THE STORY OF A WHITE BLACKBIRD ALFRED DE MUSSET

I

How glorious, but how distressing a thing it is to be an exceptional blackbird in this world! I am by no means a fabulous bird, and M. de Buffon has described me. But, alas! I am extremely rare, and very difficult to find. Would God I had been utterly undiscoverable!

My father and mother were two good souls, who had lived for a number of years at the bottom of a secluded old garden in the Marais. Theirs was an exemplary household. While my mother, squatted in a thick bush, laid regularly three times a year, and sat on her eggs, dozing, with patriarchal devotion, my father, still very tidy and very smart despite his great age, kept pilfering around her all day long, bringing her fine insects which he held delicately by the tip of the tail, so as not to disgust his wife, and, when night came, he never failed, if the weather was fine, to regale her with a song, which rejoiced the whole neighbourhood. Never a quarrel, never the least cloud, had disturbed that sweet union.

Scarcely had I come into the world, when my father, for the first time in his life, began to show bad temper. Although I was as yet only a dubious grey, he failed to recognize in me either the colour, or the form of his numerous posterity.

“There’s a dirty child,” he would sometimes say, looking askance at me; “it looks as if that ragamuffin must go and poke himself into every mortar-heap and mud-heap he comes across, that he is always so ugly and bespattered.”

“Eh, dear me, my friend,” answered my mother, always curled into a ball in an old bowl, of which she had made her nest, “don’t you see that it’s all you can expect at his age? In your young days, weren’t you a charming little pickle yourself? Let our blackbirdie grow, and you’ll see how handsome he’ll be; he’s one of the best I ever laid.”

Although thus taking my side, my mother was under no delusion; she saw the growth of my fatal plumage, which to her appeared a monstrosity; but she did as mothers do, who often become partial to their infants because of the very thing in which they are hardly used by Nature, as if the fault were their own, or as if they could repel in advance the injustice of fortune which must strike their children.

When the time of my first moult came, my father turned very pensive indeed, and considered me attentively. So long as my feathers were coming out, he continued to treat me kindly enough, and even gave me some paste when he saw me shivering almost naked in a corner; but as soon as my poor numbed wings began to get a new covering of down, with each white feather he saw appear, he flew into such a rage that I was afraid he’d pluck me for the rest of my days. Alas! I had no mirror; I knew not the cause of his anger, and I asked myself why the best of fathers showed himself so barbarous to me.

One day, when a ray of sunshine and my sprouting plumage had, despite me, stirred my heart to joy, as I was fluttering about in an alley, I started, unfortunately for me, to sing. The first note that my father heard, he sprang up in the air like a rocket.

“What is that I hear there?” he exclaimed. “Is that how a blackbird whistles? Is that how I whistle? Is that whistling?”

And, alighting beside my mother with a most terrible countenance:

“Wretch!” he said, “who has been laying in your nest?”

At these words my mother darted, deeply insulted, out of her bowl, not without doing some damage to one foot; she tried to speak, but her sobs choked her; she fell on the ground half swooning. I saw her at the point of death; terrified and trembling with fear I threw myself at my father’s knees.

“O my father!” I said to him, “though I whistle wrong, and though I am wrongly clad, don’t let my mother be punished for it! Is it her fault if Nature has denied me a voice like yours? Is it her fault if I have not your handsome yellow beak and your fine black French coat, which make you look like a churchwarden swallowing an omelette? If Heaven has made a monster of me, and if some one must be punished for it, let me at least be the only one to suffer!”

“That is not the question,” said my father. “What is the meaning of the absurd way in which you have just now presumed to whistle? Who taught you to whistle like that, contrary to all custom and all rule?”

“Alas! sir,” I answered humbly, “I whistled as I could, because I felt merry that it was fine weather, and perhaps because I had eaten too many flies.”

“We don’t whistle like that in my family,” retorted my father, beside himself. “For centuries we have whistled from father to son, and, when I make my voice heard in the night, let me tell you that there is an old gentleman here on the first floor and a little work-girl in the attic, who open their windows to listen to me. Is it not enough to have before my eyes the frightful colour of your ridiculous feathers, which give you a powdered look, like a clown at a fair? If I were not the most peaceable of blackbirds, I would have plucked you naked a hundred times before now, for all the world like a barn-door fowl ready for the spit.”

“Why then!” I exclaimed, revolted at my father’s injustice, “if that is the case, sir, don’t let that stand in your way! I will take myself off from your presence, I will spare your eyes the sight of this unfortunate white tail by which you drag me about all day long. I will depart, sir, I will flee; plenty other children will console your old age, since my mother lays three times a year; I will go far from you to hide my misery, and perhaps,” I added sobbing, “perhaps I shall find, in some neighbour’s kitchen-garden, or on the gutters, some earth-worms or some spiders to maintain my sad existence.”

“As you will,” replied my father, far from being softened at this speech; “let me never see you again! You are not my son; you are not a blackbird.”

“And what am I then, sir, if you please?”

“I have no idea, but you are not a blackbird.”

After these crushing words, my father went off with slow steps. My mother rose sadly, and went limping to have her cry out in her bowl. As for me, confounded and overcome, I took my flight as best I could, and I went, as I had announced, to perch myself on the gutter of a neighbouring house.

II

My father had the inhumanity to leave me for several days in this mortifying situation. In spite of his violence, he had a good heart, and, from the stolen looks which he directed towards me, I saw well that he would have liked to pardon me and recall me; my mother especially looked up to me constantly with eyes full of fondness, and sometimes even ventured to call me with a little plaintive cry; but my horrible white plumage caused them, in spite of themselves, a repugnance and a terror for which, I saw well, there was no remedy whatever.

