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.