Chapter 8

VI.—THE SILKWORM.CHAPTER VI.THE SILKWORM."The ideal of the human arts of spinning and weaving,"—said to me one day a Southerner (a manufacturer, but a man of imagination),—"the ideal which we always follow is a woman's beautiful hair! Oh, how far are the softest wools or finest cotton from approaching it! At what an enormous distance does all, and ever will all, our progress leave us! We drag ourselves onward, a long, long way in the rear, and enviously regard that supreme perfection which Nature daily realizes as a mere matter of pastime."That delicate, yet strong and tenacious hair, vibrating with an exquisite sonority which goes from the ear to the heart, and yet withal so soft, warm, luminous, and electrical—is the flower of the human flower."Men fruitlessly dispute respecting the merits of colour. Whatdoes it matter? The brilliant black contains and promises the flame; the blonde displays it with the splendours of the Golden Fleece. The sunny brown appropriates the very sun, makes use of it, blends it with its mirages, floats, and undulates, and incessantly varies in its streaming reflexes, now smiles with light, now deepens into gloom, always deceives, and, whatever we may say, deceives us most delightfully."The principal, the infinite effort of human industry, has combined all possible means for the improvement of cotton. Between the Vosges and the Rhine, the rare agreement of capital, machinery, the arts of design, and the chemical sciences, has produced those splendid Indian products of Alsace, to which England herself does honour by purchasing them. Alas! all this cannot disguise the original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which men have so richly embellished. If the woman who in her vanity clothes her form in these materials, and thinks her beauty heightened by them, would loosen her tresses about her, and unroll their waves over the indigent richness of our most sheeny cottons, what would occur? How they would be humiliated!"Sir, we must own the truth; there is only one thing worthy of being placed side by side with woman's hair. Only one manufacturer can contend against it. That manufacturer is an insect,—the modest silkworm."A peculiar charm attends the labours of the silkworm; it ennobles everything which surrounds it. In traversing our rudest provinces, the valleys of the Ardèche, where all is rocky,—where the mulberry and the chestnut seem to dispense with earth, to live upon air and pebbles,—where low stone houses sadden the eyes by their gray tints,—everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or three charming brunettes, with ivory teeth, who smiled on the wayfarer, and continued spinning their silken gold. The wayfarer said to them in a low voice, as the carriage bore him away:—"What a pity, innocent fairies, that the gold may not be for you! That instead of being disguised with a useless colour, and disfigured by art, it does not retain its natural hue, and shine on the person of its beautiful spinners! Howmuch better the royal tissue would become you than thegrandes dames!"A mere glance at the silkworm convinces you that it is no more a native of Europe than any other sweet thing. All that is soft and exquisite springs from the East. Our West, that hardy soldier, blacksmith, and miner, is good only to dig. It is good mother Asia, disdained by her rude son, who has bestowed upon him the treasures which seem to concentrate the essence of the globe. With the Arab horse and the nightingale, she has given him coffee, and sugar, and silk,—the revivifiers of existence and the true ornament of love.When silk first arrived at Rome, the empresses felt that previously they had been no better than plebeians. They compared it, as far as its soft lustre was concerned, to the pearls of the Orient, paying for it, without haggling, the price of pearls and gold.China esteemed it of such high value, that, to preserve the monopoly, she inflicted the penalty of death on any persons who dared to export the silkworm. It was only at the utmost peril, and by concealing it in a hollow cane, that men succeeded in carrying it to Byzantium, whence it passed to the West.In the Middle Age, the age of indigence and barren disputes, when wool was the luxury of the rich, and the poor wore serge in winter, no attention was paid to silk, and its manufacture was exclusively confined to Italy.It is the gold of the silkworms of Verona which, in Giorgione, at the mighty outcome of the Venetian art, and in the strong Titian, the master of masters, enriches with a ruddy radiance their beautiful blondes and brunettes, the sovereign beauties of the world.On the other hand, in an age of decadence, when Spain and Flanders had waned, the melancholy artist who preferred to paint the beauty which years had marked,—the fading flower,—the fruit too early pierced and unnaturally ripened,—Van Dyck, clothed with white silk, like a consoling beam of moonlight, his languishing and drooping signoras. Under the soft folds of their satins they still trouble hearts with vain dreams and regrets.The woman who possessed the secret of preserving her charms tothe last decline of old age, whose cypher everywhere inscribed teaches us that Love can conquer Time, Diana de Poitiers, in her profound art, did exactly the opposite of what our imprudent ladies do, who, incessantly changing, as if to amuse the passer-by, leave no trace upon the soul, and produce no permanent impression. She permitted the Irises to delectate themselves with their fugitive rainbow; but, like the celestial Dian, always wore the same costume, black or white, and invariably of silk.It was to please her that Henry II. wore the first pair of silk stockings, and the fine silken close-fitting vest, which indicated all the gracefulness of a muscular yet slender figure. We know how ardent an enthusiasm Henry IV., at a later period, showed in promoting the growth of the silk-manufacture, planting mulberry-trees everywhere,—along the highways, in the market-places, in the courts of his palaces, and even in the gardens of the Tuileries. Coloured silks, for decoration and furniture, and silks with flowered designs, were soon afterwards manufactured at Lyons, which provided all Europe with them.Shall I say it, however? These coloured and ornamented silks do not by any means produce a great and profound effect. Silk in its natural state, and not even tinted, is in much more intimate sympathy with woman and beauty. Amber and pearls, the latter slightly yellow, with rich falls of lace, the latter not too yellow, are the only suitable accompaniments of silk.For silk is a noble and in nowise pretentious attire, which lends a subdued charm to the exuberant liveliness of youth, and clothes declining beauty with its most tender and touching radiance.A genuine mystery attends it which is not without attraction. Colour or gloss? Cotton has its peculiar gloss, and, when fitly prepared, often acquires an agreeable freshness. Silk is not properly glossy, but luminous,—with a soft electrical light, which harmonizes naturally with the electricity of the woman. A living tissue, it embraces willingly the living person.Oriental ladies, before they foolishly adopted our Western customs, wore but two kinds of stuff: underneath, the real cashmere (of so fine a texture that a large shawl might be passed through a ring); and above, a beautiful tunic of silk of a pale blonde, or rather straw colour, with a gleam or flash of magnetic amber.These two articles were less garments than friends,—gentle slaves,—supple and charming flatterers: the cashmere warm, caressing, and pliant, enfolding the bather lovingly when she emerged from her bath; the silk tunic, on the contrary, light and aërial, only not too diaphanous. Its blonde whiteness agreed most admirably with the colour of her skin; one might indeed have very justly said that it had imbibed that colour through its constant intimacy and accustomed tenderness. Inferior to the skin, undoubtedly, yet it seemed related to it; or rather it became in the end a part of the body, and, as it were, melted into it, like a dream which informs our whole existence, and cannot be separated from it.VII.—INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT.CHAPTER VII.INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT: AND ITS CHEMICAL ENERGIES, AS IN THE COCHINEAL AND THE CANTHARIDES.Have I insisted too much upon my theme? No; I have reached its very depths, its most important details.Silk is not a particular, but a general view or aspect of it, for nearly every insect produces silk.Hitherto we have dealt with only one kind of silk,—that of the bombyx, and indeed that of a species of bombyx which is not very fertile. Let us hope that the meritorious Society of Acclimatization will introduce here the Chinese bombyx (Attacus), which lives on the dwarf oak, whose strong and cheap silk might be used as clothing for the poor. All classes thenceforth might wear a material warm, light, impervious, solid; and not only so, but beautiful, brilliant, and noble. Such a change would be equivalent, in my eyes, to the general ennoblement and transfiguration of the people.Réaumur long ago asserted that numerous chrysalides would furnish a beautiful silk. The spider would yield a substance both delicate and tenacious,—as witness the admirable veil of spider's silk preserved in the Paris Museum.The delicate Arachne, whose light thread resembles a fleecy cloud,—which is nevertheless so strong, as it issues from the spinnerets,—Arachne is pre-eminently the spinner. But, as a general rule, the insect is the weaver, and wholly devoted to that feminine art. I was about to say, the insect is a woman.In our vocabulary "feminine" means feeble; but in the Insect World it is the synonym of strength and energy. It is,—as is the case with maternity everywhere,—it is for the purpose of defending and nourishing the child, of provisioning the cradle in which the orphan will remain alone,—it is for this purpose specially that the insect is a warrior, and furnished with formidable weapons.As far as concerns the instruments which pierce, and cut, and saw, the insect, in spite of all our progress, is perhaps a little in advance of man to-day. The instinct of maternity, the need of providing for its child—the future orphan—the protecting shelter of the hardest bodies, has evidently inspired it to make extraordinary efforts for the development and refinement of its tools. A few, in their fantastical character, have as yet no analogues in any of our factories.Long before Réaumur organized the thermometer, the ants, for the protection of their delicate, hygrometrical, and susceptible eggs, divided their habitations into a series of thirty or forty stories,—lowering or raising the tiny creatures to the degree of warmth, dryness, or humidity, which the temperature of the day and of the hour of the day rendered necessary. Thus they formed an infallible thermometer, on which one might rely with as much certainty as on that of the philosophers.In the comparisons between human and insect industry, the differenceswhich we remark belong not so much to the methods as to the speciality of their wants and situation. The insect aptly varies the application of its arts. For example: the spider which, in its network-trap, improvised every day, lightens its work by a mixture of gluing and spinning, follows quite a different process in the important labour of fabricating the soft, warm, and durable cocoons which are intended to receive its young. The nest would seem to be partly spun and partly felted, like the majority of birds' nests.We know that from the water-spider man derived the idea of the diving-bell; but it isnotgenerally known that an ingenious Norman peasant has succeeded in imitating perfectly the operations of the larva of the syrphes, which, by means of an extremely prolonged respiratory apparatus, preserves a communication with the pure and wholesome air, even while working at the bottom of the most putrid waters.It seems, then, that in the Insect World exist a complete pharmacy, chemistry, and perfumery. Have our sciences been sufficiently attentive to this fact? The potent vitality which gives an extraordinary force to the muscles of such tiny creatures, seems also to endow their liquids with active properties and burning energies which the large animals do not possess. Many, for defensive purposes, are gifted with caustic secretions—which they eject the moment you approach—or with fulminating powders. Others with poison, which flows as soon as the sting has been thrust in. Some possess, in addition, an art of magnetizing or etherizing their enemy; and others, like certain ants which work in damp, woody places, season their abodes by burning them, as it were, with potent formic acid.The entire genus of theCerambyx(or Long-horned Beetle) exhale a strong, rose-like odour, which is smelt at a distance, is lasting, and endures after the creature's death. Even among the Carnivora, ay, and among the Coprophagi, we meet with perfumed insects, or, at all events, with insects which, when in danger of being captured, endeavour to deceive you, or implore pity, by emitting agreeable odours.Others shine with admirable colours. The deep reds of the Nopal Coccus have furnished the purple of kings.By a skilful mixture, we also obtain from the cochineal the pre-eminently gay and radiant colour, carmine, with its innumerable tints and rosy shades.A sovereign art with the insect is to carry on its sting, and concentrate at a particular point, the liquids which flow in the plant, in the living being. It is the very art of irritation. Its applications are innumerable in medicine and industry; tints, paintings, varied ornaments, a hundred fantastic and beautiful things come to us from the sting of the galls, the excrescences and gibbosities which they so skilfully raise.The cochineal insect, while engaged in extracting by this process from exotic vegetables the envelope of solid green in which it will spend its prolonged period of rest, furnishes us with the red of reds, the scarlet of lake, which will colour varnishes, and wax, and a multitude of objects.In health or illness, the stings of insects upon the living flesh are violent irritants for disturbing or re-establishing the course of life. In these there is nothing mediocre. A few, without sting, burn you by their internal acridity.Who has not seen on the dusty plain, before the thirsty harvest, the cantharides, with its emerald enamel, abruptly crossing the footpath with a wild and agitated movement! Burning elixir of existence, where love transforms itself into a poison,—it is not with impunity that we make use of it medicinally. That medieval pharmacy, which was so dangerous to man, is not without peril, it seems, for the animals themselves. A very intelligent but eccentrically ardent cat, which I kept for a long time, among its other caprices of violence loved to hunt the cantharides. It seemed attracted by the acridity of the beautiful insect, as the moth is by the flame. It was an intoxication. But when, hunting it through the flowers, she had seized and crushed her dangerous victim, the latter appeared to take its revenge.The inflammable feline nature, stimulated by the fiery sting, broke out in cries, in excesses of fury, in strange leaps and bounds. She expiated her orgie of fire by terrible sufferings.But, on the contrary, another insect, the bamboo-worm, ormalalis,provides you, if you first remove its head, which is a deadly poison, with an exquisite cream, the sweet and soporific influence of which, say the Brazilian Indians, lulls love asleep. For two days and nights, the young maiden who has tasted of it, crouching under the blossomy tree, feels all the more powerfully in her soul the depth of the virgin forests, and the mystery of those fresh glades which have never seen the sun, nor echoed to the step of man, nor known any intruder but the lonely great blue butterfly. And yet she is not alone: love quenches her thirst with the most delicious fruits.VIII.—THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.CHAPTER VIII.ON THE RENOVATION OF OUR ARTS BY THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.The Arts properly so called, the Fine Arts, should profit much more than the Industrial, by the study of insects. The goldsmith and the lapidary would do well to seek in them models and instruction. The soft insects, the flies, specially possess in their eyes truly magical irises, with which no casket of gems can bear comparison. In passing from one species to another, and even, if I mistake not, from one individual to another, new combinations may be observed. Remark that the flies with brilliant wings are not always the most richly endowed, as far as their optical organs are concerned. Take the dull, gray, dusty, odious horse-fly, which lives on warm blood; its eye, to the magnifying-glass, offers the strange faëry spectacle of a mosaic of jewels, such as all the art of Froment-Meurice has scarcely invented.If you descend still lower, insects which do not live, like this fly, upon living but upon dead matter, ordure, and decomposition, astonish us by the richness of their reflections, which our enamel ought to endeavour to reproduce. The dunghill beetle, an ungainly black insect if we look only at the upper part of its body, is, underneath, of a deep sapphire-blue which no kingly diadem ever equalled! And what shall we say of the son of the dead, of the Egyptian scarabæus,—a living emerald, but far superior to that jewel in the gravity, opulence, and magic of its lustre? The imagination is impressed, and one does not feel astonished that a people so tender and devout, so in love with death, so full of the dreams of eternity, took for a symbol the little miraculous animal,—a burning jet of life springing from the grave!A certain skill in examination, and a choice of day and of light, are necessary. You cannot properly study the insect of the tropics and that of our colder climates on the same day or at the same hour. The former should be examined only in favourable weather, under a pure sky and a strong sun,—a vivid and genial ray, analogous to the light which bathes it in its own country. The other, frequently uninteresting to the naked eye, but of great beauty under the microscope, may reserve its grand illuminating effects for the evening, or for artificial light. Little is promised by the cockchafer, at first sight so coarse and prosaic in appearance. Yet its scaly wing, when submitted to the focus of the microscope, and well lighted up beneath the little mirror, so that it is seen by transparency, presents a noble winter stuff, a dead leaf, where meander veins of a very beautiful brown. And in the evening it becomes quite another thing: the yellowish part of the scale has got the best of it, and in the light shines forth like gold—(a poor comparison!)—the strange, magical gold of paradise, which we dream of for the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, or for the robes of light worn by saints and spirits before the Throne! A sun softer and tenderer than the orb of day, and one which, we know not why, charms and affects the heart.A strange mirage! And yet nothing but a cockchafer's wing!Perhaps it may next be an insect which neither by day nor night, neither to the naked eye nor under the microscope, could excite a feeling of interest; but if you take the trouble to lift up, with a delicate and patient scalpel, the laminæ which compose the thickness of its scaly wing, you will find there, in most instances, a variety of unexpected designs, sometimes vegetable curves,—sometimes airy ramifications,—sometimes angular striated figures, like hieroglyphics, which remind you of certain Oriental languages; and compose, in truth, a genuine necromancer's book, that can neither be referred to, nor compared with, any known form.These singular characters, while strongly attracting the eye and disquieting the mind, are fully worthy of the interest they excite. What they express, and give utterance to, in their emphatic language, is the circulation of life. Some are tubes through which the air enters the wing, and distends it for flight; others are tiny veins where circulate the powerful liquids that endow the imperceptible organism with its colours and its energy.The most attractive forms are living forms. Take a drop of blood, and submit it to the microscope. This drop, as it spreads, rewards you with a delightful arborescence,—with the delicacy and lightness of certain winter trees, when revealed in their actual figure, and no longer encumbered with leaves.Thus, Nature's infinite potency of beauty is not limited to the surface, as antiquity supposed. It does not trouble itself about human eyesight, but labours for its own behoof, and on its own work. From the surface to the interior, it frequently increases in beauty as in depth. It invests with surpassing loveliness things which are absolutely hidden, and which death alone can unveil. Sometimes, as if to contradict and confound our ideas, it clothes in ravishing forms the organs which, from our point of view, accomplish the vilest functions. I am thinking of the exquisite beauty and delicate tenderness of that coral-tree which incessantly pours out the chyle of our intestines.To return to the insects: beauty abounds in them both externally and internally. One need not search far in order to discover it. Take an insect, not very rare, which I constantly meet with on the sandy soil of Fontainebleau, in localities well open to the sun. Take—but not without precaution, for it is well armed—the brilliant cicindela. Even to the naked eye it is an agreeable object; but under the microscope it appears to be perhaps the richest and the most varied which art could study. These are truly surprising creatures! Each individual differs; all are enamelled, and decorated to an excess, without resembling one another. In each, if taken and separately studied, new discoveries may be made.It is the ardent and murderous hunter of other insects, and endowed with formidable weapons,—having for its two anterior mandibles a couple of sickles which close in upon one another, and transfix deeply, on both sides, their unfortunate victim. Its rich and living aliment apparently communicates to the cicindela its glowing colours. Its entire body is embellished with them. On the wings, a changeful besprinkling of peacock's eyes. On the fore parts, numerous meanders, diversely and softly shaded, are trailed over a dark ground. Abdomen and legs are glazed with such rich hues that no enamel can sustain a comparison with them; the eye can scarcely endure their vivacity. The singular thing is, that beside these enamels you find the dead tones of flowers and the butterfly's wing. To all these various elements add some singularities, which you would suppose to be the work of human art, in the Oriental styles, Persian and Turkish, or as in the Indian shawl, where the colours, slightly subdued, have found an admirable basis; time having gradually lent a grave tone to their sweet harmony.Frankly, is there aught approaching such a degree of excellence in our human arts? How great the necessity that, in their apparently fatigued and languid condition, they should gain life and strength from these living sources!In general, instead of going straight to Nature, to the inexhaustible fountain of beauty and invention, they have solicited help from the erudition, the history, and the antiquity of man.We have copied ancient jewels; sometimes those of the barbarous peoples which first procured them from our own merchants. We have copied the old robes and the stuffs of our ancestors. We have copied, especially, the painted-glass windows of Gothic architecture, whose colours and forms have been selected hap-hazard, and transplanted to objects utterly discordant and unsuitable,—as, for instance, to shawls!If we were desirous of comprehending and rehabilitating these ancient windows, we might have taken a lesson from the enamels of certain scarabæi. Seen beneath the microscope, they present very analogous effects, simply because they possess the same elements of beauty. The thirteenth century glass-windows (you may see them at Bourges, and especially in the Museum of that city) were double. The light therefore remained in them, did not pass through them, gave them the magical effects of precious stones. And of a similar character are those insect wings composed of numerous leaves, between which you may detect, with the microscope, a network of mysterious hieroglyphics.Gothic, so little in harmony with either our wants or our ideas, has passed out of our furniture, but it still lingers in the shawl-manufacture; a rich and costly industry, which, having once adopted the fantastic method of imitating in opaque wools those windows whose transparency was their special merit, can hardly emancipate itself from the bondage.Men have not consulted women. In order to weave complex designs, heap up a medley of arches and oriels, and condemn our wives to carry churches on their backs, men have provided a heavy groundwork of the stoutest wools; the whole being despatched from London and Paris to be servilely woven by the Indians who have unlearned their own arts.Our intelligent Parisian merchants, who have reluctantly followed in the path traced out for them by the great producers, may very well escape from theserichand heavy styles. Let some one lose patience, and turning his back on the copyists of antique absurdities, go to Nature herself in search of advice,—to the great insect collections and the conservatories of the Jardin des Plantes.Nature, being feminine, will tell him that if he would fitly decorate his sister in the soft and airy tissue of the ancient cashmere, he must delineate thereupon—not the towers of Notre-Dame,[N]but a hundred charming creatures—that little, but, if you will, very common marvel of the cicindela, in which all styles are combined;—or the purple scarabæus glorified in its lily;—or the emerald chrysomela, which this very morning I found sensually reposing at the bottom of a rose.[N]Notre-Dame is the metropolitan cathedral of Paris.Do I mean that you should copy these? Not at all. I should call these living creatures, in their robe of love, from which they derive all their charm, an animated aureola, which cannot be translated. We must be content to love and contemplate them, to draw our inspiration from them, to convert them into ideal forms, and new rainbows of colours, and exquisite posies of blossoms. Thus transformed,they will become, not what they are in Nature, but fantastic and wonderful,—as the child who pants for them sees them in its slumber, or the maiden yearning after a beautiful attire, or as the young pregnant wife when dreaming of them in her hours of longing.IX.