Chapter II: Part 2

M. Tielemans stood up, thanked M. van Nuffel and said that he would die with an easy mind, as he had spent his existence doing all the good in his power, and that he would not beg for mercy. He entreated, however, that the lives of his fellow-citizens and of his son, a boy of fifteen and his mother’s last consolation, might be spared. The officer grinned and made no reply. The burgomaster’s brother next asked for mercy, not for himself but for his brother and his nephew. His request fell on deaf ears. The lad then got up and took his place between his father and his uncle. Six soldiers took aim at ten yards’ distance; the officer lowered his sword; and, as the widow of the heroic burgomaster says, “the best man in this world had ceased to exist.”

3

I will now quote from the evidence of M. Gustave Nys, an eye-witness of the horrible drama which nearly numbered him among its victims:

“The other civilians were thereupon placed in rows of three. The
third in each row was to leave it and fall out behind the dead
bodies, in order to be shot. All the civilians had their hands tied
behind their backs. My brother and I stood next to each other: I was
number two; my brother Omer, twenty years of age, was number three.
I asked the officer, ‘May I change places with my brother? It makes
no difference to you who falls under your bullets; but it does to my
mother, who is a widow, for my brother has finished his studies and
is more useful to her than I am.’ Once again he refused to listen
to my prayer. ‘Fall out, number three!’ My brother and I embraced;
and he joined the others. There were thirty of them, drawn up in
line. Then a horrible scene took place: the German soldiers, walking
slowly along the row, killed three at each discharge of their rifles,
waiting between the volleys for the officer’s word of command.”

4

Incidents such as these would pass unperceived if one did not take the trouble to seek them out and to collect them piously amid the huge mass of tragedies which for more than four years upset and ravaged the unhappy country tortured by its invaders. Had they occurred in the history of Greece or Rome, they would have found a place among the great deeds that honour our earth and deserve to live for ever in the memory of man. It is our duty to make them known for a moment and to engrave in our recollection the names of those who were their heroes. Thus set down, simply and plainly, as befits historic truth, in depositions sworn under oath before a nameless registrar who has stripped them of any literary or sentimental embellishment, they give at first but a very faint idea of the intensity of the tragedy and the value of the sacrifice. There is here no question of a glorious death faced amid the excitement of the fighting, on a vast field of battle. Nor are we considering an indefinite or overhanging menace, or an uncertain, remote and perhaps avoidable danger. We have to do with an obscure, solitary, horrible and imminent death in a ditch; and the six rifle-barrels are there, aimed almost point-blank, ready, upon a sign of the officer who accepts your offer, to change you, in a second, into a heap of bleeding flesh and to send you to the unknown, terrible region which man dreads all the more when he is still full of strength and life. There is not a moment’s interval nor a gleam of hope between question and answer, between existence with all its joys and death with all its horrors. There is no encouragement, no word or gesture of stimulation or support, no reward; in an instant, all is given in exchange for nothing; it is sheer self-sacrifice standing naked and so pure that we are surprised that not even Germans were conquered by its beauty.

There was but one manner in which they could have extricated themselves without dishonour and that was to pardon the two victims; or else, supposing the thing which was not, which never is the case, that a death was absolutely necessary, there was a second solution, which was to accept the offer and to kill the martyr whom they ought to have worshipped on their knees. In this way they would only have acted as the worst of savages. But they discovered a third, which doubtless, before them, the Carthaginians alone would have invented and adopted. For that matter, they exceeded the fiercest savagery and equalled the abominable Punic morality in another case which brings to mind that of Regulus and which will be the third instance of heroism that I intend to recall.

5

A few days after the events which I have narrated, on the 23rd of August, 1914, Dinant became the scene of wholesale massacres which involved exactly six hundred and six victims, including eleven children under five years old, twenty-eight of ages between ten and fifteen and seventy-one women.

Nothing can give an idea of the horror and infamy of these massacres, which form one of the most disgraceful and terrible pages in the long and monstrous history of Teuton shame. But it is not my purpose to speak of this for the moment. There would be too much to tell. I wish to-day only to separate from the mass an episode in which the hero of Dinant-la-Wallone is worthy of a place beside his two brethren of Aerschot in Flanders.

Just outside Dinant, near the famous Roche à Bayard, the legendary glory of the fair and smiling little township, the Germans occupied the right bank of the Meuse and were beginning to build a bridge of boats. The French, hidden in the bushes and the windings of the left bank, were firing on the engineers. Their fire was not very well-sustained; and the Germans, without the least justification, drew the conclusion that it was due to _francs-tireurs_, who, for that matter, throughout this Belgian campaign, never existed except in their imagination. At that moment, eighty hostages, taken from among the inhabitants of Dinant, were collected and kept in sight at the foot of the rock. The German officer sent one of them, M. Bourdon, a clerk attached to the law-courts, to the left bank, to inform the enemy that, if the firing continued, all the hostages would be instantly shot. M. Bourdon crossed the Meuse, fulfilled his mission and pluckily returned to reconstitute himself a prisoner. He assured the officer that he had convinced himself that there were no _francs-tireurs_ and that only French soldiers of the regular army were taking part in the defence of the other bank. A few more bullets fell; and the officer caused the eighty hostages to be shot, beginning, that he might be punished as he deserved for his heroic faithfulness to his pledged word, with the poor clerk, his wife, his daughter and his two sons, one of whom was a mere child of fifteen.