“I am not a blackbird!” I repeated; and, in fact, when preening myself in the morning and gazing at my reflection in the water of the gutter, I recognized only too clearly how little I resembled my family. “O Heaven!” I repeated again, “do tell me what I am!”

One night, when it was raining in torrents, I was about to go to sleep, worn out by hunger and vexation, when I saw a bird settle beside me, more drenched, more pallid, and more lean than I thought possible. He was about my colour, so far as I could judge in the rain which was deluging us, he had scarcely feathers enough on his body to clothe a sparrow, and he was bigger than myself. He seemed to me, at first sight, a poor and necessitous bird indeed; but, in spite of the storm which maltreated his almost clean-plucked brow, he preserved an air of pride which charmed me. I modestly made him a profound reverence, to which he responded with a peck of his bill, which all but threw me down off the gutter. Seeing that I scratched my ear and took myself off with compunction, without trying to answer him in his own language:

“Who are you?” he asked in a voice which was as hoarse as his skull was bald.

“Alas, your Lordship,” I answered (fearing a second thrust), “I have no idea. I thought I was a blackbird, but they have convinced me that I am not one.”

The singularity of my answer, and my air of sincerity, interested him. He came beside me, and made me tell my story, a task of which I acquitted myself with all the sadness and all the humility which were suitable to my position and the fearful weather which we were having.

“If you were a carrier-pigeon like me,” he said, after having heard me, “the petty annoyances at which you distress yourself would not disturb you one moment. We travel, that is our life, and we have our loves, it is true, but I do not know who my father is. To cleave the air, to traverse space, to see the mountains and plains beneath our feet, to breathe the very azure of the heavens, not the exhalations of the earth, to fly like the arrow to an appointed mark which never escapes us, that is our pleasure and our existence. I travel farther in one day than a man can do in ten.”

“Upon my word, sir,” I said, somewhat emboldened, “you are a Bohemian bird.”

“That’s another thing about which I don’t much trouble,” he replied. “I have no country at all; I know only three things: my travels, my wife, and my little ones. Where my wife is, there is my country.”

“But what have you hanging there at your neck? It’s like an old, tattered curl-paper.”

“These are papers of importance,” he replied, puffing himself out; I am going to Brussels this trip, and I am taking news to the celebrated banker X—— which will make the funds fall one franc seventy-eight centimes.”

“Gracious goodness!” I exclaimed, “it is a fine life yours, and Brussels, I am sure, must be a town well worth seeing. Could you not take me with you? Since I am not a blackbird, I am perhaps a carrier-pigeon.”

“If you were one,” he replied, “you would have returned that peck which I gave you a moment ago.”

“Why, sir, I’ll return it to you; don’t let us quarrel over such a trifle. See, the morning is appearing and the storm is subsiding. Pray let me follow you! I am lost, I have nothing left me in the world;—if you refuse me, there is nothing for it but to drown myself in this gutter.”

“Very well then, go ahead! Follow me if you can.”

I took a last look at the garden where my mother was sleeping. A tear rolled from my eyes; the wind and rain carried it away. I spread my wings, and set out.

III

My wings, I have said, were not very strong yet. While my guide went like the wind, I panted at his side; I kept up for some time, but soon such a violent dizziness seized me that I felt as if I should faint.

“Is there far to go yet?” I asked in a weak voice.

“No,” he answered me, “we are at Bourget; we have only sixty leagues to do now.”

I tried to take fresh courage, not wishing to look like a draggled hen, and flew another quarter of an hour, but, for once, I was done up.

“Sir,” I stammered afresh, “couldn’t we stop here a moment? I have a horrible thirst, which is torturing me, and, if we perched on a tree....”

“Go to the devil! You’re a blackbird!” answered the carrier-pigeon in a rage.

And, without deigning to turn his head, he continued his journey in high dudgeon. As for me, dazed and blind, I fell into a corn-field.

I do not know how long my faint lasted. When I recovered consciousness, the first thing that I remembered was the carrier-pigeon’s last words; “You’re only a blackbird,” he had told me.—” Oh my dear parents,” I thought, “you were wrong then! I will return to you; you will recognize me as your true and lawful child, and you will restore me my place in that dear little heap of leaves which is below my mother’s bowl.”

I made an effort to rise; but the fatigue of my journey and the pain which I felt from my fall paralysed all my limbs. Scarcely had I stood up on my feet, when the faintness seized me once more and I fell again on my side.

The frightful thought of death was already presenting itself to my mind, when, across the cornflowers and poppies, I saw two charming persons coming towards me on tiptoe. One was a little magpie, very neatly marked and extremely coquettish, and the other a rose-coloured turtle-dove. The turtle halted some paces from me, with an intense air of modesty and of compassion for my misfortune; but the magpie came up to me hopping in the most graceful manner in the world.

“Eh, dear me, poor child, what are you doing there?” she asked me in a playful and silvery voice.

“Alas! my Lady Marchioness,” I answered (for she must have been that at least), “I am a poor devil of a traveller whom his postilion has dropped by the roadside, and I am in a fair way of dying of hunger.”

“Holy Virgin! Do you tell me so!” she responded.

And she at once began to flit here and there upon the bushes which surrounded us, coming and going from one side to the other, bringing me a quantity of berries and fruits, of which she made a little heap beside me, continuing her questions all the time.

