Piccolissima

Piccolissima was descended on the father's side from the famous Tom
Thumb, so well known to all children. On the mother's side, her
lineage was no less distinguished. Mignonette Littlepin (this was
the family name of Madam Tom Thumb) was the great granddaughter of
the wonderful Princess, who once lodged in a spectacle case, out of
which she came so splendidly attired that the brilliancy of her
little person illuminated all surrounding objects. A trustworthy
biographer tells us that nothing occurred in the history of Mr. and
Mrs. Tom Thumb to disgrace their illustrious parentage, and they
were considered none the less good citizens because they were rather
smaller than other people.

In the mean while, however, our humble couple became suddenly
celebrated by the birth of our heroine; this small creature was so
delicate, so exquisite, so pretty, and so lively and full of spirit,
that from the age of two years she became the object of general
admiration. She was not more than one inch in height, and her
mother, who had prepared the cradle and baby linen for a child of
the usual size, was puzzled to know what to do. Finally, the half of
a cocoanut shell, lined, and furnished with soft cushions of thistle
down, made a good bed for the little wonder; and the nursery maid,
wife of a neighboring clockmaker, and a person of ingenuity,
conceived the admirable idea of suspending the cocoanut cradle from
the pendulum of a great clock, in order that the infant might be
rocked all the time. Madam Tom Thumb was enchanted with the
invention. She adhered to the old-fashioned notions, and could not
suppose it possible that her little one could sleep without rocking.
What the good little mother found the most trouble from, in the
extreme smallness and delicacy of the limbs of her new-born doll
baby, was the impossibility of swathing and dressing it. So she was
forced to resign herself to doing as the birds do, and bring up her
little one on a bed of moss and down. She hardly dared to put upon
the little arm, smaller than her own little finger, a little shift
made of the fine white skin of the inside of an eggshell. The boots
of the little one had soles cut out of the inside husks of the corn;
a poppy leaf made her an ample bonnet. The spider's web which the
dew whitens, and the wind winds up in balls, seemed too coarse too
weave her sheets with, and the cup of an acorn was big enough for
Piccolissima. Her parents obtained all her wardrobe, and all the
small furniture for her use from those thousands of skilful
laborers, so adroit, and yet of whom we think so little, who hide
themselves in all the walls, in the leaves of the trees turned up
like horns, under the bark of the trees; in short, that are found in
all the corners and crevices of creation.

Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb were not people who could be astonished.
Simple themselves, every thing appeared simple to them. Mrs.
Mignonette was at first a little disconcerted at finding that a
drawer of baby linen which she had taken so much pains to make was
of no use, and that one of the stockings which she had knit was big
enough for her child to get into. But, when she was convinced that
the baby could do just as well without stockings, and that the
cushions of thistle down were sufficient to keep it warm, she was no
longer troubled, and she said to her neighbors, who were eager to
see her little wonder, "It is very natural that the little one
should be so very delicate; from the first we called it
Piccolissima; then, neither Mr. Tom Thumb nor I are very large; and
I am told that our ancestors were still more delicately
formed; what then is more natural than that this little one should be
such a wee wee thing?"

The tranquillity of Mrs. Tom Thumb had this good effect; it appeased
the curiosity of the neighbors. At last, like her, they came to the
conclusion "that it was very natural that the child was smaller than
the mother." and all went on as usual around our heroine, while she
was quietly rocked by the passing hours, and was amused with the
sound of the silver clock bell. When, however, Piccolissima was two
inches high, and lively as a grasshopper, she became restless in her
cocoanut shell; she was desirous to get out of it, to walk, and to
jump, and she not only deranged the clock, but she was in real
danger.

She was now as much as seven years old, and she amused herself with
all sorts of little pranks, and loving ways, with one of her
brothers eighteen months old. The great boy, in a sort of ecstasy at
some of the drolleries of his little sister, seized her and put her
in his mouth, taking into it nearly the whole head of the poor
little thing. Her cry was so shrill that the baby boy opened his
jaws and let the unfortunate Piccolissima fall on the floor. She did
not recover for a long time from this fall. Another time, a large
cat, a great mouser, ran after her, and it was with difficulty they
rescued Piccolissima from the claws of Raminagrobis. The father, Mr.
Thumb, could not repress some anxiety about the fate of his amiable
daughter, who had more than common intelligence, and who, by her
extreme smallness, was exposed to so many dangers.

Piccolissima did her best to acquire knowledge. She had the best
intentions in the world; she desired in every thing to please all
who approached her; but her extreme restlessness led her away in
spite of herself. One evening she lost herself in the solitude of a
drawer in which was kept some tobacco; she came near dying from the
effect of it. Once she was near drowning in a superb salad dish of
frothed eggs, which she may have taken for snow mountains. She had a
passion for discovery, she had a prodigious activity of mind and
body, and yet they could find nothing for her to do, "because," they
said, "she is so little, so delicate." She could not play with
children of her own age, she was not allowed to run about, and
without object, without employment, without means of studying, with
no companions, no sympathy, the poor little thing was in danger of
falling into a state of apathy, more to be feared than the accidents
from which they wished to preserve her.