—THE SPIDER.CHAPTER IX.THE SPIDER—INDUSTRY—THE STOPPAGE.Before we pass on to those insect communities with which the latter portion of this volume will be occupied, let us speak here of a solitary individual.Higher, and yet lower, than the insect, the spider is separated from it by its organization, but connected with it by its instincts, wants, and food.A being strongly specialized in two particulars, it is excluded from the great classes of the animal kingdom, and stands isolated, as it were, in creation.In the fertile countries of the tropics, where game abounds, it lives with its fellows. Some are said to weave around a tree one immense net, common to all, whose avenues they guard in perfect agreement. Nay more: having frequent occasion to deal with powerful insects, and even little birds, they co-operate in the hour of peril, and lend each other, as it were, a helping hand.But this gregarious mode of living is wholly exceptional, confined to certain species, and peculiarly favoured climates. Everywhere else the spider, through its organism and the fatality of its life, assumes the character of the hunter, of the savage, who, living upon uncertain prey, remains envious, mistrustful, exclusive, and solitary.But remember that it does not resemble the ordinary hunter, who gets quit with his journeys, his exertions, and his activity. The spider's hunt costs it dearly, if I may venture to say so, and demands an incessant outlay. Every day, every hour, it must draw from its own substance the essential element of the network which is to provide it with food and renew that substance. Accordingly, it starves in order to nourish, and exhausts in order to recruit itself; it grows lean on the dubious hope of afterwards growing fat. Its life is a lottery, remitted to the risk of a thousand unforeseen contingencies. Hence, it cannot fail to develop into an unquiet creature, sympathizing but coldly with its kind, in whom it sees possible competitors,—in a word, it is a fatally egotistical animal. And were it not so, it would perish.The worst of it is, as far as the poor creature is concerned, that it is profoundly ugly. It is not one of those which, ugly to the naked eye, are rehabilitated by the microscope. The overwhelming speciality of its career has the effect, as we see among men, of attenuating one limb, exaggerating another, and prevents anything like harmony: the blacksmith is frequently a hunchback. In the same manner the spider is pot-bellied. Nature has sacrificed everything to its function, its wants, and the industrial apparatus which will satisfy those wants. It is an artisan, a rope-maker, a spinner, and a weaver. Do not look at its figure, but at the product of its art. It is not only a spinner, but a spinning-mill.Concentrated and circular, with eight feet around its body, and eight vigilant eyes in its head, it causes astonishment by the eccentric prominency of its enormous belly. An ignoble feature, wherein the careless observer reads the result of gormandising! Alas, it is just thecontrary! This big belly is its workshop, its magazine, the pouch where the rope-maker carries in front of it the material of the thread which it winds and unwinds; but as it fills this pouch with nothing but its very substance, it enlarges only at the expense of itself, and by dint of extreme sobriety. And you shall often see it, though emaciated in every limb, retaining full and expanded the treasure which is the indispensable element of its labour, the hope of its industry, and its only chance of a future. A true type of the man of industry! "If I fast to-day," it says, "I shall eat perhaps to-morrow; but if my material runs short, all is over,—my stomach must rest and fast for ever!"My first relations with the spider were nothing less than agreeable. In my poverty-blighted childhood, while I toiled alone (as I have said in my book on "The People") in the then ruinous and desolate printing-office of my father, the temporary workshop was in a kind of cellar, sufficiently well lighted,—being a cellar in the boulevard where my family resided, but on the ground-floor so far as concerned the adjoining street. Through a large grated window the mid-day sun obliquely lighted up the sombre case where I put together my little leaden letters. There, at the angle of the wall, I distinctly perceived a prudent spider, which, supposing the stray sunbeam would bring some imprudent fly for its breakfast, drew near my case. This sunbeam, falling not in its corner but nearer me, was a natural temptation to invite its closer approach. In spite of my innate disgust, I admired the progressive ratio of timid, slow, and prudent experiment by which it ascertained the character of him to whose mercy it virtually confided its very existence. It watched me closely with all its eight eyes, and propounded to itself the problem, "Is he, or is he not, an enemy?"Without analyzing its figure, or very clearly distinguishing its eyes, I felt that I was observed and watched; and apparently this observation, in the long run, proved favourable to me. By the instinct of work, perhaps (which is very great in its species), it perceived that I was really a peaceful labourer, and that I was busy, like itself, in weaving my cobweb. However this may be, it abandoned its stratagems and precautions with a quick decision, as if adopting an adventurousand somewhat perilous step. Not without grace it descended upon its thread, and planted itself resolutely on our respective frontier—the edge of my case, favoured, at that moment, with a golden ray of the sickly sun.I was divided between two sentiments. I confess that I did not relish so close an intimacy,—the figure of such a friend pleased me but little; on the other hand, this prudent and observant being, which certainly did not lavish its confidence, seemed to say to me: "Wherefore should I not enjoy a little of thy sun? So different in nature, we have nevertheless arrived together from our necessitous toil and cold obscurity at this sweet banquet of light. Let us take heart, and fraternize. This ray which you permit me to share, receive it from me, and preserve it. In another half century, it will kindle up your winter."As the little black fairy said this in its own language, whispering low, very low—in fact, it could not be lower (for it is thus that fairies speak)—I marked the effect of it vaguely, and it slumbered in my mind. The circumstance, however, was recalled for a brief while some years ago; and again, after a long interval, it has been revived on this very day, when for the first time I record and explain it.On the former occasion, after a domestic affliction, I was spending my holidays in Paris, and I went daily alone to walk in my little garden in the Rue des Postes. My family were in the country. Mechanically I remarked the beautiful concentric stars which the spiders had woven round my trees, and which they repaired and remade incessantly with a laudable industry, giving themselves immense trouble to preserve my small stock of fruits and grapes, and relieving myself from the importunity of flies and the stings of gnats. They reminded me of the black domestic spider which, in my childhood, had entered into conversation with me. These latter were very different. Daughters of air and light, always exposed, always before the eyes of men, without other shelter than the surface of a leaf, where they may easily be captured, they are unable to cultivate the reserve or diplomacy of my old acquaintance. All their work, is visible, all their little mystery open to the wind, and their persons at everybody's discretion; they haveno other protection than what may be afforded them through compassion, or in consideration of a well-understood interest in the positive services which they render.Those which suspend their nests to the branches of trees, like those which suspend them to our windows, display an evident design to place themselves in the wind, where a current of air may waft the insects to them, or in the path of a ray of light in which the gnat may float and whirl. The web does not fall vertically, for such a position would restrict it to one current; the spider, like an able seaman, gives it a great obliquity, and thus secures a couple of currents, or even more.From the extremity of its belly, four screw-plates or tubercles, which can be drawn in or out (like telescopes), eject by their movement a very little cloud, that increases in size from minute to minute. This cloud is composed of threads of an infinite tenuity; each tubercle secretes a thousand, and the four, by combining together their four thousand threads, make the unique and tolerably strong thread of which the web is woven.Mark well, that the threads of the intelligent manufacturer are not all alike, but of different strength and quality according to their destination. Some are dry for warping, others viscous for gluing. The tissues of the nest intended for the reception of the new-born are of a cottony material, while those which will enwrap the cocoon containing the eggs possess all the resistant power necessary for the safety of the latter.When the spider has produced a sufficient quantity of thread to undertake a web, it voluntarily glides from an elevated point, and unwinds its skein. There it remains suspended, and afterwards reascending to its starting-point by the assistance of its tiny cordage, moves towards another point; and continues to trace in this manner a series of radii all diverging from the same centre.The skein stretched, it is busied next in weaving the woof by crossing the thread. Running from radius to radius, it touches each with its tubercles, which fasten to it the circular border. The whole is not a compact tissue, but a veritable network, so geometrically proportioned that all the meshes of the circle are invariably of the same size.This web, woven out of itself, living and vibrating, is much more than an instrument; it is a part of its being. Itself of a circular form, the spider seems to expand within this circle, and prolong the filaments of its nerves to the radiating threads which it weaves. In the centre of its web lies its greatest force for attack or defence. Out of that centre it is timid; a fly will make it recoil. The web is its electric telegraph, responding to the lightest touch, and revealing the presence of an imperceptible and almost imponderable victim; while, at the same time, being slightly viscous in substance, it retains the prey, or delays and entangles a dangerous enemy.In windy weather, the continual agitation of the web prevents it from giving an account of what transpires, and the spider then remains at the centre. But usually it keeps near its machinery, hidden under a leaf, that it may not terrify its victims, or fall a prey to any of its numerous foes.Prudence and patience, rather than courage, are its characteristics. Its experience is too great, it has undergone too many accidents and misadventures, it is too much accustomed to the severities of fate, to indulge in any surpassing audacity. It is afraid even of an ant. The latter, often a mischievous individual, a restless and rugged rodent, and afraid of nothing, frequently persists in exploring the strange woof, of which it can make nothing. The spider accordingly gives way to it,—whether it fears the acid of the ant, which burns like aquafortis, or whether, like a good artisan, it calculates that a long and obstinate struggle will cost it more time than will the manufacture of another web. Therefore, without yielding to the slightest susceptibility of self-love, it allows the ant to strut about, and takes up its post a little further off.Every animal lives by depredation. Nature is ever devouring itself; but the prey is not always sought and merited by a patient industry deserving of respect. No being, however, is so much the plaything of fate as the spider. Like every good workman, it has a twofold value: in its work and its person. An infinity of insects—the murderous carabus, or thelibellula, an elegant and splendid assassin—have only their bodies and their weapons, and spend their lives joyously in killing. Others possess secure and easily defended asylums, where they have cause to fear few dangers. The field-spider has neither the one nor the other advantage. It is in the position of the respectable operative, who, through his small and ill-guaranteed fortune, attracts or tempts cupidity or insolence. The lizard from below, the squirrel from above, hunt the feeble hunter. The inert frog darts at it the viscous tongue, which glues it and renders it immovable. It is the felicity of the swallow, in her graceful circle, to carry off, without injuring, the spider and his web; and all birds look upon it as a great dainty or an excellent medicine. The nightingale, faithful, like all great singers, to a certain hygiene, prescribes for herself, as an occasional purgative, a spider.Even if she be not swallowed up herself, if the instrument of her trade is destroyed, the consequences are the same. Should the web be undone blow upon blow, a somewhat protracted fast renders it unable to secrete a fresh supply of thread, and it soon perishes of hunger. It is constantly confined in this vicious circle:—To spin, it requires food;To feed, it must spin.Its thread, for the spider as for the Parcæ, is that of destiny.We once made the experiment of removing three times running a spider's web. Three times, in six hours, it replaced it, with admirable patience, and without abating one jot of hope. The experiment was a cruel one, and we now reproach ourselves for it. We meet with too many poor unfortunates, whom accidents of this kind have thrown out of work, and who are thenceforth too exhausted to resume their industry. One sees them, like living skeletons, attempting fruitlessly a different trade, in which they succeed but poorly, and mournfully envying the long legs of the field-spiders, which gain their living by incessant travelling.When people speak of the eager gluttony of the spider, they forget that it must either eat a double quantity, or soon perish: eat to recruit its body, and eat to renew its thread.Three circumstances contribute to wear it out: the ardour of incessant work, its nervous susceptibility—which is carried to an extreme—and its twofold respiratory system.For it has not only the passive respiration of the insect, which receives, or submits to, the air introduced through its stigmata; it has also a kind of active respiration, analogous to the play of the lungs in the higher animals. It takes the air and masters it, transforms and decomposes it, and incessantly renews it. If you do but examine its movements, you feel that it is something more than an insect; the vital glow traverses its frame in a rapid circulation; the heart beats very differently from what it does in the fly or butterfly.But its superiority is its peril. The insect braves with impunity the strongest odours and mephitic miasmas. The spider cannot endure them. Instantly affected by them, it falls into convulsions, struggles,and expires. I saw this incident one day at Lucerne. Chloroform, whose action the stag-beetle had endured for fourteen days without succumbing, immediately—at the first contact—overpowered the spider. Yet the victim was a large one, and I found it engaged in eating a gnat. I wished to experiment, and poured on it a single drop. The effect was terrible. Nothing more pitiful could be seen in a case of human asphyxia. It tumbled over, raised itself, and then swooned; all its supports failed it, and its limbs appeared disjointed. One thing was very pathetic—that in this supreme moment the fecundity of its bosom became apparent; in its agony, its tubercles sent forth their little cloudy woof, so that you might have believed it to be working even in death.I felt oppressed, and in the hope that the fresh air would perhaps revive it, I placed it on my window-sill; but it was no longeritself. I know not how the effect was produced; but it seemed to have melted away, and nothing of it remained but its skeleton. The vanished substance had left but its shadow, which the wind bore away to the neighbouring lake.

