"Here also is some music," added the Chinese, "that my wife composed on a passage in your preface. It is marvelous in its illustration of the meaning of the author."
"Gentlemen," I said to them, "so far as I can judge, you appear to me to be endowed with great depth of feeling and great brilliancy of intellect; but pardon me for asking you a question. Why are you so sad?"
"Eh, monsieur!" replied the traveler from Senegal, "just look at me and see how I am constructed. My plumage is pleasing to the eye, it is true, and I am dressed in that beautiful shade of green that shines so lustrously on the neck of the duck, but my beak is too small and my foot is too big, and just look at the ridiculous tail that I am tricked out with! It is a great deal longer than my whole body. Is it not enough to tempt one to use profane language?"
"And look at me, too," said the'Chinaman; "my pitiable state is even worse than his. My confrère sweeps the streets with his tail, but at me the little street urchins point their fingers because I have no tail at all."
"Gentlemen," I rejoined, "I pity you from the bottom of my heart; it is always inconvenient to have too much or too little of anything, be it what it may. Allow me to suggest to you, however, that there are several persons very like you in the Jardin des Plantes, where they have been living very quietly for some time past, in a stuffed condition. Even as it does not suffice a woman of letters to cast her modesty to the winds in order to write a good book, so no blackbird can command genius merely by manifesting discontent. I am the only one of my kind, and I am sorry for it; I may be wrong, but I can't help it. I am white, gentlemen; do you become white, too, and then we'll see what you have to say."
VIII
Notwithstanding all my resolutions and my affected calmness, I was not happy. My isolation seemed none the less hard to bear for being glorious, and I could never think without a shudder of the cheerless prospect that lay before me of living all my life unmated. The return of spring, in particular, brought with it a mortal feeling of disquietude, and I was beginning to fall back into my old morbid state of mind, when an unforeseen circumstance occurred that shaped my future for me.
It is unnecessary here to state that my writings had crossed the Channel, and that the English were quarreling among themselves for copies, The English quarrel over everything except that which is comprehensible to them. One day I received a letter from London, from a young hen-blackbird.
"I have read your poem," she said, "and the admiration that it inspired in me has induced me to make you the offer of my hand and person. God made us for each other! I am like you; I am a white blackbird!"
My surprise and delight may be readily imagined. "A white hen-blackbird!" I said to myself; "can it be possible? So, then, I am no longer alone upon the earth!" I made haste to answer the fair unknown, and I did it in such a strain as showed how acceptable her proposition was to me. I urged her to come to Paris, or else permit me to fly to her. She responded that she preferred to come to me, because her parents were plaguing her to death, that she was putting her affairs in order, and would be with me almost immediately.
She arrived, in fact, a few days after her letter. Oh, joy! she was the prettiest little blackbird in the world, and was even whiter than I was.
"Ah! mademoiselle," I cried, "or madame, rather for from this moment I look upon you as my lawful wedded wife, is it possible that so charming a creature can have been a dweller upon earth and the tongue of fame have never told me of her existence? Blessed be the ills that I have endured and the peckings that my father gave me with his beak, since kind Heaven has had in store for me a compensation so unhoped-for! Until this day, I believed myself condemned to eternal solitude, and to speak you frankly, the burden was a heavy one to bear, but now that I look on you, I feel within me all the qualities requisite for a good father and husband. Let us not delay; accept my hand; we will be married in English style, without ceremony, and start at once for Switzerland."
"I don't look at the matter in that light," replied the young lady blackbird. "I mean that our espousals shall be celebrated in magnificent style and that all the blackbirds in France that have a drop of good blood in their veins shall be present in solemn conclave. People of our quality owe it to their station not to marry like a couple of cats in a coal-hole. I have a store of banknotes with me; get out your invitations, go to your tradesmen, and see that you don't skimp the refreshments."
I followed implicitly the instructions of my white Merlette. Our wedding-feast was on a scale of unparalleled luxury; ten thousand flies were consumed at it. We received the nuptial benediction at the hands of a reverend Cormorant father, who was archbishop in partibus. The day was brought to an end by a splendid ball; in a word, there was nothing wanting to complete my felicity.
My love for my charming wife increased as I became better acquainted with her character and disposition; in her small person all accomplishments of mind and body were united. The only blemish was that she was a little prudish in her notions, but I attributed that to the influence of the English fog in which she had been living until then, and I doubted not but that this small cloud would quickly melt away in the genial atmosphere of France.
A matter that was cause to me of more serious uneasiness was a sort of mystery in which she would at times enshroud herself with strange inflexibility, shutting herself away under lock and key with her maids, and thus passing, as she pretended, whole hours in making her toilet. Husbands are not generally inclined to look with favor upon whims of this description in their family. Twenty times it had happened that I had gone to my wife's apartment and knocked and she had not opened the door. It tried my patience cruelly. One day, however, I was so persistent and in such a horribly bad temper that she was obliged to yield and unlock the door rather hastily, at the same time reproaching me for my importunity. As I entered my eyes alighted on a great bottle filled with a kind of paste made of flour and Spanish white. I asked my wife what use she put that ointment to. She replied that it was a lenitive for frost-bites that she was troubled with.
It struck me at the time that there was something more about that lenitive than she chose to tell, but how could I distrust such a sweet, well-behaved creature, who had bestowed her hand on me with such gladness and perfect candor? I had been ignorant at first that my wife was a literary character, but she admitted it after a while, and even went so far as to show me the manuscript of a novel for which she had taken Walter Scott and Scarron as her models. It may be imagined how pleased I was by such an agreeable surprise. Not only did I behold myself possessed of a beauty beyond compare, but I was now also fully assured that my companion's intellect was in all respects worthy of my genius. From that time forth we worked together. While I was composing my poems she would bescribble reams of paper. I used to read my poetry aloud to her, and that did not in the least disturb her or prevent her from going on with her writing. She hatched out her romances with a facility that was almost equal to my own, always selecting the most dramatic subjects, such as parricides, rapes, murders, and even small rascalities, and always taking pains to give the government a slap when she could and inculcate the emancipation of female blackbirds. In a word, there was no obstacle of sufficient magnitude to daunt her intelligence, and she allowed no scruples of modesty to keep her from saying a brilliant thing; she never erased a line and never sat down to her work with a plot arranged beforehand. She was the perfect type of the feminine literary blackbird.
She was working away one day with rather more than her usual industry, when I noticed that she was perspiring violently, and at the same time I was surprised to see that she had a great black spot right in the middle of her back.
"Good gracious!" I said, "what ails you? Are you ill?"
She seemed a little frightened at first, and I even thought that there was a guilty expression on her face, but her habit of familiarity with the world quickly enabled her to regain the wonderful control that she always exercised