I do not know how long my faint lasted. When I recovered consciousness, the first thing that I remembered was the carrier-pigeon’s last words; “You’re only a blackbird,” he had told me.—” Oh my dear parents,” I thought, “you were wrong then! I will return to you; you will recognize me as your true and lawful child, and you will restore me my place in that dear little heap of leaves which is below my mother’s bowl.”
I made an effort to rise; but the fatigue of my journey and the pain which I felt from my fall paralysed all my limbs. Scarcely had I stood up on my feet, when the faintness seized me once more and I fell again on my side.
The frightful thought of death was already presenting itself to my mind, when, across the cornflowers and poppies, I saw two charming persons coming towards me on tiptoe. One was a little magpie, very neatly marked and extremely coquettish, and the other a rose-coloured turtle-dove. The turtle halted some paces from me, with an intense air of modesty and of compassion for my misfortune; but the magpie came up to me hopping in the most graceful manner in the world.
“Eh, dear me, poor child, what are you doing there?” she asked me in a playful and silvery voice.
“Alas! my Lady Marchioness,” I answered (for she must have been that at least), “I am a poor devil of a traveller whom his postilion has dropped by the roadside, and I am in a fair way of dying of hunger.”
“Holy Virgin! Do you tell me so!” she responded.
And she at once began to flit here and there upon the bushes which surrounded us, coming and going from one side to the other, bringing me a quantity of berries and fruits, of which she made a little heap beside me, continuing her questions all the time.
“But who are you? And where do you come from? What an incredible adventure yours is! And where are you going? Fancy travelling alone, so young, for you are only coming out of your first moult! What do your parents do? Where do they come from? How did they come to let you away in that state? Why, it’s enough to make one’s feathers stand on end!”
While she was talking, I had raised myself a little on one wing, and I ate with a good appetite. The turtle remained motionless, always looking at me with an air of pity. Meanwhile she noticed that I was looking about with an exhausted air, and she understood that I was thirsty. A drop from the rain which had fallen during the night was left on a scrap of pimpernel; she timidly gathered this drop in her beak and brought it to me quite fresh. Certainly, if I had not been so ill, such a reserved person would never have ventured on such a proceeding.
I did not yet know what love was, but my heart beat violently. Divided between two varying emotions, I was possessed by an inexplicable pleasure. My table-maid was so gay, my cup-bearer so effusive and gentle, that I could have wished to go on breakfasting thus to all eternity. Unfortunately everything has an end, even a convalescent’s appetite. The repast finished and my strength restored, I satisfied the little magpie’s curiosity and related my misfortunes to her with as much sincerity as I had told them the evening before to the pigeon. The magpie listened to me with more attention than seemed natural to her, and the turtle gave me some charming tokens of her profound sensibility. But when I came to touch on the prime cause of my troubles, that is to say my ignorance as to what I was: