During the Crimean War, while Colonel de Saint-A***, married scarcely six months before, was fighting under the walls of Sebastopol, his wide, Comtesse Blanche, was living on the banks of the Loire in a Medieval château, transformed into a comfortable habitation by virtue of determination and money.
The bedroom, in particular, offered a truly singular mixture if the severe luxury of the 14th century and the elegant research of the nineteenth. However, the dressers, in sculpted black oak-wood, the big bed with spiral columns and tapestried canopies, the armchair with fantastically damascened arms, and the fireplace with the Saint-A*** coat of arms, as high as an attic in the Rue de Helder, harmonized in a charming fashion with the brocade draperies, the lace curtains, the Boule furniture and a piano, a masterpiece by Érard.
A decoratively-woven carpet had replaced the sheaves of reeds that had covered the worn floor of the room four centuries earlier, although it is true that the floorboards had given way to a parquet of exotic wood, which embellished itself in summer with incrustations, arabesques and designs as precious as the marvels of the carpet that covered and hid it in winter.
At present, the carpet was still covering the parquet, for April had only just begun to blazon the escutcheon of the zodiac with the bull of Taurus; belated snow veiled the pathways and the flower-beds of the garden and dusted the branches, scarcely in bud, of a stand of squat trees that grew directly beneath the Comtesse’s windows. These tall bushes occupied the location of a profound ditch that had been full of water in Feudal times, but was dry today and partly filled in by the rubble of collapses, invasions of vegetation and the patient and indefatigable leveler called time.
One morning, when the pretty chatelaine had received good news from the Crimea, and she was dreaming simultaneously of the past and future, with her forehead leaning against one of the large windows of her room, she noticed a very busy bird. It was building its nest at the top of an old pollarded oak. From the window, the comtesse could look down on the work, which was approaching completion, only lacking a few twigs to form a neat little construction, composed of moss and roots bound together by reeds. A soft bed of linen, feathers, down, silk and cotton carpeted the nest’s interior.
The female bird was working alone, seizing a blade of grass or a dry stem, stopping, running, looking, plaiting and weaving. The male, perched on a nearby branch, was whistling his most beautiful song, like a savage of the Rocky Mountains, leaving the housework to his companion—but he was hunting on her behalf, also like the Sioux. While singing, he kept a keen lookout all around. At the slightest movement in the grass or under the snow, he launched himself forward, skimmed the soil, brought back to his female and placed in her beak—without keeping any for himself—the entire produce of his swoop, always provided that, by hazard, the swoop in question had been productive. I say by hazard because, alas, more times than not, he returned disappointed, with his beak empty, to resume the place he had quit and recommence his fruitlessly-interrupted song.
The Comtesse did not take long to sympathize with the young household. She appropriated beetle-larvae destined for the nourishment of the pheasants, and threw a handful to the two blackbirds.
The latter, without the slightest apprehension, raced to pick up the meal-worms and then flew to the window to see where that living manna had come from. The Comtesse resumed her distribution.
The blackbirds found the process so much to their taste that, a week hence, they were taping the window with their beaks, casually coming into the room and taking their nourishment from the young woman’s slender white fingers, and, if necessary, cleverly tracking down the porcelain vase containing the larvae for which they showed themselves so gluttonous. A large cork sealed the vase, but with two thrusts of the beak, the blackbird and his mate caused the cork to leap out, and the pillage commenced.
The Comtesse, whose isolation was cheered up by the society of these winged friends, let them do as they wished, and even encouraged them—all the more so when five blue-green eggs, specked confusedly with rust, laid by the female in the nest, were succeeded, after twenty days of incubation, by five little yellow beaks, always chirping, always open and always insatiable.
The chicks, introduced by their parents, soon exhibited the same free-and-easy attitude toward the Comtesse. More than once they woke her up at daybreak, so forcefully were they tapping at the windows and so shrilly were they crying out with impatience and hunger. It was necessary to see them when she finally gave in to their desire—it was, I insist, necessary to see them flying on to her arms, breast and head, pecking her, caressing her, and then, having paid their tribute of affection, darting and ferreting everywhere. They took no account of the protests of the chambermaid, nor of the thrusts of the beak of the large grey parrot, which were more brutal than well-aimed. The residence was theirs; I can guarantee that they made more than ample use of it!
A few months later, toward the end of September, the Comte had returned to his château, with seven wounds, fortunately scarring over, with the rank of brigadier-general and the sash of the Légion d’honneur. Sprawled in a large armchair, still pale and weak, he was savoring the ineffable benefits of convalescence. The Comtesse, seated at the piano, had just finished playing one of those old melodies of Northern France, the naïve grace and simple motifs of which reminded the general of his love-affair with Blanche and the good times when, without her having yet confessed that she loved him, she had played the songs of her homeland for him, as she did that evening.
