I began to despair, and I was about to go to sleep in a solitary corner, when a nightingale began to sing. Everybody at once became silent. Alas! how pure his voice was, how his very melancholy appeared sweet! So far from disturbing the slumbers of others, his harmonies seemed to lull them to sleep. No one dreamt of silencing him, no one found fault with him for singing his song at such an hour; his father did not beat him, his friends did not take flight.
“Is there no one, then, but me,” I cried, “who is forbidden to be happy? Let us depart, let us flee this cruel world! Better to seek my way amid the darkness, at the risk of being devoured by some owl, than to let myself be thus tortured by the sight of others’ happiness.
With this thought I set out again, and wandered a long time at random. With the first streak of day I descried the towers of Notre Dame. In the twinkling of an eye I had reached it, and I did not cast my eyes around long before I recognized our garden. I flew thither quicker than lightning.... Alas, it was empty!... I called in vain for my parents: no one answered me. The tree where my father used to post himself, the maternal bush, the dear bowl, all had disappeared. The axe had destroyed everything; instead of the green alley where I was born, there remained only a hundred of faggots.
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!”