CHAPTER VI.

THE MUMMY, NYMPH, OR CHRYSALIS.

Let us respect the childhood of the world. Let us pardon the early ages for the consolations and hopes which they drew from the strange drama represented by the Insect, the thoughts of immortality which grave Egypt founded upon it. This drama tranquillized more hearts and wiped away more tears than all the mysteries of Canopus or the revels of Eleusis.

When the mourning widow, the eternal Isis, ever reproducing herself in eternal anguish, was snatched from her beloved Osiris, she reposed her hope of a future reunion on the sacred beetle, and hushed her sobs.

What is death? What is life? What is the awakening, or what the slumber? Do you not see this little miracle, this dumb confidant of the grave, which makes us the mock of destiny? It sleeps in the egg, and afterwards sleeps again in the nymph. It is thrice born; and it dies thrice--as larva, nymph, and beetle. In each of these existences the larva or mask is the prefigurement of the succeeding existence. It prepares, begets, and hatches itself. From the most repulsive sepulchre it emerges sparkling. On the dust it shines; on the gray Egyptian plain, in its season of aridity, it shimmers, and eclipses everything. Its jewelled wing mirrors the all-powerful sun.

Where was it? In the foul shadow, in night and death. A deity has summoned it forth, and will yet do much more for this beloved soul! Sweet, tender ray! The hope was surely founded upon justice, on the impartial love of the Creator of all life.

Accordingly, the widow draws from its death the brilliant pledge of the future, and gives utterance to this woman's cry:--"Merciful Heaven! do for my husband and for me what thou hast done for the insect. Do not grant less to man; do not grant to my best-beloved less than thou accordest to this brother of the gnat!"

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Has modern science swept away the ancient poesy? Has it completely eliminated the miraculous from nature?

The inaugurator of this science, Swammerdam, has discovered that the grub already contains the nymph; nay more, even the butterfly. In the grub he has detected the rudiment of the wing and proboscis of the future being.

This is not all. Malpighi saw the _nymph_ of the silkworm in its virgin slumber, _already furnished with the attributes of its coming maternity_,--containing the eggs which, as a butterfly, it would fecundate.

And yet again, this is not all. Réaumur, in the oak-grub, _in a grub scarcely a few hours old, found the eggs of the future butterfly_. In other words, the infant insect, at that very stage when the grub itself, as Harvey points out, is simply a mobile egg, already possesses eggs and children.

It is the identity of three beings. It seems as if there could be no intermediary deaths; one single life is continuously carried on.

All this seems clear, does it not? The ancient mystery has perished? Man has discovered, in its fulness, the secret of things?

Réaumur does not think so; Réaumur himself, who has guided us so far. In recording his observations he does not appear satisfied, and confesses "that they still leave very much to be desired."[I]

[Footnote I: Réaumur, "Histoire des Insectes," tome i., p. 351.]

In truth, it is a thing to confound and almost to terrify the imagination, to think that a grub, at the outset no bigger than a thread, should include in itself all the elements of its moultings and metamorphoses; should contain its triple, and even octuple envelopes; nay more, the sheath or case of its _nympha_ and its complete butterfly, all folded up one in another, with an immense apparatus of vessels, respiratory and digestive, of nerves for feeling and muscles for moving! A prodigious system of anatomy! first traced out in complete detail in Lyonnet's colossal work on the willow-grub. The twofold monster, endowed with a strong grub-stomach for the destruction of innumerable hard leaves, will possess ere long a light and delicate apparatus for extracting the honey of flowers. And yet the clothed creature, which contains in its organism a complete silk-manufactory, will almost immediately sweep away the complex system.

One knows the gentle manoeuvres by which nature conducts the young of the higher animals from the embryonic existence to the independent life, adapting the old organs to new functions. Here, this is not done. It is not a simple change of condition. The destination is not merely different, but contrary, with a violent contrast. Therefore, instruments fitted for an entirely novel existence are required, and the abolition and definitive sacrifice of the primitive organism.

The revolution, which for all other beings is so well concealed, is here entirely thrown open. And we are enabled to scrutinize with our eyes this astonishing _tour de force_ in numerous grubs which undergo the great change in the light of day, suspended to the branch of a tree by a silken cable.

The effort is worthy of our admiration and pity. To see yonder nymph, short and feeble, soft and gelatinous, without arms or paws, contriving, by the skill with which it expands and contracts its rings, to escape from the heavy and rough machine which it was at first, flinging aside its limbs, setting free its head, and--one hardly dares to record the fact--throwing off its body, and rejecting many of its principal internal organs!

This little body, when it has thus escaped from its long heavy mask (living, nevertheless, but a moment since, a life full of energy), will dangle, and grow dry, and skilfully ascend to its silken fastening. There it prepares to fix itself in its new "Me" as a nymph, while its former "Me," tossed about by the wind, is speedily driven I know not whither.

