a small ascent, crowned with a garland of pines. These fine trees,
incessantly beaten by the sea-breezes, and shaken by the adverse winds
which follow the currents of the great river and its two tributaries,
groaned in the struggle, and day and night filled the profound silence
of the place with a melancholy harmony. At times, you might have
thought yourself by the sea; they so imitated the noise of the waves,
of the ebbing and flowing tide.
By degrees, as the season became a little drier, this sojourn exhibited
itself to me in its real character; serious, indeed, but more varied
than one would have supposed at the first glance, and beautiful with
a touching beauty which went home to the soul. Austere, as became the
gate of Brittany, it had all the luxuriant verdure of the Vendean coast.
I could have thought, when I saw the pomegranates blooming in the
open air, robust and loaded with flowers, that I was in the south.
The magnolia, no dwarf, as we see it elsewhere, but splendid and
magnificent, and full-grown, like a great tree, perfumed all my garden
with its huge white blossoms, which contain in their thick chalices an
abundance of I know not what kind of oil, an oil sweet and penetrating,
whose odour follows you everywhere; you are enveloped in it.
We found ourselves this time in possession of a true garden, a large
establishment, a thousand domestic occupations with which we had
previously dispensed. A wild Breton girl rendered help only in the
coarser tasks. Save one weekly journey to the town, we were very
lonely, but in an extremely busy solitude; rising very early in the
morning, at the first awakening of the birds, and even before the day.
It is true that we retired to rest at a good hour, and almost at the
same time as the birds.
This profusion of fruits, vegetables, and plants of every kind, enabled
us to keep numerous domestic animals: only the difficulty was, that
nourishing them, knowing each of them, and well-known by them, we
could not make up our minds to eat them. We planted, and here we met
with quite a distinct kind of inconvenience--our plantations were
nearly always devoured beforehand.
This earth, fertile in vegetables, was equally or more prolific of
destructive animals; enormous capacious snails, devouring insects.
In the morning we collected a great tubful of snails. The next day
you would never have thought so. There still seemed to be the full
complement.
[Illustration]
Our hens did their best. But how much more effective would have been
the skilful and prudent stork, the admirable scavenger of Holland and
all marshy districts, which some Western lands ought at all costs to
adopt. Everybody knows the affectionate respect in which this excellent
bird is held by the Dutch. In their markets you may see him standing
peacefully on one foot, dreaming in the midst of the crowd, and feeling
as safe as in the heart of the deepest deserts. It is a fantastic but
well-assured fact, that the Dutch peasant who has had the misfortune to
wound his stork and to break his leg, provides him with one of wood.
To return: our residence near Nantes would have possessed an infinite
charm for a less absorbed mind. This beautiful spot, this great
liberty of work, this solitude, so sweet in such society, formed a
rare harmony, such as one but seldom meets with in life. Its sweetness
contrasted strongly with the thoughts of the present, with the gloomy
past which then occupied my pen. I was writing of '93. Its heroic
primeval history enveloped, possessed, shall I say consumed, me. All
the elements of happiness which surrounded me, which I sacrificed to
work, adjourning them for a time that, according to all appearances,
might never be mine, I regretted daily, and incessantly cast back upon
them a look of sorrow. It was a daily battle of affection and nature,
against the sombre thoughts of the human world.
[Illustration]
That battle for me will be always a powerful _souvenir_. The scene has
remained sacred in my thought. Elsewhere it no longer exists. The house
is destroyed--another built on its site. And it is for this reason
that I have dallied here a little. My cedar, however, has survived; a
notable thing, for architects now-a-days hate trees.
When, however, I drew near the end of my task, some glimpses of light
enlivened the wild darkness. My sorrows were less keen, when I felt
sure that I should thenceforth enjoy this memorial of a cruel but
fertile experience. Once more I began to hear the voices of solitude,
and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but slowly and with
unaccustomed ear, like one who shall have been some time dead, and have
returned from the other world.
