By a skilful mixture, we also obtain from the cochineal the pre-eminently gay and radiant colour, carmine, with its innumerable tints and rosy shades.
A sovereign art with the insect is to carry on its sting, and concentrate at a particular point, the liquids which flow in the plant, in the living being. It is the very art of irritation. Its applications are innumerable in medicine and industry; tints, paintings, varied ornaments, a hundred fantastic and beautiful things come to us from the sting of the galls, the excrescences and gibbosities which they so skilfully raise.
The cochineal insect, while engaged in extracting by this process from exotic vegetables the envelope of solid green in which it will spend its prolonged period of rest, furnishes us with the red of reds, the scarlet of lake, which will colour varnishes, and wax, and a multitude of objects.
In health or illness, the stings of insects upon the living flesh are violent irritants for disturbing or re-establishing the course of life. In these there is nothing mediocre. A few, without sting, burn you by their internal acridity.
Who has not seen on the dusty plain, before the thirsty harvest, the cantharides, with its emerald enamel, abruptly crossing the footpath with a wild and agitated movement! Burning elixir of existence, where love transforms itself into a poison,—it is not with impunity that we make use of it medicinally. That medieval pharmacy, which was so dangerous to man, is not without peril, it seems, for the animals themselves. A very intelligent but eccentrically ardent cat, which I kept for a long time, among its other caprices of violence loved to hunt the cantharides. It seemed attracted by the acridity of the beautiful insect, as the moth is by the flame. It was an intoxication. But when, hunting it through the flowers, she had seized and crushed her dangerous victim, the latter appeared to take its revenge.
The inflammable feline nature, stimulated by the fiery sting, broke out in cries, in excesses of fury, in strange leaps and bounds. She expiated her orgie of fire by terrible sufferings.
But, on the contrary, another insect, the bamboo-worm, or malalis, provides you, if you first remove its head, which is a deadly poison, with an exquisite cream, the sweet and soporific influence of which, say the Brazilian Indians, lulls love asleep. For two days and nights, the young maiden who has tasted of it, crouching under the blossomy tree, feels all the more powerfully in her soul the depth of the virgin forests, and the mystery of those fresh glades which have never seen the sun, nor echoed to the step of man, nor known any intruder but the lonely great blue butterfly. And yet she is not alone: love quenches her thirst with the most delicious fruits.
