact.
I wandered from room to room in the wake of these inquisitive aristocratic
ladies who had arrived before me. They went into a bedroom hung with Persian
fabrics and I was about to go in after them, when they came out again almost
immediately, smiling and as it were, put to shame by this latest revelation.
The effect was to make me even keener to see inside. It was the dressing-room,
complete down to the very last details, in which the dead woman's profligacy
had seemingly reached its height.
On a large table standing against one wall, it measured a good six feet
by three, shone the finest treasures of Aucoc and Odiot. It was a magnificent
collection, and among the countless objects each so essential to the appearance
of the kind of woman in whose home we had gathered, there was not one that
was not made of gold or silver. But it was a collection that could only
have been assembled piece by piece, and clearly more than one love had gone
into its making.
I, who was not the least put out by the sight of the dressing-room of
a kept woman, spent some time agreeably inspecting its contents, neglecting
none of them, and I noticed that all these magnificently wrought implements
bore different initials and all manner of coronets.
As I contemplated all these things, each to my mind standing for a separate
prostitution of the poor girl, I reflected that God had been merciful to
her since He had not suffered her to live long enough to undergo the usual
punishment but had allowed her to die at the height of her wealth and beauty,
long before the coming of old age, that first death of courtesans.
Indeed, what sadder sight is there than vice in old age, especially
in a woman? It has no dignity and is singularly unattractive. Those everlasting
regrets, not for wrong turnings taken but for wrong calculations made and
money foolishly spent, are among the most harrowing things that can be heard.
I once knew a former woman of easy virtue of whose past life there remained
only a daughter who was almost as beautiful as the mother had once been,
or so her contemporaries said. This poor child, to whom her mother never
said 'You are my daughter' except to order her to keep her now that she
was old just as she had been kept when she was young, this wretched creature
was called Louise and in obedience to her mother, she sold herself without
inclination or passion or pleasure, rather as she might have followed an
honest trade had it ever entered anyone's head to teach her one. [had倒裝
句﹐等于 if -- had --]
The continual spectacle of debauchery, at so tender an age, compounded
by her continuing ill-health, had extinguished in the girl the knowledge
of good and evil which God had perhaps given her, but which no one had ever
thought to nurture.
I shall always remember that young girl who walked along the boulevards
almost every day at the same hour. Her mother was always with her, escorting
her as assiduously as a true mother might have accompanied her daughter.
I was very young in those days and ready enough to fall in with the easy
morality of the times. Yet I recall that the sight of such scandalous chaperoning
filled me with contempt and disgust.
Add to all this that no virgin's face ever conveyed such a feeling of
innocence nor any comparable expression of sadness and suffering.
You would have said it was the image of Resignation itself.
And then one day, the young girl's face lit up. In the midst of the
debauches which her mother organized for her, it suddenly seemed to this
sinful creature that God had granted her one happiness. And after all why
should God, who had made her weak and helpless, abandon her without consolation
to struggle on beneath the oppressive burden of her life? One day, then,
she perceived that she was with child, and that part of her which remained
pure trembled with joy. The soul finds refuge in the strangest sanctuaries.
Louise ran to her mother to tell her the news that had filled her with such
happiness. It is a shameful thing to have to say, but we do not write gratuitously
of immorality here, we relate a true incident and one perhaps which we would
be better advised to leave untold if we did not believe that it is essential
from time to time to make public the martyrdom of these creatures who are
ordinarily condemned without a hearing and despised without trial, it is,
we say, a matter for shame, but the mother answered her daughter saying
that as things stood they scarcely had enough for two, and that they would
certainly not have enough for three; that such children serve no useful
purpose; and that a pregnancy is so much time wasted.
The very next day, a midwife (of whom we shall say no more than that
she was a friend of the mother) called to see Louise, who remained for a
few days in her bed from which she rose paler and weaker than before.
Three months later, some man took pity on her and undertook her moral
and physical salvation. But this latest blow had been too great and Louise
died of the after effects of the miscarriage she had suffered.
The mother still lives. How? God alone knows.
This story had come back to me as I stood examining the sets of silver
toilet accessories, and I must have been lost in thought for quite some
time. For by now the apartment was empty save for myself and a porter who,
from the doorway, was eyeing me carefully lest I should try to steal anything.
I went up to this good man in whom I inspired such grave anxieties.
"Excuse me," I said, "I wonder if you could tell me the name of the
person who lived here."
"Mademoiselle Marguerite Gautier."
I knew this young woman by name and by sight.
"What!" I said to the porter. "Marguerite Gautier is dead."
"Yes, sir."
"When did it happen?"
"Three weeks ago, I think."
"But why are people being allowed to view her apartment?"
"The creditors thought it would be good for trade. People can get the
effect of the hangings and the furniture in advance. Encourages people to
buy, you understand."
"So she had debts, then?"
"Oh yes, sir! Lots of'em."
"But I imagine the sale will cover them."
"Over and above."
"And who stands to get the balance?"
"The family."
"She had a family?"
"Seems she did."
"Thank you very much."
The porter, now reassured as to my intentions, touched his cap and I
left.
"Poor girl," I said to myself as I returned home, "she must have died
a sad death, for in her world, people only keep their friends as long as
they stay fit and well." And in spite of myself, I lamented the fate of
Marguerite Gautier.
All this will perhaps seem absurd to many people, but I have a boundless
forbearance towards courtesans which I shall not even trouble to enlarge
upon here.
One day, as I was on my way to collect a passport from the prefecture,
I saw down one of the adjacent streets, a young woman being taken away by
two policemen. Now I have no idea what she had done. All I can say is that
she was weeping bitterly and clasping to her a child only a few months old
from which she was about to be separated by her arrest. From that day until
this, I have been incapable of spurning any woman on sight.
1) 生詞自查。
2) 作者介紹﹕Alexandre Dumas, fils (= Jr. in English) (27 July 1824 -- 27
November 1895) was a French author and dramatist. He was the son of Alexandre
Dumas, pere (=Sr.) also a writer and playwright. Dumas was born in Paris,
France, the illegitimate child of Marie-Laure-Catherine Labay (1794-1868),
a dressmaker, and novelist Alexandre Dumas. During 1831 his father legally
recognized him and ensured that the young Dumas received the best education
possible at the Institution Goubaux and the College Bourbon.
During 1844 Dumas moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to live with his father.
There, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan who would be the inspiration
for his romantic novel The Lady of the Camellias, wherein Duplessis was
named Marguerite Gauthier. Adapted into a play, it was titled Camile in
English and became the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata, Duplessis
undergoing yet another name change, this time to Violetta Valery.
3) 關於小說﹕The Lady of the Camellias is a novel by Alexandre Dumas Jr.
first published in 1848, and subsequently adapted for the stage. The Lady
of the Camellias premiered at the Theatre du Vaudeville in Paris, France
on February 2, 1852. The play was an instant success, and Giuseppe Verdi
immediately set about putting the story to music. His work became the 1853
opera La Traviata, with the female protagonist, Marguerite Gautier, renamed
Violetta Valery.
4) 法國作家小仲馬的“茶花女”也是世界名著。原著當然是法文的﹐但英文譯本也
具有文學作品水平。所以也可以當作泛讀材料。由此故事改編成的歌劇當然也世界
著名的。其中詠嘆調“飲酒歌”常被單獨演唱。
选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
