“Merciful Heaven!” I exclaimed, “that’s my case. O Providence! I am the son of a blackbird, and I am white: I am a white blackbird!”
This discovery, it must be acknowledged, altered my ideas considerably. Instead of continuing to lament my lot, I began to puff out my chest and march proudly up and down the gutter, looking into space with a victorious air.
“It’s something,” I said to myself, “to be a white blackbird: that isn’t found in a donkey’s stride. I was very simple to distress myself at not finding my like: it is the fate of genius, it is mine! I meant to flee the world: now I mean to astonish it! Since I am this bird without a peer, of which the vulgar deny the existence, I ought, and I mean, to comport myself as such, nothing more or less than the Phœnix, and to despise the rest of the winged race. I must buy the memoirs of Alfieri and the poems of Lord Byron; that substantial pabulum will inspire me with a noble pride; without reckoning that which God has given me. Yes, I mean to add, if that is possible, to the lustre of my birth. Nature has made me rare; I will make myself mysterious. It will be a favour, a glory, to see me. And, indeed,” I added in a lower tone, “supposing I show myself frankly for money?
“But shame! What an unworthy thought! I mean to make a poem, like Kacatogan, not in one canto, but in twenty-four, like all the great men; that is not enough, there will be forty-eight, with notes and an appendix! The universe must learn of my existence. I shall not fail, in my verses, to deplore my loneliness; but I shall do it in such a way that the most fortunate will envy me. Since Heaven has refused me a mate, I will say frightful evil of those of others. I will prove that everything is too sour, except the grapes which I eat. The nightingales must look to themselves; I will demonstrate, as sure as two and two make four, that their complaints make one sick, and that their wares are worth nothing. I must go and find Charpentier. I mean to establish a strong literary position for myself at the very start. I intend to have a court about me composed not only of journalists, but of real authors and even of women writers. I’ll write a rôle for Mademoiselle Rachel, and, if she refuses to take it, I’ll publish with sound of trumpet that her talent is much inferior to that of an old provincial actress. I will go to Venice and I’ll hire on the banks of the Grand Canal, in the heart of that fairy city, the beautiful Mocenigo Palace, which costs four livres ten sous a day; there I will inspire myself with all the souvenirs which the author of ‛Lara’ must have left in it. From the depth of my solitude I will inundate the world with a deluge of alternate rhymes, modelled on the Spenserian stanza, wherewith I shall solace my great soul; I shall make all the tomtits sigh, all the turtles coo, all the woodcocks dissolve in tears, and all the old screech-owls screech. But, as regards my own person, I will prove inexorable and inaccessible to love. In vain will they press me, supplicate me to have pity on the unfortunates whom my sublime songs have led astray; to all that I will answer ‛Faugh!’ O superabundance of glory! My manuscripts will sell for their weight in gold, my books will traverse the seas; renown, fortune, will attend me everywhere; I alone shall seem indifferent to the murmurs of the crowd which will surround me. In one word, I will be a perfect white blackbird, a veritable eccentric author, fêted, petted, admired, envied, but utterly surly and insupportable.”
VII
It did not take me more than six weeks to give my first work to the world. It was, as I had promised myself, a poem in forty-eight cantos. True there were some negligences in it owing to the prodigious fecundity with which I had written it; but I reckoned that the public of to-day, accustomed as it is to the elegant literature at the foot of the newspapers, would not reproach me with them.
I had a success worthy of myself, that is to say, without its like. The subject of my work was nothing else than myself: in this respect I conformed to the height of fashion of our day. I related my past sufferings with a charming fatuity; I informed the reader of a thousand domestic details of the most piquant interest; the description of my mother’s bowl filled no less than fourteen cantos: I counted its grooves, its holes, its lumps, its chips, its splinters, its nails, its stains, its different colours, its reflections; I showed its inside, its outside, its edges, its bottom, its sides, its inclined planes and its level planes; passing to its contents, I gave studies of the tufts of grass, the straws, the dried leaves, the little scraps of wood, the pebbles, the drops of water, the remains of flies, the broken cockchafers’ legs, which were to be found there; it was a ravishing description. But do not imagine that I had it printed all in a piece; there are impertinent readers who would have skipped it. I had cleverly cut it into pieces, and worked it into the narrative in such a fashion that none of it was lost; so that at the most interesting and most dramatic moment, all of a sudden there came fifteen pages of bowl. There, in my opinion, is one of the great secrets of the art, and, as there is not the least trace of avarice about me, any one who likes may profit by it.
All Europe was in a stir at the appearance of my book; it devoured the intimate revelations which I condescended to communicate to it. How could it have been otherwise? Not only did I enumerate all the facts relative to my person, but I also gave the public a complete picture of all the moonshine that I had passed through my head since the age of two months; I had even intercalated, in the best place, an ode composed by me in the egg. At the same time, it is needless to say that I did not neglect, in passing, to discuss the great subject which is occupying the world so much nowadays, to wit, the future of the human race. This problem had struck me as interesting; in a leisure moment I had sketched a solution of it, which passed generally for satisfying.
Every day people sent me compliments in verse, letters of congratulation, and anonymous declarations of love. As for visits, I adhered rigorously to the plan which I had traced for myself; my door was shut to every one. Still, I could not debar myself from seeing two strangers who announced themselves as relations of mine. One was a blackbird from Senegal, and the other a blackbird from China.
“Ah, sir!” they said to me, embracing me like to choke me, “what a great blackbird you are! How well you have depicted, in your immortal poem, the deep-seated suffering of misunderstood genius! If we were not as unappreciated as possible already, we should become so after having read you. How we sympathize with your griefs, with your sublime contempt of the vulgar. We also, sir, we know from our own experience the secret pains which you have sung! Here are two sonnets which we have composed, such as they are, and which we beg you to accept.”