The Nightingales’ Nest
by Alani Hicks-Bartlett, translated from Théophile Gautier
Surrounding the chateau was a lovely park.
In the park, there were birds of all kinds—nightingales, blackbirds, warblers—every bird on earth congregated there.
In spring, the birdsong was beautifully deafening: each leaf hid a nest, each tree was a full orchestra. All of the tiny, feathered musicians vied with one another to be the loudest and best. Some of them chirped, others billed and cooed; some sang trills and lustrous cadences; others carolled with flashy fioriture or embellished grand finales: expert musicians could never have played so splendidly.
But in the chateau, there were two beautiful cousins who, together, sang even better than all the birds in the park. One cousin was named Fleurette, and the other Isabeau. Both of them were attractive, captivating, and hale, and, on Sundays when they wore their nicest dresses, if their white shoulders hadn’t revealed that they were real girls, they could have been taken for angels; they were only lacking feathers. When they sang, old Lord Maulevrier, their uncle, would sometimes hold them by the hand, so afraid was he that they might suddenly fancy flying away.
I’ll leave it to you to imagine the impressive clashing of lances that resounded at the carousels and tournaments held in honour of Fleurette and Isabeau. The reputation of the girls’ beauty and talent had travelled all around Europe, and yet they were none the prouder for it; they lived a life of seclusion, not seeing anyone other than the little page Valentin, a handsome boy with blond hair, and Lord Maulevrier, a hoary old man, deeply tanned by the sun and bent and broken all over from having worn his battle armour for sixty long years.
They spent their days tossing seed to the tiny birds, saying their prayers, and, above all else, studying the great musical works of the masters, and rehearsing together some motet, madrigal, villanelle, or some other similar piece of music. They had their own gardens, which they watered and cared for themselves. Their life unspooled in these sweet and poetic girlish pursuits; they stayed tucked away in shadows and far from the greedy eyes of the world, but the world cared for them yet. Neither the nightingale nor the rose can fully hide itself: their song and their perfume always betray them. At once, our two cousins were both roses and nightingales.
Dukes and princes came to ask for their hand in marriage; the Emperor of Trebizond and the Sultan of Egypt sent ambassadors to Lord Maulevrier to propose alliances; the two cousins hadn’t tired of being unmarried and didn’t want to hear anything about such matters. Perhaps, due to some secret instinct, they sensed that their mission on earth was to remain chaste and to sing, and to go against this ideal would be wrong.
They had come to this manor when they were little girls. Their bedroom window faced the park, and they had been nurtured and raised on birdsong. They were barely able to stand on their own when old Blondiau, Lord Maulevrier’s bard, had placed their tiny hands on the virginal’s ivory keys; they had never owned any other child’s toy than this, and they knew how to sing before they were able to speak. They sang just as others breathed: it was natural.
This sort of upbringing had a singular influence on their character. Their harmonious childhood had spared them from a turbulent, frivolous one. They had never cried out sharply nor uttered a dissonant complaint; they cried to the beat and wept in perfect harmony. Their musical sensibility, cultivated within them at the expense of their other senses, left them quite impervious to anything other than music. They fluttered about on a melodious plane, and ignored nearly everything about the real world, except for its sounds. They understood admirably well the rustling of foliage, the murmuring of streams, the chiming of the clock, the sighing of wind in the chimney, the whirring of the spinning wheel, the raindrops falling on the quivering window, all of the external and internal harmonies; but they themselves did not feel, I must say, a great deal of enthusiasm when they saw a setting sun, and they were just as unable to appreciate a painting as if their beautiful blue and black eyes had been covered by a thick, cloudy film. They were sick with music: they dreamed of it, they forgot to eat and drink because of it; they loved nothing else in the world. In truth, they still loved one other thing: Valentin and their flowers: Valentin, because he resembled roses; the roses, because they resembled Valentin. But this love was completely secondary. Indeed, Valentin was only thirteen years old. Their greatest pleasure was to spend the evening at their window, singing the music they had composed during the day.
The most famous music teachers came from far and wide to listen to them and to challenge them. No sooner had these visitors heard a measure than they would smash their instruments and tear their scores to pieces, admitting defeat. Certainly, the music was so enjoyable and so melodious that angels from heaven came to the window with the other musicians and learned the music by heart in order to sing it to God.
One evening in May, the two cousins were singing a motet for two voices: never had a more favourable motif been so skilfully styled and performed. One of the park’s nightingales, tucked away on a rosebush, was listening to them attentively. When they had finished, he drew close to the window and told them in his nightingale language: “I would like to have a singing competition with you both.”
The two cousins replied that they were quite willing, and that he had only to begin.
And so, the nightingale started. He was a consummate master. His little throat swelled, his wings fluttered, his entire body trembled: he sang endless runs, ornamental tirades, arpeggios, chromatic scales: he sang high and low, he sailed through sounds, he refined the pearly cadences with a despairing purity: it was as if his voice had wings just like those of his body. He stopped, certain that he was victorious.
