The unfortunate effect produced by my song did not fail to sadden me.
“Alas, music; alas, poesy!” I repeated on my way back to Paris, “How
few hearts there are which comprehend you!”
Whilst making these reflections, I bumped my head against another
bird’s who was flying in the opposite direction to me. The shock was so
violent and so unexpected that we both fell down on a tree-top, which,
by good luck, was there. After shaking ourselves a bit, I eyed the new
comer, expecting a quarrel. I was surprised to see that he was white.
To tell the truth, he had a head somewhat bigger than myself, and over
his brow a sort of crest, which gave him a mock-heroic appearance.
Besides that, he carried his tail well up in the air, with great
magnanimity; however, he did not seem at all disposed to do battle. We
addressed each other very civilly, and made our mutual excuses, after
which we entered into conversation. I took the liberty of asking him
his name and what country he came from.
“I am astonished,” he said to me, “that you do not know me. Are you not
one of us?”
“To tell the truth, sir,” I answered, “I do not know whom I belong to.
Every one asks me and says the same thing to me; it must be a wager
that they have made.”
“You are joking,” he said; “your plumage becomes you too well for me
not to recognize a brother. You belong unmistakably to that illustrious
and venerable race which is entitled in Latin _cacatua_, in learned
language _kakatoës_, and in vulgar jargon cockatoo.”
“Faith, sir, that is possible, and it would be a great honour indeed
for me. But do not let that prevent you from acting as if I were not
one, and have the condescension to inform me whom I have the honour of
addressing.”
“I am,” responded the unknown, “the great poet Kacatogan. I have
made mighty travels, sir, arid passages, and cruel peregrinations.
It was not yesterday that I began to rhyme, and my Muse has had her
misfortunes. I have warbled under Louis XVI., sir, I have bawled for
the Republic, I have nobly sung the Empire, I have discreetly lauded
the Restoration, I have even made an effort in these last times, and
have submitted, not without difficulty, to the exigencies of this
tasteless century. I have launched on the world piquant distichs,
sublime hymns, gracious dithyrambs, pious elegies, long-haired dramas,
woolly romances, powdered vaudevilles, and bald tragedies. In a word,
I can flatter myself with having added to the Temple of the Muses
some gallant festoons, some sombre battlements, and some ingenious
arabesques. What more do you want? I have grown old. But I still rhyme
vigorously, sir, and such as you see me now, I was dreaming over a poem
in one canto, which would be at least six pages long, when you gave me
a bump on my brow. Nevertheless, if I can help you in any way, I am
entirely at your service.”
“Indeed you can, sir,” I replied, “for you find me at this moment in a
serious poetical difficulty. I do not presume to say that I am a poet,
still less a great poet, such as you,” I added, bowing to him, “but
Nature has endowed me with a throat, which itches when I am at ease or
when I am vexed. To tell you the truth, I am absolutely ignorant of the
rules.”
“I have forgotten them,” said Kacatogan, “don’t worry yourself about
that.”
“But an annoying thing happens to me,” I replied; “my voice produces an
effect on those who hear it, almost the same as that which a certain
Jean de Nivelle’s produced on.... You know what I mean?”
“I know,” said Kacatogan; “I have seen this odd effect in my own
experience. The cause of it is unknown to me, but the effect is
indisputable.”
“Well then, sir, you who seem to me to be the Nestor of poesy, can you
suggest, I entreat you, a remedy for this painful drawback?”
“No,” said Kacatogan, “for my own part, I have never been able to
find one. I was much exercised about it when I was young, because
they always hissed me; but nowadays I have ceased to think about it
I suspect that this repugnance arises from what the public reads by
others than ourselves: that distracts its attention.”
“I am of your opinion; but you will agree, sir, that it is very hard
for a well-intentioned creature to put people to flight the moment a
good impulse seizes him. Would you be so kind as do me the service of
listening to me, and giving me your frank opinion?”
“Most willingly,” said Kacatogan; “I am all ears.”
I at once began to sing, and I had the satisfaction of seeing that
Kacatogan neither fled nor fell asleep. He stared at me fixedly, and
from time to time nodded his head with an air of approval, and with
a sort of murmur of commendation. But I soon saw that he was not
listening to me, and was dreaming of his poem. Taking advantage of a
moment when I was taking breath, he interrupted me all at once.
“I have found that rhyme after all!” he cried, smiling and wagging his
head; “it is the sixty-thousand-seven-hundred-and-fourteenth that has
come out of this brain of mine! And they have the audacity to say that
I am ageing! I’ll go and read it to my kind friends, I’ll go and read
it to them, and we’ll see what they have to say to it!”
So speaking, he took flight and disappeared, apparently having quite
forgotten that he had met me.
