The Life of the Fly quotes

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;

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.

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:

And so, in May, as soon as it is dark, the pond becomes a deafening orchestra: it is impossible to talk at table, impossible to sleep. We had to remedy this by means perhaps a little too rigorous. What could we do?

He who tries to sleep and cannot needs becomes ruthless.

Bolder still, the wasp has taken possession of the dwelling house. On my door sill, in a soil of rubbish, nestles the white-banded Sphex:

When I look for some term to designate this digestive entrance, of which so far I know no other example, I can find only that of a sucker or cupping glass.

Its attack is a mere kiss, but what a perfidious kiss!

We know the machine; now let us see the working. To facilitate observation, I shifted the newborn Anthrax grub, together with the Chalicodoma grub, its wet nurse, from the natal cell into a glass tube.

For the lack of an attacking point prescribed for him at birth, he will perish on the damaged provisions.

His freedom of action will have killed him.

Certainly, liberty is a noble attribute, even in an insignificant grub; but it also has its dangers everywhere. The Anthrax escapes the peril only on the condition of being, so to speak, muzzled. His mouth is not a fierce forceps that tears asunder;

When they wished Medea to restore Pelias to the vigor of youth, his daughters cut the old king's body to pieces and boiled it in a cauldron, for there can be no new existence without a prior dissolution.

We must pull down before we can rebuild; the analysis of death is the first step towards the synthesis of life.

The substance of the grub that is to be transformed into a bee begins, therefore, by disintegrating and dissolving into a fluid broth. The materials of the future insect are obtained by a general recasting.

Success will come: of that they are all convinced. While waiting, one washes her antennae by passing them through her mouth, another polishes her wings with her hind legs, another frisks about to while away the period of inaction.

Some are making love, a sovran means of killing time, whether one be born that day or twenty years ago.

Some, I said, make love. These favored ones are rare; they hardly count. Is it through indifference? No, but the gallants are lacking. The sexes are very unequally represented in the population of a cell:

Can the mothers, in fact, dispense with their assistance, without being deprived of offspring on that account? I do not say yes, but I do not say no. The duality of the sexes is a hard problem.

Why two sexes? Why not just one? It would have been much simpler and saved a great deal of foolery.

Why such a thing as sex, when the tuber of the Jerusalem artichoke can do without it?

This is all very coherent; it is all deduced like a geometrical proposition.

But to the wings of imagination, however smooth their flight, we must prefer the sandals of observed facts, the slow sandals with the leaden soles.

Thus shod, I proceed.

A man must have the devil in him to leave the shade at this time of the year. And what for, pray? To write the story of a fly! The greater the heat, the better my chance of success.

What causes me to suffer torture fills the insect with delight; what prostrates me braces the fly.

Come along!

What hecatombs of unfortunate sleepers removed from their silken bags and doomed, for the most part, to a wretched end, despite the care which I took to put them in a place of safety, where the work of the transformation might be pursued!

Curiosity makes us cruel.

I continue to rip up cocoons. And nothing, nothing! It needed the sturdiest faith to make me persevere. That faith I possessed; and well for me that I did.

Was it really the original larva of the Anthrax? Yes, for I at last saw my bantlings transform themselves into the larva previously described and make their first start at draining their victims with kisses.

A few moments of satisfaction like those which I then enjoyed make up for many a weary hour.

Let us resume the story of the wee animal, now recognized as the genuine origin of the Anthrax. It is a tiny worm about a millimeter long and almost as slender as a hair. It is very difficult to see because of its transparency.

With what am I enjoying the glorious radiance: with my mouth or my eyes? That is the question put by my budding scientific curiosity. Reader, do not smile: the future observer is already practicing and experimenting.

I open my mouth wide and close my eyes: the glory disappears. I open my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappears.

I repeat the performance, with the same result. The question's solved: I have learnt by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. Oh, what a discovery! That evening, I told the whole house all about it. Grandmother smiled fondly at my simplicity:

the other is spent, with much misgiving, in botanizing and looking for the treasures of the sea. What a country and what magnificent studies to be made, if, unobsessed by x and y, I had devoted myself wholeheartedly to my inclinations!

