Thus he grew accustomed to see me daily without any uneasiness, as an inoffensive, pacific being, with little of movement or noise about me. The fire in the grate, and near the fire this peaceable reader, were, during the absences of the preferred individual, in the still and almost solitary hours, his objects of contemplation.
I ventured yesterday, being alone, to approach him, to speak to him as I do to the robin, and he did not grow agitated, he did not appear disturbed; he listened quietly, with an eye full of softness. I saw that peace was concluded, and that I was accepted.
This morning I have with my own hand placed the poppy seed in the cage, and he is not the least alarmed. You will say: "Who gives is welcome." But I assert that our treaty was signed yesterday, before I had given him anything, and was perfectly disinterested.
See, then, in less than a month, the most nervous of artists, the most timid and mistrustful of beings, grows reconciled with the human species.
A curious proof of the natural union, of the pre-existent alliance which prevails between us and these creatures of instinct, which we call inferior.
This alliance, this eternal fact, which our brutality and our ferocious intelligences have not yet been able to rend asunder, to which these poor little ones so readily return, to which we shall ourselves return, when we shall be truly men, is exactly the conclusion this book has aimed at, and which I was about to write, when the nightingale entered, and the father with the nightingale.
The bird himself has been, in that facile amnesty which he has granted to us, his tyrants, my living conclusion.
Those travellers who have been the first to penetrate into lands hitherto untrodden by man, unanimously report that all animals, mammals, amphibians, birds, do not shun them, but, on the contrary, rather approach to regard them with an air of benevolent curiosity, to which they have responded with musket-shots.