The Life of the Caterpillar

by Jean-Henri Fabre

The Pine Processionary knows nothing of privation. He knows as little of family ties, another source of unrelenting competition. To make ourselves a place in the sun is but a half of the struggle imposed upon us by life: we must also, as far as possible, prepare a place for our successors; and, as the preservation of the species is of greater importance than that of the individual, the struggle for the future is even fiercer than the struggle for the present. Every mother regards the welfare of her offspring as her primary law. Perish all else, provided that the brood flourish! Every one for himself is her maxim, imposed by the rigours of the general conflict; every one for himself is her rule, the safeguard of the future.

With maternity and its imperious duties, communism ceases to be practicable. At first sight, certain Hymenoptera[3] seem to declare the contrary. We find, for instance, the Mason-bees of the Sheds[4] nesting in myriads [[52]]on the same tiles and building a monumental edifice at which all the mothers work. Is this really a community? Not at all. It is a city in which the inhabitants have neighbours, not collaborators. Each mother kneads her pots of honey; each amasses a dowry for her offspring and nothing but a dowry for her offspring; each wears herself out for her family and only for her family. Oh, it would be a serious business if some one merely came and alighted on the brim of a cell that did not belong to her; the mistress of the house would give her to understand, by means of a sound drubbing, that manners such as those are not to be endured! She would have to skedaddle very quickly, unless she wanted a fight. The rights of property are sacred here.

Even the much more social Hive-bee is no exception to the rule of maternal egoism. To each hive one mother. If there be two, civil war breaks out and one of them perishes by the other’s dagger or else quits the country, followed by a part of the swarm. Although virtually fit to lay eggs, the other Bees, to the number of some twenty thousand, renounce maternity and vow themselves to celibacy in order to bring up the prodigious [[53]]family of the one and only mother. Here, communism reigns, under certain aspects; but, for the immense majority, motherhood is forthwith abolished.

Even so with the Wasps, the Ants, the Termites[5] and the various social insects. Life in common costs them dear. Thousands and thousands remain incomplete and become the humble auxiliaries of a few who are sexually endowed. But, whenever maternity is the general portion, individualism reappears, as among the Mason-bees, notwithstanding their show of communism.

The Pine Caterpillars are exempt from the duty of preserving the race. They have no sex, or rather are obscurely preparing one, as undecided and rudimentary as all that is not yet but must one day be. With the blossoming of maternity, that flower of adult age, individual property will not fail to appear, attended by its rivalries. The insect now so peaceable will, like the others, have its displays of selfish intolerance. The mothers will isolate themselves, jealous of the double pine-needle in which the cylinder of eggs is to be fixed; the males, fluttering their wings, [[54]]will challenge one another for the possession of the coveted bride. It is not a serious struggle among these easy-going ones, but still it presents a faint picture of those mortal affrays which the mating so often produces. Love rules the world by battle; it too is a hotbed of competition.

The caterpillar, being almost sexless, is indifferent to amorous instincts. This is the first condition for living pacifically in common. But it is not enough. The perfect concord of the community demands among all its members an equal division of strength and talent, of taste and capacity for work. This condition, which perhaps is the most important of all, is fulfilled preeminently. If there were hundreds, if there were thousands of them in the same nest, there would be no difference between any of them.

They are all the same size and equally strong; all wear the same dress; all possess the same gift for spinning; and all with equal zeal expend the contents of their silk-glands for the general welfare. No one idles, no one lounges along when there is work to be done. With no other stimulus than the satisfaction of doing their duty, every evening, [[55]]when the weather is favourable, they all spin with equal industry and drain to the last drop their reservoirs of silk, which have become distended during the day. In their tribe there is no question of skilled or unskilled, of strong or weak, of abstemious or gluttonous; there are neither hard-workers nor idlers, neither savers nor spendthrifts. What one does the others do, with a like zeal, no more and no less well. It is a splendid world of equality truly, but, alas, a world of caterpillars!

If it suited us to go to school to the Pine Processionary, we should soon see the inanity of our levelling and communistic theories. Equality is a magnificent political catchword, but little more. Where is it, this equality of ours? In our social groups, could we find as many as two persons exactly equal in strength, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight and all the other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity? Where should we find anything analogous to the exact parity prevailing among caterpillars? Nowhere. Inequality is our law. And a good thing, too.

A sound which is invariably the same, however often multiplied, does not constitute a [[56]]harmony. We need dissimilarities, sounds loud and soft, deep and shrill; we need even discords which, by their harshness, throw into relief the sweetness of the chords. In the same way, human societies are harmonious only with the aid of contraries. If the dreams of our levellers could be realized, we should sink to the monotony of the caterpillar societies; art, science, progress and the lofty flights of the imagination would slumber indefinitely in the dead calm of mediocrity.

Besides, if this general levelling were effected, we should still be very far from communism. To achieve that, we should have to do away with the family, as the caterpillars and Plato teach us; we should need abundance of food obtained without any effort. So long as a mouthful of bread is difficult to acquire, demanding an industry and labour of which we are not all equally capable, so long as the family remains the sacred reason for our foresight, so long will the generous theory of all for each and each for all be absolutely impracticable.