[转载]《项链》莫泊桑（英文版）
2013-06-02 21:34阅读：
Guy de Maupassant
The Necklace
She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as
though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans. She
had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting
known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and
distinction; and she let herself be married off to a little clerk
in the Ministry of Education. Her tastes were simple because she
had never been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy as
though she had married beneath her; for women have no caste or
class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or
family, their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their
nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the slum
girl on a level with the highest lady in the land.
She suffered endlessly,
feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She su
ffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn
chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women
of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted
her. The sight of the little Breton girl who came to do the work in
her little house aroused heart-broken regrets and hopeless dreams
in her mind. She imagined silent antechambers, heavy with Oriental
tapestries, lit by torches in lofty bronze sockets, with two tall
footmen in knee-breeches sleeping in large arm-chairs, overcome by
the heavy warmth of the stove. She imagined vast saloons hung with
antique silks, exquisite pieces of furniture supporting priceless
ornaments, and small, charming, perfumed rooms, created just for
little parties of intimate friends, men who were famous and sought
after, whose homage roused every other woman's envious
longings.
When she sat down for dinner
at the round table covered with a three-days-old cloth, opposite
her husband, who took the cover off the soup-tureen, exclaiming
delightedly: 'Aha! Scotch broth! What could be better?' she
imagined delicate meals, gleaming silver, tapestries peopling the
walls with folk of a past age and strange birds in faery forests;
she imagined delicate food served in marvellous dishes, murmured
gallantries, listened to with an inscrutable smile as one trifled
with the rosy flesh of trout or wings of asparagus chicken.
< 2 >
She had no clothes, no
jewels, nothing. And these were the only things she loved; she felt
that she was made for them. She had longed so eagerly to charm, to
be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after.
She had a rich friend, an
old school friend whom she refused to visit, because she suffered
so keenly when she returned home. She would weep whole days, with
grief, regret, despair, and misery.
*
One evening her husband came home with an exultant air, holding a
large envelope in his hand.
'Here's something for you,'
he said.
Swiftly she tore the paper
and drew out a printed card on which were these words:
'The Minister of Education
and Madame Ramponneau request the pleasure of the company of
Monsieur and Madame Loisel at the Ministry on the evening of
Monday, January the 18th.'
Instead of being delighted,
as her husband hoped, she flung the invitation petulantly across
the table, murmuring:
'What do you want me to do
with this?'
'Why, darling, I thought
you'd be pleased. You never go out, and this is a great occasion. I
had tremendous trouble to get it. Every one wants one; it's very
select, and very few go to the clerks. You'll see all the really
big people there.'
She looked at him out of
furious eyes, and said impatiently: 'And what do you suppose I am
to wear at such an affair?'
He had not thought about it;
he stammered:
'Why, the dress you go to
the theatre in. It looks very nice, to me . . .'
He stopped, stupefied and
utterly at a loss when he saw that his wife was beginning to cry.
Two large tears ran slowly down from the corners of her eyes
towards the corners of her mouth.
< 3 >
'What's the matter with you?
What's the matter with you?' he faltered.
But with a violent effort
she overcame her grief and replied in a calm voice, wiping her wet
cheeks:
'Nothing. Only I haven't a
dress and so I can't go to this party. Give your invitation to some
friend of yours whose wife will be turned out better than I
shall.'
He was heart-broken.
'Look here, Mathilde,' he
persisted. 'What would be the cost of a suitable dress, which you
could use on other occasions as well, something very simple?'
She thought for several
seconds, reckoning up prices and also wondering for how large a sum
she could ask without bringing upon herself an immediate refusal
and an exclamation of horror from the careful-minded clerk.
At last she replied with
some hesitation:
'I don't know exactly, but I
think I could do it on four hundred francs.'
He grew slightly pale, for
this was exactly the amount he had been saving for a gun, intending
to get a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre with
some friends who went lark-shooting there on Sundays.
Nevertheless he said: 'Very
well. I'll give you four hundred francs. But try and get a really
nice dress with the money.'
The day of the party drew
near, and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy and anxious. Her dress
was ready, however. One evening her husband said to her:
'What's the matter with you?
You've been very odd for the last three days.'
'I'm utterly miserable at
not having any jewels, not a single stone, to wear,' she replied.
'I shall look absolutely no one. I would almost rather not go to
the party.'
< 4 >
'Wear flowers,' he said.
'They're very smart at this time of the year. For ten francs you
could get two or three gorgeous roses.'
She was not convinced.