In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable History, I
had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth, with a heart less
tender than ardent. At a later period, when residing in the suburb of
Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love. I watched with interest
my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so sensible every evening of the
joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly grateful. How much more at
Nantes, surrounded by a nature ever powerful and prolific, seeing the
herbage shoot upward hour after hour, and all animal life multiplying
around me, ought I not, I too, to expand and revive with this new
sentiment!
If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and broken
the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book which we
frequently read in the evening, the "Birds of France," by Toussenel, a
charming and felicitous transition from the thought of country to that
of nature.
[Illustration]
So long as France exists, his Lark and his Redbreast, his Bullfinch,
his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there
were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover
all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the Gallic
sense, the French _esprit_, the very soul of our fatherland.
The formulæ of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its
forced comparisons (which sometimes make us think of those too
_spirituel_ animals of Granville), do not prevent the French genius,
gay, good, serene, and courageous, young as an April sun, from
illuminating the entire book. It possesses numerous passages enlivened
with the joyousness, the elasticity, the gushing song of the lark in
the first day of spring.
Add a thing of great beauty, which does not spring from youth. The
author, a child of the Meuse and of a land of hunters, himself in
his early years an ardent and impassioned sportsman, appears altered
in character by his book. He wavers visibly between the first habits
of slaughterous youth, and his new sentiment, his tenderness for
those pathetic lives which he unveils--for these souls, these beings
recognized by his soul. I dare to say that thenceforth he will no more
hunt without remorse. Father and second creator of this world of love
and innocence, he will find interposed between them and him a barrier
of compassion. And what barrier? His own work, the book in which he
gives them life.
I had scarcely begun my book, when it became necessary for me to
leave Nantes. I, too, was ill. The dampness of the climate, the hard
continuous labour, and still more keenly, without doubt, the conflict
of my thoughts, seemed to have struck home to that vital nerve of which
nothing had ever before taken hold. The road which our swallows tracked
for us, we followed; we proceeded southward. We fixed our transitory
nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from Genoa.
An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which, in
the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of an
equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense with
fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard and the
invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however? These
oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage with
the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony. Animated life
was very rare. There were few or no small birds; no sea birds. The
fish, limited in numbers, did not fill with life those translucent
waters. My glance pierced them to a great depth, and saw nothing but
solitude, and the white and black rocks which form the bed of that gulf
of marble.
The littoral, exceedingly narrow, is nothing but a small cornice, an
extremely confined border, a mere eyebrow (_sourcil_) of the mountains,
as the Latins would have said. To ascend the ladder and overlook the
gulf is, even for the most robust, a violent gymnastic effort. My sole
promenade was a little quay, or rather a rugged circular road, which
wound, with a breadth of about three feet, between ancient garden
walls, rocks, and precipices.
[Illustration]
Deep was the silence, sparkling the sea, but all lonesome and
monotonous, except for the passage of a few distant barks. Work was
prohibited to me; for the first time for thirty years, I was separated
from my pen, and had escaped from that paper and ink existence in
which I had previously lived. This pause, which I thought so barren,
in reality proved to me very fertile. I watched, I observed. Unknown
voices awoke within me.
At some distance from Genoa, and the excellent friends whom we knew
there, our only society was the small people of the lizards, which run
over the rocks, played, and slumbered in the sun. Charming, innocent
animals, which every noon, when we dined, and the quay was absolutely
deserted, amused me with their vivacious and graceful evolutions. At
the outset my presence had appeared to disquiet them; but a week had
not passed before all, even the youngest, knew me, and knew they had
nothing to fear from the peaceful dreamer.
Such the animal, and such the man. The abstemious life of my lizards,
for which a fly was an ample banquet, differed in nothing from that of
the _povera gente_ of the coast. Many lived wholly on herbs. But herbs
were not abundant in the barren and gaunt mountain. The destitution of
the country exceeded all belief. I was not grieved at daring it, at
finding myself sympathizing with the woes of Italy, my glorious nurse,
who has nourished France, and me more than any Frenchman.
