First publication : February 15, 1874

The unknown words sang on your lips, cursed fragments of an absurd sentence.

 I left my apartment with the clean feeling of a wing sliding on the strings of an instrument, drawling and light, which replaced a voice saying the words in a lowering tone: “The next to last is dead”, so that 

The next to last                        

                        finished the verse and

Is dead.

loosened itself from the fateful suspension in meaning’s space more pointlessly.  My footsteps echoed in the street and I recognized in the stillness the tensed string of the musical instrument, which had been forgotten, and which the glorious Remembrance certainly came to visit from his wing or from a palm, and, with my finger on the subtlety of the mystery, I smiled and implored from intellectual wishes a different speculation.   The sentence returned, virtual, detached from the preceding fall of a feather or of a twig, from then on the voice was heard, until finally it spoke, living from his personality alone.  I went (satisfying myself with no more than a perception) reading it as the end of a verse, and, once, I attempted to adapt it in my own voice; soon I pronounced it with a moment of silence after "The next to last" in which I found a painful enjoyment: "The next to last", then the string of the instrument, tense in the oblivion of stillness, doubtless broke and I added as if in prayer: "died." I did not stop trying to return to thoughts of things I favored, soothingly, to calm myself, saying that certainly “the next to last” is the term in the lexicon which means the next to last syllable of a word, and by its appearance, the rest was badly foresworn by a labor of language in which the daily sobs interrupted my noble poetic faculty, the sound itself did so, and the air of a lie arising in haste from my easy assertion which became a cause of anguish.  Harassed, I resolved to let the words of sad nature wander in my mouth themselves, and I went whispering with the susceptible intonation of condolence: "The next to last died, it died, it’s dead and buried, the desperate next to last" believing thereby to satisfy my unease, and not without the secret hope of overcoming the ever-louder voice when, to my horror! – from an easily perceivable and nervous magic -- I saw my hand reflected in a shop window making the gesture of a caress which falls on something, and I heard the same voice (the first voice, which was undoubtedly unique).

But where the irrefutable intervention of the supernatural settled down, and the fear under which my former spirit was dying began, Lord, it is when I saw, raising my eyes, in the street of the antique dealers that I instinctively made my way down, I found myself in front of the shop of a violin-maker, a salesman of old instruments.  Hanging on the wall and on the ground were the yellow palms and wings buried in the  shadow, the ancient birds.  I ran away, bizarrely, a person likely condemned to carry the grief of the inexplicable next to last.