Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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Chandelle—But you say my father was more to you than a personal friend; in what way?

Lamarque—Can’t you see?

François—I—I—he helped—(Destage pours out more wine and gives it to him.)

Destage—You see he—how shall I say it?—he expressed us. If you can imagine a mind like mine, potently lyrical, sensitive without being cultivated. If you can imagine what a balm, what a medicine, what an all in all was summed up for me in my conversations with him. It was everything to me. I would struggle pathetically for a phrase to express a million yearnings and he would say it in a word.

Lamarque—Monsieur is bored? (Chandelle shakes his head and opening his case selects a cigarette and lights it.)

Lamarque—Here, sir, are three rats, the product of a sewer—destined by nature to live and die in the filthy ruts where they were born. But these three rats in one thing are not of the sewer—they have eyes. Nothing to keep them from remaining in the sewer but their eyes, nothing to help them if they go out but their eyes—and now here comes the light. And it came and passed and left us rats again—vile rats—and one, when he lost the light, went blind.