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.”