Inside, outside

1. L’OISEAU QUI A FROID

C’est l’hiver. Il fait froid. Un petit oiseau a faim et froid. Il frappe à une fenêtre. Une petite fille ouvre la fenêtre et l’oiseau entre. Elle lui donne à manger et le soigne tout l’hiver. Au printemps l’oiseau est triste. Il ne chante plus. L’enfant ouvre la cage et l’oiseau s’envole.

—from Short Stories for Oral French,
by Anna Woods Ballard, p. 1

*

With winter setting into the sparseness of its feathers, a hungry canary taps its beak on a window to be let inside a building. Behind the window, an old woman sketches restlessly in a notebook the contours of several windows. She is a lover of windows. What she draws now is a blending of two windows from her life—one the window in her present house, the other a bamboo-latticed window in a faraway house in which she used to live, until the age of three, with her mother and father. The latter window is a hazy yet heavy memory, and evidence of this former life lies clearly in a photograph stashed beneath her pillow. In the photograph, she stands between her parents outside the window, the only window in the building that remains intact while a pitted rubble, created by giant, new machines, has settled around them. A flood or a highway (the old woman can’t remember which) is about to go through their Mule City, and this sturdy window with their family’s surname burned into the topmost bamboo strip is the only thing allowed to hold on to life. The window in her present house, meanwhile, is plain, a single pane set in red brick, and she looks at it now to see which window, this or the one in the photograph, will gain the upper hand in her sketch—and finally she notices the bedraggled canary shivering on the sill. Stunned, she no longer sees the window, or any window at all. Instead, she sees the rest of her life play out within the canary’s black, black eyes: She will let the canary in, and it will land gratefully on her pillow where the photograph of the ruined house lies, flat, underneath. All winter she will feed the canary bits of her meals, and at night the canary will perch itself on her hard pillow. Then when spring comes—the old woman’s final spring—the canary will look out the plain window and remember, perhaps with confusion or perhaps with abrupt clarity, that the yellow sun had once been kin. It will stop its songs, for spring is its home, not the inside of a forgotten house. So the old woman will open the window for her little canary again, and flicking its tail feathers now dense with brightness belonging to the sun, the bird will fly off and away.

*

[study questions after the jump]

“Have you?”

19. ET VOUS?

On dit qu’Alexandre Dumas n’est pas l’auteur de plusieurs romans qui portent sa signature. Un jour il rencontra son fils et lui dit: “Eh bien, que penses-tu de mon dernier roman? l’as-tu lu?” — “Non, je ne l’ai pas lu, mon père, et vous?” répondit Alexandre Dumas fils dont la réputation pour l’esprit est bien connue et bien méritée.

—from Short Stories for Oral French,
Anna W. Ballard
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), p. 24

*

Certain novels by their covers claim Alexandre Dumas as their author—but in fact it is rumored, gossiped about, spread far and wide that, because his reliance upon assistants and collaborators was extensive, he had not written a single one of these books on his own. One day, on his way to the market, or perhaps the press, or let’s say his lover’s cottage—it is hard to pinpoint, with these false authors (alleged, alleged)—Dumas came upon his son, also named Alexandre and also a writer (though distinguished as “Junior”), and because Senior had recently published a new novel, or rather the latest novel bearing his name was recently published, he said to the young Alexandre, his Junior: “Well? Have you read it, my Junior? Tell me what you think.”

Answered Junior: “No, my father who shares my name but not my pursuit of Truth—no, I haven’t read a word of it. Have you?”