'No . . . there's nothing so
humiliating as looking poor in the middle of a lot of rich
women.'
'How stupid you are!'
exclaimed her husband. 'Go and see Madame Forestier and ask her to
lend you some jewels. You know her quite well enough for
that.'
She uttered a cry of
delight.
'That's true. I never
thought of it.'
Next day she went to see her
friend and told her her trouble.
Madame Forestier went to her
dressing-table, took up a large box, brought it to Madame Loisel,
opened it, and said:
'Choose, my dear.'
First she saw some
bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross in gold and
gems, of exquisite workmanship. She tried the effect of the jewels
before the mirror, hesitating, unable to make up her mind to leave
them, to give them up. She kept on asking:
'Haven't you anything
else?'
'Yes. Look for yourself. I
don't know what you would like best.'
Suddenly she discovered, in
a black satin case, a superb diamond necklace; her heart began to
beat covetously. Her hands trembled as she lifted it. She fastened
it round her neck, upon her high dress, and remained in ecstasy at
sight of herself.
Then, with hesitation, she
asked in anguish:
'Could you lend me this,
just this alone?'
'Yes, of course.'
She flung herself on her
friend's breast, embraced her frenziedly, and went away with her
treasure. The day of the party arrived. Madame Loisel was a
success. She was the prettiest woman present, elegant, graceful,
smiling, and quite above herself with happiness. All the men stared
at her, inquired her name, and asked to be introduced to her. All
the Under-Secretaries of State were eager to waltz with her. The
Minister noticed her.
< 5 >
She danced madly,
ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything, in
the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a cloud
of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of
the desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so
dear to her feminine heart.
She left about four o'clock
in the morning. Since midnight her husband had been dozing in a
deserted little room, in company with three other men whose wives
were having a good time. He threw over her shoulders the garments
he had brought for them to go home in, modest everyday clothes,
whose poverty clashed with the beauty of the ball-dress. She was
conscious of this and was anxious to hurry away, so that she should
not be noticed by the other women putting on their costly
furs.
Loisel restrained her.
'Wait a little. You'll catch
cold in the open. I'm going to fetch a cab.'
But she did not listen to
him and rapidly descended the staircase. When they were out in the
street they could not find a cab; they began to look for one,
shouting at the drivers whom they saw passing in the
distance.
They walked down towards the
Seine, desperate and shivering. At last they found on the quay one
of those old nightprowling carriages which are only to be seen in
Paris after dark, as though they were ashamed of their shabbiness
in the daylight.
It brought them to their
door in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they walked up to their own
apartment. It was the end, for her. As for him, he was thinking
that he must be at the office at ten.
She took off the garments in
which she had wrapped her shoulders, so as to see herself in all
her glory before the mirror. But suddenly she uttered a cry. The
necklace was no longer round her neck!
< 6 >
'What's the matter with
you?' asked her husband, already half undressed.
She turned towards him in
the utmost distress.
'I . . . I . . . I've no
longer got Madame Forestier's necklace. . . .'
He started with
astonishment.
'What! . . .
Impossible!'
They searched in the folds
of her dress, in the folds of the coat, in the pockets, everywhere.
They could not find it.
'Are you sure that you still
had it on when you came away from the ball?' he asked.
'Yes, I touched it in the
hall at the Ministry.'
'But if you had lost it in
the street, we should have heard it fall.'
'Yes. Probably we should.
Did you take the number of the cab?'
'No. You didn't notice it,
did you?'
'No.'
They stared at one another,
dumbfounded. At last Loisel put on his clothes again.
'I'll go over all the ground
we walked,' he said, 'and see if I can't find it.'
And he went out. She
remained in her evening clothes, lacking strength to get into bed,
huddled on a chair, without volition or power of thought.
Her husband returned about
seven. He had found nothing.
He went to the police
station, to the newspapers, to offer a reward, to the cab
companies, everywhere that a ray of hope impelled him.
She waited all day long, in
the same state of bewilderment at this fearful catastrophe.
Loisel came home at night,
his face lined and pale; he had discovered nothing.
< 7 >
'You must write to your
friend,' he said, 'and tell her that you've broken the clasp of her
necklace and are getting it mended. That will give us time to look
about us.'
She wrote at his
dictation.
*
By the end of a week they had lost all hope.
Loisel, who had aged five
years, declared:
'We must see about replacing
the diamonds.'
Next day they took the box
which had held the necklace and went to the jewellers whose name
was inside. He consulted his books.