V
Left alone and disappointed, the best thing I could do was to take
advantage of what was left of the day, and fly at the full stretch
of my wings towards Paris. Unfortunately I did not know my way. My
journey with the pigeon had been too agreeable to leave me with any
very exact recollection; so, instead of going straight on, I turned to
the left at Bourget, and, overtaken by the night, was obliged to seek a
resting-place in the woods of Morfontaine.
They were all going to bed when I arrived. The magpies and jays,
who, as every one knows, are the worst bedfellows in the world, were
squabbling on every hand. In the bushes the sparrows were chirruping
and treading one upon another. At the water’s edge two herons were
stalking gravely, perched on their long stilts, in the attitude of
meditation, the George Dandins of the place, waiting patiently for
their wives. Some enormous crows, half asleep, were settling themselves
heavily on the tops of the highest trees, and were snuffling their
evening prayers. Lower down, the amorous tits were still pursuing one
another in the copses, whilst a dishevelled woodpecker was pushing her
family from behind to make them go into the hollow of a tree. Troops
of hedge-sparrows returned from the fields, dancing in the air like
puffs of smoke, and swooping down upon a shrub, which they covered
entirely; chaffinches, warblers, redbreasts arranged themselves lightly
on detached branches, like the crystals on a chandelier. On every hand
voices resounded, saying as plainly as could be: “Come, my wife! Come,
my girl!--Come to me, my fair one!--This way, my sweet!--Here I am, my
dear!--Good evening, my mistress!--Adieu, my friends!--Sound sleep, my
children!”
What a situation for a bachelor to have to sleep in such a guesthouse!
I was tempted to attach myself to some birds of my own build, and ask
hospitality of them. “At night,” I reflected, “all birds are grey; and,
besides, does one do any harm to people by sleeping politely beside
them?”
I made my way first of all to a ditch, where the starlings were
assembling. They were dressing for the night with very great care, and
I noticed that the most of them had gilded wings and varnished claws;
they were the dandies of the forest. They were good enough fellows,
and did not honour me with any attention. But their talk was so empty,
and they related their petty quarrels and their conquests with such
fatuity, and made up to one another so clumsily, that it was impossible
for me to stay there.
I next went to perch myself on a branch where half a dozen birds of
different sorts were in a row. I modestly took the last place, at
the extremity of the branch, in the hope that they would tolerate
me. As ill luck would have it, my neighbour was an old dove, as dry
as a rusty weather-cock. At the moment when I came near her, the few
feathers which covered her bones were the object of her solicitude;
she pretended to preen them, but she was too much afraid of pulling
one out; she merely passed them in review to see if she had her count.
Scarcely had I touched her with the tip of my wing, when she drew
herself up majestically.
“What do you mean, sir?” she said to me, compressing her beak with a
modesty quite British.
And, fetching me a great nudge with her elbow, she sent me down with a
vigour that would have done honour to a porter.
I fell into a clump of heather, where a fat woodhen was sleeping. My
own mother in her bowl did not have such an air of bliss. She was so
plump, so full-blown, so well set on her triple stomach, that one would
have taken her for a pie of which the crust had been eaten. I crept
furtively in beside her. “She won’t wake,” I said to myself, “and in
any case such a good fat mammy can’t be very cross.” No more she was.
She half opened her eyes, and said to me, with a slight sigh:
“You’re bothering me, child; go away.”
At the same instant I heard some one calling me: it was some thrushes
who were making signs to me from the top of a mountain-ash to come to
them. “Here are some kind souls at last,” I thought. They made room
for me, laughing like mad, and I slipped into their feathery group as
promptly as a love-letter into a muff. But I was not long in concluding
that those ladies had eaten more grapes than was wise; they could
scarcely support themselves on the branches, and their ill-bred jokes,
their outbursts of laughter and their decidedly free songs forced me to
take my departure.
I began to despair, and I was about to go to sleep in a solitary
corner, when a nightingale began to sing. Everybody at once became
silent. Alas! how pure his voice was, how his very melancholy appeared
sweet! So far from disturbing the slumbers of others, his harmonies
seemed to lull them to sleep. No one dreamt of silencing him, no one
found fault with him for singing his song at such an hour; his father
did not beat him, his friends did not take flight.
“Is there no one, then, but me,” I cried, “who is forbidden to be
happy? Let us depart, let us flee this cruel world! Better to seek my
way amid the darkness, at the risk of being devoured by some owl, than
to let myself be thus tortured by the sight of others’ happiness.
With this thought I set out again, and wandered a long time at random.
With the first streak of day I descried the towers of Notre Dame. In
the twinkling of an eye I had reached it, and I did not cast my eyes
around long before I recognized our garden. I flew thither quicker than
lightning.... Alas, it was empty!... I called in vain for my parents:
no one answered me. The tree where my father used to post himself,
the maternal bush, the dear bowl, all had disappeared. The axe had
destroyed everything; instead of the green alley where I was born,
there remained only a hundred of faggots.