VI.—THE SILKWORM.

VI.—THE SILKWORM.

CHAPTER VI.THE SILKWORM."The ideal of the human arts of spinning and weaving,"—said to me one day a Southerner (a manufacturer, but a man of imagination),—"the ideal which we always follow is a woman's beautiful hair! Oh, how far are the softest wools or finest cotton from approaching it! At what an enormous distance does all, and ever will all, our progress leave us! We drag ourselves onward, a long, long way in the rear, and enviously regard that supreme perfection which Nature daily realizes as a mere matter of pastime."That delicate, yet strong and tenacious hair, vibrating with an exquisite sonority which goes from the ear to the heart, and yet withal so soft, warm, luminous, and electrical—is the flower of the human flower."Men fruitlessly dispute respecting the merits of colour. Whatdoes it matter? The brilliant black contains and promises the flame; the blonde displays it with the splendours of the Golden Fleece. The sunny brown appropriates the very sun, makes use of it, blends it with its mirages, floats, and undulates, and incessantly varies in its streaming reflexes, now smiles with light, now deepens into gloom, always deceives, and, whatever we may say, deceives us most delightfully.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SILKWORM.

"The ideal of the human arts of spinning and weaving,"—said to me one day a Southerner (a manufacturer, but a man of imagination),—"the ideal which we always follow is a woman's beautiful hair! Oh, how far are the softest wools or finest cotton from approaching it! At what an enormous distance does all, and ever will all, our progress leave us! We drag ourselves onward, a long, long way in the rear, and enviously regard that supreme perfection which Nature daily realizes as a mere matter of pastime.

"That delicate, yet strong and tenacious hair, vibrating with an exquisite sonority which goes from the ear to the heart, and yet withal so soft, warm, luminous, and electrical—is the flower of the human flower.

"Men fruitlessly dispute respecting the merits of colour. Whatdoes it matter? The brilliant black contains and promises the flame; the blonde displays it with the splendours of the Golden Fleece. The sunny brown appropriates the very sun, makes use of it, blends it with its mirages, floats, and undulates, and incessantly varies in its streaming reflexes, now smiles with light, now deepens into gloom, always deceives, and, whatever we may say, deceives us most delightfully.