“But who are you? And where do you come from? What an incredible adventure yours is! And where are you going? Fancy travelling alone, so young, for you are only coming out of your first moult! What do your parents do? Where do they come from? How did they come to let you away in that state? Why, it’s enough to make one’s feathers stand on end!”

While she was talking, I had raised myself a little on one wing, and I ate with a good appetite. The turtle remained motionless, always looking at me with an air of pity. Meanwhile she noticed that I was looking about with an exhausted air, and she understood that I was thirsty. A drop from the rain which had fallen during the night was left on a scrap of pimpernel; she timidly gathered this drop in her beak and brought it to me quite fresh. Certainly, if I had not been so ill, such a reserved person would never have ventured on such a proceeding.

I did not yet know what love was, but my heart beat violently. Divided between two varying emotions, I was possessed by an inexplicable pleasure. My table-maid was so gay, my cup-bearer so effusive and gentle, that I could have wished to go on breakfasting thus to all eternity. Unfortunately everything has an end, even a convalescent’s appetite. The repast finished and my strength restored, I satisfied the little magpie’s curiosity and related my misfortunes to her with as much sincerity as I had told them the evening before to the pigeon. The magpie listened to me with more attention than seemed natural to her, and the turtle gave me some charming tokens of her profound sensibility. But when I came to touch on the prime cause of my troubles, that is to say my ignorance as to what I was:

“Are you joking?” the pie exclaimed; “You a blackbird! You a pigeon! Fie! you are a magpie, my dear child, a magpie, if ever there was one—and a very pretty magpie,” she added, giving me a little blow with her wing, a tap with her fan, so to speak.

“But, my Lady Marchioness,” I answered, “it seems to me that, for a magpie, my colour, if you’ll excuse me saying so....”

“A Russian magpie, my dear; you are a Russian magpie! Don’t you know that they are white? Poor boy, what innocence!”

“But, madam,” I replied, “how should I be a Russian magpie, when I was born in the Marais in an old broken bowl?”

“Ah! the dear child! You are one of the invaders, my dear; do you fancy that you are the only one? Leave it to me, and do as I bid you; I’ll take you with me this very hour, and show you the finest things in the world.”

“Where is that, madam, if you please?”

“In my green palace, my darling; you’ll see what a life we lead there. You’ll not have been a magpie a quarter of an hour, before you’ll want to hear tell of no other thing. There are a hundred of us there; not those great village magpies, who beg alms on the high roads, but all noble and well-bred, slim, active, and no bigger than a fist. Not one of us but has neither more nor less than seven black bars and five white bars; that is an invariable rule, and we despise everybody else. You have not the black marks, it is true, but your quality of Russian will be enough to secure your admission. Our life is spent in two things, chattering and tittivating. From morning to midday we tittivate, and from midday to evening we chatter. Each of us perches on a tree, as lofty and old as possible. In the middle of the forest rises an immense oak, uninhabited alas! It was the dwelling of the late King Pie X., whither we used to go in pilgrimage, heaving mighty great sighs; but, apart from this little sadness, we pass the time wonderfully. Our wives are not prudes, any more than our husbands are jealous, but our pleasures are pure and honest, because our heart is as noble as our language is frank and joyous. Our pride has no bounds, and, if a jay or any other low fellow should chance to thrust himself in among us, we pluck him without mercy. But that does not prevent us from being the best neighbours in the world, and the sparrows, the tomtits, and the goldfinches, who live in our copses, find us always ready to help them, to feed them, and to defend them. Nowhere is there more chattering than among us, and nowhere less evil speaking. We are not without some old devotee magpies, who say their paternosters all day long, but the giddiest young gossip among us can pass, without fear of a peck, close to the severest dowager. In a word, we live on pleasure, on honour, on gossip, on glory, and on dress.”

“That is very fine indeed, madam,” I replied, “and I should certainly be ill-advised not to obey the orders of a person like you. But, before having the honour of following you, allow me, by your leave, to say a word to this good young lady here. Mademoiselle,” I continued, addressing myself to the turtle, “tell me frankly, I entreat you, do you think that I am really a Russian magpie?”

At this question, the turtle hung down her head, and turned pink, like Lolotte’s ribbons.

“Why, sir,” she said, “I don’t know if I can....”

“In Heaven’s name, speak, mademoiselle! I have not the slightest intention of offending you, quite the contrary. You both look so charming to me, that I here and now vow to offer my heart and my claw to whichever of you will accept it, the moment I know if I am a magpie or something else; for, when I look at you,” I added, speaking in a lower tone to the young lady, “I feel a something of the turtle-dove about me, which torments me strangely.”

“Why, to be sure,” said the turtle, blushing still more, “I do not know if it is the reflection of the sun striking on you through these poppies, but your plumage does seem to me to have a slight tint....”

She did not venture to say more.

“O perplexity!” I exclaimed, “how am I to know what to believe? How give my heart to one of you, when it is so cruelly torn asunder? O Socrates! how admirable, but how hard to follow, the principle thou hast given us, when thou saidst, ‛Know thyself!’”

Since the day when my unfortunate song had so enraged my father, I had never made use of my voice. At this juncture it came into my mind to employ it as a means of discerning the truth. “By Jove,” thought I, “since my father put me to the door after the first couplet, the least the second can do is to produce some effect on these ladies!” Having, then, commenced by bowing politely, as if to request their indulgence because of the rain which I had come through, I began first of all to whistle, then to warble, then to do roulades, then at last to sing at the pitch of my voice, like a Spanish muleteer in full blast.