A nurse? That was she ever, so far as was possible in her poverty of
resources, in the poverty of nature to which my health reduced me.
Incapable of food, I still received from her the only nourishment
which I could support, the vivifying air and the light--the sun, which
frequently permitted us, in one of the severest winters of the century,
to keep the windows open in January.
In the lazy, lizard-like life which I lived upon that shore, I wholly
occupied myself with the surrounding country, with the apparent
antiquity of the Apennines and the mountains which girdle the
Mediterranean. Is there then no remedy? Or rather, in their leafless
declivities shall we not discover the fountains which may renew their
life? Such was the idea which absorbed me. I no longer thought of
my illness; I troubled myself no more about recovering. I had made
what is truly great progress for an invalid: I had forgotten myself.
My business henceforward was to resuscitate that mighty patient,
the Apennines. And as by degrees I became aware that the case was
not hopeless--that the waters were hidden, not lost--that by their
discovery we might restore vegetable life, and eventually animal
life,--I felt myself much stronger, refreshed, renewed. For each spring
that revealed itself, I grew less athirst; I felt its waters rise
within my soul.
Ever fertile is Italy. She proved so to me through her very barrenness
and poverty. The ruggedness of the bald Apennines, the lean Ligurian
coast, did but the more awaken, by contrast, the recollection of that
genial nature which cherishes the luxuriant richness of our western
France. I missed the animal life; I felt its absence. From the mute
foliage of sombre orange-gardens I demanded the woodland birds. For
the first time I perceived the seriousness of human existence when it
is no longer surrounded by the grand society of innocent beings whose
movements, voices, and sports are, so to speak, the smile of creation.
A revolution took place in me which I shall, perhaps, some day relate.
I returned, with all the strength of my ailing existence, to the
thoughts which I had uttered, in 1846, in my book of "The People," to
that City of God where the humble and simple, peasants and artisans,
the ignorant and unlettered, barbarians and savages, children, and
those other children, too, which we call animals, are all citizens
under different titles, have all their privileges and their laws, their
places at the great civic banquet. "I protest, for my part, that if
any one remains in the rear whom the City still rejects and does not
shelter with her rights, I myself will not enter in, but will halt upon
her threshold."
Thus, all natural history I had begun to regard as a branch of the
political. Every living species came, each in its humble right,
striking at the gate and demanding admittance to the bosom of
Democracy. Why should their elder brothers repulse them beyond the pale
of those laws which the universal Father harmonizes with the law of the
world?
Such, then, was my renovation, this tardy new life (_vita nuova_),
which led me, step by step, to the natural sciences. Italy, whose
influence over my destiny has always been great, was its scene, its
occasion, just as, thirty years before, it had lit for me, through
Vico, the first spark of the historic fire.
Beloved and beneficent nurse! Because I had for one moment shared her
sorrows, suffered, dreamed with her, she bestowed on me a priceless
gift, worth more than all the diamonds of Golconda. What gift? A
profound sympathy of spirit, a fruitful interchange of the most
intimate ideas, a perfect home-harmony in the thought of Nature.
We arrived at this goal by two paths: I, by my love of the City, by the
effort of completing it through an association of self with all other
beings; my wife, by religious feeling and by her filial reverence for
the fatherhood of God.
Henceforth we were able, every evening, to enjoy a mutual feast.
I have already explained how this work, unknown to ourselves, grew
rich, was rendered fruitful, was impelled forward, by our modest
auxiliaries. They have almost always dictated it.
Our Parisian flowers prepared what our birds of Nantes accomplished. A
certain nightingale of which I speak at the close of the book crowned
the work.
These divers impressions blended and melted together, on our return
to France, and especially here, in the presence of the ocean. At the
promontory of La Hève, under the venerable elms which overshadow it,
this revelation completed itself. The gulls, gannets, and guillemots of
the coast, the small birds of the groves, could say nothing which was
not understood. All things found an echo in our hearts, like so many
internal voices.
