Social Life in the Insect World

by Jean-Henri Fabre

Grandville, whose pencil rivals the author's pen, has fallen into the same error. In his illustration to the fable we see the Ant dressed like a busy housewife. On her threshold, beside her full sacks of wheat, she disdainfully turns her back upon the would-be borrower, who holds out her claw—pardon, her hand. With a wide coachman's hat, a guitar under her arm, and a skirt wrapped about her knees by the gale, there stands the second personage of the fable, the perfect portrait of a grasshopper. Grandville knew no more than La Fontaine of the true Cigale; he has beautifully expressed the general confusion.

But La Fontaine, in this abbreviated history, is only the echo of another fabulist. The legend of the Cigale and the cold welcome of the Ant is as old as selfishness: as old as the world. The children of Athens, going to school with their baskets of rush-work stuffed with figs and olives, were already repeating the story under their breath, as a lesson to be repeated to the teacher. "In winter," they used to say, "the Ants were putting their damp food to dry in the sun. There came a starving Cigale to beg from them. She begged for a few grains. The greedy misers replied: 'You sang in the summer, now dance in the winter.'" This, although somewhat more arid, is precisely La Fontaine's story, and is contrary to the facts.

Yet the story comes to us from Greece, which is, like the South of France, the home of the olive-tree and the Cigale. Was Æsop really its author, as tradition would have it? It is doubtful, and by no means a matter of importance; at all events, the author was a Greek, and a compatriot of the Cigale, which must have been perfectly familiar to him. There is not a single peasant in my village so blind as to be unaware of the total absence of Cigales in winter; and every tiller of the soil, every gardener, is familiar with the first phase of the insect, the larva, which his spade is perpetually discovering when he banks up the olives at the approach of the cold weather, and he knows, having seen it a thousand times by the edge of the country paths, how in summer this larva issues from the earth from a little round well of its own making; how it climbs a twig or a stem of grass, turns upon its back, climbs out of its skin, drier now than parchment, and becomes the Cigale; a creature of a fresh grass-green colour which is rapidly replaced by brown.

We cannot suppose that the Greek peasant was so much less intelligent than the Provençal that he can have failed to see what the least observant must have noticed. He knew what my rustic neighbours know so well. The scribe, whoever he may have been, who was responsible for the fable was in the best possible circumstances for correct knowledge of the subject. Whence, then, arose the errors of his tale?

Less excusably than La Fontaine, the Greek fabulist wrote of the Cigale of the books, instead of interrogating the living Cigale, whose cymbals were resounding on every side; careless of the real, he followed tradition. He himself echoed a more ancient narrative; he repeated some legend that had reached him from India, the venerable mother of civilisations. We do not know precisely what story the reed-pen of the Hindoo may have confided to writing, in order to show the perils of a life without foresight; but it is probable that the little animal drama was nearer the truth than the conversation between the Cigale and the Ant. India, the friend of animals, was incapable of such a mistake. Everything seems to suggest that the principal personage of the original fable was not the Cigale of the Midi, but some other creature, an insect if you will, whose manners corresponded to the adopted text.

Imported into Greece, after long centuries during which, on the banks of the Indus, it made the wise reflect and the children laugh, the ancient anecdote, perhaps as old as the first piece of advice that a father of a family ever gave in respect of economy, transmitted more or less faithfully from one memory to another, must have suffered alteration in its details, as is the fate of all such legends, which the passage of time adapts to the circumstance of time and place.

The Greek, not finding in his country the insect of which the Hindoo spoke, introduced the Cigale, as in Paris, the modern Athens, the Cigale has been replaced by the Grasshopper. The mistake was made; henceforth indelible. Entrusted as it is to the memory of childhood, error will prevail against the truth that lies before our eyes.

Let us seek to rehabilitate the songstress so calumniated by the fable. She is, I grant you, an importunate neighbour. Every summer she takes up her station in hundreds before my door, attracted thither by the verdure of two great plane-trees; and there, from sunrise to sunset, she hammers on my brain with her strident symphony. With this deafening concert thought is impossible; the mind is in a whirl, is seized with vertigo, unable to concentrate itself. If I have not profited by the early morning hours the day is lost.

Ah! Creature possessed, the plague of my dwelling, which I hoped would be so peaceful!—the Athenians, they say, used to hang you up in a little cage, the better to enjoy your song. One were well enough, during the drowsiness of digestion; but hundreds, roaring all at once, assaulting the hearing until thought recoils—this indeed is torture! You put forward, as excuse, your rights as the first occupant. Before my arrival the two plane-trees were yours without reserve; it is I who have intruded, have thrust myself into their shade. I confess it: yet muffle your cymbals, moderate your arpeggi, for the sake of your historian! The truth rejects what the fabulist tells us as an absurd invention. That there are sometimes dealings between the Cigale and the Ant is perfectly correct; but these dealings are the reverse of those described in the fable. They depend not upon the initiative of the former; for the Cigale never required the help of others in order to make her living: on the contrary, they are due to the Ant, the greedy exploiter of others, who fills her granaries with every edible she can find. At no time does the Cigale plead starvation at the doors of the ant-hills, faithfully promising a return of principal and interest; the Ant on the contrary, harassed by drought, begs of the songstress. Begs, do I say! Borrowing and repayment are no part of the manners of this land-pirate. She exploits the Cigale; she impudently robs her. Let us consider this theft; a curious point of history as yet unknown.

In July, during the stifling hours of the afternoon, when the insect peoples, frantic with drought, wander hither and thither, vainly seeking to quench their thirst at the faded, exhausted flowers, the Cigale makes light of the general aridity. With her rostrum, a delicate augur, she broaches a cask of her inexhaustible store. Crouching, always singing, on the twig of a suitable shrub or bush, she perforates the firm, glossy rind, distended by the sap which the sun has matured. Plunging her proboscis into the bung-hole, she drinks deliciously, motionless, and wrapt in meditation, abandoned to the charms of syrup and of song.