The longer I sang, the farther and farther the little magpie made off from me with an air of surprise, which soon became stupefaction, then turned into a feeling of terror mingled with profound weariness. She described circles round about me, like a cat about a piece of scalding hot bacon which has just burned her, but which she wishes to taste again. Seeing the effect of my experiment, and wishing to carry it out to the end, the more impatience the poor Marchioness showed, the more I sang myself hoarse. She resisted my melodious efforts for five-and-twenty minutes; at last, unable to stand them any longer, she flew away noisily and returned to her palace of verdure. As for the turtle, she had been sound asleep almost from the first.

“Admirable effect of harmony!” I reflected. “O Marais! O maternal bowl! More than ever my thoughts return to you!”

At the moment when I was spreading my wings to depart, the turtle reopened her eyes.

“Adieu,” she said, “stranger, so polite and so tiresome! My name is Guruli; remember me!”

“Beauteous Guruli,” I answered, “you are good, gentle and charming; I would live and die for you. But you are rose-colour; such happiness is not meant for me!”

IV

The unfortunate effect produced by my song did not fail to sadden me. “Alas, music; alas, poesy!” I repeated on my way back to Paris, “How few hearts there are which comprehend you!”

Whilst making these reflections, I bumped my head against another bird’s who was flying in the opposite direction to me. The shock was so violent and so unexpected that we both fell down on a tree-top, which, by good luck, was there. After shaking ourselves a bit, I eyed the new comer, expecting a quarrel. I was surprised to see that he was white. To tell the truth, he had a head somewhat bigger than myself, and over his brow a sort of crest, which gave him a mock-heroic appearance. Besides that, he carried his tail well up in the air, with great magnanimity; however, he did not seem at all disposed to do battle. We addressed each other very civilly, and made our mutual excuses, after which we entered into conversation. I took the liberty of asking him his name and what country he came from.

“I am astonished,” he said to me, “that you do not know me. Are you not one of us?”

“To tell the truth, sir,” I answered, “I do not know whom I belong to. Every one asks me and says the same thing to me; it must be a wager that they have made.”

“You are joking,” he said; “your plumage becomes you too well for me not to recognize a brother. You belong unmistakably to that illustrious and venerable race which is entitled in Latin cacatua, in learned language kakatoës, and in vulgar jargon cockatoo.”

“Faith, sir, that is possible, and it would be a great honour indeed for me. But do not let that prevent you from acting as if I were not one, and have the condescension to inform me whom I have the honour of addressing.”

“I am,” responded the unknown, “the great poet Kacatogan. I have made mighty travels, sir, arid passages, and cruel peregrinations. It was not yesterday that I began to rhyme, and my Muse has had her misfortunes. I have warbled under Louis XVI., sir, I have bawled for the Republic, I have nobly sung the Empire, I have discreetly lauded the Restoration, I have even made an effort in these last times, and have submitted, not without difficulty, to the exigencies of this tasteless century. I have launched on the world piquant distichs, sublime hymns, gracious dithyrambs, pious elegies, long-haired dramas, woolly romances, powdered vaudevilles, and bald tragedies. In a word, I can flatter myself with having added to the Temple of the Muses some gallant festoons, some sombre battlements, and some ingenious arabesques. What more do you want? I have grown old. But I still rhyme vigorously, sir, and such as you see me now, I was dreaming over a poem in one canto, which would be at least six pages long, when you gave me a bump on my brow. Nevertheless, if I can help you in any way, I am entirely at your service.”

“Indeed you can, sir,” I replied, “for you find me at this moment in a serious poetical difficulty. I do not presume to say that I am a poet, still less a great poet, such as you,” I added, bowing to him, “but Nature has endowed me with a throat, which itches when I am at ease or when I am vexed. To tell you the truth, I am absolutely ignorant of the rules.”

“I have forgotten them,” said Kacatogan, “don’t worry yourself about that.”

“But an annoying thing happens to me,” I replied; “my voice produces an effect on those who hear it, almost the same as that which a certain Jean de Nivelle’s produced on.... You know what I mean?”

“I know,” said Kacatogan; “I have seen this odd effect in my own experience. The cause of it is unknown to me, but the effect is indisputable.”

“Well then, sir, you who seem to me to be the Nestor of poesy, can you suggest, I entreat you, a remedy for this painful drawback?”

“No,” said Kacatogan, “for my own part, I have never been able to find one. I was much exercised about it when I was young, because they always hissed me; but nowadays I have ceased to think about it I suspect that this repugnance arises from what the public reads by others than ourselves: that distracts its attention.”

“I am of your opinion; but you will agree, sir, that it is very hard for a well-intentioned creature to put people to flight the moment a good impulse seizes him. Would you be so kind as do me the service of listening to me, and giving me your frank opinion?”

“Most willingly,” said Kacatogan; “I am all ears.”

I at once began to sing, and I had the satisfaction of seeing that Kacatogan neither fled nor fell asleep. He stared at me fixedly, and from time to time nodded his head with an air of approval, and with a sort of murmur of commendation. But I soon saw that he was not listening to me, and was dreaming of his poem. Taking advantage of a moment when I was taking breath, he interrupted me all at once.

“I have found that rhyme after all!” he cried, smiling and wagging his head; “it is the sixty-thousand-seven-hundred-and-fourteenth that has come out of this brain of mine! And they have the audacity to say that I am ageing! I’ll go and read it to my kind friends, I’ll go and read it to them, and we’ll see what they have to say to it!”

So speaking, he took flight and disappeared, apparently having quite forgotten that he had met me.