"The principal, the infinite effort of human industry, has combined all possible means for the improvement of cotton. Between the Vosges and the Rhine, the rare agreement of capital, machinery, the arts of design, and the chemical sciences, has produced those splendid Indian products of Alsace, to which England herself does honour by purchasing them. Alas! all this cannot disguise the original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which men have so richly embellished. If the woman who in her vanity clothes her form in these materials, and thinks her beauty heightened by them, would loosen her tresses about her, and unroll their waves over the indigent richness of our most sheeny cottons, what would occur? How they would be humiliated!

"Sir, we must own the truth; there is only one thing worthy of being placed side by side with woman's hair. Only one manufacturer can contend against it. That manufacturer is an insect,—the modest silkworm."

A peculiar charm attends the labours of the silkworm; it ennobles everything which surrounds it. In traversing our rudest provinces, the valleys of the Ardèche, where all is rocky,—where the mulberry and the chestnut seem to dispense with earth, to live upon air and pebbles,—where low stone houses sadden the eyes by their gray tints,—everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or three charming brunettes, with ivory teeth, who smiled on the wayfarer, and continued spinning their silken gold. The wayfarer said to them in a low voice, as the carriage bore him away:—"What a pity, innocent fairies, that the gold may not be for you! That instead of being disguised with a useless colour, and disfigured by art, it does not retain its natural hue, and shine on the person of its beautiful spinners! Howmuch better the royal tissue would become you than thegrandes dames!"

A mere glance at the silkworm convinces you that it is no more a native of Europe than any other sweet thing. All that is soft and exquisite springs from the East. Our West, that hardy soldier, blacksmith, and miner, is good only to dig. It is good mother Asia, disdained by her rude son, who has bestowed upon him the treasures which seem to concentrate the essence of the globe. With the Arab horse and the nightingale, she has given him coffee, and sugar, and silk,—the revivifiers of existence and the true ornament of love.

When silk first arrived at Rome, the empresses felt that previously they had been no better than plebeians. They compared it, as far as its soft lustre was concerned, to the pearls of the Orient, paying for it, without haggling, the price of pearls and gold.

China esteemed it of such high value, that, to preserve the monopoly, she inflicted the penalty of death on any persons who dared to export the silkworm. It was only at the utmost peril, and by concealing it in a hollow cane, that men succeeded in carrying it to Byzantium, whence it passed to the West.

In the Middle Age, the age of indigence and barren disputes, when wool was the luxury of the rich, and the poor wore serge in winter, no attention was paid to silk, and its manufacture was exclusively confined to Italy.

It is the gold of the silkworms of Verona which, in Giorgione, at the mighty outcome of the Venetian art, and in the strong Titian, the master of masters, enriches with a ruddy radiance their beautiful blondes and brunettes, the sovereign beauties of the world.

On the other hand, in an age of decadence, when Spain and Flanders had waned, the melancholy artist who preferred to paint the beauty which years had marked,—the fading flower,—the fruit too early pierced and unnaturally ripened,—Van Dyck, clothed with white silk, like a consoling beam of moonlight, his languishing and drooping signoras. Under the soft folds of their satins they still trouble hearts with vain dreams and regrets.

The woman who possessed the secret of preserving her charms tothe last decline of old age, whose cypher everywhere inscribed teaches us that Love can conquer Time, Diana de Poitiers, in her profound art, did exactly the opposite of what our imprudent ladies do, who, incessantly changing, as if to amuse the passer-by, leave no trace upon the soul, and produce no permanent impression. She permitted the Irises to delectate themselves with their fugitive rainbow; but, like the celestial Dian, always wore the same costume, black or white, and invariably of silk.

It was to please her that Henry II. wore the first pair of silk stockings, and the fine silken close-fitting vest, which indicated all the gracefulness of a muscular yet slender figure. We know how ardent an enthusiasm Henry IV., at a later period, showed in promoting the growth of the silk-manufacture, planting mulberry-trees everywhere,—along the highways, in the market-places, in the courts of his palaces, and even in the gardens of the Tuileries. Coloured silks, for decoration and furniture, and silks with flowered designs, were soon afterwards manufactured at Lyons, which provided all Europe with them.

Shall I say it, however? These coloured and ornamented silks do not by any means produce a great and profound effect. Silk in its natural state, and not even tinted, is in much more intimate sympathy with woman and beauty. Amber and pearls, the latter slightly yellow, with rich falls of lace, the latter not too yellow, are the only suitable accompaniments of silk.

For silk is a noble and in nowise pretentious attire, which lends a subdued charm to the exuberant liveliness of youth, and clothes declining beauty with its most tender and touching radiance.

A genuine mystery attends it which is not without attraction. Colour or gloss? Cotton has its peculiar gloss, and, when fitly prepared, often acquires an agreeable freshness. Silk is not properly glossy, but luminous,—with a soft electrical light, which harmonizes naturally with the electricity of the woman. A living tissue, it embraces willingly the living person.

Oriental ladies, before they foolishly adopted our Western customs, wore but two kinds of stuff: underneath, the real cashmere (of so fine a texture that a large shawl might be passed through a ring); and above, a beautiful tunic of silk of a pale blonde, or rather straw colour, with a gleam or flash of magnetic amber.

These two articles were less garments than friends,—gentle slaves,—supple and charming flatterers: the cashmere warm, caressing, and pliant, enfolding the bather lovingly when she emerged from her bath; the silk tunic, on the contrary, light and aërial, only not too diaphanous. Its blonde whiteness agreed most admirably with the colour of her skin; one might indeed have very justly said that it had imbibed that colour through its constant intimacy and accustomed tenderness. Inferior to the skin, undoubtedly, yet it seemed related to it; or rather it became in the end a part of the body, and, as it were, melted into it, like a dream which informs our whole existence, and cannot be separated from it.

VII.—INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT.

VII.—INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT.

CHAPTER VII.INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT: AND ITS CHEMICAL ENERGIES, AS IN THE COCHINEAL AND THE CANTHARIDES.Have I insisted too much upon my theme? No; I have reached its very depths, its most important details.Silk is not a particular, but a general view or aspect of it, for nearly every insect produces silk.Hitherto we have dealt with only one kind of silk,—that of the bombyx, and indeed that of a species of bombyx which is not very fertile. Let us hope that the meritorious Society of Acclimatization will introduce here the Chinese bombyx (Attacus), which lives on the dwarf oak, whose strong and cheap silk might be used as clothing for the poor. All classes thenceforth might wear a material warm, light, impervious, solid; and not only so, but beautiful, brilliant, and noble. Such a change would be equivalent, in my eyes, to the general ennoblement and transfiguration of the people.

CHAPTER VII.

INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT: AND ITS CHEMICAL ENERGIES, AS IN THE COCHINEAL AND THE CANTHARIDES.

Have I insisted too much upon my theme? No; I have reached its very depths, its most important details.

Silk is not a particular, but a general view or aspect of it, for nearly every insect produces silk.

Hitherto we have dealt with only one kind of silk,—that of the bombyx, and indeed that of a species of bombyx which is not very fertile. Let us hope that the meritorious Society of Acclimatization will introduce here the Chinese bombyx (Attacus), which lives on the dwarf oak, whose strong and cheap silk might be used as clothing for the poor. All classes thenceforth might wear a material warm, light, impervious, solid; and not only so, but beautiful, brilliant, and noble. Such a change would be equivalent, in my eyes, to the general ennoblement and transfiguration of the people.

Réaumur long ago asserted that numerous chrysalides would furnish a beautiful silk. The spider would yield a substance both delicate and tenacious,—as witness the admirable veil of spider's silk preserved in the Paris Museum.

The delicate Arachne, whose light thread resembles a fleecy cloud,—which is nevertheless so strong, as it issues from the spinnerets,—Arachne is pre-eminently the spinner. But, as a general rule, the insect is the weaver, and wholly devoted to that feminine art. I was about to say, the insect is a woman.

In our vocabulary "feminine" means feeble; but in the Insect World it is the synonym of strength and energy. It is,—as is the case with maternity everywhere,—it is for the purpose of defending and nourishing the child, of provisioning the cradle in which the orphan will remain alone,—it is for this purpose specially that the insect is a warrior, and furnished with formidable weapons.

As far as concerns the instruments which pierce, and cut, and saw, the insect, in spite of all our progress, is perhaps a little in advance of man to-day. The instinct of maternity, the need of providing for its child—the future orphan—the protecting shelter of the hardest bodies, has evidently inspired it to make extraordinary efforts for the development and refinement of its tools. A few, in their fantastical character, have as yet no analogues in any of our factories.

Long before Réaumur organized the thermometer, the ants, for the protection of their delicate, hygrometrical, and susceptible eggs, divided their habitations into a series of thirty or forty stories,—lowering or raising the tiny creatures to the degree of warmth, dryness, or humidity, which the temperature of the day and of the hour of the day rendered necessary. Thus they formed an infallible thermometer, on which one might rely with as much certainty as on that of the philosophers.