We are the wisp of straw, the plaything of the winds.

We think that we are making for a goal deliberately chosen; destiny drives us towards another. Mathematics, the exaggerated preoccupation of my youth, did me hardly any service;

We thus have, all of us, in different directions and in a greater or lesser degree, characteristics that brand us with a special mark, characteristics of an unfathomable origin. They exist because they exist; and that is all that any one can say.

The gift is not handed down: the man of talent has a fool for a son.

Nor is it acquired; but it is improved by practice. He who has not the germ of it in his veins will never possess it, in spite of all the pains of a hothouse education.

Nothing causes it to be foreseen, nothing in the organization explains it. If cross-examined on this point, the Dung beetles and the rest, each with his own peculiar talent, would answer, were we able to understand them: '

Instinct is the animal's genius.

'

At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a scarab—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue.

The angels in paradise must wear dresses of that color.

I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.

And yet no!

Alone among living creatures, man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things.

The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast.

A gorgeous equipment may be all very well for laboratories wherein the cells and fibers of the dead are consulted at great expense; but such magnificence is of doubtful utility when we have to study the actions of the living.

It is the humble makeshift, of no value, that stumbles on the secrets of life.

What did the best results of my studies of instinct cost me? Nothing but time and, above all, patience. My extravagant expenditure of twenty francs, therefore, will be a risky speculation if devoted to the purchase of an apparatus of study.

There are angles in this direction and angles in the other, resulting in sharp little turns and twists; the big is mixed with the little, the correct rubs shoulders with the shapeless. It is not an edifice, it is a frenzied conglomeration.

Sometimes, a fine disorder is an effect of art.

This is not so here: the work of the Caddis worm is not a masterpiece worth signing.

The water carpenter has an art of its own, has method and rules of symmetry. When well served by fortune, it is quite able to turn out good work; when ill-served, it acts like others: the work which it turns out is bad.

Poverty makes for ugliness.

There is another matter wherein the caddis worm deserves our attention. With a perseverance which repeated trials do not tire, it makes itself a new tube when I strip it.

but, in that case, an exceptional condition becomes obligatory, namely, the capacity for recommencing the work. This most unusual gift of recommencing it possesses in a high measure. I am ready to see its origin in the persecutions of the Dytiscus and other pirates.

Necessity is the mother of industry.

Certain caddis worms, of the Sericostoma and Leptocerus species, clothe themselves in grains of sand and do not leave the bed of the stream.

The maggot walks with the aid of what a superficial examination would pronounce to be a machine for eating.

It carries in its gullet the equivalent of the climber's alpenstock.

Let us hold it, on a piece of flesh, under the lens. We shall see it walking about, raising and lowering its head and, each time, stabbing the meat with its pair of hooks.

All the sand in the apparatus is saturated, has turned into mud, as though there had been a shower of rain. Through the hole at the bottom, which is protected by a flat pebble, the gruel trickles drop by drop.

It is a still at work, a mortuary still, in which the Snake is being drawn off.

Wait a week or two; and the whole will have disappeared, drunk up by the sun: naught but the scales and bones will remain on a sheet of mud.

I was denied the privilege of learning with a master. I should be wrong to complain. Solitary study has its advantages: it does not cast you in the official mould; it leaves you all your originality.

Wild fruit, when it ripens, has a different taste from hothouse produce: it leaves on a discriminating palate a bittersweet flavor whose virtue is all the greater for the contrast.

Yes, if it were in my power, I would start afresh, face to face with my only counselor, the book itself, not always a very lucid one;

And I left it at that for a moment or two, thinking hard, drawn now this way, now that with indecision: 'Shall I accept? Shall I refuse?' continued the inner voice.

Pooh, let's accept! An heroic method of learning to swim is to leap boldly into the sea.

Let us hurl ourselves head first into the algebraical gulf; and perhaps the imminent danger of drowning will call forth efforts capable of bringing me to land. I know nothing of what he wants. It makes no difference:

and perhaps the imminent danger of drowning will call forth efforts capable of bringing me to land. I know nothing of what he wants. It makes no difference: let's go ahead and plunge into the mystery. I shall learn by teaching.

