CHAPTER V.

THE ORPHAN: ITS FEEBLENESS.[H]

[Footnote H: _La Frileuse_,--literally, "The chilly one."]

We have told the easiest and pleasantest story to relate, the story of the privileged creature for whom its mother has duly provided, and who is nourished and clothed by her efforts. But many--in truth, the greatest number--enter life destitute and necessitous. They fall naked into the great world.

Poverty the audacious, necessity the ingenious, the severe internal travail of hunger and desire, stimulate and develop the energetic organs which come to their assistance.

What organs? The great Swammerdam, the martyr of patience, was the first to distinguish them. With a piercing eye, examining the newly-hatched egg,--that dubious foundation!--he seized the opening lineaments of life, and marked in them the profound and decisive characters which make the mystery of the insect. He saw the little creature, with its gelatinous body, push forward its mandible or jaws,--a distinct and complete organ, placed in front of the mouth, and visibly intended to nourish and protect the still feeble being.

Behind this active apparatus he detected on the sides of the body a passive apparatus, a series of tiny mouths or valves (the _stigmata_) which await the air, and open to receive it.

Ingenious precautions! The orphan born completely naked, and launched into life unprotected to undergo the most toilsome metamorphoses, is rendered competent for the task only by eating greedily from the moment of its birth, absorbing and devouring! It must eat always and everywhere, even in the least respirable atmosphere, and in unhealthy and deadly places. It is for this reason nature has endowed it with a slower, and, if I may so speak, a more suspicious circulation and respiration, than that of the superior creatures which live only in pure air. In these creatures, as in man, the blood continually flows to meet the air and be vivified by it. In the insect, on the contrary, the protecting apparatus which guards its lateral mouths are disposed in such a manner as to be able always to moderate, sift, and, if need be, exclude, the invading atmosphere. One is overcome with surprise by the infinite variety of the combinations designed for this end, the numerous mechanical and chemical arts of the most complicated character. To receive and yet not receive, to breathe without breathing, to preserve the control of what must nevertheless be a passive function, to trust and yet mistrust, to surrender and yet protect, is the difficult problem which life here proposed to itself, and of which it has found innumerable solutions. To give air to a grub! Behold, arrogant humanity, which callest thyself the centre of all things, the most laborious effort that has engrossed the powers of nature!

Its circulation resembles that of the embryo in the bosom of its mother. But how much less favourable the condition of the insect! The foetus is in immediate contact with the world through the soft maternal medium. The motherless insect embryo does not swim, like the other, in a sea of milk. It is cradled in the rude mould of the universal life; it travels therein at great peril, on the rude earth, from shock to shock.

This fact the moderns have recognized,--_the insect is an embryo_. But who would suppose that this very circumstance would doom it to death? How rude a contradiction! An embryo launched into the thick of the fray, to be the victim of all--of birds, and even of insects. An embryo armed, it is true; and nothing is stranger than to see the soft grubs brandishing their threatening jaws, while their feeble body, deprived of all defence, is exposed on every side.

Flight offers them but few chances; their best protection is night. And therefore they shun the light,--they live as they can under the ground, in the wood, or at least beneath the leaf. If this be true of the larvæ, the grubs, of what we call worms, we may say the same of the insect. For its first period (that of the larva) endures a considerable time, though its life as a nymph, and finally its third period, last but a very brief while. Numerous species (May-bugs, stag-beetles, and the like) have three to six years of a tenebrous existence, and only three months under the sun.

Even the insects which live longest in the sun, like the bees and the ants, work willingly in obscurity; are partial to the shadows of their hives and ant-hills.

We may assert as a general rule that _the insect is the child of night_.

Most insects shun the day. But how can they avoid the air? Even in hot countries, the contact of the variable atmosphere with a live nude body, whose epidermis is not yet hardened, becomes infinitely painful. In our severe climates, each breath of air must produce the sensation of piercing arrows, of a million of fine needles. What would it be, O Heaven, for a poor human foetus to issue, after a week or a fortnight, from its mother's womb, and instead of peacefully undergoing the transformations which strengthen it, to be subjected to them in a naked condition and in open day? What would be its sensations on quitting its soft asylum, and falling into the cold air? Yet such must be those of the insect, when, soft, feeble, assailable, and penetrable everywhere, still almost floating and gelatinous to the eye, it experiences the cold, and the wind, and the shock of so many painful accidents.

Certain clothed species are a little better protected. Some are lodged in the heart of a fruit. Others (bees and ants) form a protecting community; but the immense majority are born solitary and naked.

Some of our readers, always well clothed and warmed, will say, I am sure, that cold is an excellent thing, which stimulates the appetite and strengthens the frame. But those who have been poor will very well understand my preceding observations. For my part, recollections of my childhood convince me that cold is, in all truth, a punishment; you cannot get accustomed to it; its prolongation does not render its effect less severe. How keen a joy I felt (in rigorous winters) at each thaw which released me from my agitated, terrified, and uneasy condition, and secured the happy re-establishment of the internal harmony!

I do not deny, however, that cold may not be a powerful tonic, which sharpens and braces up the mind, and draws from it fresh efforts of invention. Cold, as well as hunger--and perhaps hunger especially--is the great stimulus of the arts; hunger weakens, cold strengthens.