WASTED BEAUTIES

VII

WASTED BEAUTIES

1

Under the grey skies and the disheartening rains of this autumnal July, I think of the light which I have left behind me. I have left it down there, on the now empty shores of the Mediterranean, and I ask myself in vain why I parted from it. Yet I was one of the last to tear myself away. All the others leave in the early days of April, recalled by legendary memories of the deceitful spring-tides of the north, nor do they realize that they are losing a great happiness.

It is good, it is wise to escape, amid the blue of sea and sky, the icy months of our winters, dismal as punishment; but, although in the south these months are warmer and above all more luminous than ours, they do not quite make up to us for the darkness and the frost of our native climes. The brightest and warmest hours, in spite of all, retain an after-taste of cloud and snow; they are beautiful, but timid; swiftly and fearfully they hasten towards the night. Now man, who is born of the sun, like all things, has need of his hereditary portion of primitive heat and all-pervading light. He has within him numberless deep-seated cells which retain the memory of the resplendent days of the prime and become unhappy when they cannot reap their harvest of rays. Man can live in the gloom, but at long last he loses the smile and the confidence that are so essential. Because of our twilit summers it becomes indispensable to restore the balance between darkness and light and sometimes to drive away, by superb excesses of sunshine, the cold and the dark that invade our very souls.

2

It reigns at a few hours’ distance from us, the incomparable steady sun which we no longer see. Those who leave before mid-June do not know what happens when they are gone. Lo and behold, the real actors in this wonderful fairyland spring up on every side as though they had been awaiting the departure of intruding and mocking witnesses. During the winter, in the presence of the official visitors, they have played but a tempered prologue, a little colourless, a little slow, a little timid and restrained. But now of a sudden the great lyrical acts blaze forth upon the intoxicated earth.

The heavens open their vistas to the uttermost limits of the blue, to the supreme heights where the glory and rapture of God are outspread; and all the flowers rend the gardens, the rocks and the heaths, to uplift themselves and leap towards the gulf of gladness which draws them into space. The camomiles have gone mad; for six weeks they hold outstretched, to invisible lovers, their great round clusters like shields of glowing snow. The scarlet, tumultuous mantle of the Bougainvilleas blinds the houses whose dazzled windows blink amid the flames. The yellow roses cover the hills with a saffron-coloured cloak; the pink roses, of the lovely, innocent pink of maiden blushes, flood the valleys, as though the divine well-springs of the dawn, which elaborate the ideal flesh of women and angels, had overflowed the earth. Others climb the trees, scale pillars, columns, house-fronts, porches, leap up and fall, rise again and multiply, jostle one another, lie one on top of the other, forming so many bunches of effervescing delight, so many silent swarms of impassioned petals. And the innumerable, diverse and imperious scents that flow through this ocean of mirth, like rivers which do not mingle, rivers whose source we recognize at every breath! Here is the cold, green torrent of the rose-geranium, the trickle of clove-carnations, the bright, limpid stream of lavender, the resinous eddy of the pine-barren and the wide, still, luscious lake, of an all but dizzy sweetness, of the orange-blossom, which drowns the country-side in the vast, unmeasured fragrance of the azure heavens, recognized at last.

3

I do not believe that the world contains anything more beautiful than those gardens and valleys of the Provençal coast during the six or seven weeks when departing spring still mingles its verdure with the first warmth of advancing summer. But what gives this wonderful exultation of nature a melancholy which we do not find in any other spot is the inhuman and almost painful solitude in which it is revealed. Here, amid this desert, this silence, this emptiness, from the vine-arbours to the terraces and from the terraces to the porches of a thousand abandoned villas, reigns a rivalry of beauty which reaches a poignant agony of intensity, exhausting every energy, form and colour. There is here a sort of magic password, as though all the powers of grace and splendour that nature holds concealed had united to give at the same moment, to a spectator unknown to men, one great, decisive proof of the blessings and the glories of the earth. There is here a sort of unparalleled expectation, awful and unendurable, which over the hedges, the gates and the walls watches for the coming of a mighty god; an ecstatic silence which demands a supernatural presence; a wild, exasperated impatience pouring from every side over the roads where nothing now passes save the mute and diaphanous procession of the hours.

4

Alas, how many beauties are wasted in this world! Here is enough to feed our eyes till death! Here is the wherewithal to gather memories which would support our souls even to the tomb! Here is that which would provide thousands of hearts with the supreme sustenance of life!