When she had quit the piano and taken the convalescent’s hands in hers once again, airborne voices, which had nothing human about them, suddenly repeated the last phrases of the tune that the Comtesse had played.
“Are there other fairies than you here, then?” the general asked, smiling, without understanding what he had heard.
“Fairies, no—but goblins, yes,” she replied, opening the window and uttering a light cry of summons.
Seven little stars became visible in the air then, which were flying, wheeling, rising up and descending, spiraling outside the window.
Then the seven stars went out, and a flock of blackbirds—not counting the general’s moustache—boldly invaded the drawing-room and settled on Blanche’s arms and head—after which the birds resumed their flight in the garden via the window.
“Which explains the singers,” said the general. “In fact, they’re not the first musicians of that sort I’ve heard. In the Rue du Petit-Musc, in the Celestines’ barracks, the blackbirds that nest in the trees in the courtyard repeat my regiment’s trumpet-fanfares...but the stars! What of the stars?”
“They intrigue me as much as you, my friend. Never have I seen that phosphorescence shining in the beaks of my protégés.” Laughing, she added: “Perhaps it’s an light-show they’ve put on to celebrate the return of their liege lord to his domains.”
“By God!” replied the Comte. “I’m not the friend and pupil of General Levaillant44 for nothing. One day, under Arab fire, while crossing a ditch in order to reckon with those clowns, he perceived a rare insect in the grass of the verge, stopped his horse dead, dismounted, picked up the beetle, stuffed it into the finger of one of his gloves, got back in the saddle, and then chased after the Bedouins so furiously that two hours later, their leader surrendered and led forth the horse of submission. Give me your arm, Blanche, and let’s go into the garden to see what’s going on.”
They headed into the grounds, approached the raised bank, and found the blackbirds occupied in pecking amid a veritable sea of light. At every instant, one of the birds took flight, holding in its beak a sort of little star, which shone for a few seconds and then went out, never to light up again—after which the blackbird returned to the quarry and repeated the operation.
The general leaned over, plunged his hand into the heat-less flame that was undulating over the surface of the ground, and picked up a handful of earth, in which he saw five or six of the myriapod insects that entomologists call Scolopendra, and which popular parlance, with its picturesque energy, calls centipedes. These Scolopendra belonged to the smallest species, which is designated by the epithet electrica.45
For some times, the Comtesse and the general contemplated the strange spectacle of a flame fifty centimeters long and broad, which bore no resemblance to any other flame, and in which hundreds of Scolopendra were swarming. On the general’s orders, a gardener dug in the soil around the phosphorescent mass, and the displaced soil was literally covered with droplets of fire. One might have thought that an invisible sprinkler wielded by a fairy had distributed a luminous rain everywhere the spade had touched the earth. If one crushed a little of that soil in one’s hands, it left shiny streaks there.
“You see, dear Blanche,” the general said, “how nature is pleased to dress the most humble and seemingly obscure of creatures with her splendors. Do you know why Scolopendra not only shine with a mysterious gleam but also spread so much light over everything that surrounds them? Nature has gratified them with such beacons in order that they might send one another signals of love, like Hero and Leander.”
“And so that they might reveal their hiding-place to my little star-eaters! Here they are, all seven of them, coming back to the Scolopendra hunt! Let’s leave them to it. All the more so because the night is cool and I don’t think that humidity is exactly a remedy effective against chills and incompletely-scarred wounds.”
“She’s right!” sighed the general. “To seek to understand the ultimate causes of creation is one of the insensate dreams of humankind. As we were informed by the almoner who cared for us in the Crimea, the Imitation has all too much reason to say: Falluntur saepe hominum sensus in judicando.46
“Yes!” the Comtesse interjected, laughing. “We should not take so much pride in appearances. See how our beautiful and mysterious stars of a little while ago have become no more than worms, and our star-eaters no more than blackbirds.”
“Alas, that’s the story of all human things. From far away it’s something, but at close range, nothing.”47
“A century ago, La Fontaine voiced the truths that we are discovering at present…I even think that they were already past their first freshness in his time...”
“You’re right, we repeat things continually,” the general replied. Placing his lips on Blanche’s forehead, he murmured: “There’s nothing true and lasting but love!”
“Yes, when it lasts,” she replied, laughing.
“Since when do angels speak ill of God?” asked the general, leaning with even more tenderness on his wife’s arm.
And they went back indoors on that beautiful Autumn night, forgetting the star-eaters—forgetting everything, except their tenderness.