V

Left alone and disappointed, the best thing I could do was to take advantage of what was left of the day, and fly at the full stretch of my wings towards Paris. Unfortunately I did not know my way. My journey with the pigeon had been too agreeable to leave me with any very exact recollection; so, instead of going straight on, I turned to the left at Bourget, and, overtaken by the night, was obliged to seek a resting-place in the woods of Morfontaine.

They were all going to bed when I arrived. The magpies and jays, who, as every one knows, are the worst bedfellows in the world, were squabbling on every hand. In the bushes the sparrows were chirruping and treading one upon another. At the water’s edge two herons were stalking gravely, perched on their long stilts, in the attitude of meditation, the George Dandins of the place, waiting patiently for their wives. Some enormous crows, half asleep, were settling themselves heavily on the tops of the highest trees, and were snuffling their evening prayers. Lower down, the amorous tits were still pursuing one another in the copses, whilst a dishevelled woodpecker was pushing her family from behind to make them go into the hollow of a tree. Troops of hedge-sparrows returned from the fields, dancing in the air like puffs of smoke, and swooping down upon a shrub, which they covered entirely; chaffinches, warblers, redbreasts arranged themselves lightly on detached branches, like the crystals on a chandelier. On every hand voices resounded, saying as plainly as could be: “Come, my wife! Come, my girl!—Come to me, my fair one!—This way, my sweet!—Here I am, my dear!—Good evening, my mistress!—Adieu, my friends!—Sound sleep, my children!”

What a situation for a bachelor to have to sleep in such a guesthouse! I was tempted to attach myself to some birds of my own build, and ask hospitality of them. “At night,” I reflected, “all birds are grey; and, besides, does one do any harm to people by sleeping politely beside them?”

I made my way first of all to a ditch, where the starlings were assembling. They were dressing for the night with very great care, and I noticed that the most of them had gilded wings and varnished claws; they were the dandies of the forest. They were good enough fellows, and did not honour me with any attention. But their talk was so empty, and they related their petty quarrels and their conquests with such fatuity, and made up to one another so clumsily, that it was impossible for me to stay there.

I next went to perch myself on a branch where half a dozen birds of different sorts were in a row. I modestly took the last place, at the extremity of the branch, in the hope that they would tolerate me. As ill luck would have it, my neighbour was an old dove, as dry as a rusty weather-cock. At the moment when I came near her, the few feathers which covered her bones were the object of her solicitude; she pretended to preen them, but she was too much afraid of pulling one out; she merely passed them in review to see if she had her count. Scarcely had I touched her with the tip of my wing, when she drew herself up majestically.

“What do you mean, sir?” she said to me, compressing her beak with a modesty quite British.

And, fetching me a great nudge with her elbow, she sent me down with a vigour that would have done honour to a porter.

I fell into a clump of heather, where a fat woodhen was sleeping. My own mother in her bowl did not have such an air of bliss. She was so plump, so full-blown, so well set on her triple stomach, that one would have taken her for a pie of which the crust had been eaten. I crept furtively in beside her. “She won’t wake,” I said to myself, “and in any case such a good fat mammy can’t be very cross.” No more she was. She half opened her eyes, and said to me, with a slight sigh:

“You’re bothering me, child; go away.”

At the same instant I heard some one calling me: it was some thrushes who were making signs to me from the top of a mountain-ash to come to them. “Here are some kind souls at last,” I thought. They made room for me, laughing like mad, and I slipped into their feathery group as promptly as a love-letter into a muff. But I was not long in concluding that those ladies had eaten more grapes than was wise; they could scarcely support themselves on the branches, and their ill-bred jokes, their outbursts of laughter and their decidedly free songs forced me to take my departure.

I began to despair, and I was about to go to sleep in a solitary corner, when a nightingale began to sing. Everybody at once became silent. Alas! how pure his voice was, how his very melancholy appeared sweet! So far from disturbing the slumbers of others, his harmonies seemed to lull them to sleep. No one dreamt of silencing him, no one found fault with him for singing his song at such an hour; his father did not beat him, his friends did not take flight.

“Is there no one, then, but me,” I cried, “who is forbidden to be happy? Let us depart, let us flee this cruel world! Better to seek my way amid the darkness, at the risk of being devoured by some owl, than to let myself be thus tortured by the sight of others’ happiness.

With this thought I set out again, and wandered a long time at random. With the first streak of day I descried the towers of Notre Dame. In the twinkling of an eye I had reached it, and I did not cast my eyes around long before I recognized our garden. I flew thither quicker than lightning.... Alas, it was empty!... I called in vain for my parents: no one answered me. The tree where my father used to post himself, the maternal bush, the dear bowl, all had disappeared. The axe had destroyed everything; instead of the green alley where I was born, there remained only a hundred of faggots.

VI

At first I searched for my parents in all the gardens round about, but it was wasted labour; they had without doubt taken refuge in some far-off quarter, and I should never be able to get news of them.

Overcome by a dreadful sorrow, I went to perch myself on the gutter to which my father’s anger had first exiled me. I passed days and nights there in deploring my sad existence. I had no more sleep, I scarcely ate: I was like to die of grief.

One day, when I was lamenting as usual:

“So then,” I said aloud, “I am neither a blackbird, for my father plucked me; nor a pigeon, since I fell by the way when I wanted to go to Belgium; nor a Russian magpie, since the little Marchioness stopped her ears the moment I opened my beak; nor a turtle-dove, since Guruli, even the good Guruli, snored like a monk when I was singing; nor a parrot, since Kacatogan did not deign to listen to me; nor a bird of any kind, in short, since at Morfontaine they let me sleep all by myself. And yet I have feathers on my body; here are claws and here are wings. I am no monster, witness Guruli, and even the little Marchioness, who found me quite to their taste. By what inexplicable mystery can these feathers, these wings, these claws not form a total to which a name might be given? Can I not by any chance be....”

