The former was, it is true, of an exceptionally long and supple sort. As for the latter, it had nothing distinctive about it, and, like its fellows, it conscientiously counterfeited a dozen great ear-lobes. On two of its hairy, silvery leaves and on one of the twigs of the plantain below it, a bandage showed like a bracelet of white cloth which tar (apparently) stained brown.
I sighed a sigh of relief. “Good,” said I to myself, “Lerne has inoculated them. This is only a repetition of what I have already seen, or rather an early, timid and simple essay, a stage on the road to the rotunda, as it is a stage on the way to the atrocities of the aquarium. I might have begun here, gone on to the central garden of Eden, and finished off by the polypi. Thank God, I have seen the worst.”
So ran my thoughts, when the twig of the plantain twisted about like a worm!
At the same time a mass of shining gray gave a jump which betrayed its presence behind the dresser. There lay in the midst of a pool of blood a rabbit with silvery fur. It had just expired, and had nothing in the way of ears but two bleeding holes.
The presentiment of the reality made me break out into a sweat. It was then I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two grafted leaves like ears, I perceived they were hot and quivering.
A recoil sent me up against the dresser. My hand stiff with disgust tried to shake off the feeling of that contact as it would that of a hideous spider; it knocked violently against the rat’s cage, which fell.
At once the rat bounded towards the middle of its cage, biting and rolling about with mad fury ... and my staring eyes went continually from the plantain to the animal, from the twig quivering like a thin black snake to the rat which had no tail.
Its wound had healed, but the poor beast bore traces of another experiment which it dragged about in its somersaults—a sort of loosened girdle, which still, however, kept fixed in its place a piece of greenery that had been inserted into its slashed flank!
This growth seemed to me to have withered. So Lerne was mounting the scale of Being. He was now grafting together the higher animals and all kinds of plants! Infamous and great, my uncle inspired me with disgust and admiration, such as one might feel for a maleficient deity.
His works, however, seemed to me less estimable than repulsive, and I had to do violence to myself to force myself to prolong my visit.