Social Life in the Insect World | Page 2

bien aise, Eh bien, dansez maintenant!
has done more to immortalise the insect than her skill as a musician.
"You sang! I am very glad to hear it! Now you can dance!" The words
lodge in the childish memory, never to be forgotten. To most
Englishmen--to most Frenchmen even--the song of the Cigale is
unknown, for she dwells in the country of the olive-tree; but we all
know of the treatment she received at the hands of the Ant. On such
trifles does Fame depend! A legend of very dubious value, its moral as
bad as its natural history; a nurse's tale whose only merit is its brevity;
such is the basis of a reputation which will survive the wreck of
centuries no less surely than the tale of Puss-in-Boots and of Little Red
Riding-Hood.
The child is the best guardian of tradition, the great conservative.
Custom and tradition become indestructible when confided to the
archives of his memory. To the child we owe the celebrity of the Cigale,
of whose misfortunes he has babbled during his first lessons in
recitation. It is he who will preserve for future generations the absurd
nonsense of which the body of the fable is constructed; the Cigale will
always be hungry when the cold comes, although there were never
Cigales in winter; she will always beg alms in the shape of a few grains

of wheat, a diet absolutely incompatible with her delicate capillary
"tongue"; and in desperation she will hunt for flies and grubs, although
she never eats.
Whom shall we hold responsible for these strange mistakes? La
Fontaine, who in most of his fables charms us with his exquisite
fineness of observation, has here been ill-inspired. His earlier subjects
he knew down to the ground: the Fox, the Wolf, the Cat, the Stag, the
Crow, the Rat, the Ferret, and so many others, whose actions and
manners he describes with a delightful precision of detail. These are
inhabitants of his own country; neighbours, fellow-parishioners. Their
life, private and public, is lived under his eyes; but the Cigale is a
stranger to the haunts of Jack Rabbit. La Fontaine had never seen nor
heard her. For him the celebrated songstress was certainly a
grasshopper.
Grandville, whose pencil rivals the author's pen, has fallen into the
same error. In his illustration to the fable we see the Ant dressed like a
busy housewife. On her threshold, beside her full sacks of wheat, she
disdainfully turns her back upon the would-be borrower, who holds out
her claw--pardon, her hand. With a wide coachman's hat, a guitar under
her arm, and a skirt wrapped about her knees by the gale, there stands
the second personage of the fable, the perfect portrait of a grasshopper.
Grandville knew no more than La Fontaine of the true Cigale; he has
beautifully expressed the general confusion.
But La Fontaine, in this abbreviated history, is only the echo of another
fabulist. The legend of the Cigale and the cold welcome of the Ant is as
old as selfishness: as old as the world. The children of Athens, going to
school with their baskets of rush-work stuffed with figs and olives,
were already repeating the story under their breath, as a lesson to be
repeated to the teacher. "In winter," they used to say, "the Ants were
putting their damp food to dry in the sun. There came a starving Cigale
to beg from them. She begged for a few grains. The greedy misers
replied: 'You sang in the summer, now dance in the winter.'" This,
although somewhat more arid, is precisely La Fontaine's story, and is
contrary to the facts.

Yet the story comes to us from Greece, which is, like the South of
France, the home of the olive-tree and the Cigale. Was Æsop really its
author, as tradition would have it? It is doubtful, and by no means a
matter of importance; at all events, the author was a Greek, and a
compatriot of the Cigale, which must have been perfectly familiar to
him. There is not a single peasant in my village so blind as to be
unaware of the total absence of Cigales in winter; and every tiller of the
soil, every gardener, is familiar with the first phase of the insect, the
larva, which his spade is perpetually discovering when he banks up the
olives at the approach of the cold weather, and he knows, having seen it
a thousand times by the edge of the country paths, how in summer this
larva issues from the earth from a little round well of its own making;
how it climbs a twig or a stem of grass, turns upon its back, climbs out
of its skin, drier now than parchment, and becomes the Cigale; a
creature of a