In the main, when we come to think of it, all that is best in us, all that is pure, happy and limpid in our intelligence and our feelings, has its origin in a few beautiful spectacles. If we had never seen beautiful things, we should possess only poor and ugly images wherewith to clothe our ideas and emotions, which would perish of cold and wretchedness like those of the blind. The great highway which climbs from the plains of existence to the radiant heights of human consciousness would be so gloomy, so bare and so deserted that our thoughts would very soon lack the strength and courage to tread it; and where our thoughts no longer pass it is not long before the briars and the cruel horrors of the forest return. A beautiful spectacle which we might have seen, which was ours, which seemed to call us and from which we fled can never be replaced. Nothing more can grow in the spot where it awaited us. It leaves in our soul a great barren area, in which we shall find naught but thorns on the day when we most need roses. Our thoughts and our actions derive their energy and their shape from the things which our eyes have beheld. Between the heroic deed, the duty accomplished, the sacrifice generously accepted and the beautiful landscape which we have seen in the past there is very often a closer and more vital connection than that which our memory has retained. The more we see of beautiful things the better fitted we become to perform good actions. If our inner life is to thrive, we need a magnificent store of wonderful spoils.

THE INSECT WORLD

VIII

THE INSECT WORLD

1

Henri Fabre, as all the world now knows, is the author of half a score of well-filled volumes in which, under the title of _Souvenirs entomologiques_,[1] he set down the results of fifty years of observation, study and experiment on the insects that seem to us the best-known and the most familiar: different species of wasps and wild bees, a few gnats, flies, beetles and caterpillars; in a word, all those vague, unconscious, rudimentary and almost nameless little lives which surround us on every side and which we contemplate with eyes that are amused, but already thinking of other things, when we open our window to welcome the first hours of spring, or when we go into the gardens or the fields to bask in the blue summer days.

2

We take up at random one of these great volumes and naturally expect to find first of all the very learned and rather dry lists of names, the very fastidious and exceedingly quaint specifications of those huge, dusty graveyards of which all the entomological treatises that we have read so far seem almost wholly to consist. We therefore open the book without zest and without unreasonable expectations; and forthwith, from between the open leaves, there rises and unfolds itself, without hesitation, without interruption and almost without remission to the end of the four thousand pages, the most extraordinary of tragic fairy plays that it is possible for the human imagination, not to create or to conceive, but to admit and to acclimatize within itself.

Indeed, there is no question here of the human imagination. The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain earthly brotherhood in them. They often surprise and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not seem to belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space. In vain does it seize upon life with an authority, a fecundity unequalled here below: we cannot accustom ourselves to the idea that it is a thought of that nature of whom we fondly believe ourselves to be the privileged children and probably the ideal to which all the earth’s efforts tend. Only the infinitely small disconcerts us still more greatly; but what really is the infinitely small, other than an insect which our eyes do not see? There is, no doubt, in this astonishment and lack of understanding a certain instinctive and profound uneasiness inspired by those existences incomparably better-armed, better-equipped than our own, by those creature made up of a sort of compressed energy and activity in which we suspect our most mysterious adversaries, our ultimate rivals and, perhaps, our successors.

3

But it is time, under the conduct of an admirable guide, to penetrate behind the scenes of our fairy play and to study at close quarters the actors and supernumeraries, loathsome or magnificent, as the case may be, grotesque or sinister, heroic or appalling, gifted or stupid and almost always improbable and unintelligible.

And here, to begin with, taking the first that comes, is one of those individuals, frequent in the South, where we can see it prowling around the abundant manna which the mule scatters heedlessly along the white roads and the stony paths: I mean the Sacred Scarab of the Egyptians, or, more simply, the Dung-beetle, the brother of our northern Geotrupes, a big Coleopteron all clad in black, whose mission in this world is to shape the more savoury parts of his find into an enormous ball which he must next roll to the underground dining-room where the incredible digestive adventure is to take its course. But destiny, jealous of all undiluted bliss, before admitting him to that abode of sheer delight, imposes upon the grave and probably sententious beetle tribulations without number, which are nearly always complicated by the arrival of an untoward parasite.

Hardly has he begun, by dint of great efforts of his forehead and his bandy legs, to roll the toothsome sphere backwards, when an indelicate colleague, who has been awaiting the completion of the work, appears and hypocritically offers his services. The other well knows that, in this case, help and services, besides being quite unnecessary, will soon mean partition and dispossession; and he accepts the enforced collaboration without enthusiasm. But, so that their respective rights may be clearly marked, the lawful owner invariably retains his original place, that is to say, he pushes the ball with his forehead, whereas the compulsory guest pulls it towards him on the other side. And thus it jogs along between the two gossips, amid interminable vicissitudes, flurried falls, ludicrous tumbles, till it reaches the place chosen to receive the treasure and to become the banqueting-hall. On arriving, the owner sets about digging out the refectory, while the sponger pretends to go innocently to sleep on the top of the bolus. The excavation becomes visibly wider and deeper; and soon the first Dung-beetle dives bodily into it. This is the moment for which the cunning auxiliary was waiting. He nimbly scrambles down from the blissful eminence and, pushing it with all the energy that a bad conscience gives, strives to gain the offing. But the other, who is rather distrustful, interrupts his laborious digging, looks over the edge, sees the sacrilegious rape and leaps out of the hole. Caught in the act, the shameless and dishonest partner makes untold efforts to play upon the other’s credulity, turns round and round the inestimable orb and, embracing it and propping himself against it, with mock heroic exertions, pretends to be frantically supporting it on a non-existent slope. The two expostulate with each other in silence, gesticulate wildly with their mandibles and tarsi and then, with one accord, bring back the ball to the burrow.

