“Here also,” said the Chinese, “is some music which my wife has composed on a passage in your preface. It expresses the author’s intention most wonderfully.”
“Gentlemen,” I said to them, “so far as I can judge, you appear to me to be endowed with a great heart and an enlightened mind. But excuse me asking you a question. Whence proceeds your melancholy?”
“Why, sir,” replied the inhabitant of Senegal, “look how I am built. My plumage, it is true, is pleasant to look at, and I am clad in that handsome green colour which is seen shining on ducks; but my beak is too short and my foot too large; and see what a tail I am rigged out with! The length of my body does not make two-thirds of it. Is that not reason enough to wish oneself dead and done with?”
“And as for me, sir,” said the Chinese, “my misfortune is even more distressing. My brother’s tail sweeps the streets; but the street-boys point their finger at me because I have no tail at all.”
“Gentlemen,” I replied, “I pity you with all my soul; it is always annoying to have too much or too little of anything, no matter what it is. But permit me to tell you that in the Zoological Gardens there are several persons who resemble you, and who have stayed there a long time very peaceably, stuffed. Just as it is not enough for a woman author to cast aside all modesty in order to write a good book, no more is it enough for a blackbird to be discontented in order to have genius. I am the only one of my kind; and I grieve over the fact; perhaps I am wrong, but I am within my rights. I am white, gentlemen; become the same, and we’ll see what you’ll be able to say.”
VIII
In spite of the resolution which I had formed and the calm which I had affected, I was not happy. My isolation, though glorious, did not seem to me less painful, and I could not reflect without dread on the necessity, under which I found myself, of passing all my life in celibacy. The return of spring, in particular, caused me mortal discomfort, and I was beginning to relapse into my old melancholy, when an unforeseen circumstance decided my whole life.
It need hardly be said that my writings had crossed the Channel, and that the English made a run upon them. The English make a run upon everything, except the things they understand. One day I received a letter from London, signed by a young lady blackbird: “I have read your poem,” she said to me, “and the admiration which I felt has caused me to form the resolution of offering you my hand and my person. God has created us for each other! I am like you, I am a white young lady blackbird!...”
My surprise and my joy may be easily imagined. “A white young lady blackbird!” I said to myself. “Is it really possible? Then I am no longer alone upon the earth!” I hastened to reply to the fair unknown, and I did so in a manner which showed plainly enough how much her offer was to my mind. I pressed her to come to Paris, or to permit me to fly to her. She replied that she preferred to come herself, because her parents bored her, that she was arranging her affairs, and that I should see her very soon.
She did indeed come some days later. O joy! she was the prettiest lady blackbird in the world, and she was even whiter than myself.