The Life of the Fly | Page 5

say. It has come;
and, with it--a more serious condition--perhaps a little leisure. I say
perhaps, for my leg is still hampered with a few links of the convict's
chain.

The wish is realized. It is a little late, O my pretty insects! I greatly fear
that the peach is offered to me when I am beginning to have no teeth
wherewith to eat it. Yes, it is a little late: the wide horizons of the
outset have shrunk into a low and stifling canopy, more and more
straitened day by day. Regretting nothing in the past, save those whom
I have lost; regretting nothing, not even my first youth; hoping nothing
either, I have reached the point at which, worn out by the experience of
things, we ask ourselves if life be worth the living.
Amid the ruins that surround me, one strip of wall remains standing,
immovable upon its solid base: my passion for scientific truth. Is that
enough, O my busy insects, to enable me to add yet a few seemly pages
to your history? Will my strength not cheat my good intentions? Why,
indeed, did I forsake you so long? Friends have reproached me for it.
Ah, tell them, tell those friends, who are yours as well as mine, tell
them that it was not forgetfulness on my part, not weariness, nor
neglect: I thought of you; I was convinced that the Cerceris [a digger
wasp] cave had more fair secrets to reveal to us, that the chase of the
Sphex held fresh surprises in store. But time failed me; I was alone,
deserted, struggling against misfortune. Before philosophizing, one had
to live. Tell them that; and they will pardon me.
Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the
solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page
that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the
truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on
condition of being obscure. Come here, one and all of you--you, the
sting bearers, and you, the wing-cased armor- clads--take up my
defense and bear witness in my favor. Tell of the intimate terms on
which I live with you, of the patience with which I observe you, of the
care with which I record your actions. Your evidence is unanimous: yes,
my pages, though they bristle not with hollow formulas nor learned
smatterings, are the exact narrative of facts observed, neither more nor
less; and whoever cares to question you in his turn will, obtain the same
replies.
And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince those good people,
because you do not carry the weight of tedium, I, in my turn, will say to
them: 'You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an
object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labor in a

torture chamber and dissecting room, I make my observations under the
blue sky to the song of the cicadas, you subject cell and protoplasm to
chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry
into death, I pry into life. And why should I not complete my thought:
the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history, youth's
glorious study, has, by dint of cellular improvements, become a hateful
and repulsive thing. Well, if I write for men of learning, for
philosophers, who, one day, will try to some extent to unravel the tough
problem of instinct, I write also, I write above all things for the young.
I want to make them love the natural history which you make them hate;
and that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of truth, I avoid
your scientific prose, which too often, alas seems borrowed from some
Iroquois idiom."
But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the bit of
land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living
entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the solitude
of a little village. It is a harmas, the name given, in this district [the
country round Serignan, in Provence], to an untilled, pebbly expanse
abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the
work of the plow; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has
chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.
My harmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth swamped by
a huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation:
I am told that vines once grew here. And, in fact, when we dig the
ground before planting a few trees, we turn up, here