I was about to continue my lamentations, when I was interrupted by two market-women disputing in the street.

“Why, hang me,” said one of them to the other, “if you ever manage it, I’ll make you a present of a white blackbird!”

“Merciful Heaven!” I exclaimed, “that’s my case. O Providence! I am the son of a blackbird, and I am white: I am a white blackbird!”

This discovery, it must be acknowledged, altered my ideas considerably. Instead of continuing to lament my lot, I began to puff out my chest and march proudly up and down the gutter, looking into space with a victorious air.

“It’s something,” I said to myself, “to be a white blackbird: that isn’t found in a donkey’s stride. I was very simple to distress myself at not finding my like: it is the fate of genius, it is mine! I meant to flee the world: now I mean to astonish it! Since I am this bird without a peer, of which the vulgar deny the existence, I ought, and I mean, to comport myself as such, nothing more or less than the Phœnix, and to despise the rest of the winged race. I must buy the memoirs of Alfieri and the poems of Lord Byron; that substantial pabulum will inspire me with a noble pride; without reckoning that which God has given me. Yes, I mean to add, if that is possible, to the lustre of my birth. Nature has made me rare; I will make myself mysterious. It will be a favour, a glory, to see me. And, indeed,” I added in a lower tone, “supposing I show myself frankly for money?

“But shame! What an unworthy thought! I mean to make a poem, like Kacatogan, not in one canto, but in twenty-four, like all the great men; that is not enough, there will be forty-eight, with notes and an appendix! The universe must learn of my existence. I shall not fail, in my verses, to deplore my loneliness; but I shall do it in such a way that the most fortunate will envy me. Since Heaven has refused me a mate, I will say frightful evil of those of others. I will prove that everything is too sour, except the grapes which I eat. The nightingales must look to themselves; I will demonstrate, as sure as two and two make four, that their complaints make one sick, and that their wares are worth nothing. I must go and find Charpentier. I mean to establish a strong literary position for myself at the very start. I intend to have a court about me composed not only of journalists, but of real authors and even of women writers. I’ll write a rôle for Mademoiselle Rachel, and, if she refuses to take it, I’ll publish with sound of trumpet that her talent is much inferior to that of an old provincial actress. I will go to Venice and I’ll hire on the banks of the Grand Canal, in the heart of that fairy city, the beautiful Mocenigo Palace, which costs four livres ten sous a day; there I will inspire myself with all the souvenirs which the author of ‛Lara’ must have left in it. From the depth of my solitude I will inundate the world with a deluge of alternate rhymes, modelled on the Spenserian stanza, wherewith I shall solace my great soul; I shall make all the tomtits sigh, all the turtles coo, all the woodcocks dissolve in tears, and all the old screech-owls screech. But, as regards my own person, I will prove inexorable and inaccessible to love. In vain will they press me, supplicate me to have pity on the unfortunates whom my sublime songs have led astray; to all that I will answer ‛Faugh!’ O superabundance of glory! My manuscripts will sell for their weight in gold, my books will traverse the seas; renown, fortune, will attend me everywhere; I alone shall seem indifferent to the murmurs of the crowd which will surround me. In one word, I will be a perfect white blackbird, a veritable eccentric author, fêted, petted, admired, envied, but utterly surly and insupportable.”

VII

It did not take me more than six weeks to give my first work to the world. It was, as I had promised myself, a poem in forty-eight cantos. True there were some negligences in it owing to the prodigious fecundity with which I had written it; but I reckoned that the public of to-day, accustomed as it is to the elegant literature at the foot of the newspapers, would not reproach me with them.

I had a success worthy of myself, that is to say, without its like. The subject of my work was nothing else than myself: in this respect I conformed to the height of fashion of our day. I related my past sufferings with a charming fatuity; I informed the reader of a thousand domestic details of the most piquant interest; the description of my mother’s bowl filled no less than fourteen cantos: I counted its grooves, its holes, its lumps, its chips, its splinters, its nails, its stains, its different colours, its reflections; I showed its inside, its outside, its edges, its bottom, its sides, its inclined planes and its level planes; passing to its contents, I gave studies of the tufts of grass, the straws, the dried leaves, the little scraps of wood, the pebbles, the drops of water, the remains of flies, the broken cockchafers’ legs, which were to be found there; it was a ravishing description. But do not imagine that I had it printed all in a piece; there are impertinent readers who would have skipped it. I had cleverly cut it into pieces, and worked it into the narrative in such a fashion that none of it was lost; so that at the most interesting and most dramatic moment, all of a sudden there came fifteen pages of bowl. There, in my opinion, is one of the great secrets of the art, and, as there is not the least trace of avarice about me, any one who likes may profit by it.

All Europe was in a stir at the appearance of my book; it devoured the intimate revelations which I condescended to communicate to it. How could it have been otherwise? Not only did I enumerate all the facts relative to my person, but I also gave the public a complete picture of all the moonshine that I had passed through my head since the age of two months; I had even intercalated, in the best place, an ode composed by me in the egg. At the same time, it is needless to say that I did not neglect, in passing, to discuss the great subject which is occupying the world so much nowadays, to wit, the future of the human race. This problem had struck me as interesting; in a leisure moment I had sketched a solution of it, which passed generally for satisfying.

