THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES

It was that great assembly of the fairies, to proceed with the repartition of gifts among the new-born who had arrived at life within the last twenty-four hours.

All these antique and capricious sisters of destiny,all these bizarre mothers of sadness and of joy, were most diversified: some had a somber, crabbed air;others were wanton, mischievous; some, young, who had always been young; others old, who had always been old.

All the fathers who believed in fairies had come,each bearing his new-born in his arms.

Gifts, Faculties, Good Fortunes, Invincible Circumstances, were gathered at the side of the tribunal, as prizes on the platform for distribution.What was peculiar here was that the gifts were not the reward of an effort, but, quite the contrary, a grace accorded him who had not yet lived, a grace with power to determine his destiny and become as well the source of his misfortune as of his good.

The poor fairies were kept very busy; for the crowd of solicitors was great, and the intermediate world,placed between man and God, is subject, like man,to the terrible law of Time and his endless offspring,Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds.

In truth, they were as bewildered as ministers on an audience day, or as guards at the Mont-de-Piété when a national holiday authorizes gratuitous liberations. I really think that from time to time they looked at the hands of the clock with as much impatience as human judges, who, sitting since morn, cannot help dreaming of dinner, of the family, and of their cherished slippers.If, in supernatural justice, there is a little of haste and of luck, we should not be surprised sometimes to find the same in human justice. We ourselves, in that case,would be unjust judges.

So some shams were enacted that day which might be thought bizarre, if prudence, rather than caprice,were the distinctive, eternal characteristic of the fairies.

For instance, the power of magnetically attracting fortune was awarded the sole heir of a very wealthy family, who, endowed with no feeling of charity, no more than with lust for the most visible goods of life,must later on find himself prodigiously embarrassed by his millions.

Thus, love of the beautiful and poetic power were given to the son of a gloomy knave, a quarry-man by trade, who could in no way develop the faculties or satisfy the needs of his deplorable offspring.

All the fairies rose, thinking their task was through;for there remained no gift, no bounty, to hurl at all that human fry, when one fine fellow, a poor little tradesman, I think, rose, and grasping by her robe of multi-colored vapors the Fairy nearest at hand, cried:

"Oh, Madam! You are forgetting us! There is still my little one! I don't want to have come for nothing!" The fairy could have been embarrassed, for there no longer was a thing. However, she recalled in time a law, well known, though rarely applied, in the supernatural world, inhabited by those impalpable deities, friends,of man and often constrained to mold themselves to his passions, such as Fairies, Gnomes, Salamanders,Sylphides, Sylphs, Nixies, Watersprites and Undines—I mean the law which grants a Fairy, in a case similar to this, namely, in case of the exhausting of the prizes, power to give one more, supplementary and exceptional, provided always that she has sufficient imagination to create it at once.

Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-possession worthy of her rank: "I give to your son.... I give him ... the gift of pleasing!"

"Pleasing? How? Pleasing? Why?" obstinately asked the little shopkeeper, who was doubtless one of those logicians so commonly met, incapable of rising to the logic of the Absurd.

"Because! Because!" replied the incensed Fairy,turning her back on him; and, rejoining the train of her companions, she said to them: "What do you think of this little vainglorious Frenchman, who wants to know everything, and who, having secured for his son the best of gifts, dares still to question and to dispute the indisputable?"