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.”