In the comparisons between human and insect industry, the differenceswhich we remark belong not so much to the methods as to the speciality of their wants and situation. The insect aptly varies the application of its arts. For example: the spider which, in its network-trap, improvised every day, lightens its work by a mixture of gluing and spinning, follows quite a different process in the important labour of fabricating the soft, warm, and durable cocoons which are intended to receive its young. The nest would seem to be partly spun and partly felted, like the majority of birds' nests.

We know that from the water-spider man derived the idea of the diving-bell; but it isnotgenerally known that an ingenious Norman peasant has succeeded in imitating perfectly the operations of the larva of the syrphes, which, by means of an extremely prolonged respiratory apparatus, preserves a communication with the pure and wholesome air, even while working at the bottom of the most putrid waters.

It seems, then, that in the Insect World exist a complete pharmacy, chemistry, and perfumery. Have our sciences been sufficiently attentive to this fact? The potent vitality which gives an extraordinary force to the muscles of such tiny creatures, seems also to endow their liquids with active properties and burning energies which the large animals do not possess. Many, for defensive purposes, are gifted with caustic secretions—which they eject the moment you approach—or with fulminating powders. Others with poison, which flows as soon as the sting has been thrust in. Some possess, in addition, an art of magnetizing or etherizing their enemy; and others, like certain ants which work in damp, woody places, season their abodes by burning them, as it were, with potent formic acid.

The entire genus of theCerambyx(or Long-horned Beetle) exhale a strong, rose-like odour, which is smelt at a distance, is lasting, and endures after the creature's death. Even among the Carnivora, ay, and among the Coprophagi, we meet with perfumed insects, or, at all events, with insects which, when in danger of being captured, endeavour to deceive you, or implore pity, by emitting agreeable odours.

Others shine with admirable colours. The deep reds of the Nopal Coccus have furnished the purple of kings.

By a skilful mixture, we also obtain from the cochineal the pre-eminently gay and radiant colour, carmine, with its innumerable tints and rosy shades.

A sovereign art with the insect is to carry on its sting, and concentrate at a particular point, the liquids which flow in the plant, in the living being. It is the very art of irritation. Its applications are innumerable in medicine and industry; tints, paintings, varied ornaments, a hundred fantastic and beautiful things come to us from the sting of the galls, the excrescences and gibbosities which they so skilfully raise.

The cochineal insect, while engaged in extracting by this process from exotic vegetables the envelope of solid green in which it will spend its prolonged period of rest, furnishes us with the red of reds, the scarlet of lake, which will colour varnishes, and wax, and a multitude of objects.

In health or illness, the stings of insects upon the living flesh are violent irritants for disturbing or re-establishing the course of life. In these there is nothing mediocre. A few, without sting, burn you by their internal acridity.

Who has not seen on the dusty plain, before the thirsty harvest, the cantharides, with its emerald enamel, abruptly crossing the footpath with a wild and agitated movement! Burning elixir of existence, where love transforms itself into a poison,—it is not with impunity that we make use of it medicinally. That medieval pharmacy, which was so dangerous to man, is not without peril, it seems, for the animals themselves. A very intelligent but eccentrically ardent cat, which I kept for a long time, among its other caprices of violence loved to hunt the cantharides. It seemed attracted by the acridity of the beautiful insect, as the moth is by the flame. It was an intoxication. But when, hunting it through the flowers, she had seized and crushed her dangerous victim, the latter appeared to take its revenge.

The inflammable feline nature, stimulated by the fiery sting, broke out in cries, in excesses of fury, in strange leaps and bounds. She expiated her orgie of fire by terrible sufferings.

But, on the contrary, another insect, the bamboo-worm, ormalalis,provides you, if you first remove its head, which is a deadly poison, with an exquisite cream, the sweet and soporific influence of which, say the Brazilian Indians, lulls love asleep. For two days and nights, the young maiden who has tasted of it, crouching under the blossomy tree, feels all the more powerfully in her soul the depth of the virgin forests, and the mystery of those fresh glades which have never seen the sun, nor echoed to the step of man, nor known any intruder but the lonely great blue butterfly. And yet she is not alone: love quenches her thirst with the most delicious fruits.

VIII.—THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.

VIII.—THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.

CHAPTER VIII.ON THE RENOVATION OF OUR ARTS BY THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.The Arts properly so called, the Fine Arts, should profit much more than the Industrial, by the study of insects. The goldsmith and the lapidary would do well to seek in them models and instruction. The soft insects, the flies, specially possess in their eyes truly magical irises, with which no casket of gems can bear comparison. In passing from one species to another, and even, if I mistake not, from one individual to another, new combinations may be observed. Remark that the flies with brilliant wings are not always the most richly endowed, as far as their optical organs are concerned. Take the dull, gray, dusty, odious horse-fly, which lives on warm blood; its eye, to the magnifying-glass, offers the strange faëry spectacle of a mosaic of jewels, such as all the art of Froment-Meurice has scarcely invented.

CHAPTER VIII.

ON THE RENOVATION OF OUR ARTS BY THE STUDY OF THE INSECT.

The Arts properly so called, the Fine Arts, should profit much more than the Industrial, by the study of insects. The goldsmith and the lapidary would do well to seek in them models and instruction. The soft insects, the flies, specially possess in their eyes truly magical irises, with which no casket of gems can bear comparison. In passing from one species to another, and even, if I mistake not, from one individual to another, new combinations may be observed. Remark that the flies with brilliant wings are not always the most richly endowed, as far as their optical organs are concerned. Take the dull, gray, dusty, odious horse-fly, which lives on warm blood; its eye, to the magnifying-glass, offers the strange faëry spectacle of a mosaic of jewels, such as all the art of Froment-Meurice has scarcely invented.

If you descend still lower, insects which do not live, like this fly, upon living but upon dead matter, ordure, and decomposition, astonish us by the richness of their reflections, which our enamel ought to endeavour to reproduce. The dunghill beetle, an ungainly black insect if we look only at the upper part of its body, is, underneath, of a deep sapphire-blue which no kingly diadem ever equalled! And what shall we say of the son of the dead, of the Egyptian scarabæus,—a living emerald, but far superior to that jewel in the gravity, opulence, and magic of its lustre? The imagination is impressed, and one does not feel astonished that a people so tender and devout, so in love with death, so full of the dreams of eternity, took for a symbol the little miraculous animal,—a burning jet of life springing from the grave!

A certain skill in examination, and a choice of day and of light, are necessary. You cannot properly study the insect of the tropics and that of our colder climates on the same day or at the same hour. The former should be examined only in favourable weather, under a pure sky and a strong sun,—a vivid and genial ray, analogous to the light which bathes it in its own country. The other, frequently uninteresting to the naked eye, but of great beauty under the microscope, may reserve its grand illuminating effects for the evening, or for artificial light. Little is promised by the cockchafer, at first sight so coarse and prosaic in appearance. Yet its scaly wing, when submitted to the focus of the microscope, and well lighted up beneath the little mirror, so that it is seen by transparency, presents a noble winter stuff, a dead leaf, where meander veins of a very beautiful brown. And in the evening it becomes quite another thing: the yellowish part of the scale has got the best of it, and in the light shines forth like gold—(a poor comparison!)—the strange, magical gold of paradise, which we dream of for the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, or for the robes of light worn by saints and spirits before the Throne! A sun softer and tenderer than the orb of day, and one which, we know not why, charms and affects the heart.

A strange mirage! And yet nothing but a cockchafer's wing!

Perhaps it may next be an insect which neither by day nor night, neither to the naked eye nor under the microscope, could excite a feeling of interest; but if you take the trouble to lift up, with a delicate and patient scalpel, the laminæ which compose the thickness of its scaly wing, you will find there, in most instances, a variety of unexpected designs, sometimes vegetable curves,—sometimes airy ramifications,—sometimes angular striated figures, like hieroglyphics, which remind you of certain Oriental languages; and compose, in truth, a genuine necromancer's book, that can neither be referred to, nor compared with, any known form.

These singular characters, while strongly attracting the eye and disquieting the mind, are fully worthy of the interest they excite. What they express, and give utterance to, in their emphatic language, is the circulation of life. Some are tubes through which the air enters the wing, and distends it for flight; others are tiny veins where circulate the powerful liquids that endow the imperceptible organism with its colours and its energy.

The most attractive forms are living forms. Take a drop of blood, and submit it to the microscope. This drop, as it spreads, rewards you with a delightful arborescence,—with the delicacy and lightness of certain winter trees, when revealed in their actual figure, and no longer encumbered with leaves.

Thus, Nature's infinite potency of beauty is not limited to the surface, as antiquity supposed. It does not trouble itself about human eyesight, but labours for its own behoof, and on its own work. From the surface to the interior, it frequently increases in beauty as in depth. It invests with surpassing loveliness things which are absolutely hidden, and which death alone can unveil. Sometimes, as if to contradict and confound our ideas, it clothes in ravishing forms the organs which, from our point of view, accomplish the vilest functions. I am thinking of the exquisite beauty and delicate tenderness of that coral-tree which incessantly pours out the chyle of our intestines.