'It was not I who sold this
necklace, Madame; I must have merely supplied the clasp.'
Then they went from jeweller
to jeweller, searching for another necklace like the first,
consulting their memories, both ill with remorse and anguish of
mind.
In a shop at the
Palais-Royal they found a string of diamonds which seemed to them
exactly like the one they were looking for. It was worth forty
thousand francs. They were allowed to have it for thirty-six
thousand.
They begged the jeweller not
to sell it for three days. And they arranged matters on the
understanding that it would be taken back for thirty-four thousand
francs, if the first one were found before the end of
February.
Loisel possessed eighteen
thousand francs left to him by his father. He intended to borrow
the rest.
He did borrow it, getting a
thousand from one man, five hundred from another, five louis here,
three louis there. He gave notes of hand, entered into ruinous
agreements, did business with usurers and the whole tribe of
money-lenders. He mortgaged the whole remaining years of his
existence, risked his signature without even knowing if he could
honour it, and, appalled at the agonising face of the future, at
the black misery about to fall upon him, at the prospect of every
possible physical privation and moral torture, he went to get the
new necklace and put down upon the jeweller's counter thirty-six
thousand francs.
< 8 >
When Madame Loisel took back
the necklace to Madame Forestier, the latter said to her in a
chilly voice:
'You ought to have brought
it back sooner; I might have needed it.'
She did not, as her friend
had feared, open the case. If she had noticed the substitution,
what would she have thought? What would she have said? Would she
not have taken her for a thief?
*
Madame Loisel came to know the ghastly life of abject poverty. From
the very first she played her part heroically. This fearful debt
must be paid off. She would pay it. The servant was dismissed. They
changed their flat; they took a garret under the roof.
She came to know the heavy
work of the house, the hateful duties of the kitchen. She washed
the plates, wearing out her pink nails on the coarse pottery and
the bottoms of pans. She washed the dirty linen, the shirts and
dish-cloths, and hung them out to dry on a string; every morning
she took the dustbin down into the street and carried up the water,
stopping on each landing to get her breath. And, clad like a poor
woman, she went to the fruiterer, to the grocer, to the butcher, a
basket on her arm, haggling, insulted, fighting for every wretched
halfpenny of her money.
Every month notes had to be
paid off, others renewed, time gained.
Her husband worked in the
evenings at putting straight a merchant's accounts, and often at
night he did copying at twopence-halfpenny a page.
And this life lasted ten
years.
At the end of ten years
everything was paid off, everything, the usurer's charges and the
accumulation of superimposed interest.
Madame Loisel looked old
now. She had become like all the other strong, hard, coarse women
of poor households. Her hair was badly done, her skirts were awry,
her hands were red. She spoke in a shrill voice, and the water
slopped all over the floor when she scrubbed it. But sometimes,
when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and
thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been
so beautiful and so much admired.
< 9 >
What would have happened if
she had never lost those jewels. Who knows? Who knows? How strange
life is, how fickle! How little is needed to ruin or to save!
One Sunday, as she had gone
for a walk along the Champs-Elysees to freshen herself after the
labours of the week, she caught sight suddenly of a woman who was
taking a child out for a walk. It was Madame Forestier, still
young, still beautiful, still attractive.
Madame Loisel was conscious
of some emotion. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now
that she had paid, she would tell her all. Why not?
She went up to her.
'Good morning,
Jeanne.'
The other did not recognise
her, and was surprised at being thus familiarly addressed by a poor
woman.
'But . . . Madame . . .' she
stammered. 'I don't know . . . you must be making a mistake.'
'No . . . I am Mathilde
Loisel.'
Her friend uttered a
cry.
'Oh! . . . my poor Mathilde,
how you have changed! . . .'
'Yes, I've had some hard
times since I saw you last; and many sorrows . . . and all on your
account.'
'On my account! . . . How
was that?'
'You remember the diamond
necklace you lent me for the ball at the Ministry?'
'Yes. Well?'
'Well, I lost it.'
'How could you? Why, you
brought it back.'
'I brought you another one
just like it. And for the last ten years we have been paying for
it. You realise it wasn't easy for us; we had no money. . . . Well,
it's paid for at last, and I'm glad indeed.'
< 10 >
Madame Forestier had
halted.
'You say you bought a
diamond necklace to replace mine?'
'Yes. You hadn't noticed it?
They were very much alike.'
And she smiled in proud and
innocent happiness.
Madame Forestier, deeply
moved, took her two hands.
'Oh, my poor Mathilde! But
mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred
francs! . . . '
