More Beetles

My hermitage boasts a long, wide lilac-walk. When May is here and the two rows of bushes, bending beneath their load of clustering blooms, form pointed arches overhead, this walk becomes a chapel, in which the loveliest festival of the year is celebrated beneath the kisses of the morning sun: a peaceful festival, with no flags flapping at the windows, no expenditure of gun-powder, no drunken squabbles; a festival of simple creatures disturbed neither by the harsh brass band of the dance nor by the shouts of the crowd acclaiming the amateur who has just won a silk handkerchief at the hop, skip and jump. Vulgar delights of drinks and crackers, how far removed are you from this solemn celebration!

I am one of the worshippers in the chapel of the lilacs. My orison, which cannot be translated into words, is a tender and intimate emotion. Devoutly I make my stations from one column of verdure to another, telling step by step my observer’s rosary. My prayer is an “Oh!” of admiration.

To this delicious festival pilgrims have hastened, to gain the Lenten indulgences and to slake their thirst. Here, dipping their tongues by turns into the holy-water stoup of the same flower, are the Anthophora [1] and her tyrant the Melecta. [2] Robber and victim sip their nectar like good neighbours. There is no ill-feeling: between them. Both attend to their own affairs in peace. They seem not to know each other.

The Osmiæ, [3] clad in black-and-red velvet, dust their ventral brushes with pollen and make hoards of meal in the reeds round about. Here are the Eristales, [4] noisy, giddy-pated insects, whose wings shimmer in the sun like scales of mica. Drunk with syrup, they withdraw from the festival and sleep off their debauch in the shadow of a leaf.

These others are Wasps, Polistes, [5] hot-tempered swashbucklers. When these intolerant creatures are abroad, peaceful insects withdraw and establish themselves elsewhere. Even the Hive-Bee, predominating in numbers and ever ready to unsheathe her sting, makes way for them, busy as she is gathering in the harvest.

These thick-set, richly variegated Moths are Sesiæ, with wings not dusted with scales throughout. The bare zones, like so much transparent gauze, contrast with the covered zones and are an added beauty. The sober sets off the magnificent.

Here is a crazy swarm, eddying, receding, returning, rising and falling. It is the ballet of the common Butterfly-folk, the Cabbage Butterflies, [6] all white, with black, eye-shaped dots. They flirt in mid-air, pursuing and pressing their attentions on one another, until, weary of frolic, now one, now another of the dancers alights once more upon the lilacs, quenching her thirst from the amphoræ of the flowers. While the proboscis dives down the narrow throat of the blossom, sucking the nectar at the base, the wings, gently fluttering, are raised above the back, expanding anew and again standing erect.

Almost as numerous but less sudden in flight, because of his wide-spreading wings, is the Machaon, the magnificent Swallow-tail Butterfly, with the orange spots and the blue crescents.

The children have come to join me. They are enraptured by this elegant creature, which always escapes their pouncing hands and flies a little farther to taste the nectar of the flowers while moving its wings after the fashion of the Cabbage Butterfly. If the pump is working quietly in the sunlight, if the syrup is rising easily, this gentle fanning of the wings is in all these Butterflies a sign of satisfaction.

A catch! Anna, the youngest of the whole household, gives up all hope of capturing the Swallow-tails, who never wait for her nimble little hand to seize them. She has found something more to her liking. It is the Cetonia. The handsome insect has not yet recovered from the chill of morning; it lies slumbering all golden on the lilac-blossoms, unconscious of danger, incapable of flight. It is plentiful. Five or six are quickly caught. I intervene, so that the rest may be left in peace. The booty is placed in a box, with a bed of blossoms. Presently, during the heat of the day, the Cetonia, with a long thread tied to one leg, will fly in circles round the little girl’s head.

Childhood is pitiless because it does not understand, for nothing is more cruel than ignorance. None of my madcaps will heed the sufferings of the insect, a melancholy galley-slave chained to a cannon-ball. These artless minds find amusement in torture. I dare not always call them to order, for I admit that I on my side am also guilty, though I am ripened by experience, to some extent civilized and beginning to know a thing or two. They inflict suffering for the sake of amusement and I for the sake of information: is it not really the same thing? Is there a very definite line of demarcation between the experiments of knowledge and the puerilities of childhood? I cannot see it.

Human barbarity in the past employed the rack to force a prisoner to speak. Am I anything but a torturer when I interrogate my insects and put them to the rack to wrest some secret from them? Let Anna get such pleasure as she can out of her prisoners, for I am meditating something worse. The Cetonia has things to reveal to us, things that will interest us, beyond a doubt. Let us try to obtain these revelations. We cannot, of course, do so without serious inconvenience to the insect. So be it; and now let us proceed: we will silence our kindly scruples for the sake of the story.

