A variation which we hear in the western provinces of France is the following:—
"Barbot, vole, vole, vole,
Ton père est à l'école,
Qui m'a dit, si tu ne voles,
Il te coupera la gorge
Avec un grand couteau de Saint-George."
Fig. 432.—Cockchafer (Melolontha vulgaris).
During the day the cockchafers remain under the leaves in a state of perfect immobility; for the heat which gives activity to other insects, seems, on the contrary, to stupefy them, and it is during the night only that they devour the leaves of elms, poplars, oaks, beech, birch-trees, &c. In years when their number is not very great, one hardly perceives the damage done by them; but at certain periods they appear in innumerable legions, and then whole parts of gardens or woods are stripped of their verdure, and present, in the middle of the summer, the appearance of a winter landscape. The trees thus stripped do not in general die; but they recover their former vigour with difficulty, and, in the case of orchard trees, remain one or two years without bearing fruit. It is principally the trees skirting woods, and situated along cultivated fields, which are exposed to the ravages of the cockchafer, because the larvæ of these insects are developed in the fields. In the interior of forests they are never met with in great numbers.
In certain years cockchafers multiply in such a frightful manner that they devastate the whole vegetation of a country. In the environs of Blois 14,000 cockchafers were picked up by children in a few days. At Fontainebleau they could have gathered as many in a certain year in as many hours. Sometimes they congregate in swarms, like locusts, and migrate from one locality to another, when they lay waste everything. To present an idea of the prodigious extent to which cockchafers increase under certain circumstances, we will give a few statistics:—In 1574, these insects were so abundant in England that they stopped many mills on the Severn. In 1688, in the county of Galway, in Ireland, they formed such a black cloud that the sky was darkened for the distance of a league, and the country people had great difficulty in making their hay in the places where they alighted. They destroyed the whole of the vegetation in such a way that the landscape assumed the desolate appearance of winter. Their voracious jaws made a noise which may be compared to that produced by the sawing of a large piece of wood, and in the evening the buzzing of their wings resembled the distant rolling of drums. The unfortunate Irish were reduced to the necessity of cooking their invaders, and, for the want of any other food, of eating them. In 1804, immense swarms of cockchafers, precipitated by a violent wind into the Lake of Zurich, formed on the shore a thick bank of bodies heaped up one on the other, the putrid exhalations from which poisoned the atmosphere. On May 18, 1832, at nine o'clock in the evening, a legion of cockchafers assailed a diligence on the road from Gournay to Gisors, just as it was leaving the village of Talmontiers; the horses, blinded and terrified, refused to advance, and the driver was obliged to return as far as the village, to wait till this new sort of hail-storm was over. M. Mulsant, in his "Monographie des Lamellicornes de la France," relates that in May, 1841, clouds of cockchafers traversed the Saône, from the south-east in the direction of the north-west, and settled in the vineyards of the Mâconnais. The streets of the town of Mâcon were so full of them, that they were shovelled up with spades. At certain hours, one could not pass over the bridge without whirling a stick rapidly round and round, to protect oneself against their touch.