Every day people sent me compliments in verse, letters of congratulation, and anonymous declarations of love. As for visits, I adhered rigorously to the plan which I had traced for myself; my door was shut to every one. Still, I could not debar myself from seeing two strangers who announced themselves as relations of mine. One was a blackbird from Senegal, and the other a blackbird from China.

“Ah, sir!” they said to me, embracing me like to choke me, “what a great blackbird you are! How well you have depicted, in your immortal poem, the deep-seated suffering of misunderstood genius! If we were not as unappreciated as possible already, we should become so after having read you. How we sympathize with your griefs, with your sublime contempt of the vulgar. We also, sir, we know from our own experience the secret pains which you have sung! Here are two sonnets which we have composed, such as they are, and which we beg you to accept.”

“Here also,” said the Chinese, “is some music which my wife has composed on a passage in your preface. It expresses the author’s intention most wonderfully.”

“Gentlemen,” I said to them, “so far as I can judge, you appear to me to be endowed with a great heart and an enlightened mind. But excuse me asking you a question. Whence proceeds your melancholy?”

“Why, sir,” replied the inhabitant of Senegal, “look how I am built. My plumage, it is true, is pleasant to look at, and I am clad in that handsome green colour which is seen shining on ducks; but my beak is too short and my foot too large; and see what a tail I am rigged out with! The length of my body does not make two-thirds of it. Is that not reason enough to wish oneself dead and done with?”

“And as for me, sir,” said the Chinese, “my misfortune is even more distressing. My brother’s tail sweeps the streets; but the street-boys point their finger at me because I have no tail at all.”

“Gentlemen,” I replied, “I pity you with all my soul; it is always annoying to have too much or too little of anything, no matter what it is. But permit me to tell you that in the Zoological Gardens there are several persons who resemble you, and who have stayed there a long time very peaceably, stuffed. Just as it is not enough for a woman author to cast aside all modesty in order to write a good book, no more is it enough for a blackbird to be discontented in order to have genius. I am the only one of my kind; and I grieve over the fact; perhaps I am wrong, but I am within my rights. I am white, gentlemen; become the same, and we’ll see what you’ll be able to say.”

VIII

In spite of the resolution which I had formed and the calm which I had affected, I was not happy. My isolation, though glorious, did not seem to me less painful, and I could not reflect without dread on the necessity, under which I found myself, of passing all my life in celibacy. The return of spring, in particular, caused me mortal discomfort, and I was beginning to relapse into my old melancholy, when an unforeseen circumstance decided my whole life.

It need hardly be said that my writings had crossed the Channel, and that the English made a run upon them. The English make a run upon everything, except the things they understand. One day I received a letter from London, signed by a young lady blackbird: “I have read your poem,” she said to me, “and the admiration which I felt has caused me to form the resolution of offering you my hand and my person. God has created us for each other! I am like you, I am a white young lady blackbird!...”

My surprise and my joy may be easily imagined. “A white young lady blackbird!” I said to myself. “Is it really possible? Then I am no longer alone upon the earth!” I hastened to reply to the fair unknown, and I did so in a manner which showed plainly enough how much her offer was to my mind. I pressed her to come to Paris, or to permit me to fly to her. She replied that she preferred to come herself, because her parents bored her, that she was arranging her affairs, and that I should see her very soon.

She did indeed come some days later. O joy! she was the prettiest lady blackbird in the world, and she was even whiter than myself.

“Ah, mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, “or rather madam, for I regard you from this moment as my lawful wife, is it credible that such a charming creature should have existed on the earth without fame informing me of her existence? Blessed be the misfortunes which I have experienced and the pecks which my father has given me, since Heaven reserved me a consolation so unhoped-for! Until this day I thought myself condemned to an eternal solitude, and, to speak frankly to you, it was a heavy burden to bear; but when I see you I feel within me all the qualities of a father of a family. Accept my hand without delay; let us be married English fashion, without ceremony, and go away together to Switzerland.”

“I won’t hear of that,” said the young lady blackbird; “I mean our marriage to be magnificent, and all the blackbirds in France, who are anything like well-born, to be solemnly gathered to it. People like us owe it to their own reputation not to get married like cats in the gutter. I have brought a supply of bank-notes with me. Write out your invitations, go to your tradesmen, and don’t be stingy with the refreshments.”

I conformed blindly to the white lady blackbird’s orders. Our wedding was of overwhelming magnificence; they ate ten thousand flies at it. We received the nuptial benediction from a Reverend Father Cormorant, who was archbishop in partibus. The day finished up with a superb ball; in short nothing was wanting to my happiness.

The more deeply I understood the character of my charming wife, the more my love increased. She united in her little person all advantages of soul and body. Her only fault was that she was somewhat strait-laced; but I attributed this to the influence of the English fogs in which she had lived hitherto, and I had no doubt that the climate of France would soon dissipate this slight cloud.

A thing which disquieted me more seriously was a sort of mystery, in which she sometimes wrapped herself with singular strictness, locking herself in with her lady’s maids, and so passing hours together at her toilette, as she pretended. Husbands do not much like such whims in their households. A score of times it happened that I knocked at my wife’s apartments without getting the door opened. This vexed me cruelly. One day I insisted with so much ill temper, that she found herself obliged to accede and open to me for a moment, not without complaining bitterly of my importunity. I noticed, on entering, a great bottle full of a sort of paste made with flour and Spanish whiting. I asked my wife what she did with that concoction, and she replied that it was a soothing application for some chilblains that she had.