The Pharos, the huge cliff, from three to four hundred feet in
height,[9] which from so lofty an elevation overlooks the vast
embouchure of the Seine, the Calvados, and the ocean, was the customary
goal of our promenades, and our resting-point. We usually climbed
to it by a deep covered road, full of freshness and shadow, which
suddenly opened upon this immense lighthouse. Sometimes we ascended
the colossal staircase which, without surprises, in the full sunlight,
and always facing the mighty sea, leads by three flights to the summit,
each flight covering upwards of a hundred feet. You cannot accomplish
this ascent at one breath; at the second stage, you breathe, you seat
yourself for a few moments by the monument which the widow of one of
France's greatest soldiers has raised to his memory, in the hope that
its pyramid might prove a beacon to the mariner, and guard him from
shipwreck.
[Illustration]
This cliff, of a very sandy soil, loses a little every winter.[10] It
is not, however, the sea which gnaws at it; the heavy rains wash it
away, carrying off the débris, which, at first bare and shapeless, bear
eloquent witness to their downfall. But tender and gracious Nature does
not long suffer this. She speedily attires them, bestows upon them
greensward, herbs, shrubs, briers, which in due time become miniature
oases on the declivity, Liliput landscapes suspended on the vast cliff,
consoling its gloomy barrenness with their sweet youth.
Thus the Beautiful and the Sublime here embrace, a thing of rarity.
The storm-beaten mountain relates to you the _epopea_ of earth, its
rude dramatic history, and shows its bones in evidence of its truth.
But these young children of chance, who spring up on its arid flank,
prove that she is still fertile, that her débris contain the elements
of a new organization, that all death is a life begun.
So these ruins have never caused us any sadness. We have conversed
among them freely of destiny, providence, death, the life to come.
I, whom age and toil have given a right to die--she, whose brow is
already bent by the trials of infancy and a wisdom beyond her years,
we have not lived the less for a grand inspiration of soul, for the
rejuvenescent breath of that much-loved mother, Nature.[11]
Sprung from her at so great a distance from one another, so united in
her to-day, we would fain have rendered eternal this rare moment of
existence, "have cast anchor on the island of time." And how could we
better realize our idea than by this work of tenderness, of universal
brotherhood, of adoption of all life!
My wife incessantly recalled me to it, enlarging my sentiments of
individual tenderness by her facile, bright, emotional interpretation
of the spirit of the country and the voices of solitude.
It was then, among other things, that I learned to understand birds
which, like the swallows, sing little, but talk much--prattling of
the fine weather, of the chase, of scanty or abundant food, of their
approaching departure; in fact, of all their affairs. I had listened
to them at Nantes in October, at Turin in June. Their September
_causeries_ were more intelligible at La Hève. We translated them
easily in all their fond vivacity, all their joyousness of youth and
good-humour, free from ostentation or satire, in accord with the
happy moderation of a bird so free and so wise, which appears not
ungratefully to recognize that he has received from God a lot of such
signal felicity.
Alas! even the swallow is not spared in that senseless warfare which
we wage against nature. We destroy the very birds that protect our
crops--our guardians, our honest labourers--which, following close upon
the plough, seize the future pest, which the heedless peasant disturbs
only to replace in the earth.
[Illustration]
Whole races, valuable and interesting, perish. Those lords of ocean,
those wild and sagacious creatures which Nature has endowed with blood
and milk--I speak of the cetacea--to what number are they reduced!
Many great quadrupeds have vanished from the globe. Many animals of
every kind, without utterly disappearing, have recoiled before man;
brutalized (_ensauvagés_) they fly, they lose their natural arts, and
relapse into barbarism. The heron, whose prudence and address were
remarked by Aristotle, is now, at least in Europe, a misanthropical,
narrow-minded, half-foolish animal. The beaver, which, in America, in
its peaceful solitudes, had become a great architect and engineer, has
grown discouraged;[12] to-day it has scarcely the heart to excavate a
burrow in the earth. The hare, so gentle, so handsome, distinguished by
its fur, its swiftness, its wonderful delicacy of ear, will soon have
disappeared; the few of its kind which remain are positively embruted.
