《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter IV》第21节
The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, and later in Deauville, and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all—and yet there’s something in that voice of hers … Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you—do you remember?—if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said: “What Gatsby?” and when I described him—I was half asleep—she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.
注释摘要
乔丹的叙述在这段文字里陡然加快了节奏，她用一种淡漠而精确的口吻，将黛西从新婚到为人母的几年光阴压缩成寥寥几笔。次年四月黛西生下女儿，之后全家去法国住了一年，在戛纳与多维尔的春天里短暂露面，接着回芝加哥定居。这一串地名——戛纳、多维尔——本身即是二十年代美国富裕阶层欧洲流亡的注脚，那时候美元坚挺，大批美国人在战后涌入法国海滨度假，菲茨杰拉德本人也在这两地消磨…