This soothing application seemed to me just a little suspicious; but what distrust could be excited in me by a person so gentle and discreet, who had surrendered herself to me with such enthusiasm and such perfect sincerity? I did not know at first that my well-beloved was a woman of the pen; she made the avowal in course of time, and she even went so far as to show me the manuscript of a novel in which she had imitated at one and the same time Walter Scott and Scarron. I leave you to imagine the agreeable surprise which such a discovery caused me. Not only did I see myself the possessor of an incomparable beauty, but I also acquired the certainty that the intelligence of my companion was in every respect worthy of my genius. From that moment we worked together. While I composed my poems, she blotted reams of paper. I recited my verses to her aloud, which did not in the least hinder her from writing all the time. She laid her novels with a facility almost equal to my own, always choosing the most dramatic subjects, parricides, rapes, murders, and even knaveries, always taking care to attack the Government by the way and to preach the emancipation of women blackbirds. In a word, no task was too great for her mind, no daring too much for her modesty; she never once had to strike out a line or to form a plan before setting to work. She was the type of the literary woman blackbird.

One day when she was applying herself to her work with unaccustomed ardour, I noticed that she was sweating great drops, and I was astonished to see at the same time that she had a great black stain on her back.

“Why, good gracious, I said to her, “whatever is that! Are you unwell?”

She seemed rather frightened, and even put out at first; but her great experience of the world soon helped her to regain the admirable command which she always exercised over herself. She told me that it was a spot of ink, and that she was very liable to it in her moments of inspiration.

“Can it be that my wife is going off colour?” I asked myself in a whisper. This thought prevented me from sleeping. The bottle of paste came to my mind. “O Heaven!” I exclaimed, “What a suspicion! Can this celestial creature be nothing but a painting, a touch of whitewash? Can she have varnished herself to impose upon me?... When I thought I was pressing to my heart the sister of my soul, the privileged being created for me alone, can it be that I wedded nothing but flour?”

Haunted by this horrible doubt, I formed a plan for delivering myself from it. I made the purchase of a barometer, and waited eagerly for it to be a wet day. I meant to take my wife to the country, to choose a doubtful Sunday, and try the experiment of a drenching. But we were in the middle of July; it was frightfully fine weather.

The semblance of happiness and the habit of writing had stimulated my sensibility exceedingly. Artless as I was, it sometimes happened, when I was at work, that sentiment was stronger than thought, and I began to weep whilst waiting for a rhyme. My wife loved those rare occasions immensely: any masculine weakness charms feminine pride. One night when I was polishing an erasure, according to Boileau’s precept, it so happened that I opened my heart.

“O thou!” I said to my dear lady blackbird, “thou, my only and best beloved! Thou without whom my life is a dream, thou whose look, whose smile metamorphoses the universe for me, life of my heart, knowest thou how much I love thee? A little study and attention would easily enable me to find words to put into verse a commonplace idea, already worn threadbare by other poets; but where will I ever find them to express that with which thy beauty inspires me? Could the memory of my past pains, even, furnish me with a word to describe to thee my present happiness? Before thou camest to me, my isolation was that of an orphan in exile; to-day it is that of a king. In this feeble body, of which I have the form until death make of it a ruin, in this fevered little brain, where an unavailing thought ferments, dost thou know, my angel, dost thou comprehend, my fair one, that there can be nothing but what is thine? Hear what little my brain can express, and understand how much greater is my love! O that my genius were a pearl, and that thou wert Cleopatra!”

Whilst raving thus, I shed tears on my wife, and she changed colour visibly. At each tear that dropped from my eyes, appeared a feather, not even black, but of the most faded russet (I do believe she had already bleached herself elsewhere). After some minutes of tender outpouring, I found myself in presence of a bird stripped of paste and flour, exactly like the most common and everyday blackbirds.

What could I do or say? what measures could I take? Reproaches were useless. No doubt I was fully entitled to consider the matter redhibitory and have my marriage declared null; but how dare to publish my shame? Had I not misfortune enough already? I took my courage in my claws, I resolved to forsake the world, to abandon my literary career, to flee into a desert, if that were possible, to shun for ever the sight of a living creature, and to seek, like Alceste,

IX

Thereupon I flew away, always weeping; and the wind, which is the Fate of birds, bore me to a branch in Morfontaine. This time they were all in bed.—” What a marriage!” I said to myself, “What a business! No doubt it was with a good intention that the poor child made herself white; but I am none the less to be pitied, and she is none the less russet.”

The nightingale was singing again. Alone, in the bosom of the night, he was enjoying whole-heartedly his divine gift, which makes him so superior to the poets, and was uttering his thought freely to the silence that surrounded him. I could not resist the temptation of going up to him and addressing him.

“How happy you are!” I said to him. “Not only do you sing as much as you wish, and very well, too, and all the world listens to you; but you have a wife and children, your nest, your friends, a good pillow of moss, full moon, and no newspapers. Rubini and Rossini are nothing compared to you: you are as good as the one, and you anticipate the other. I too have sung, sir, and it was pitiable. I have drawn up words in serried rows like so many Prussian soldiers, I have strung stale commonplaces together, while you were in the wood. Is your secret to be discovered?”

“Yes,” the nightingale replied to me, “but it is not what you imagine. My wife bores me, I do not love her at all; I am in love with the rose; Sadi the Persian has mentioned it. I sing myself hoarse for her all night long, but she sleeps and does not hear me. Her chalice is shut at the present moment: she is nursing an old beetle in it—and to-morrow morning, when I reach my bed worn out with suffering and fatigue, then she will spread herself out to let a bee devour her heart!”