FullReads

* Contes de Perrault, edition Aadre Lefevre, p. 87

Meanwhile, Cicogne and Boulingrin waited side by side upon their bench.

“Boulingrin,” whispered the Duchess in her old friend’s ear, “does it not seem to you that there is something suspicious in this business? Don’t you suspect an intrigue on the part of the King’s brothers to get the poor man to abdicate? He is well known as a good father. They may well have wished to throw him into despair.”

“It is possible,” answered the Secretary of State. “In any case the fairies have nothing whatever to do with the matter. Only old countrywomen can still believe these cock-and-bull stories.”

“Be quiet, Boulingrin,” said the Duchess. “There is nothing so hateful as a sceptic. He is an impertinent person who laughs at our simplicity. I detest strong-minded people; I believe what I ought to believe; but in this particular case, I suspect a dark intrigue.”

At the moment when Cicogne spoke these words, the fairy Vivien touched them both with her ring, and sent them to sleep like the rest.

CHAPTER V

IN a quarter of an hour there grew all round about the park such an immense quantity of trees, large and small, with thorns and briars interlaced,-that neither man nor beast could pass; so that only the tops of the castle towers could be seen, and these only from a long way off.{*} Once, twice, thrice, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety, and a hundred times did Urania close the circle of Time: the Sleeping Beauty and her Court, with Boulingrin beside the Duchess on the bench in the antechamber, still slept on.

* Contes de Perrault, pp. 87-88.

Whether one regard Time as a mode of the unique substance, whether it be defined as one of the forms of the conscious ego, or an abstract phase of the immediate externality, or whether one regard it purely as a law, a relation resulting from the progression of Reality, we can affirm that one hundred years is a certain space of time.

CHAPTER VI

EVERY one knows the end of the enchantment, and how, after a hundred terrestrial cycles, a prince favoured by the fairies penetrated the enchanted wood, and reached the bed where slept the Princess. He was a little German princeling, with a pretty moustache, and rounded hips. As soon as she woke up, she fell, or rather rose so much in love, that she followed him to his little principality in such a hurry that she never said a word to the people of her household, who had slept with her for a hundred years.

Her first lady-in-waiting was quite touched thereby, and exclaimed with admiration: “I recognize the blood of my kings.” Boulingrin woke up beside the Duchess de Cicogne at the same time as the Princess and all her household. As he rubbed his eyes, his mistress said: “Boulingrin, you have been asleep.” “Not at all, dear lady, not at all.” He spoke in good faith. Having slept without dreaming for a hundred years, he did not know that he had been asleep.

“I have been so little asleep,” he said, “that I can repeat what you said a minute ago.”

“Well, what did I say?”

“You said, ‘I suspect a dark intrigue.'”

As soon as it awoke, the whole of the little Court was discharged; every one had to fend for himself as best he could.

Boulingrin and Cicogne hired from the castle steward an old seventeenth-century trap drawn by an animal which was already very aged before it went to sleep for a hundred years, and drove to the station of Eaux-Perdues, where they caught a train which, in two hours, deposited them in the capital of the country. Great was their surprise at all that they saw and heard. But by the end of a quarter of an hour they had exhausted their astonishment, and nothing surprised them any more. As for themselves, nobody took the slightest interest in them. Their story was perfectly incomprehensible, and awakened no curiosity, for our minds are not interested in anything that is too obvious, or too difficult to follow.

As one may well believe, Boulingrin had not the remotest idea what had happened to him. But when the Duchess said that it was not natural, he answered:

“Dear lady, allow me to observe that you have been badly trained in physics. Nothing exists which is not according to Nature.”

There remained to them neither friends, relations, nor property. They could not identify the position of their house. With the little money they had they bought a guitar, and sang in the streets. By this means they gained sufficient to support themselves. At night Cicogne staked at manille, in the inns, the coppers that had been thrown her during the day, while Boulingrin, with a bowl of warm wine in front of him, explained to the company that it was ridiculous to believe in fairies.