Among the guests at the festival of the lilacs the Cetonia deserves to be most honourably mentioned. He is of a good size, which lends itself to observation. Though deficient in elegance with his massive, square-cut build, he has splendour in his favour: the gleam of copper, the flash of gold, or the austere magnificence of bronze as it leaves the brass-founder’s burnisher. He is a regular frequenter of my enclosure, a neighbour, and will therefore spare me the trips which are beginning to tell upon me. Lastly—and this is an excellent quality when one wishes to be understood by all one’s readers—he is known to everybody, if not by his classic name, [7] at least as an object that often meets the eye.

Who has not seen him, like a great emerald lying at the heart of a rose, whose tender blush he enhances by the richness of his jewellery? In this voluptuous bed of stamens and petals he is encrusted, motionless; he remains there night and day, intoxicated by the heady fragrance, drunk with nectar. It needs the stimulus of fierce sunlight to arouse him from his bliss and set him soaring with a buzzing flight.

To watch the idle Beetle in his sybaritic bed, without further information, one would hardly suspect him of gluttony. What nourishment can he find on a rose or a cluster of hawthorn-blossom? At most a tiny drop of sugary exudation, for he does not browse upon the petals, still less upon the foliage. And can this, a mere nothing, satisfy that big body? I hesitate to believe it.

In the first week of August I placed in a cage fifteen Cetoniæ that had just burst their shells in my rearing-jars. Bronze above and violet underneath, they belong to the species C. metallica, Fab. I provide them, according to the resources of the day, with pears, plums, melon or grapes.

It is a joy to see them feast. Once at table they do not budge. Not a movement, not even a shifting of the feet. With their heads in the fruit-pulp, often with their bodies completely submerged, they sip and swallow night and day, in the darkness, in the sunlight, without a break. Surfeited with sweets, the guzzlers hold on. Collapsing under the table, that is to say, under the deliquescent fruit, they still lick their lips, in the blissful drowsiness of a child that drops asleep with its slice of bread and jam at its lips.

There is no sportiveness in their orgy, even when the sun shines fiercely into the cage. All activity is suspended; the time is wholly devoted to the joys of the stomach. In this torrid heat it is so pleasant to lie under the greengage, oozing with juice! With such good things at hand, why go flying across the fields where everything is parched? None dreams of such a thing. There is no scaling of the walls of the cage, no sudden unfurling of the wings in an attempt to escape.

This life of junketing has already lasted a fortnight without producing satiety. Such a protracted banquet is not frequent; we do not find it even in the Dung-beetles, who are zealous eaters. When the Sacred Beetle, spinning his little unbroken cord of intestinal refuse, has remained a whole day on a tasty morsel, it is the most that the gormandizer can allow himself. [8] But my Cetoniæ have been feasting on the sweets of the plum and pear for a full fortnight; and there is no sign yet that they have had enough. When will the orgy make way for the wedding and the cares of the future?

Well, there will be no wedding and no family-cares this year. These are put off till next year: a singular postponement, quite at variance with the usual custom, which is to be extremely expeditious in these important matters. It is the season of fruits; and the Cetonia, a passionate glutton, means to enjoy these good things without being diverted from them by the worries of egg-laying. The gardens offer the luscious pear and the wrinkled fig, its eye moist with syrup. The greedy creature takes possession of them and becomes oblivious to all else.

However, the dog-days are becoming more and more pitiless. Day after day, another load of brushwood, as our peasants say, is added to the furnace of the sun. Excessive heat, like cold, produces a suspension of life. To kill the time, creatures that are grilled or frozen go to sleep. The Cetoniæ in my breeding-cage bury themselves in the sand, a couple of inches down. The sweetest fruits no longer tempt them: it is too hot.

It takes the moderate temperature of September to wake them from their torpor. At this season they reappear on the surface; they settle down to my bits of melon-rind, or slake their thirst at a small bunch of grapes, but soberly, taking only short draughts. The hunger-fits of early days and the interminable filling of the belly have gone for ever.

Now comes the cold weather. Again my captives disappear underground. Here they pass the winter, protected only by a layer of sand a few inches in depth. Under this slight covering, in their wooden shelter, exposed to all the winds of heaven, they are not endangered by the severe frosts. I thought them susceptible to cold, but I find that they bear the hardships of the winter remarkably well. They have retained the robust constitution of the larvæ, which I used to find, to my astonishment, lying stiff and stark in a block of frozen snow, yet returning to life when carefully thawed.

March is not over before signs of life reappear. My buried Beetles emerge, climb up the wire trellis, wandering about if the sun is kind, going back into the sand if the air grows colder. What am I to give them? There is no fruit. I serve them some honey in a paper dish. They go to it without any marked assiduity. Let us find something more to their taste. I offer them some dates. The exotic fruit, a delicious pulp in a thin skin, suits them very well, despite its novelty: they could set no greater store by pears or figs. The dates bring us to the end of April, the time of the first cherries.