George MacDonald

CHAPTER IV.
CURDIE'S FATHER AND MOTHER.
THE eyes of the fathers and mothers are quick to read their children's looks, and when Curdie entered the cottage, his parents saw at once that something unusual had taken place. When he said to his mother, "I beg your pardon for being so late," there was something in the tone beyond the politeness that went to her heart, for it seemed to come from the place where all lovely thin were born before they began to grow in this world. When he set his father's chair to the table, an attention he had not shown him for a long time, Peter thanked him with more gratitude than the boy had ever yet felt in all his life. It was a small thing to do for the man who had been serving him since ever he was born, but I suspect there is nothing a man can be so grateful for as that to which he has the most right. There was a change upon Curdie, and father and mother felt there must be something to account for it, and therefore were pretty sure he had something to tell them. For when a child's heart is all right, it is not likely he will want to keep anything from his parents. But the story of the evening was too solemn for Curdie to come out with all at once.

Avant-propos du traducteur

Sauf erreur, on ignore entièrement en France George MacDOnald (1824-1905). C'est ignorer un poète, un romancier de la vie écossaise et par-dessus tout un merveilleux conteur. Dans une savante étude intitulée "Notes sur la foi en les fées et l'idée d'enfance", Jonathan Cott l'a appelé "le plus grand écrivain visionnaire de la littérature enfantine". C'est vrai, à condition de mettre l'accent sur visionnaire et de sous-entendre une vision profondément cohérente qui obtienne sans cesse l'adhésion du coeur. Si fantastiques que puissent être celles de George MacDonald, elles ne nous dépaysent jamais, elles créent au contraire pour nous un monde spirituel où nous reconnaissons une patrie. Et l'histoire selon laquelle elles s'ordonnent est un message - et même, disons-le, une véritable initiation.
Pierre Leyris.

The miners were a mingled company—some good, some not so good, some rather bad—none of them so bad or so good as they might have been; Curdie liked most of them, and was a favourite with all; but they knew very little about the upper world, and what might or might not take place there. They knew silver from copper ore; they understood the underground ways of thin, and they could look very wise with their lanterns in their hands searching after this or that sign of ore, or for some mark to guide their way in the hollows of the earth; but as to great-great-grandmothers, they would have mocked him all the rest of his life for the absurdity of not being absolutely certain that the solemn belief of his father and mother was nothing but ridiculous nonsense.

'Hush! scush! scurry!
There you go in a hurry!
Gobble! gobble! goblin!
There you go a wobblin';
Hobble, hobble, hobblin'—
Cobble! cobble! cobblin'!
Hob-bob-goblin!—
Huuuuuh!'

CHAPTER II.
THE WHITE PIGEON.
WHEN in the winter they had had their supper and sat about the fire, or when in the summer they lay on the border of the rock-margined stream that ran through their little meadow, close by the door of their cottage, issuing from the far-up whiteness often folded in clouds, Curdie's mother would not seldom lead the conversation to one peculiar personage said and believed to have been much concerned in the late issue of events. That personage was the greatgreat-grandmother of the princess, of whom the princess had often talked, but whom neither Curdie nor his mother had ever seen. Curdie could indeed remember, although already it looked more like a dream than he could account for if it had really taken place, how the princess had once led him up many stairs to what she called a beautiful room in the top of the tower, where she went through all the—what should he call it?—the behaviour of presenting him to her grandmother, talking now to her and now to him, while all the time he saw nothing but a bare garret, a heap of musty straw, a sunbeam, and a withered apple.

CHAPTER 21. THE ESCAPE
As the princess lay and sobbed she kept feeling the thread mechanically, following it with her finger many times up to the stones in which it disappeared. By and by she began, still mechanically, to poke her finger in after it between the stones as far as she could. All at once it came into her head that she might remove some of the stones and see where the thread went next. Almost laughing at herself for never having thought of this before, she jumped to her feet. Her fear vanished; once more she was certain her grandmother's thread could not have brought her there just to leave her there; and she began to throw away the stones from the top as fast as she could, sometimes two or three at a handful, sometimes taking both hands to lift one. After clearing them away a little, she found that the thread turned and went straight downwards. Hence, as the heap sloped a good deal, growing of course wider towards its base, she had to throw away a multitude of stones to follow the thread. But this was not all, for she soon found that the thread, after going straight down for a little way, turned first sideways in one direction, then sideways in another, and then shot, at various angles, hither and thither inside the heap, so that she began to be afraid that to clear the thread she must remove the whole huge gathering. She was dismayed at the very idea, but, losing no time, set to work with a will; and with aching back, and bleeding fingers and hands, she worked on, sustained by the pleasure of seeing the heap slowly diminish and begin to show itself on the opposite side of the fire. Another thing which helped to keep up her courage was that, as often as she uncovered a turn of the thread, instead of lying loose upon the stone, it tightened up; this made her sure that her grandmother was at the end of it somewhere.

CHAPTER 2. THE PRINCESS LOSES HERSELF
I have said the Princess Irene was about eight years old when my story
begins. And this is how it begins.
One very wet day, when the mountain was covered with mist which was
constantly gathering itself together into raindrops, and pouring down on
the roofs of the great old house, whence it fell in a fringe of water from the
eaves all round about it, the princess could not of course go out. She got
very tired, so tired that even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would
wonder at that if I had time to describe to you one half of the toys she had.
But then, you wouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the
difference: you can't get tired of a thing before you have it. It was a picture,
though, worth seeing—the princess sitting in the nursery with the sky
ceiling over her head, at a great table covered with her toys. If the artist
would like to draw this, I should advise him not to meddle with the toys. I
am afraid of attempting to describe them, and I think he had better not try
to draw them. He had better not. He can do a thousand things I can't, but I
don't think he could draw those toys. No man could better make the
princess herself than he could, though—leaning with her back bowed into
the back of the chair, her head hanging down, and her hands in her lap, very
miserable as she would say herself, not even knowing what she would like,
except it were to go out and get thoroughly wet, and catch a particularly
nice cold, and have to go to bed and take gruel. The next moment after you
see her sitting there, her nurse goes out of the room.

'What does that matter?' said the boy. 'It must be your fault. It is the princess who will suffer for it. I hope they didn't hear you call her the princess. If they did, they're sure to know her again: they're awfully sharp.'
'Lootie! Lootie!' cried the princess. 'Take me home.'
'Don't go on like that,' said the nurse to the boy, almost fiercely. 'How could I help it? I lost my way.'
'You shouldn't have been out so late. You wouldn't have lost your way if you hadn't been frightened,' said the boy. 'Come along. I'll soon set you right again. Shall I carry your little Highness?'

Puis vient la brume et une triste pluie,
Et la vie n'est plus jamais la même.

I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of the earth
that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born