It was that great assembly of the fairies, to proceed with the
repartition of gifts among the new-born who had arrived at life within
the last twenty-four hours.
All these antique and capricious sisters of destiny, all these bizarre
mothers of sadness and of joy, were most diversified: some had a
somber, crabbed air; others were wanton, mischievous; some, young, who
had always been young; others old, who had always been old.
All the fathers who believed in fairies had come, each bearing his
new-born in his arms.
Gifts, Faculties, Good Fortunes, Invincible Circumstances, were
gathered at the side of the tribunal, as prizes on the platform for
distribution. What was peculiar here was that the gifts were not the
reward of an effort, but, quite the contrary, a grace accorded him who
had not yet lived, a grace with power to determine his destiny and
become as well the source of his misfortune as of his good.
The poor fairies were kept very busy; for the crowd of solicitors
was great, and the intermediate world, placed between man and God,
is subject, like man, to the terrible law of Time and his endless
offspring, Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds.
In truth, they were as bewildered as ministers on an audience day,
or as guards at the Mont-de-Piété when a national holiday authorizes
gratuitous liberations. I really think that from time to time they
looked at the hands of the clock with as much impatience as human
judges, who, sitting since morn, cannot help dreaming of dinner, of the
family, and of their cherished slippers. If, in supernatural justice,
there is a little of haste and of luck, we should not be surprised
sometimes to find the same in human justice. We ourselves, in that
case, would be unjust judges.
So some shams were enacted that day which might be thought bizarre,
if prudence, rather than caprice, were the distinctive, eternal
characteristic of the fairies.
For instance, the power of magnetically attracting fortune was awarded
the sole heir of a very wealthy family, who, endowed with no feeling
of charity, no more than with lust for the most visible goods of life,
must later on find himself prodigiously embarrassed by his millions.
Thus, love of the beautiful and poetic power were given to the son of
a gloomy knave, a quarry-man by trade, who could in no way develop the
faculties or satisfy the needs of his deplorable offspring.
All the fairies rose, thinking their task was through; for there
remained no gift, no bounty, to hurl at all that human fry, when one
fine fellow, a poor little tradesman, I think, rose, and grasping by
her robe of multi-colored vapors the Fairy nearest at hand, cried:
"Oh, Madam! You are forgetting us! There is still my little one!
I don't want to have come for nothing!" The fairy could have been
embarrassed, for there no longer was a thing. However, she recalled
in time a law, well known, though rarely applied, in the supernatural
world, inhabited by those impalpable deities, friends, of man and
often constrained to mold themselves to his passions, such as Fairies,
Gnomes, Salamanders, Sylphides, Sylphs, Nixies, Watersprites and
Undines--I mean the law which grants a Fairy, in a case similar to
this, namely, in case of the exhausting of the prizes, power to give
one more, supplementary and exceptional, provided always that she has
sufficient imagination to create it at once.
Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-possession worthy
of her rank: "I give to your son.... I give him ... _the gift of
pleasing!_"
"Pleasing? How? Pleasing? Why?" obstinately asked the little
shopkeeper, who was doubtless one of those logicians so commonly met,
incapable of rising to the logic of the Absurd.
"Because! Because!" replied the incensed Fairy, turning her back on
him; and, rejoining the train of her companions, she said to them:
"What do you think of this little vainglorious Frenchman, who wants to
know everything, and who, having secured for his son the best of gifts,
dares still to question and to dispute the indisputable?"