All is, and ought to be, changed. _The legs will not again be the legs._ It will need lighter organs. What can the child of the air, which can balance on the point of a blade of grass, do with those coarse short feet, armed with hooks, vent-holes, and so many heavy implements?

_The head will not be the head_; at least, the enormous apparatus of mandibles will disappear, and also that of the muscles by which they were energetically moved. All is thrown aside with the mask. A colossal change! From a masticator the animal becomes a sucker. A flexible proboscis emerges.

If anything in the grub appeared of a fundamental character, it was the digestive apparatus. Ah, well! this basis of its being is no more. The absorbing throat--the powerful stomach--the greedy entrails,--all are suppressed, or reduced nearly to nothing. What would they avail the new being which, in certain species of butterflies, dispenses with sustenance, has no mouth but by agreement, and is so completely freed from digestion that frequently it has not even an inferior orifice? It abandons without difficulty its thenceforth useless furniture, and expectorates the skin of its stomach!

This is grand and magnificent,--no spectacle is grander! For life at such a point to change, to dominate over the organs, to rise victorious, so entirely free of the ancient _Ego_! To those who have revealed to us such a prodigy of transfiguration, from the bottom of my heart I say, "Thanks!"

How marvellous the security in this being which abandons everything, which unhesitatingly dismisses its strong and solid existence, the complicated organism which just now was _itself_, its own individuality! We call it its _larva_, its mask; but why? The personality seems at least as energetic in the vigorous grub as in the delicate butterfly. And, therefore, it is most indubitably its individual being which it courageously leaves to shrivel up and perish, to become--what? Nothing reassuring, nothing but a little, soft, whitish substance.

Open the nymph soon after it has spun its cocoon: in its shroud you shall find nothing but a kind of milky fluid, wherein you see, or fancy you see, certain dubious lineaments. After awhile you may, with a fine needle, separate these I know not what,--and figure to yourself that they are the limbs of the future butterfly. A frightful lacuna! For many species a moment occurs when nothing of the old any longer appears, and nothing of the new as yet has come. When Æson, cut in pieces, was thrown, in order to rejuvenate him, into the caldron of Medea, you would have found, on groping there, the limbs of Æson. But here there is nothing parallel.

Trustfully, nevertheless, the mummy surrounds its body with its bands, docilely accepting the shadows, the inertness, and the captivity of the sepulchre. It feels in itself a force, a _raison d'être_, a _causa vivendi_,--a reason for living still. And what reason? What cause? The vitality accumulated by its previous toil. All that, like a laborious grub, it has accumulated, is its obstacle to death,--its incapability of perishing,--the reason why it will immediately live again; and not only live, but with a light and tender existence, whose facility is proportioned exactly to the efforts which it makes in its anterior condition of life.

Admirable compensation! When penetrating so deep down into life, I expected to encounter certain physical fatalities. And I found justice, immortality, and hope.

Yes, antiquity was right, and modern science is right. It is death, and yet it is not death; let us call it if you will partial death. Is death ever otherwise? Is it not a new birth?

Throughout my life I have remarked that each day I died and was born again; I have undergone many painful strugglings and laborious transformations. One more does not astonish me. Many and many times I have passed from the larva into the chrysalis, and into a more complete condition; the which, after awhile, incomplete under other relations, has put me in the way of accomplishing a new circle of metamorphoses.

All this from me to me, but not less from _me_ to those who were _still_ me, who loved me, or made me, or, so long as I lived, whom I made. These, too, have been, or will be, my metamorphoses. Sometimes, a certain intonation or gesture which I detect makes me exclaim:--"Ah! this is a gesture or a tone of my father." I had not foreseen it, and if I had foreseen it, it would not have occurred; reflection had changed all; but, not thinking of it, I employed it. A tender emotion, a holy impulse seized me, when I felt my father thus living in myself. Are we two? Were we one? Oh! it was my chrysalis. And I--I play the same part for those who shall follow me, my children, or the children of my thought. I know, I feel, that besides the bases which I derived from my father, my ancestors and masters, besides the inheritance of artist-historian which I shall bequeath to others, germs existed within me which were never developed. Another, and perchance a better, man was within me, who has not arisen. Why were not the loftier germs which might have made me great, and the powerful wings of which I have sometimes felt myself possessed, displayed in life and action?

These germs, though put aside, remain to me; too late for expansion in this life, perhaps, but in another,--who knows?

An ingenious philosopher has remarked that if the human embryo, while imprisoned in the maternal bosom, might reason, it would say:--"I see myself endowed with organs of which here I can make no use,--limbs which do not move, a stomach and teeth which do not eat. Patience! these organs convince me that nature calls me elsewhere; a time will come when I shall have another residence, a life in which all these implements will find employment. They are standing still, they are waiting. I am but the chrysalis of a man!"