To return to the insects: beauty abounds in them both externally and internally. One need not search far in order to discover it. Take an insect, not very rare, which I constantly meet with on the sandy soil of Fontainebleau, in localities well open to the sun. Take—but not without precaution, for it is well armed—the brilliant cicindela. Even to the naked eye it is an agreeable object; but under the microscope it appears to be perhaps the richest and the most varied which art could study. These are truly surprising creatures! Each individual differs; all are enamelled, and decorated to an excess, without resembling one another. In each, if taken and separately studied, new discoveries may be made.

It is the ardent and murderous hunter of other insects, and endowed with formidable weapons,—having for its two anterior mandibles a couple of sickles which close in upon one another, and transfix deeply, on both sides, their unfortunate victim. Its rich and living aliment apparently communicates to the cicindela its glowing colours. Its entire body is embellished with them. On the wings, a changeful besprinkling of peacock's eyes. On the fore parts, numerous meanders, diversely and softly shaded, are trailed over a dark ground. Abdomen and legs are glazed with such rich hues that no enamel can sustain a comparison with them; the eye can scarcely endure their vivacity. The singular thing is, that beside these enamels you find the dead tones of flowers and the butterfly's wing. To all these various elements add some singularities, which you would suppose to be the work of human art, in the Oriental styles, Persian and Turkish, or as in the Indian shawl, where the colours, slightly subdued, have found an admirable basis; time having gradually lent a grave tone to their sweet harmony.

Frankly, is there aught approaching such a degree of excellence in our human arts? How great the necessity that, in their apparently fatigued and languid condition, they should gain life and strength from these living sources!

In general, instead of going straight to Nature, to the inexhaustible fountain of beauty and invention, they have solicited help from the erudition, the history, and the antiquity of man.

We have copied ancient jewels; sometimes those of the barbarous peoples which first procured them from our own merchants. We have copied the old robes and the stuffs of our ancestors. We have copied, especially, the painted-glass windows of Gothic architecture, whose colours and forms have been selected hap-hazard, and transplanted to objects utterly discordant and unsuitable,—as, for instance, to shawls!

If we were desirous of comprehending and rehabilitating these ancient windows, we might have taken a lesson from the enamels of certain scarabæi. Seen beneath the microscope, they present very analogous effects, simply because they possess the same elements of beauty. The thirteenth century glass-windows (you may see them at Bourges, and especially in the Museum of that city) were double. The light therefore remained in them, did not pass through them, gave them the magical effects of precious stones. And of a similar character are those insect wings composed of numerous leaves, between which you may detect, with the microscope, a network of mysterious hieroglyphics.

Gothic, so little in harmony with either our wants or our ideas, has passed out of our furniture, but it still lingers in the shawl-manufacture; a rich and costly industry, which, having once adopted the fantastic method of imitating in opaque wools those windows whose transparency was their special merit, can hardly emancipate itself from the bondage.

Men have not consulted women. In order to weave complex designs, heap up a medley of arches and oriels, and condemn our wives to carry churches on their backs, men have provided a heavy groundwork of the stoutest wools; the whole being despatched from London and Paris to be servilely woven by the Indians who have unlearned their own arts.

Our intelligent Parisian merchants, who have reluctantly followed in the path traced out for them by the great producers, may very well escape from theserichand heavy styles. Let some one lose patience, and turning his back on the copyists of antique absurdities, go to Nature herself in search of advice,—to the great insect collections and the conservatories of the Jardin des Plantes.

Nature, being feminine, will tell him that if he would fitly decorate his sister in the soft and airy tissue of the ancient cashmere, he must delineate thereupon—not the towers of Notre-Dame,[N]but a hundred charming creatures—that little, but, if you will, very common marvel of the cicindela, in which all styles are combined;—or the purple scarabæus glorified in its lily;—or the emerald chrysomela, which this very morning I found sensually reposing at the bottom of a rose.

[N]Notre-Dame is the metropolitan cathedral of Paris.

[N]Notre-Dame is the metropolitan cathedral of Paris.

Do I mean that you should copy these? Not at all. I should call these living creatures, in their robe of love, from which they derive all their charm, an animated aureola, which cannot be translated. We must be content to love and contemplate them, to draw our inspiration from them, to convert them into ideal forms, and new rainbows of colours, and exquisite posies of blossoms. Thus transformed,they will become, not what they are in Nature, but fantastic and wonderful,—as the child who pants for them sees them in its slumber, or the maiden yearning after a beautiful attire, or as the young pregnant wife when dreaming of them in her hours of longing.

IX.—THE SPIDER.

IX.—THE SPIDER.

CHAPTER IX.THE SPIDER—INDUSTRY—THE STOPPAGE.Before we pass on to those insect communities with which the latter portion of this volume will be occupied, let us speak here of a solitary individual.Higher, and yet lower, than the insect, the spider is separated from it by its organization, but connected with it by its instincts, wants, and food.A being strongly specialized in two particulars, it is excluded from the great classes of the animal kingdom, and stands isolated, as it were, in creation.In the fertile countries of the tropics, where game abounds, it lives with its fellows. Some are said to weave around a tree one immense net, common to all, whose avenues they guard in perfect agreement. Nay more: having frequent occasion to deal with powerful insects, and even little birds, they co-operate in the hour of peril, and lend each other, as it were, a helping hand.But this gregarious mode of living is wholly exceptional, confined to certain species, and peculiarly favoured climates. Everywhere else the spider, through its organism and the fatality of its life, assumes the character of the hunter, of the savage, who, living upon uncertain prey, remains envious, mistrustful, exclusive, and solitary.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SPIDER—INDUSTRY—THE STOPPAGE.

Before we pass on to those insect communities with which the latter portion of this volume will be occupied, let us speak here of a solitary individual.

Higher, and yet lower, than the insect, the spider is separated from it by its organization, but connected with it by its instincts, wants, and food.

A being strongly specialized in two particulars, it is excluded from the great classes of the animal kingdom, and stands isolated, as it were, in creation.

In the fertile countries of the tropics, where game abounds, it lives with its fellows. Some are said to weave around a tree one immense net, common to all, whose avenues they guard in perfect agreement. Nay more: having frequent occasion to deal with powerful insects, and even little birds, they co-operate in the hour of peril, and lend each other, as it were, a helping hand.

But this gregarious mode of living is wholly exceptional, confined to certain species, and peculiarly favoured climates. Everywhere else the spider, through its organism and the fatality of its life, assumes the character of the hunter, of the savage, who, living upon uncertain prey, remains envious, mistrustful, exclusive, and solitary.

But remember that it does not resemble the ordinary hunter, who gets quit with his journeys, his exertions, and his activity. The spider's hunt costs it dearly, if I may venture to say so, and demands an incessant outlay. Every day, every hour, it must draw from its own substance the essential element of the network which is to provide it with food and renew that substance. Accordingly, it starves in order to nourish, and exhausts in order to recruit itself; it grows lean on the dubious hope of afterwards growing fat. Its life is a lottery, remitted to the risk of a thousand unforeseen contingencies. Hence, it cannot fail to develop into an unquiet creature, sympathizing but coldly with its kind, in whom it sees possible competitors,—in a word, it is a fatally egotistical animal. And were it not so, it would perish.

The worst of it is, as far as the poor creature is concerned, that it is profoundly ugly. It is not one of those which, ugly to the naked eye, are rehabilitated by the microscope. The overwhelming speciality of its career has the effect, as we see among men, of attenuating one limb, exaggerating another, and prevents anything like harmony: the blacksmith is frequently a hunchback. In the same manner the spider is pot-bellied. Nature has sacrificed everything to its function, its wants, and the industrial apparatus which will satisfy those wants. It is an artisan, a rope-maker, a spinner, and a weaver. Do not look at its figure, but at the product of its art. It is not only a spinner, but a spinning-mill.

Concentrated and circular, with eight feet around its body, and eight vigilant eyes in its head, it causes astonishment by the eccentric prominency of its enormous belly. An ignoble feature, wherein the careless observer reads the result of gormandising! Alas, it is just thecontrary! This big belly is its workshop, its magazine, the pouch where the rope-maker carries in front of it the material of the thread which it winds and unwinds; but as it fills this pouch with nothing but its very substance, it enlarges only at the expense of itself, and by dint of extreme sobriety. And you shall often see it, though emaciated in every limb, retaining full and expanded the treasure which is the indispensable element of its labour, the hope of its industry, and its only chance of a future. A true type of the man of industry! "If I fast to-day," it says, "I shall eat perhaps to-morrow; but if my material runs short, all is over,—my stomach must rest and fast for ever!"

My first relations with the spider were nothing less than agreeable. In my poverty-blighted childhood, while I toiled alone (as I have said in my book on "The People") in the then ruinous and desolate printing-office of my father, the temporary workshop was in a kind of cellar, sufficiently well lighted,—being a cellar in the boulevard where my family resided, but on the ground-floor so far as concerned the adjoining street. Through a large grated window the mid-day sun obliquely lighted up the sombre case where I put together my little leaden letters. There, at the angle of the wall, I distinctly perceived a prudent spider, which, supposing the stray sunbeam would bring some imprudent fly for its breakfast, drew near my case. This sunbeam, falling not in its corner but nearer me, was a natural temptation to invite its closer approach. In spite of my innate disgust, I admired the progressive ratio of timid, slow, and prudent experiment by which it ascertained the character of him to whose mercy it virtually confided its very existence. It watched me closely with all its eight eyes, and propounded to itself the problem, "Is he, or is he not, an enemy?"