It is the powerful inspirer of infinite swarms of those chilly creatures which seek before all things, as soon as they are born, the means of covering themselves. They are not in want of food; nature has everywhere prepared for them an ample banquet. All the vegetable kingdom, and a great part of the animal, are at their disposal; they might live tender and indolent, as the child sleeps at its ease on the maternal placenta which nourishes its slothfulness. But the cold irritates them; the cold damp air deadens and paralyzes their entrails; finally, the light wounds them. They can enjoy no repose until they have secured a shelter. In the lowest grade of life the smallest grub becomes an artist, and by weaving, and spinning, and carving has soon contrived a robe, and, as with a second skin over her too sensitive epidermis, has covered her suffering nakedness. Happy she who finds herself placed at the outset on a prepared soil, a cloth of warm wool, a fine fur: she does not fail to make in hot haste, according to our human fashion, a pretty paletot fitted to her figure; which, nevertheless, she leaves a little loose, like economical mothers for their young growing children, in whose case the garb too large to-day will be tight and well-fitting to-morrow.

Those who on their birth come in contact with chill green leaves, and their lustrous glaze, are still more industrious. They practise arts which astonish the observer. Some raise enormous masses with imperceptible cables, and by mechanical processes analogous to those which were employed in removing and rearing the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde. Others cut out figures purposedly irregular, which the seam afterwards fits into its harmonious _ensemble_.

Every industrial corporation may be found represented in this little world: tailors, weavers, felters, spinners, miners, and the like. And in each corporation you meet with species working each after its peculiar fashion, by the various processes appropriate to it.

The tailors work from a pattern. They mark out on the leaf a suitable piece; which they remove, and lay upon another leaf; tack it, cut out a second on the first model, and stitch them together. This done, with their scaly head they flatten the ribs, just as the tailor smooths down the seams with his iron. Then they line this coat, which they carry about with them, with the very finest silk.

Others work in mosaic, others in marquetry and veneering. After having woven the robe, they disguise it by artistically gluing to it a variety of surrounding materials. The aquatic insects, for example, embellish theirs with moss, lentils, mussels, or little snails.

The miners erect galleries between a couple of leaves, and roam about in them, constructing places of exit and ingress in their subterranean abodes.

The labour is great. But among all the species an admirable justice prevails. Whoso works hard while a child, does little when an adult; and _vice versâ_. The bee, which in the larva state is richly fed by its parents, and always carried about and cradled, is destined hereafter to an exceedingly laborious life.

On the contrary, another insect which, as a grub, has toiled, and woven, and spun, will having nothing to do in its later life but whisper love-phrases to the rose. I am speaking of Sir Butterfly.

For the great majority, hard work is for infancy, for the larva or the grub; work twofold and excessive. On the one hand, the constant, urgent, and pressing search after the food craved for by an immense internal need; the necessity of recruiting and renewing its energies, of restoring the inherited organs, and developing new ones.

The existence of these poor motherless creatures is divided between two severe conditions: toil, and growth through disease.

For their moultings, or sloughings, are, in effect, a disease.

The painful moment having arrived for the little creature to change its clothing, a clothing which clings to its flesh, it is seized with illness, abandons its leaf, and creeps languidly to some solitary asylum. If you saw it in such a soft, inert, and withered condition, so different from its natural state, you would say it was on the point of death. And many do, indeed, succumb at this laborious crisis.

Passive, and suspended to a branch, it waits until nature shall complete its work,--until its epidermis be detached from the second skin beneath, recalling it to all the energies of life.

It is then that you see the garb, which was formerly so brilliant, dry up and harden like a thenceforth useless thing, carried hither and thither by the wind.

But before it will yield and separate, the invalid, despite of its weakness, must twist in every direction, and writhe, and swell, and contract, and employ all the efforts of a being in its strongest moments.

At length it has conquered; the old sheath is rent; and I see the insect free, but bathed in sweat.

Do not touch it yet, for the slightest pressure will wound. Of this it is aware, and lies perfectly motionless. It is pale, and almost swooning; it must wait patiently, before beginning to move, till its skin is less sensitive and its limbs are much firmer. Soon, fortunately, it will be invigorated by its food; it feels a terrible hunger, which restores its strength and prepares it for another sloughing. Such is its destiny. It is condemned to deliver itself continually in a series of _accouchements_, until it finally attains its latest transformation.

If either the exertion or the pain inspire it with a transient gleam of thought, it would say, on each painful occasion: "Now it is ended! I have finished my task; I will rest in peace; this is my last change." To which Nature would respond: "Not yet! not yet! Thou art not yet engendered. What art thou? Nothing but a larva, a mask which is about to fall."

What! A mask! and yet it wills and toils, strives and suffers, and sometimes seems more advanced than will be the being produced from it! So much industry and skill imprisoned in a skin which will immediately dry up and be blown away by the breeze!

However this may be, it is seized one morning by an undefinable kind of irritability and disquiet,--by a mysterious impulse which excites it to undertake a new task. You would say that within itself another self exists, moving, and stirring, and following up a distinct purpose, and yearning to become--what? does it know? This I cannot assert; but after awhile you may see it acting, and acting sagaciously, as if inspired by a perfect knowledge. Its presentiment of the slumber which will shortly seize upon it, paralyze its forces, and surrender it helplessly to all its enemies, incites it to the sudden display of a novel activity. "Let us work well! Let us work quickly! For soon I shall sleep soundly."