And yet the poor animal is still docile and teachable: in careful
hands it might be taught the things most antagonistic to its nature,
even those which need a display of courage.[13]
These thoughts, which others have expressed in far better language,
we cherished at heart. They had been our aliment, our habitual dream,
over which we had brooded for two years, in Brittany, in Italy; it is
here that they have developed into--what shall I say--a book? a living
fruit? At La Hève it appeared to us in its genial idea, that of the
primitive alliance which God has ordained for all his creatures, of the
love-bond which the universal mother has sealed between her children.
The winged order--the loftiest, the tenderest, the most sympathetic
with man--is that which man now-a-days pursues most cruelly.
What is required for its protection? To reveal the bird as soul, to
show that it is a person.
_The_ bird, then, _a single bird_--that is all my book; but the bird
in all the variations of its destiny, as it accommodates itself to the
thousand conditions of earth, to the thousand vocations of the winged
life. Without any knowledge of the more or less ingenious systems of
transformations, the heart gives oneness to its object; it neither
allows itself to be arrested by the external differences of species,
nor by that death which seems to sever the thread. Death, rude and
cruel, intervenes in this book, in the full current of life, but as a
passing accident only; life does not the less continue.
The agents of death, the murdering species, so glorified by man,
who recognizes in them his image, are here replaced very low in
the hierarchy, remitted to the rank which is rightly theirs. They
are the most deficient in the two special qualifications of the
bird--nest-making and song. Sad instruments of the fatal passage, they
appear in the midst of this book as the blind ministers of nature's
hardest necessity.
But the lofty light of life--art in its earliest dawn--shines only
in the smallest. With the small birds, unostentatious as they are,
modestly and seriously clad, art begins, and, on certain points, rises
higher than the sphere of man. Far from equalling the nightingale, we
have been unable to express or to render an account of his sublime song.
The eagle, then, is in these pages dethroned; the nightingale reigns
in his stead. In that moral _crescendo_, where the bird continuously
advances in self-culture, the apex and the supreme point are naturally
discovered, not in brutal strength, so easily overpassed by man, but
in a puissance of art, of soul, and of aspiration which man has not
attained, and which, beyond this world, transports him in a moment to
the further spheres.
High justice and true, because it is clear-visioned and tender! Feeble
on too many points, I doubt not, this book is strong in tenderness and
faith. It is one, constant and faithful. Nothing makes it divaricate.
Above death and its false divorce, through life and the masks which
disguise its unity, it flies, it loves to hover, from nest to nest,
from egg to egg, from love to the love of God.
LA HÈVE, NEAR HAVRE, _September 21, 1855_.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Part First.
[Illustration: THE EGG.]
[Illustration]
THE EGG.
The wise ignorance, the clear-seeing instinct of our forefathers gave
utterance to this oracle: "Everything springs from the egg; it is the
world's cradle."
Even our original, but especially the diversity of our destiny, is due
to the mother. She acts and she foresees, she loves with a stronger or
a weaker love, she is more or less the mother. The more she is so, the
higher mounts her offspring; each degree in existence depends on the
degree of her love.
What can the mother effect in the mobile existence of the fish?
Nothing, but trust her birth to the ocean. What in the insect world,
where she generally dies as soon as she has produced the egg? To obtain
for it before dying a secure asylum, where it may come to light, and
live.
In the case of the superior animal, the quadruped, where the warm
blood should surely stir up love, where the mother's womb is so long
the rest and home of her young, the cares of maternity are also of
minor import. The offspring is born fully formed, clothed in all things
like its mother; and its food awaits it. And in many species its
education is accomplished without any further care on the part of the
mother than she bestowed when it grew in her bosom.
Far otherwise is the destiny of the bird. It would die if it were not
loved.