It was a fine courage that drove me full tilt into a province which I had not yet thought of entering.

My twenty-year-old confidence was an incomparable lever.

'

You understand, because you succeed in making another understand.

'

How I toiled over that wretched paradox! It would seem that the book did not explain this subject clearly, or rather employed too abstract a method. I read, reread and meditated in vain: the obscure text retained all its obscurity.

That is the drawback of books in general: they tell you what is printed in them and nothing more.

If you fail to understand, they never advise you, never suggest an attempt along another road which might lead you to the light. The merest word would sometimes be enough to put you on the right track;

When the subject comes within the scope of natural science, the interest is nearly always assured; the difficulty, the great difficulty, is to prune it of its thorns and to present it under a prepossessing aspect.

Truth, they say, rises naked from a well. Agreed; but admit that she is all the better for being decently clothed.

She craves, if not the gaudy furbelows borrowed from rhetoric's wardrobe, at least a vine leaf. The geometers alone have the right to refuse her that modest garment; in theorems, plainness suffices.

Whence do they come? Probably from a habit which I acquired very early in life: to have food always there for my mind, to pour the never failing oil constantly into the lamp of thought.

Would you succeed in the things of the mind? The infallible method is to be always thinking of them.

This method I practiced more sedulously than my comrade; and hence, no doubt, arose the interchange of positions, the disciple turned into the master. It was not, however, an overwhelming infatuation, a painful obsession; it was rather a recreation, almost a poetic feast.

Is this poetic exaggeration? Surely not: Victor Hugo spoke truly.

Algebra, the poem of order, has magnificent flights.

I look upon its formulae, its strophes as superb, without feeling at all astonished when others do not agree. My colleague's satirical look came back when I was imprudent enough to confide my extrageometrical raptures to his ears: 'Nonsense,' said he, 'pure stuff and nonsense!

It is easily moved where you wish: in front of the window, when the sky is cloudy; into the discreet light of a corner, when the sun is troublesome. In winter, it allows you to come close to the hearth, where a log is blazing.

Poor little walnut board, I have been faithful to you for half a century and more.

Ink-stained, cut and scarred with the penknife, you lend your support today to my prose as you once did to my equations. This variation in employment leaves you indifferent;

you pass and repass your shuttle through the woof of figures. Useless efforts all: the darkness continues. What would be needed to supply the illuminating ray? Often enough, a trifle, a mere word; and that word the book will not speak.

Happy is he who is guided by a master's teaching!

His progress does not know the misery of those wearisome breakdowns. What was I to do before the disheartening wall that every now and then rose up and barred my road? I followed d'Alembert's precept in his advice to young mathematical students:

ay, it is the invariable rule. For the melting down and remolding of matter, man is no better, corpse for corpse, than the lowest of the brutes. Then the fly exercises her rights and deals with us as she does with any ordinary animal refuse.

Nature treats us with magnificent indifference in her great regenerating factory: placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike.

There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.

Then the fly exercises her rights and deals with us as she does with any ordinary animal refuse. Nature treats us with magnificent indifference in her great regenerating factory: placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike.

There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.

But, as the time comes for descending into the earth, the worms, now powerful and suddenly versed in the necessary art, well know how to eat away patiently and clear themselves a passage. With the hooks of their spikes they dig, scratch and tear.

Instinct has flashes of inspiration.

What the animal did not know how to do at the start it learns without apprenticeship when the time comes to practice this or that industry.

The dangers of the exhumation are not the only ones; the Bluebottle must be acquainted with others.

Life, when all is said, is a knacker's yard wherein the devourer of today becomes the devoured of tomorrow; and the robber of the dead cannot fail to be robbed of her own life when the time comes.

I know that she has one exterminator in the person of the tiny Saprinus beetle, a fisher of fat sausages on the edge of the pools formed by liquescent corpses. Here swarm in common the grubs of the greenbottle, the flesh fly and the bluebottle.

