Aloysius Bernard: My Thatched Cottage

 I. My Thatched Cottage

 In autumn the thrushes would come to rest there, drawn by the berries of a vivid redness harvested from the service tree of the bird-catchers. The Baron R. Monthermé. 

Lifting her eyes afterwards, the good old woman observed how the dry cold north wind was tossing the trees, and was dispersing the traces of the crows that hopped over the snow surrounding the barn. The German poet Voss, Idyll XIII. 

My thatched cottage will have, in the summer, the leafage of the woodland for a parasol, and in the autumn, for a garden, at the window’s edge, a patch of moss that will enshrine the pearls of the rainfall, and some wallflower that smells like the almond. But in the winter, what a pleasure, when the morning will have discarded its bouquets of hoarfrost on my frozen windows, to perceive quite far off, on the outskirts of the forest, a traveler who continues to diminish, him and his mount, in the snow and the haze! 

What a pleasure, in the evening, to peruse, under the mantel of the fireplace blazing and perfumed from the brushwood of a juniper tree, the chronicles of the gallant knights and monks, portrayed so marvelously that they seem, some to joust and others to pray, one more time! 

And what a pleasure, in the late night, during the uncertain and pallid hour that precedes the break of day, to hear my cockerel making himself hoarse inside the henhouse, and then the cockerel at some farm responding to him faintly, a sentinel perched on the outposts of the slumbering village.

Ah! If only the King were reading, ensconced in his Louvre, what we have written–O my muse unsheltered against the hurricanes of life!–then surely that lord suzerain over so many fiefs that he does not know the number of his castles would not begrudge us a small thatched cottage!

Translated by Donald Sidney-Fryer