It is pronounced sufficiently spacious and comfortable. They introduce the treasure, they close the entrance to the corridor; and now in the propitious darkness and the warm damp, where the magnificent stercoral globe alone holds sway, the two reconciled messmates sit down face to face. Then, far from the light and the cares of day and in the great silence of the subterranean shade, solemnly commences the most fabulous banquet whereof abdominal imagination ever evoked the absolute beatitudes.

For two whole months, they remain cloistered; and, with their paunches gradually hollowing out the inexhaustible sphere, definite archetypes and sovereign symbols of the pleasures of the table and the delights of the belly, they eat without stopping, without interrupting themselves for a second, day or night. And, while they gorge, steadily, with a movement perceptible and constant as that of a clock, at the rate of three millimetres a minute, an endless, unbroken ribbon unwinds and stretches itself behind them, fixing the memory and recording the hours, days and weeks of the prodigious feast.

4

After the Dung-beetle, that dolt of the company, let us greet, also in the order of the Coleoptera, the model household of _Minotaurus typhaeus_, who is pretty well-known and extremely gentle, in spite of his dreadful name. The female digs a huge burrow which is often more than a yard and a half deep and which consists of spiral staircases, landings, passages and numerous chambers. The male loads the rubbish on the three-pronged fork that surmounts his head and carries it to the entrance of the conjugal dwelling. Next, he goes into the fields in quest of the harmless droppings left by the sheep, takes them down to the first story of the crypt and reduces them to flour with his trident, while the mother, right at the bottom, collects the flour and kneads it into huge cylindrical loaves, which will presently be food for the little ones. For three whole months, until the provisions are deemed sufficient, the unfortunate husband, without taking nourishment of any kind, exhausts himself in this gigantic work. At last, his task accomplished, feeling his end at hand, so as not to encumber the house with his wretched remains, he spends his last strength in leaving the burrow, drags himself laboriously along and, lonely and resigned, knowing that he is henceforth good for nothing, goes and dies far away among the stones.

Here, on another side, are some rather strange caterpillars, the Processionaries, which are not rare; as it happens, a single string of them, five or six yards long, has just climbed down from my umbrella-pines and is at this moment unfolding itself in the walks of my garden, carpeting the ground traversed with transparent silk, according to the custom of the race. To say nothing of the meteorological apparatus of unparalleled delicacy which they carry on their backs, these caterpillars, as everybody knows, have this remarkable quality, that they travel only in a troop, one after the other, like Breughel’s blind men or those of the parable, each of them obstinately, indissolubly following its leader; so much so that, our author having one morning disposed the file on the edge of a large stone vase, thus closing the circuit, for seven whole days, during an atrocious week, amid cold, hunger and unspeakable weariness, the unhappy troop on its tragic round, without rest, respite or mercy, pursued the pitiless circle until death overtook it.

5

But I see that our heroes are infinitely too numerous and that we must not linger over our descriptions. We may at most, in enumerating the more important and familiar, bestow on each of them a hurried epithet, in the manner of old Homer. Shall I mention, for instance, the Leucospis, a parasite of the Mason-bee, who, to slay his brothers and sisters in their cradle, arms himself with a horn helmet and a barbed breastplate, which he doffs immediately after the extermination, the safeguard of a hideous right of primogeniture? Shall I tell of the marvellous anatomical knowledge of the Tachytes, of the Cerceris, of the Ammophila, of the Languedocian Sphex and many other wasps, who, according as they wish to paralyse or to kill their prey or their adversary, know exactly, without ever blundering, which nerve-centres to strike with their sting or their mandibles? Shall I speak of the art of the Eumenes, who transforms her stronghold into a complete museum adorned with shells and with grains of translucent quartz; of the magnificent metamorphosis of the Grey Locust; of the musical instrument owned by the Cricket, whose bow numbers one hundred and fifty triangular prisms that set in motion simultaneously the four dulcimers of the wing-case? Shall I sing the fairy-like birth of the nymph of the Onthophagus, a transparent monster, with a bull’s snout, that seems carved out of a block of crystal? Would you behold the Flesh-fly, the common Blue-bottle, daughter of the maggot, as she issues from the earth? Listen to our author:

“She disjoints her head into two movable halves, which, each
distended with its great red eye, by turns separate and reunite. In
the intervening space, a large, glassy hernia rises and disappears,
disappears and rises. When the two halves move asunder, with one
eye forced back to the right and the other to the left, it is as
though the insect were splitting its brain-pan in order to expel the
contents. Then the hernia rises, blunt at the end and swollen into
a great knob. Next, the forehead closes and the hernia retreats,
leaving visible only a kind of shapeless muzzle. In short, a frontal
pouch, with deep pulsations, momentarily renewed, becomes the
instrument of deliverance, the pestle wherewith the newly-hatched
Dipteron bruises the sand and causes it to crumble. Gradually, the
legs push the rubbish back and the insect advances so much towards
the surface.”

