‘I was too much astounded even to laugh.
‘ “What I tell you is perfectly serious.”
‘ “My dear master, I knew your reputation for profound scholarship; but from that to imagining that you owed your fame to discovering the etymology of the word haricot: ah no, I should never have expected that! Can you tell me how you made the discovery?”
‘ “With pleasure. It was like this: I found some particulars about haricots when searching through a fine sixteenth-century work on natural history, Hernandez’ De Historia plantarum novi orbis. The word haricot was unknown in France until the seventeenth century: we used to say [[223]]fève or phaséol; in Mexican, ayacot. Thirty varieties of haricot were cultivated in Mexico before the conquest. They are called ayacot to this day, especially the red haricot, with black or violet spots. One day, at Gaston Paris’ house, I met a great scholar. On hearing my name, he rushed at me and asked if it was I who had discovered the etymology of the word haricot. He was absolutely ignorant of the fact that I had written poems and published Les Trophées.…” ’
What a glorious jest, to place the jewellery of his sonnets under the protection of a bean! I in my turn am delighted with the ayacot. How right I was to suspect that strange word haricot of being an American-Indian idiom! How truthful the insect was when it declared, in its own fashion, that the precious seed reached us from the New World! While retaining its first name, or something very nearly, the bean of Montezuma, the Aztec ayacot, found its way from Mexico to our kitchen-gardens.
But it came to us unaccompanied by the insect which is its titular consumer, for there must certainly be a Weevil in its native country which levies tribute on the generous bean. Our indigenous nibblers of seeds have disowned the foreigner; they have not yet had time to become familiar with it and to appreciate its merits; they have prudently refrained from touching the ayacot, which aroused suspicion because of its novelty. [[224]]Until our own days, therefore, the Mexican bean remained unharmed, differing curiously in this from our other legumina, all of which are eagerly devoured by the Weevil.
This state of things could not last. If our fields do not contain the haricot-loving insect, the New World knows it well. In the ordinary way of commercial exchange, some sack of worm-eaten beans was bound to bring it to Europe. The invasion was inevitable.
Indeed, according to data in my possession, it seems recently to have taken place. Three or four years ago, I received from Maillanne, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, what I was vainly seeking in my neighbourhood, although I cross-examined both farmers and housewives, astonishing them greatly by my questions. No one had ever seen the pest of the haricots; no one had ever heard of it. Friends who knew of my inquiries sent me from Maillanne, as I have said, the wherewithal to satisfy fully my curiosity as a naturalist. It consisted of a bushel of haricots outrageously spoilt, riddled with holes, changed into a sort of sponge and swarming inside with innumerable Bruchi, which recalled the Lentil-weevil by their diminutive size.
The senders told me of the damage suffered at Maillanne. The odious insect, they said, had destroyed the best part of the crop. A veritable plague, the like of which had never been known [[225]]before, had fallen upon the haricots, leaving the housekeeper hardly any with which to garnish her stew. Of the culprit’s habits, of its way of going to work, nothing was known. It was for me to find out this by experiment.
Quick, then, let us experiment! Circumstances favour me. We are in the middle of June; and I have in the garden a row of early haricots, black Belgian haricots, sown for cooking-purposes. Though it mean sacrificing the precious vegetable, let us loose the terrible destroyer on the mass of verdure. The development of the plant is at just the right stage, if I may go by what the Pea-weevil has already shown me: there are plenty of flowers and also of pods, still green and of all sizes.