“Some deep depression is about to reach us.”
And I have guessed right. Two days later, [[106]]sure enough, the meteorological record of the Temps gives me the following information: a minimum of 29.2 in., coming from the Bay of Biscay on the 22nd, reaches Algeria on the 23rd and spreads over the Provence coast on the 24th. There is a heavy snowfall at Marseilles on the 25th.
“The ships,” I read in my paper, “present a curious spectacle, with their yards and rigging white. That is how the people of Marseilles, little used to such sights, picture Spitzbergen and the North Pole.”
Here certainly is the gale which my caterpillars foresaw when they refused to go out last night and the night before; here is the centre of disturbance which revealed itself at Sérignan by a violent and icy north wind on the 25th and the following days. Again I perceive that the greenhouse caterpillars are alarmed only at the approach of the wave of atmospheric disturbance. Once the first uneasiness caused by the depression had abated, they came out again, on the 25th and the following days, in the midst of the gale, as though nothing extraordinary were happening. [[107]]
From the sum of my observations it appears that the Pine Processionary is eminently sensitive to atmospheric vicissitudes, an excellent quality, having regard to his way of life in the sharp winter nights. He foresees the storm which would imperil his excursions.
His capacity for scenting bad weather very soon won the confidence of the household. When we had to go into Orange to renew our provisions, it became the rule to consult him the night before; and, according to his verdict, we went or stayed at home. His oracle never deceived us. In the same way, simple folk that we were, we used in the old days to interrogate the Dor-beetle,[3] another doughty nocturnal worker. But, a little demoralized by imprisonment in a cage and apparently devoid of any special sensitive apparatus, performing his evolutions, moreover, in the mild autumn evenings, the celebrated Dung-beetle could never rival the Pine Caterpillar, who is active during the roughest season of the year and endowed, as everything [[108]]would seem to affirm, with organs quick to perceive the great atmospheric fluctuations.
Rural lore abounds in meteorological forecasts derived from animals. The Cat, sitting in front of the fire and washing behind her ears with a saliva-smeared paw, foretells another cold snap; the Cock, crowing at unusual hours, announces the return of fine weather; the Guinea-fowl, with her screeching, as of a scythe on the grindstone, points to rain; the Hen, standing on one leg, her plumage ruffled, her head sunk on her neck, feels a hard frost coming; the pretty green Tree-frog inflates his throat like a bladder at the approach of a storm and, according to the Provençal peasant, says:
“Ploùra, ploùra; it will rain, it will rain!”
This rustic meteorology, the heritage of the centuries, does not show up so badly beside our scientific meteorology.
Are not we ourselves living barometers? Every veteran complains of his glorious scars when the weather is about to break. One man, though unwounded, suffers from insomnia or from bad dreams; another, though a brain-worker, cannot drag an idea out of his impotent head. Each of us, in [[109]]his own way, is tried by the passage of those huge funnels which form in the atmosphere and hatch the storm.