It falls and overturns the second, which, in the same way, topsy-turvies the third; and so on, right to the end of the row. In less than no time, the capsizing wave spreads and the handsome edifice is shattered.

Order is succeeded by disorder, I might almost say, by death.

What was needed thus to upset the procession of friars? A very, very slight first push, out of all proportion to the toppled mass.

What has happened? This: crystallization has set in at the first contact of the particle of alum, the center of attraction; next, it has spread bit by bit, each solidified particle producing the solidification of those around.

The impulse comes from an atom; the mass impelled is boundless. The very small has revolutionized the immense.

Of course, in the comparison between these two instances and the effects of my injections, the reader must see no more than a figure of speech, which, without explaining anything, tries to throw a glimmer of light upon it.

I will not decide this question, nor is it really of importance. The fact remains that the poison proceeds from those substances and from them alone. Animal matter, therefore, which has ceased to live is an agent of destruction within the organism.

The dead cell kills the living cell; in the delicate statics of life, it is the grain of sand which, refusing its support, entails the collapse of the whole edifice.

In this connection, we may recall those dreadful dissecting room accidents. Through awkwardness, a student of anatomy pricks himself with his scalpel in the course of his work; or else, by inadvertence, he has an insignificant scratch on his hand.

All show the same relaxed muscles, the same blackened flesh, signs of putrefaction. It is probable, therefore, that, if injected into our own veins, the same fluid would likewise prove fatal. What is excellent in the digestive tubes would be appalling in the arteries.

What is food in one case is poison in the other.

A Liebig's extract of a different kind, the broth in which the liquefier puddles, is of a virulence equal, if not superior, to that of my products. All those operated upon, Capricorns, sacred beetles, ground beetles, die in convulsions.

In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of my hand.

Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.

My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hilltop over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again.

Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside.

The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names.

To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for today I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or stonechat.

In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee deep.

Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless sea; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls.

About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.

How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! 'Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!' said Horace.

Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end!

They were the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; today, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along, as it rushes towards the abyss. Fleeting though they be, let us make the most of them.

It is the universal rule.

What our illusions have most fondly cherished comes to a pitiful end under the claws of ruthless reality.

It were out of place to recall my long relations with the bolete and the agaric if the insect did not here enter into a question of grave interest. Several mushrooms are edible, some even enjoy a great reputation; others are formidable poisons.

For that matter, he had made a wise choice, the epicure! This popular fungus is one of our best mushrooms, despite its color of a doubtful white, its skin which is often wrinkled and its gills soiled with rusty brown at the spores.

We must not judge people by appearances, nor mushrooms either.

This one, magnificent in shape and color, is poisonous; that other, so poor to look at, is excellent.

Of natural history, absolutely nothing. No one thought of telling us anything about flowers and trees, which give such zest to one's aimless rambles, nor about insects, with their curious habits, nor about stones, so instructive with their fossil records.

That entrancing glance through the windows of the world was refused us.

Grammar was allowed to strangle life.

That entrancing glance through the windows of the world was refused us.

Grammar was allowed to strangle life.

Chemistry was never mentioned either: that goes without saying. I knew the word, however. My casual reading, only half-understood for want of practical demonstration, had taught me that chemistry is concerned with the shuffle of matter, uniting or separating the various elements.

The feast of learning was over. Never mind: the disastrous lesson was a mighty event for me. I had been inside the chemist's laboratory; I had had a glimpse of those wonderful jars and tubes.

In teaching, what matters most is not the thing taught, whether well or badly grasped: it is the stimulus given to the pupil's latent aptitudes; it is the fulminate awakening the slumbering explosives.

One day, I shall obtain on my own account that oxygen which ill luck has denied me; one day, without a master, I shall yet learn chemistry.

What has the future in store for it? Like many another in the ringing city, to use Rabelais' epithet, will it become a home for the fuller's teasels, a warehouse for scrap iron, a carrier's stable? Who knows?

Stones have their destinies no less unexpected than ours.

When I took possession of it as a laboratory for the municipal course of lectures, the nave remained as it was at the time of my former short and disastrous visit. To the right, on the wall, a number of black stains struck the eye.