Without analyzing its figure, or very clearly distinguishing its eyes, I felt that I was observed and watched; and apparently this observation, in the long run, proved favourable to me. By the instinct of work, perhaps (which is very great in its species), it perceived that I was really a peaceful labourer, and that I was busy, like itself, in weaving my cobweb. However this may be, it abandoned its stratagems and precautions with a quick decision, as if adopting an adventurousand somewhat perilous step. Not without grace it descended upon its thread, and planted itself resolutely on our respective frontier—the edge of my case, favoured, at that moment, with a golden ray of the sickly sun.

I was divided between two sentiments. I confess that I did not relish so close an intimacy,—the figure of such a friend pleased me but little; on the other hand, this prudent and observant being, which certainly did not lavish its confidence, seemed to say to me: "Wherefore should I not enjoy a little of thy sun? So different in nature, we have nevertheless arrived together from our necessitous toil and cold obscurity at this sweet banquet of light. Let us take heart, and fraternize. This ray which you permit me to share, receive it from me, and preserve it. In another half century, it will kindle up your winter."

As the little black fairy said this in its own language, whispering low, very low—in fact, it could not be lower (for it is thus that fairies speak)—I marked the effect of it vaguely, and it slumbered in my mind. The circumstance, however, was recalled for a brief while some years ago; and again, after a long interval, it has been revived on this very day, when for the first time I record and explain it.

On the former occasion, after a domestic affliction, I was spending my holidays in Paris, and I went daily alone to walk in my little garden in the Rue des Postes. My family were in the country. Mechanically I remarked the beautiful concentric stars which the spiders had woven round my trees, and which they repaired and remade incessantly with a laudable industry, giving themselves immense trouble to preserve my small stock of fruits and grapes, and relieving myself from the importunity of flies and the stings of gnats. They reminded me of the black domestic spider which, in my childhood, had entered into conversation with me. These latter were very different. Daughters of air and light, always exposed, always before the eyes of men, without other shelter than the surface of a leaf, where they may easily be captured, they are unable to cultivate the reserve or diplomacy of my old acquaintance. All their work, is visible, all their little mystery open to the wind, and their persons at everybody's discretion; they haveno other protection than what may be afforded them through compassion, or in consideration of a well-understood interest in the positive services which they render.

Those which suspend their nests to the branches of trees, like those which suspend them to our windows, display an evident design to place themselves in the wind, where a current of air may waft the insects to them, or in the path of a ray of light in which the gnat may float and whirl. The web does not fall vertically, for such a position would restrict it to one current; the spider, like an able seaman, gives it a great obliquity, and thus secures a couple of currents, or even more.

From the extremity of its belly, four screw-plates or tubercles, which can be drawn in or out (like telescopes), eject by their movement a very little cloud, that increases in size from minute to minute. This cloud is composed of threads of an infinite tenuity; each tubercle secretes a thousand, and the four, by combining together their four thousand threads, make the unique and tolerably strong thread of which the web is woven.

Mark well, that the threads of the intelligent manufacturer are not all alike, but of different strength and quality according to their destination. Some are dry for warping, others viscous for gluing. The tissues of the nest intended for the reception of the new-born are of a cottony material, while those which will enwrap the cocoon containing the eggs possess all the resistant power necessary for the safety of the latter.

When the spider has produced a sufficient quantity of thread to undertake a web, it voluntarily glides from an elevated point, and unwinds its skein. There it remains suspended, and afterwards reascending to its starting-point by the assistance of its tiny cordage, moves towards another point; and continues to trace in this manner a series of radii all diverging from the same centre.

The skein stretched, it is busied next in weaving the woof by crossing the thread. Running from radius to radius, it touches each with its tubercles, which fasten to it the circular border. The whole is not a compact tissue, but a veritable network, so geometrically proportioned that all the meshes of the circle are invariably of the same size.

This web, woven out of itself, living and vibrating, is much more than an instrument; it is a part of its being. Itself of a circular form, the spider seems to expand within this circle, and prolong the filaments of its nerves to the radiating threads which it weaves. In the centre of its web lies its greatest force for attack or defence. Out of that centre it is timid; a fly will make it recoil. The web is its electric telegraph, responding to the lightest touch, and revealing the presence of an imperceptible and almost imponderable victim; while, at the same time, being slightly viscous in substance, it retains the prey, or delays and entangles a dangerous enemy.

In windy weather, the continual agitation of the web prevents it from giving an account of what transpires, and the spider then remains at the centre. But usually it keeps near its machinery, hidden under a leaf, that it may not terrify its victims, or fall a prey to any of its numerous foes.

Prudence and patience, rather than courage, are its characteristics. Its experience is too great, it has undergone too many accidents and misadventures, it is too much accustomed to the severities of fate, to indulge in any surpassing audacity. It is afraid even of an ant. The latter, often a mischievous individual, a restless and rugged rodent, and afraid of nothing, frequently persists in exploring the strange woof, of which it can make nothing. The spider accordingly gives way to it,—whether it fears the acid of the ant, which burns like aquafortis, or whether, like a good artisan, it calculates that a long and obstinate struggle will cost it more time than will the manufacture of another web. Therefore, without yielding to the slightest susceptibility of self-love, it allows the ant to strut about, and takes up its post a little further off.

Every animal lives by depredation. Nature is ever devouring itself; but the prey is not always sought and merited by a patient industry deserving of respect. No being, however, is so much the plaything of fate as the spider. Like every good workman, it has a twofold value: in its work and its person. An infinity of insects—the murderous carabus, or thelibellula, an elegant and splendid assassin—have only their bodies and their weapons, and spend their lives joyously in killing. Others possess secure and easily defended asylums, where they have cause to fear few dangers. The field-spider has neither the one nor the other advantage. It is in the position of the respectable operative, who, through his small and ill-guaranteed fortune, attracts or tempts cupidity or insolence. The lizard from below, the squirrel from above, hunt the feeble hunter. The inert frog darts at it the viscous tongue, which glues it and renders it immovable. It is the felicity of the swallow, in her graceful circle, to carry off, without injuring, the spider and his web; and all birds look upon it as a great dainty or an excellent medicine. The nightingale, faithful, like all great singers, to a certain hygiene, prescribes for herself, as an occasional purgative, a spider.

Even if she be not swallowed up herself, if the instrument of her trade is destroyed, the consequences are the same. Should the web be undone blow upon blow, a somewhat protracted fast renders it unable to secrete a fresh supply of thread, and it soon perishes of hunger. It is constantly confined in this vicious circle:—

To spin, it requires food;

To feed, it must spin.

Its thread, for the spider as for the Parcæ, is that of destiny.

We once made the experiment of removing three times running a spider's web. Three times, in six hours, it replaced it, with admirable patience, and without abating one jot of hope. The experiment was a cruel one, and we now reproach ourselves for it. We meet with too many poor unfortunates, whom accidents of this kind have thrown out of work, and who are thenceforth too exhausted to resume their industry. One sees them, like living skeletons, attempting fruitlessly a different trade, in which they succeed but poorly, and mournfully envying the long legs of the field-spiders, which gain their living by incessant travelling.

When people speak of the eager gluttony of the spider, they forget that it must either eat a double quantity, or soon perish: eat to recruit its body, and eat to renew its thread.

Three circumstances contribute to wear it out: the ardour of incessant work, its nervous susceptibility—which is carried to an extreme—and its twofold respiratory system.

For it has not only the passive respiration of the insect, which receives, or submits to, the air introduced through its stigmata; it has also a kind of active respiration, analogous to the play of the lungs in the higher animals. It takes the air and masters it, transforms and decomposes it, and incessantly renews it. If you do but examine its movements, you feel that it is something more than an insect; the vital glow traverses its frame in a rapid circulation; the heart beats very differently from what it does in the fly or butterfly.

But its superiority is its peril. The insect braves with impunity the strongest odours and mephitic miasmas. The spider cannot endure them. Instantly affected by them, it falls into convulsions, struggles,and expires. I saw this incident one day at Lucerne. Chloroform, whose action the stag-beetle had endured for fourteen days without succumbing, immediately—at the first contact—overpowered the spider. Yet the victim was a large one, and I found it engaged in eating a gnat. I wished to experiment, and poured on it a single drop. The effect was terrible. Nothing more pitiful could be seen in a case of human asphyxia. It tumbled over, raised itself, and then swooned; all its supports failed it, and its limbs appeared disjointed. One thing was very pathetic—that in this supreme moment the fecundity of its bosom became apparent; in its agony, its tubercles sent forth their little cloudy woof, so that you might have believed it to be working even in death.

I felt oppressed, and in the hope that the fresh air would perhaps revive it, I placed it on my window-sill; but it was no longeritself. I know not how the effect was produced; but it seemed to have melted away, and nothing of it remained but its skeleton. The vanished substance had left but its shadow, which the wind bore away to the neighbouring lake.

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