6

And monster after monster passes, such as the imagination of Bosch or Callot never conceived! The larva of the Rosechafer, which, though it has legs under its belly, always travels on its back; the Blue-winged Locust, unluckier still than the Flesh-fly and possessing nothing wherewith to perforate the soil, to escape from the tomb and reach the light but a cervical bladder, a viscous blister; and the Empusa, who, with her curved abdomen, her great projecting eyes, her legs with knee-pieces armed with cleavers, her halberd, her abnormally tall mitre, would certainly be the most devilish goblin that ever walked the earth, if, beside her, the Praying Mantis were not so frightful that her mere aspect deprives her victims of their power of movement when she assumes, in front of them, what the entomologists have termed “the spectral attitude.”

7

One cannot mention, even casually, the numberless industries, nearly all of absorbing interest, exercised among the rocks, under the ground, in the walls, on the branches, the grass, the flowers, the fruits and down to the very bodies of the subjects studied; for we sometimes find a treble superposition of parasites, as in the Oil-beetles; and we see the maggot itself, the sinister guest at the last feast of all, feed some thirty brigands with its substance.

Among the Hymenoptera, which represent the most intellectual class in the world which we are studying, the building-talents of our wonderful Hive-bee are certainly equalled, in other orders of architecture, by those of more than one wild and solitary bee and notably by the Megachile, or Leaf-cutter, a little insect which is nothing to look at and which, to house its eggs, manufactures honey-pots formed of a multitude of disks and ellipses cut with mathematical precision from the leaves of certain trees. For lack of space, I am unable, to my great regret, to quote the beautiful and pellucid pages which Fabre, with his usual conscientiousness, devotes to the exhaustive study of this admirable work; nevertheless, since the occasion offers, let us listen to his own words, though it be but for a moment and in regard to a single detail:

“With the oval pieces, it becomes another matter. What model has the
Megachile when cutting her neat ellipses out of the delicate material
for her wallets, the robinia-leaves? What ideal pattern guides her
scissors? What system of measurement tells her the dimension? One
would like to picture the insect as a living pair of compasses,
capable of tracing an elliptic curve by a certain natural inflexion
of its body, even as our arm traces a circle by swinging from the
shoulder. A blind mechanism, the mere outcome of its organization,
would alone be responsible for its geometry. This explanation would
tempt me if the large oval pieces were not accompanied by much
smaller ones, also oval, which are used to fill the empty spaces. A
pair of compasses which changes its radius of its own accord and
alters the curve according to the plan before it appears to me an
instrument somewhat difficult to believe in. There must be something
better than that. The circular pieces of the lid suggest it to us.

“If, by the mere flexion inherent in her structure, the Leaf-cutter
succeeds in cutting out ovals, how does she manage to cut out rounds?
Can we admit the presence of other wheels in the machinery for the
new pattern, so different in shape and size? However, the real point
of the difficulty does not lie there. Those rounds, for the most
part, fit the mouth of the jar with almost exact precision. When the
cell is finished, the bee flies hundreds of yards away to make the
lid. She arrives at the leaf from which the disk is to be cut. What
picture, what recollection has she of the pot to be covered? Why,
none at all: she has never seen it; she does her work underground, in
utter darkness! At the utmost, she can have the indications of touch:
not actual indications, of course, for the pot is not there, but
past indications, useless in a work of precision. And yet the disk to
be cut out must have a fixed diameter: if it were too large, it would
not go in; if too small, it would close badly, it would slip down on
the honey and suffocate the egg. How shall it be given its correct
dimensions without a pattern? The bee does not hesitate for a moment.
She cuts out her disk with the same celerity which she would display
in detaching any shapeless lobe that might do for a stopper; and
that disk, without further measurement, is of the right size to fit
the pot. Let whoso will explain this geometry, which in my opinion
is inexplicable, even when we allow for memory begotten of touch and
sight.”

Let us add that the author calculated that, to form the cells of a kindred Megachile, the Silky Megachile, exactly 1,064 of these ellipses and disks would be required; and they must all be collected and shaped in the course of an existence that lasts a few weeks.

8

Who would imagine that the Pentatoma, on the other hand, the poor and evil-smelling Wood-bug, has invented a really extraordinary apparatus wherewith to leave the egg? And first let us state that this egg is a marvellous little box of snowy whiteness, which our author thus describes:

“The microscope discovers a surface engraved with dents similar to
those of a thimble and arranged with exquisite symmetry. At the
top and bottom of the cylinder is a wide belt of a dead black; on
the sides, a large white zone with four big, black spots evenly
distributed. The lid, surrounded by snowy cilia and encircled with
white at the edge, swells into a black cap with a white knot in the
centre. Altogether, a striking burial urn, with the sudden contrast
between the coal-black and the fleecy white. The Etruscans would have
found a magnificent model here for their funeral pottery.”

The little bug, whose forehead is too soft, covers her head, to raise the lid of the box, with a mitre formed of three triangular rods, which is always at the bottom of the egg at the moment of delivery. Her limbs being sheathed like those of a mummy, she has nothing wherewith to put her rods in motion except the pulsations produced by the rhythmic flow of blood in her skull and acting after the manner of a piston. The rivets of the lid gradually give way; and, as soon as the insect is free, it lays aside its mechanical helmet.

