LITMIR.BIZ

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and Destage produces a pipe and begins to fill it.)

      Francois: Why, we’re four again!

      Lamarque: Idiot!

      Chandelle: Here, Pitou! Wine for everyone. (Pitou nods and shuffles out) Now, Messieurs, tell me of Chandelle. Tell me of his personality.

      (Lamarque looks blankly at Destage. )

      Destage: Well, he was—was attractive—

      Lamarque: Not to everyone.

      Destage: But to us. Some thought him a sneak. (Chandelle winces) He was a wonderful talker—when he wished, he could amuse the whole wine room. But he preferred to talk to us. (Pitou enters with a bottle and glasses. He pours and leaves the bottle on the table. Then he goes out.)

      Lamarque: He was educated. God knows how.

      Francois: (draining his glass and pouring out more.) He knew everything, he could tell anything—he used to tell me poetry. Oh, what poetry! And I would listen and dream—

      Destage: And he could make verses and sing them with his guitar.

      Lamarque: And he would tell us about men and women of history—about Charlotte Corday and Fouquet and Moliere and St. Louis and Mamine, the strangler, and Charlemagne and Mme. Dubarry and Machiavelli and John Law and Francois Villon—

      Destage: Villon! (enthusiastically) He loved Villon. He would talk for hours of him.

      Francois: (Pouring more wine) And then he would get very drunk and say “Let us fight” and he would stand on the table and say that everyone in the wine shop was a pig and a son of pigs. La! He would grab a chair or a table and Sacre Vie Dieu! but those were hard nights for us.

      Lamarque: Then he would take his hat and guitar and go into the streets to sing. He would sing about the moon.

      Francois: And the roses and the ivory towers of Babylon and about the ancient ladies of the court and about “the silent chords that flow from the ocean to the moon.”

      Destage: That’s why he made no money. He was bright and clever—when we worked, he worked feverishly hard, but he was always drunk, night and day.

      Lamarque: Often he lived on liquor alone for weeks at a time.

      Destage: He was much in jail toward the end.

      Chandelle: (calling) Pitou! More wine!

      Francois: (excitedly) And me! He used to like me best. He used to say that I was a child and he would train me. He died before he began. (Pitou enters with another bottle of wine; Francois siezes it eagerly and pours himself a glass.)

      Destage: And then that cursed Lafouquet—stuck him with a knife.

      Francois: But I fixed Lafouquet. He stood on the Seine bridge drunk and—

      Lamarque: Shut up, you fool you—

      Francois: I pushed him and he sank—down—down—and that night Chandelle came in a dream and thanked me.

      Chandelle: (shuddering) How long—for how many years did you come here.

      Destage: Six or seven. (Gloomily) Had to end—had to end.

      Chandelle: And he’s forgotten. He left nothing. He’ll never be thought of again.

      Destage: Remembered! Bah! Posterity is as much a charlatan as the most prejudiced tragic critic that ever boot-licked an actor. (He turns his glass nervously round and round) You don’t realize—I’m afraid—how we feel about Jean Chandelle, Francois and Lamarque and I—he was more than a genius to be admired—

      Francois: (hoarsely) Don’t you see, he stood for us as well as for himself.

      Lamarque: (rising excitedly and walking up and down.) There we were—four men—three of us poor dreamers—artistically educated, practically illiterate (he turns savagely to Chandelle and speaks almost menacingly) Do you realize that I can neither read nor write. Do you realize that back of Francois there, despite his fine phrases, there is a character weak as water, a mind as shallow as—

      (Francois starts up angrily.)

      Lemarque: Sit down (Francois sits down muttering.)

      Francois: (after a pause) But, Monsieur, you must know—I leave the gift of—of—(helplessly) I can’t name it—appreciation, artistic, aesthetic sense—call it what you will. Weak—yes, why not? Here I am, with no chance, the world against me. I lie—I steal perhaps—I am drunk—I—

      (Destage fills up Francois glass with wine.)

      Destage: Here! Drink that and shut up! You are boring the gentleman. There is his weak side—poor infant.

      (Chandelle who has listened to the last, keenly turns his chair toward Destage.)

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

      Lamarque: Can’t you see?

      Francois: 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.

      Francois: (muttering to himself)—

      Blind! Blind! Blind!

      Then he ran alone, when the light had passed;

      The sun had set and the night fell fast;

      The rat lay down in the sewer at last,

      Blind!

      (A beam of the sunset has come to rest on the glass of wine that Francois holds in his hand. The wine glitters and sparkles. Francois looks at it, starts, and drops the glass. The wine runs over the table.)

      Destage: (animatedly) Fifteen—twenty years ago he sat where you sat, small, heavy-bearded, black eyed—always sleepy looking.

      Francois: (his eyes closed—his voice trailing off) Always sleepy, sleepy, slee—

      Chandelle: (dreamily) He was a poet unsinging, crowned with wreaths of ashes. (His voice rings with just a shade of triumph.)

      Francois: (talking in his sleep) Ah, well Chandelle, are you witty tonight, or melancholy or stupid or drunk.

      Chandelle: Messieurs—it grows late. I must be off. Drink, all of you (enthusiastically) Drink until you cannot talk or walk or see. (He throws a bill on the table.)

      Destage: Young Monsieur?

      (Chandelle dons his coat and hat. Pitou enters with more wine. He fills the glasses.)

      Lamarque:

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