M. de Peyrehorade died some months after his son. By his will he bequeathed to me his manuscripts, which I shall perhaps publish some day. I have found no trace whatever among them of the paper dealing with the inscriptions on the Venus.

P.S.—My friend M. de P. has just written to me from Perpignan that the statue no longer exists. After her husband’s death, Madame de Peyrehorade’s first care was to have it melted down and made into a bell, and in this new form it is doing duty at the church of Ille. But, adds M. de P., it would appear that ill luck pursues the owners of that bronze. Since this bell began to ring at Ille the vines have twice been frosted.

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.