The two cousins then took their turn: they outdid themselves. Compared to theirs, the song of the nightingale seemed like the mere chirruping of a sparrow.
The winged virtuoso made one final attempt: he sang a romance of love, then he performed a dazzling fanfare that he crowned with a crest of high, vibrant, and sharp notes, far past the range of any human voice.
The two cousins, unperturbed by this tour de force, turned the page of their music book, and replied to the nightingale in such a way that Saint Cecilia, who was listening to them from the pinnacle of heaven, became pale with jealousy and lost hold of her violone, letting it fall to the ground.
The nightingale tried to sing once again, but the battle had completely exhausted him. His breath was failing him, his feathers were dishevelled, his eyes were closing in spite of himself. He was going to die.
“You sing better than I do,” he said to the two cousins, and the arrogance of wanting to surpass you is costing me my life. I request one thing of you: I have a nest; my three young are in this nest. The nest is in the third wild rose shrub down the large path on the side of the pond; please send for them, raise them, and teach them how to sing like you do, for I am going to die.”
Upon uttering these words, the nightingale did die, in fact. The two cousins wept over him greatly, because he had sung so beautifully. They called for Valentin, the little blond-haired page, and told him where the nest was. Valentin, a clever little rascal, found the spot easily: he put the nest against his chest, carrying it off without any trouble. Fleurette and Isabeau were waiting for him impatiently, with their elbows propped up on the balcony. Valentin soon arrived, holding the nest in both of his hands. The three little birds bobbed their heads around, opening their beaks wide. The young girls felt very sorry for the little orphans and took turns feeding them. When the birds had grown a little bigger, the girls started their musical education, just as they had promised the vanquished nightingale they would.
It was stunning to see how tame they were, how well they sang. They went flitting about the bedroom, and would perch themselves, at times on Isabeau’s head, at times on Fleurette’s shoulder. They would settle themselves in front of the music book, and one would have said that they certainly knew how to decipher the score, so wisely did they contemplate the half notes and quarter notes. They had learned all of Fleurette and Isabeau’s airs, and they were starting to improvise some very beautiful ones themselves.
Increasingly, our two cousins lived in solitude, and in the evening, the sounds of a supernatural melody could be heard escaping from their room. The nightingales, impeccably instructed, were playing their part in the concert, and they sang almost as well as their mistresses, who had made great progress themselves as well.
Their voices gained amazing virtuosity every day, vibrating in a metallic and crystalline way that far surpassed the registers of the natural voice. The young girls were growing visibly thinner: their beautiful coloration was fading, they had become pale like agate and almost exactly as transparent. Lord Maulevrier wanted to stop them from singing, but he couldn’t convince them of that point.
As soon as they had sung a few bars, a small red stain began to appear on their cheekbones, and it grew more apparent until they had finished. Then, the spot began to disappear, but a cold sweat was running from their skin, and their lips were trembling as though they had come down with a fever.
What’s more, their singing was more beautiful than it had ever been previously; it had something in it that wasn’t of this world, and so, to hear this sonorous, powerful voice issue forth from these two frail young girls, made it not difficult at all to anticipate what would happen, that the music would shatter the instrument.
They understood this themselves, and began to touch their virginal, which they had abandoned for vocalized melodies. But one night, the window was open, the birds were chirping in the park, the wind was sighing harmoniously; the music was so thick in the air that they couldn’t resist the temptation to perform a duet that they had composed the night before.
This was the “Song of the Swan,” a marvellous tune, drenched in tears. It rose to the most inaccessible peaks of the scale and descended the ladder of notes to the lowest degree. It was sparkling, extraordinary, a deluge of trills, a blazing rain of chromatic ornamentations, a musical firework that defied description. Nevertheless, the little red stain began to grow peculiarly larger, and almost completely covered their cheeks. The three nightingales watched them and listened to them with peculiar anxiety: they beat their wings, they came and went, and couldn’t remain still. Finally, the girls came to the last measure of the piece. Their voices took on a sonorous nuance that was so strange it was easy to understand that these were no longer living creatures who were singing. The nightingales had taken flight. The two cousins were dead; their souls had departed with their final note. The nightingales soared to heaven to bring this supreme song to the good Lord, who kept all three of them in paradise to perform the music of the two cousins.
Then, later, with the souls of these three nightingales, the good Lord went on to create the souls of the composers Palestrina, Cimarosa, and the Chevalier Gluck.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator who lives on the East Coast, where she finds herself increasingly in a nudiustertian mode. Her recent work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, Cagibi, Gathering Storm, Broad River Review, La Piccioletta Barca, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. She is currently working on a collection of villanelles as well as a series of translations from French, Portuguese, and Italian, along with a full-length translation of a Medieval French romance. @alanirosa on Twitter and Instagram.