Another species of bug, _Reduvius personatus_, who lives mostly in lumber-rooms, where she lies hidden in the dust, has invented a still more astonishing system of hatching. Here, the lid of the egg is not riveted, as in the case of the Pentatomae, but simply glued. At the moment of liberation, the lid rises and we see:

“... a spherical vesicle emerge from the shell and gradually expand,
like a soap-bubble blown through a straw. Driven farther and farther
back by the extension of this bladder, the lid falls.

“Then the bomb bursts; in other words, the blister, swollen beyond
its capacity of resistance, rips at the top. This envelope, which is
an extremely tenuous membrane, generally remains clinging to the edge
of the orifice, where it forms a high, white rim. At other times,
the explosion loosens it and flings it outside the shell. In those
conditions, it is a dainty cup, half spherical, with torn edges,
lengthened out below into a delicate, winding stalk.”

Now, how is this miraculous explosion produced? Fabre assumes that:

“Very slowly, as the tiny creature takes shape and grows, this
bladder-shaped reservoir receives the products of the work of
respiration performed under the cover of the outer membrane. Instead
of being expelled through the egg-shell, the carbonic acid, the
incessant result of the vital oxidization, is accumulated in this
sort of gasometer, inflates and distends it and presses upon the lid.
When the insect is ripe for hatching, a superadded activity in the
respiration completes the inflation, which perhaps has been preparing
since the first evolution of the germ. At last, yielding to the
increasing pressure of the gaseous bladder, the lid becomes unsealed.
The chick in its shell has its air-chamber; the young Reduvius has
its bomb of carbonic acid: it frees itself in the act of breathing.”

9

One would never weary of dipping eagerly into these inexhaustible treasures. We imagine, for instance, that, from seeing cobwebs so frequently displayed in all manner of places, we possess adequate notions of the genius and methods of our familiar spiders. Far from it: the realities of scientific observation call for an entire volume crammed with revelations of which we had no conception. I will simply name, at random, the symmetrical arches of the Clotho Spider’s nest, the astonishing funicular flight of the young of our Garden Spider, the diving-bell of the Water Spider, the live telephone-wire which connects the web with the leg of the Cross Spider hidden in her parlour and informs her whether the vibration of her toils is due to the capture of a prey or a caprice of the wind.

It is impossible, therefore, short of having unlimited space at one’s disposal, to do more than touch, as it were with the tip of the phrases, upon the miracles of maternal instinct, which, moreover, are confounded with those of the higher manufactures and form the bright centre of the insect’s psychology. One would, in the same way, require several chapters to convey a summary idea of the nuptial rites which constitute the quaintest and most fabulous episodes of these new Arabian Nights.

The male of the Spanish Fly, for instance, begins by frenziedly beating his spouse with his abdomen and his feet, after which, with his arms crossed and quivering, he remains long in ecstasy. The newly-wedded Osmiae clap their mandibles terribly, as though it were a matter rather of devouring each other; on the other hand, the largest of our moths, the Great Peacock, who is the size of a bat, when drunk with love finds his mouth so completely atrophied that it becomes no more than a vague shadow. But nothing equals the marriage of the Green Grasshopper, of which I cannot speak here, for it is doubtful whether even Latin possesses the words needed to describe it seemingly.

All said, the marriage-customs are dreadful and, contrary to that which happens in every other world, here it is the female of the pair that stands for strength and intelligence and also for the cruelty and tyranny which appear to be their inevitable outcome. Almost every wedding ends in the violent and immediate death of the husband. Often, the bride begins by eating a certain number of suitors. The prototype of these fantastic unions could be supplied by the Languedocian Scorpions, who, as we know, carry lobster-claws and a long tail supplied with a sting, the prick of which is extremely dangerous. They have a prelude to the festival in the shape of a sentimental stroll, claw in claw; then, motionless, with fingers still gripped, they contemplate each other blissfully, interminably; day and night pass over their ecstasy, while they remain face to face, petrified with admiration. Next, the foreheads come together and touch; the mouths--if we can give the name of mouth to the monstrous orifice that opens between the claws--are joined in a sort of kiss; after which the union is accomplished, the male is transfixed with a mortal sting and the terrible spouse crunches and gobbles him up with gusto.

But the Mantis, the ecstatic insect with the arms always raised in an attitude of supreme invocation, the horrible _Mantis religiosa_ or Praying Mantis, does better still: she eats her husbands (for the insatiable creature sometimes consumes seven or eight in succession) while they strain her passionately to their heart. Her inconceivable kisses devour, not in a metaphorical, but in an appallingly real fashion, the ill-fated choice of her soul stomach. She begins with the head, goes down to the thorax, nor stops till she comes to the hind-legs, which she deems too tough. She then pushes away the unfortunate remains, while a new lover, who was quietly awaiting the end of the monstrous banquet, heroically steps forward to undergo the same fate.

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Henri Fabre is indeed the revealer of this new world, for, strange as the admission may seem at a time when we think that we know all that surrounds us, most of those insects minutely described in the vocabularies, learnedly classified and barbarously christened, had hardly ever been observed in real life or thoroughly investigated in all the phases of their brief and evasive appearances. He has devoted to surprising their little secrets, which are the reverse of our greatest mysteries, fifty years of a solitary existence, misunderstood, poor, often very near to penury, but lit up every day by the joy which a truth brings, which is the greatest of all human joys. Petty truths, I shall be told, those presented by the habits of a spider or a grasshopper. There are no petty truths to-day; there is but one truth, whose looking-glass, to our uncertain eyes, seems broken, though its every fragment, whether reflecting the evolution of a planet or the flight of a bee, contains the supreme law.

