The recluse on her side is equally impatient. The lovers are short-lived; they die in my cages within three or four days, so that, for long intervals, until the hatching of some late-comer, the female population is [[206]]short of suitors. So, when the morning sun, already hot, strikes the cage, a very singular spectacle is repeated many times before my eyes. The entrance to the vestibule swells imperceptibly, opens and emits a mass of infinitely delicate down. A Spider’s web, carded and made into wadding, would give nothing of such gossamer fineness. It is a vaporous cloud. Then, from out of this incomparable eiderdown, appear the head and fore-part of a very different sort of caterpillar from the original collector of straws.
It is the mistress of the house, the marriageable Moth, who, feeling her hour about to come and failing to receive the expected visit, herself makes the advances and goes, as far as she can, to meet her plumed swain. He does not come hastening up and for good reason: there is not a male left in the establishment. For two or three hours the poor forsaken one leans, without moving, from her window. Then, tired of waiting, very gently she goes indoors again, backwards, and returns to her cell.
Next day, the day after and later still, as long as her strength permits, she reappears on her balcony, always in the morning, in the [[207]]soft rays of a warm sun and always on a sofa of that incomparable down, which disperses and turns to vapour if I merely fan it with my hand. Again no one comes. For the last time the disappointed Moth goes back to her boudoir, never to leave it again. She dies in it, dries up, a useless thing. I hold my bell-jars responsible for this crime against motherhood. In the open fields, without a doubt, sooner or later wooers would have appeared, coming from the four winds.
The said bell-jars have an even more pitiful catastrophe on their conscience. Sometimes, leaning too far from her window, miscalculating the balance between the front of the body, which is at liberty, and the back, which remains sheathed in its case, the Moth allows herself to drop to the ground. It is all up now with the fallen one and her lineage. Still, there is one good thing about it. Accidents such as this lay bare the mother Psyche, without our having to break into her house.
What a miserable creature she is, a great deal uglier than the original caterpillar! Here transfiguration spells disfigurement, progress means retrogression. What we have before our eyes is a wrinkled satchel, an [[208]]earthy-yellow sausage; and this horror, worse than a maggot, is a Moth in the full bloom of life, a genuine adult Moth. She is the betrothed of the elegant black Bombyx, all plumed with Marabou-feathers, and represents to him the last word in beauty. As the proverb says, beauty lies in lovers’ eyes: a profound truth which the Psyche confirms in striking fashion.
Let us describe the ugly little sausage. A very small head, a paltry globule, disappearing almost entirely in the folds of the first segment. What need is there of cranium and brains for a germ-bag! And so the tiny creature almost does without them, reduces them to the simplest expression. Nevertheless, there are two black ocular specks. Do these vestigial eyes see their way about? Not very clearly, we may be sure. The pleasures of light must be very small for this stay-at-home, who appears at her window only on rare occasions, when the male Moth is late in arriving.
The legs are well-shaped, but so short and weak that they are of no use at all for locomotion. The whole body is a pale yellow, semitransparent in front, opaque and stuffed [[209]]with eggs behind. Underneath the first segments is a sort of neck-band, that is to say, a dark stain, the vestige of a crop showing through the skin. A pad of short down ends the oviferous part at the back. It is all that remains of a fleece, of a thin velvet which the insect rubs off as it moves backwards and forwards in its narrow lodging. This forms the flaky mass which whitens the trysting-window at the wedding-time and also lines the inside of the sheath with down. In short, the creature is little more than a bag swollen with eggs for the best part of its length. I know nothing lower in the scale of wretchedness.
The germ-bag moves, but not, of course, with those vestiges of legs which form too short and feeble supports; it gets about in a way that allows it to progress on its back, belly or side indifferently. A groove is hollowed out at the hinder end of the bag, a deep, dividing groove which cuts the insect into two. It runs to the front part, spreading like a wave, and gently and slowly reaches the head. This undulation constitutes a step. When it is done, the animal has advanced about a twenty-fifth part of an inch. [[210]]
To go from one end to the other of a box two inches long and filled with fine sand, the living sausage takes nearly an hour. It is by crawling like this that it moves about in its case, when it comes to the threshold to meet its visitor and goes in again.
For three or four days, exposed to the roughness of the soil, the oviferous bag leads a wretched life, creeping about at random, or, more often, standing still. No Moth pays attention to the poor thing, who possesses no attractions outside her home; the lovers pass by with an indifferent air. This coolness is logical enough. Why should she become a mother, if her family is to be abandoned to the inclemencies of the public way? And so, after falling by accident from her case, which would have been the cradle of the youngsters, the wanderer withers in a few days and dies childless.