One day, towards the end of February, Piccolissima had been placed
upon the mantelpiece. Her mother had gone out; her father, who did
not wish to have the trouble of watching over all his little
daughter's movements, seated her upon a pincushion in which there
were no pins, and putting the dictionary as a sort of rampart before
her, he gave her a stick of barley sugar to entertain herself with, and
after the usual admonition, left her to her dreams. Leaving the
sugar to slip down by her side, she remained lost in melancholy
reflections from which she was drawn by a light murmur, such as one
hears sometimes in the silence of the night when persons are
speaking in a low voice in a distant part of the house. Piccolissima
listened with deep attention for some time. Usually she disliked the
sound of conversation; it struck harshly on her organs, and seemed a
sort of mimic thunder; but these sounds had nothing discordant,
nothing disagreeable in them, to her ear. As Piccolissima had been
forced to observe rather than to act, her faculties took a new
direction, and a development of which she was unconscious herself
took place, and her joy and her surprise were great when she found
that, in what had at first appeared to her a confused murmur, she
distinguished, as she listened attentively, intelligible words.

"It was hardly worth while," said a small, sharp voice, "it was
hardly worth the trouble it cost me to leave my cradle. I have come
into the world where all is dead around me. Ah! if I had only known
that this world was so cold and dull, I should not have made efforts
which almost destroyed me, to break the roof and leave my narrow
house."

"Patience," replied another voice, a little quieter, but much like
the other; "I have lived longer than thou, who art only a few
seconds old. I have learned that one minute does not resemble
another; that cold is near to heat, that light is near to darkness,
and that sweet follows bitter. It is now two hundred and twenty-one
thousand, seven hundred and sixty-one minutes, and twenty-four
seconds, since I broke my shell. This sun, which you now see so pale
in the dusk, glowed then with more fervor, and sent every where more
rays and sparkles than I can count seconds in my long life. I was
all wet as you are now--poor, helpless thing; but I turned myself to
some of those brilliant rays, and my wings directly became strong,
as you now see them, embossed and painted with seven different,
changing colors, reflections of the rays of the sun. See! there is
one of these rays now; come forth; spread thy moist wing, already
shrunk and chill; thou shalt take thy part in the blessings which
come from on high."

Piccolissima, all attention and full of curiosity, looked around
her, and saw coming out from the window frame two flies, who
appeared to be talking together. The wings of one of them remained
stuck together on its back, and it made a great effort to extend
them. Delighted at the discovery of companions in her solitude,
companions, too, whose language she could understand, Piccolissima
was eager to make their acquaintance; so she offered them her stick
of candy. One of the flies--it was the elder--having fixed upon the
little prodigy one of the thousand faces of his brown, sparkling
eyes, surrounded with golden eyelashes, he then placed, one by one,
his little black feet upon the stick of sugar candy, stretched forth
his trunk, and began to suck with eagerness.

Piccolissima had now time enough to contemplate a being whose organs
she thought were like her own in their weakness. She found pleasure
in examining the extraordinary form of its almost cylindrical body,
divided into three parts, and a head wider than it was long, an
irregular globe surmounted by two horns, or antennae, as they are
called. The eyes most excited her curiosity. She attempted to count
their numerous little faces, so regular, so finely cut into
hexagons, more polished, more brilliant than diamonds. When
Piccolissima had counted one hundred, she drew from a very small
box, which was a family treasure, some minikin pins, and stuck one
of them into the cushion on which she was seated, intending thus to
mark every hundred that she counted; but she had not counted thus
half a thousand, before she found that breath and knowledge failed
her; in truth, she did not know enough of arithmetic to count the
eyes of a fly. In the very first group which she undertook to count,
that on the right side of the fly, she had not counted a sixteenth
part. Piccolissima, from her education, resembled the flies a little
too much to boast of her perseverance. So she gave up her project.

While bending her small head over these eyes, she distinguished, at
the bottom of these crystals, a moving dark spot, and thousands of
little Piccolissimas, one after the other, smiled upon her from
these little mirrors. O, wonderful! these thousands of crystal
groups on each side of the head were not all; a triangle of three
diamonds crowned the forehead of the fly. Piccolissima did not know
the name they give to these small eyes, nor that a writer on the
subject had said, that the diadem of the fly outshines that of
queens, but she could not refrain from saying aloud, "O, my little
friend, pray tell me what you do with so many eyes?"

"What do I do with them, indeed! why, I look," answered the fly, a
litt