speaking! Babiole a reasoning creature! The Queen would have her again, to amuse her; they therefore carried her to her Majesty's apartments, greatly to the grief of the Prince. He began to weep; and, to console him, they gave him cats and dogs, birds and squirrels, and even a pony, called Criquetin, which danced a saraband;[1] but all this was to him not worth one word from Babiole.
On her side, she was under greater constraint with the Queen than with the Prince: they required her to answer like a Sibyl to a hundred ingenious and learned questions to which she could not always reply. When an ambassador or a stranger arrived, they made her appear in a robe of velvet or brocade with bodice and collar. If the Court was in mourning, she had to drag after her a long mantle of crape, which fatigued her very much. They did not allow her to eat what she liked, the physician always ordering her dinner, which did not at all please her, as she was as self-willed as an ape born a princess might be expected to be. The Queen gave her masters who tried the powers of her intellect most thoroughly. She excelled in playing on the harpsichord; they had made her a wonderful one in an oyster shell. Painters came from all quarters of the world, and especially from Italy, to take her likeness. Her renown spread from pole to pole, for no one had ever heard of a monkey endued with speech.
The Prince, as beautiful as the picture of the god of love, graceful and witty, was not less a prodigy. He came to see Babiole, and sometimes amused himself with talking to her; their conversation often changed from gay to grave, for Babiole had a heart, and that heart was not metamorphosed like the rest of her little body. She became, therefore, deeply attached to the Prince, and he in return became only too fond of her.
The unfortunate Babiole did not know what to do; she passed her nights on the top of a window shutter, or on a corner of the chimney-piece, without a wish to enter the basket prepared for her, which was soft, and well lined with wadding and feathers. Her governess (for she had one) often heard her sighing, and sometimes complaining; her melancholy became deeper as her reason increased, and she never saw herself in a looking-glass without trying, out of vexation,
- ↑ A dance originally Moorish.
