‘Un paouré inoucènt, pécaïre!’
And all three made the sign of the Cross.
An innocent, she had said, un inoucènt, an idiot, a poor creature, quite harmless, but half-witted; and they had all made the sign of the Cross, an idiot being to them one with God’s seal stamped upon him.
‘How now!’ thought I. ‘What a cruel mockery of fate! You, who are so laboriously seeking to discover what is instinct in the animal and what is reason, you yourself do not even possess your reason in these good women’s eyes! What a humiliating reflection!’
No matter: pécaïre, that expression of supreme compassion, in the Provençal dialect, pécaïre, coming from the bottom of the heart, soon made me forget inoucènt.
It is in this ravine with its three grape-gathering women that I would meet the reader, if he be not discouraged by the petty annoyances of which I have given him a foretaste. The Languedocian Sphex frequents these points, not in tribes congregating at the same spot when nest-building work begins, but as solitary individuals, sparsely distributed, settling wherever the chances of their vagabondage lead [[135]]them. Even as her kinswoman, the Yellow-winged Sphex, seeks the society of her kind and the animation of a yard full of workers, the Languedocian Sphex prefers isolation, quiet and solitude. Graver of gait, more formal in her manners, of a larger size and also more sombrely clad, she always lives apart, not caring what others do, disdaining company, a genuine misanthrope among the Sphegidæ. The one is sociable, the other is not: a profound difference which in itself is enough to characterize them.
This amounts to saying that, with the Languedocian Sphex, the difficulties of observation increase. No long-meditated experiment is possible in her case; nor, when the first attempts have failed, can one hope to try them again, on the same occasion, with a second or a third subject and so on. If you prepare the materials for your observation in advance, if, for instance, you have in reserve a piece of game which you propose to substitute for that of the Sphex, it is to be feared, nay, it is almost certain that the huntress will not appear; and, when she does come at last, your materials are no longer fit for use and everything has to be improvised in a hurry, that very moment, under conditions that are not always satisfactory.
Let us take heart. The site is a first-rate one. Many a time already I have surprised [[136]]the Sphex here, sunning herself on a vine-leaf. The insect, spread out flat, is basking voluptuously in the heat and light. From time to time it has a sort of frenzied outburst of pleasure: it quivers with content; it rapidly taps its feet on its couch, producing a tattoo not unlike that of rain falling heavily on the leaf. The joyous thrum can be heard several feet away. Then immobility begins again, soon followed by a fresh nervous commotion and by the whirling of the tarsi, a symbol of supreme felicity. I have known some of these passionate sun-lovers suddenly to leave the work-yard, when the larva’s cave has been half-dug, and go to the nearest vine to take a bath of heat and light, after which they would come back to the burrow, as though reluctantly, just to give a perfunctory sweep and soon end by knocking off work, unable to resist the exquisite temptation of luxuriating on the vine-leaves.
It may be that the voluptuous couch is also an observatory, whence the Wasp surveys the surrounding country in order to discover and select her prey. Her exclusive game is the Ephippiger of the Vine, scattered here and there on the branches or on any brambles hard by. The joint is a substantial one, especially as the Sphex favours solely the females, whose bellies are swollen with a mighty cluster of eggs. [[137]]
Let us take no notice of the repeated trips, the fruitless searches, the tedium of frequent long waiting, but rather present the Sphex suddenly to the reader as she herself appears to the observer. Here she is, at the bottom of a sunken road with high, sandy banks. She comes on foot, but gets help from her wings in dragging her heavy prize. The Ephippiger’s antennæ, long and slender as threads, are the harnessing-ropes. Holding her head high, she grasps one of them in her mandibles. The antenna gripped passes between her legs; and the game follows, turned over on its back. Should the soil be too uneven and so offer resistance to this method of carting, the Wasp clasps her unwieldy burden and carries it with very short flights, interspersed, as often as possible, with journeys on foot. We never see her undertake a sustained flight, for long distances, holding the game in her legs, as is the practice of those expert aviators, the Bembeces and Cerceres, for instance, who bear through the air for more than half a mile their respective Flies or Weevils, a very light booty compared with the huge Ephippiger. The overpowering weight of her capture compels the Languedocian Sphex to make the whole, or nearly the whole, journey on foot, her method of transport being consequently slow and laborious. [[138]]