For lack of taking this precaution, I very nearly lost a year. Relying on what I had read, I did not look for the family of the Languedocian Scorpion until September; and I obtained it quite unexpectedly in July. This difference between the real and the anticipated date I ascribe to the disparity of the climate: I make my observations in Provence and my informant, Léon Dufour, made his in Spain. Notwithstanding the master’s high authority, I ought to have been on my guard. I was not; and I should have lost the opportunity if, as luck would have it, the Common Black Scorpion had not taught me. Ah, how right was Pasteur not to know the chrysalis!
The Common Scorpion, smaller and much less active than the other, was brought up, for purposes of comparison, in humble glass jars that stood on the table in my study. The modest apparatus did not take up much room and were easy to examine; and I made a point of visiting them daily. Every morning, before sitting down to blacken a few pages of my diary with prose, I invariably lifted the piece of cardboard which I used to shelter my boarders and enquired into the happenings of the night. These daily visits were not so feasible in the large glass cage, whose numerous dwellings required a general over-throw, if they were to be examined one by one and then methodically replaced in condition as discovered. With my jars of Black Scorpions, the inspection was the matter of a moment.
It was well for me that I always had this auxiliary establishment before my eyes. On the 22nd of July, at six o’clock in the morning, raising the cardboard screen, I found the mother beneath it, with her little ones grouped on her chine like a sort of white mantlet. I experienced [[249]]one of those seconds of sweet contentment which, at intervals, reward the long-suffering observer. For the first time, I had before my eyes the fine spectacle of the Scorpioness clad in her young. The delivery was quite recent; it must have taken place during the night; for, on the previous evening, the mother was bare.
Further successes awaited me: on the next day, a second mother is whitened with her brood; the day after that, two others at a time are in the same condition. That makes four. It is more than my ambition hoped for. With four families of Scorpions and a few quiet days before me, I can find sweets in life.
All the more so as fortune loads me with her favours. Ever since the first discovery in the jars, I have been thinking of the glass cage and asking myself whether the Languedocian Scorpion might not be as precocious as her black sister. Let us go quick and see.
I turn over the twenty-five tiles. A glorious success! I feel one of those hot waves of enthusiasm with which I was familiar at twenty rush through my old veins. Under three of the lot of tiles, I find a mother burdened with her family. One has little ones already shooting up, about a week old, as the sequel of my observations informed me; the two others have borne their children recently, in the course of last night, as is proved by certain remnants jealously guarded under the paunch. We shall see presently what those remnants represent.
July runs to an end, August and September pass and nothing more occurs to swell my collection. The period of the family, therefore, for both Scorpions is the second fortnight in July. From that time onward, everything is finished. And yet, among my guests in the glass cage, there remain females as big and fat as those [[250]]from whom I have obtained an offspring. I reckoned on these too for an increase in the population; all the appearances authorized me to do so. Winter comes and none of them has answered my expectations. The business, which seemed close at hand, has been put off to next year: a fresh proof of long pregnancy, very singular in the case of an animal of an inferior order.
I transfer each mother and her product, separately, into medium-sized receptacles, which facilitate the niceties of the observation. At the early hour of my visit, those brought to bed during the night have still a part of the brood sheltered under their belly. Pushing the mother aside with a straw, I discover, amid the heap of young not yet hoisted on the maternal back, objects that utterly upset all that the books have taught me on this subject. The Scorpions, they say, are viviparous. The learned expression lacks exactitude: the young do not see the light directly with the formation which we know of.
And this must be so. How would you have the outstretched claws, the sprawling legs, the shrivelled tails go through the maternal passages? The cumbrous little animal could never pass through the narrow outlets. It must needs come into the world packed up and sparing of space.
The remnants found under the mothers, in fact, show me eggs, real eggs, similar, or very nearly, to those which anatomy extracts from the ovaries at an advanced stage of pregnancy. The little animal, economically compressed to the dimensions of a grain of rice, has its tail laid along its belly, its claws flattened against its chest, its legs pressed to its sides, so that the small, easy-gliding, oval lump leaves not the smallest protuberance. On the forehead, dots of an intense black mark the eyes. The [[251]]tiny insect floats in a drop of transparent moisture, which is for the moment its world, its atmosphere, contained by a pellicle of exquisite delicacy.