And these truths thus discovered had the good fortune to be grasped by a mind which knew how to understand what they themselves can but ambiguously express, to interpret what they are obliged to conceal and, at the same time, to appreciate the shimmering beauty, almost invisible to the majority of mankind, that shines for a moment around all that exists, especially around that which still remains very close to nature and has hardly left its primeval sanctuary.

To make of these long annals the generous and delightful work of literature that they are and not the monotonous and arid record of finical descriptions and trivial acts that they might have been, various and so to speak conflicting gifts were needed. To the patience, the precision, the scientific minuteness, the protean and practical ingenuity, the energy of a Darwin in the face of the unknown, to the faculty of expressing what has to be expressed with order, clearness and certainty, the venerable anchorite of Sérignan adds many of those qualities which are not to be acquired, certain of those innate good poetic virtues which cause his sure and supple prose, though a trifle provincial, a trifle antiquated, a trifle primitive, to take its place among the excellent prose of the day, prose of the kind that has its own atmosphere, in which we breathe gratefully and tranquilly and which we find only in masterpieces.

Lastly, there was needed--and this was not the least requirement of the work--a mind ever ready to cope with the riddles which, among those little objects, rise up at every step as enormous as those which fill the skies and perhaps more numerous, more imperious and more strange, as though nature had here given a freer scope to her last wishes and an easier outlet to her secret thoughts. Fabre shrinks from none of those boundless problems which are persistently put to us by all the inhabitants of that tiny world where mysteries are heaped up in a denser and more bewildering fashion than in any other. He thus meets and faces, turn by turn, the redoubtable questions of instinct and intelligence, of the origin of species, of the harmony or the accidents of the universe, of the life lavished upon the abysses of death, without counting the no less vast, but so to speak more human problems which, among infinite others, are inscribed within the range, if not within the grasp, of our intelligence: parthenogenesis; the prodigious geometry of the wasps and bees; the logarithmic spiral of the snail; the antennary sense; the miraculous force which, in absolute isolation, without the possible introduction of anything from the outside, increases the volume of the Minotaurus’ egg tenfold, where it lies, and, during seven to nine months, nourishes with an invisible and spiritual food, not the lethargy, but the active life of the scorpion and of the young of the Lycosa and the Clotho Spider. He does not attempt to explain them by one of those generally-acceptable theories, such as that of evolution, which merely shifts the ground of the difficulty and which, I may say in passing, emerges from these volumes in a somewhat sorry plight, after being sharply confronted with incontestable facts.

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Waiting for chance or a god to enlighten us, he is able, in the presence of the unknown, to preserve that great religious and attentive silence which is dominant in the best minds of the day. There are those who say:

“Now that you have reaped a plentiful harvest of details, you should follow up analysis with synthesis and generalize the origin of instinct in an all-embracing view.”

To these he replies, with the humble and magnificent loyalty that illumines all his work:

“Because I have stirred a few grains of sand on the shore, am I in a
position to know the depths of the ocean?

“Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from
the archives of the world before we possess the last word that a Gnat
has to say to us....

“Success is for the loud talkers, the self-convinced dogmatists;
everything is admitted on condition that it be noisily proclaimed.
Let us throw off this sham and recognize that, in reality, we
know nothing about anything, if things were probed to the bottom.
Scientifically, Nature is a riddle without a definite solution to
satisfy man’s curiosity. Hypothesis follows on hypothesis; the
theoretical rubbish-heap accumulates; and truth ever eludes us. To
know how not to know might well be the last word of wisdom.”

Evidently, this is hoping too little. In the frightful pit, in the bottomless funnel wherein whirl all those contradictory facts which are resolved in obscurity, we know just as much as our cave-dwelling ancestors; but at least we know that we do not know. We survey the dark faces of all the riddles, we try to estimate their number, to classify their varying degrees of dimness, to obtain an idea of their position and their extent. That already is something, pending the day of the first gleams of light. In any case, it means doing in the presence of the mysteries all that the most upright intelligence can do to-day; and that is what the author of this incomparable Iliad does, with more confidence than he professes. He gazes at them attentively. He wears out his life in surprising their most minute secrets. He prepares for them, in his thoughts and in ours, the field necessary for their evolutions. He increases the consciousness of his ignorance in proportion to their importance and learns to understand more and more that they are incomprehensible.

EVIL-SPEAKING

IX

EVIL-SPEAKING

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“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” say the three sacred monkeys carved over the gate of the Buddhist temple of Iyeyasu at Nikko.

We all of us speak ill of one another:

“No one,” Pascal remarks, “speaks of us in our presence as he does in
our absence. The union that exists among men is based solely on this
mutual deceit; and few friendships would survive if each knew what
his friend says when he is not there, though he be speaking of him in
all sincerity and without passion.

“I lay it down as a fact that, if all men knew what they say of one
another, there would not be four friends in this world.”

