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.