CHAPTER XI
THE GREAT PEACOCK
It was a memorable evening. I shall call it the Great Peacock evening. Who does not know the magnificent Moth, the largest in Europe, clad in maroon velvet with a necktie of white fur? The wings, with their sprinkling of grey and brown, crossed by a faint zig-zag and edged with smoky white, have in the centre a round patch, a great eye with a black pupil and a variegated iris containing successive black, white, chestnut and purple arcs.
No less remarkable is the caterpillar, in colour an undecided yellow. On the top of thinly-scattered tubercles, crowned with a palisade of black hairs, are set beads of turquoise blue. His stout brown cocoon, so curious with its exit-shaft shaped like an eel-trap, is usually fastened to the bark at the base of old almond-trees. The caterpillar feeds on the leaves of the same tree.
Well, on the morning of the 6th of May, a female emerges from her cocoon in my [[247]]presence, on the table of my insect-laboratory. I forthwith cloister her, still damp with the humours of the hatching, under a wire-gauze bell-jar. For the rest, I cherish no particular plans. I incarcerate her from mere habit, the habit of the observer always on the look-out for what may happen.
It was a lucky thought. At nine o’clock in the evening, just as the household is going to bed, there is a great stir in the room next to mine. Little Paul, half-undressed, is rushing about, jumping and stamping, knocking the chairs over like a mad thing. I hear him call me:
“Come quick!” he screams. “Come and see these Moths, big as birds! The room is full of them!”
I hurry in. There is enough to justify the child’s enthusiastic and hyperbolical exclamations, an invasion as yet unprecedented in our house, a raid of giant Moths. Four are already caught and lodged in a bird-cage. Others, more numerous, are fluttering on the ceiling.
At this sight, the prisoner of the morning is recalled to my mind.