If you do away with evil-speaking, you do away with three-fourths of our conversation; and an unbearable silence will hover over every gathering. Evil-speaking or calumny--for it is extremely difficult to separate the two sisters; and in reality any evil-speaking is likely to be calumnious, inasmuch as we know others even less well than we know ourselves--evil-speaking, which feeds all that creates disunion between men and poisons their intercourse, is nevertheless the chief motive that brings them together and enables them to enjoy the pleasures of society.

But the ravages which it wreaks all around us are too well-known and have too often been described to make it necessary for us to portray them once again. Let us here consider only the harm which it does to him who indulges in it. It accustoms him to see only the petty sides of men and things; little by little it conceals from him the bold outlines, the great unities, the heights and depths containing the only truths that count and endure.

In reality, the evil which we find in others, the evil which we speak of them, exists within ourselves: from ourselves we derive it; upon ourselves it recoils. We perceive clearly only those defects which are ours, or which we are on the point of acquiring. Within ourselves is kindled the evil flame whose reflection we perceive on others. Each of us diligently searches out, among those who surround him, the vice or the defect that reveals to the clear-sighted the vice or the defect to which he himself is thrall. There is no more ingenuous or intimate confession, even as there is no better examination of conscience, than to ask one’s self:

“What is the fault which I most willingly impute to my neighbour?”

You may be sure that this is the fault which you are most inclined to commit and that you most readily see what is happening in the shallows to which you yourself are descending. He who speaks ill of others is, in short, merely his own traducer; and evil-speaking is, in essence, but the story of our own falls, transposed or anticipated.

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We surround ourselves with all the evil that we attribute to the victims of our gossip. It takes form at our own expense; it lives and feeds upon the best of our substance; it accumulates all about us, peopling and encumbering our atmosphere with phantoms, at first grotesque, inconsistent, docile, timid and ephemeral, which gradually become persistent, add to their strength and stature, speak with louder voice and develop into very real and imperious entities which ere long will issue orders and assume the direction of most of our thoughts and actions. We are less and less masters in our own houses; we feel our character slowly sapped of its strength; and we find ourselves sooner or later enclosed within a sort of enchanted circle which it is all but impossible to break, a circle in which we no longer know whether we are defaming our brethren because we are growing as bad as they, or whether we are growing bad because we defame them.

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We should accustom ourselves to judge all men as we judge the heroes of this war. It is certain that, if any one had the pitiful courage to undertake their belittlement, he would find, in any gathering of these men, almost as many vices, pettinesses or blemishes as in any human gathering chosen at random in any town or village. He would tell you that it contained hopeless drunkards, unscrupulous libertines, uncouth, narrow and greedy peasants, mean and rapacious shopkeepers, callous, lewd and cheating artisans, sordid, envious clerks and, among young men of better birth, idle, presumptuous, selfish and arrogant wastrels. He would add that many of them did their duty only because there was no way of avoiding it; that they went forward, despite themselves, to brave a death which they hoped to escape, because they well knew that they could not escape the death which would threaten them if they refused to face the first. He might say all this and many other things which would appear more or less true; but there is something far more true, which is the great and magnificent truth that enfolds and uplifts all the rest: it is the thing which they really did; it is the fact that they willingly offered themselves to death in order to accomplish what they regarded as a duty. It cannot be denied: if all those who had vices and imperfections and the desire to shun danger had refused to accept the sacrifice, no force in the world could have compelled them to it; for they would represent a force at least equal to that which would have sought to impel them. We must therefore believe that these imperfections, these vices, these ignoble desires were very superficial and in any case incomparably less powerful and less deeply rooted than the great flood of feeling which carried all before it. And this is why, when we think of those dead or mutilated heroes, the petty thoughts which I have described do not even enter our minds. And it is right that this should be so. In the heroic whole they count for no more than rain-drops in the ocean. All has been swept away, all has been made equal by sacrifice, suffering and death, in the one untarnished beauty.

But let us not forget that it is almost the same with all men; and that these heroes were not of a different nature from the neighbour whom we are incessantly villifying. Death has purified and consecrated them; but we are all of us daily in the presence of the sacrifice, the suffering and, above all, the death which will purify and consecrate us in our turn. We are almost all subject to the same ordeals which, because they are less frequent and less glorious, appeal no less to the same profound virtues; and, if so many men, chosen at hazard from among us, have proved themselves worthy of our admiration, it is because, after all, we are doubtless better than we seem; for, while those others mingled in our life, even they did not appear to be much better than ourselves.

OF GAMBLING

X

OF GAMBLING

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_Paulo minora._ This essay, I need hardly say, consists of notes made before the war and put in order now, at a time when victory allows our thoughts to stray for a moment from the great tragedy in which the destinies of mankind have been at stake. For the rest, the subject, however frivolous it may at first sight appear, sometimes touches or seems to touch problems which it is not unfitting to examine, were it only to realize that they are perhaps illusive. Moreover it is unfortunately probable that, when peace is restored, our allies will visit in too numerous and confiding crowds the dubious havens of delight which we are about to enter. I have no pretension to serve them as a guide nor to teach them how to fight against the whims of fortune; but a handful of them may find in these lines, if not useful hints or profitable advice, at least some few reflections or observations which will pave the way for their own experiments or render them easier.

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