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Updated: June 3, 2025
His cymbals will never suffice to celebrate such felicity, so well earned although so ephemeral. There is another creature of the Midi which is quite as curious and interesting as the Cigale, but much less famous, as it is voiceless.
The second species, only half the size of the common Cigale, is known in Provence as the Cacan; the name, being a fairly exact imitation of the sound emitted by the insect. This is the Cigale of the flowering ash, far more alert and far more suspicious than the common species.
Let us consider this theft; a curious point of history as yet unknown. In July, during the stifling hours of the afternoon, when the insect peoples, frantic with drought, wander hither and thither, vainly seeking to quench their thirst at the faded, exhausted flowers, the Cigale makes light of the general aridity. With her rostrum, a delicate augur, she broaches a cask of her inexhaustible store.
Must not the larva of the Cigale bore its passage in some such fashion? I do not mean that the results of excavation pass through its body for earth, even the softest mould, could form no possible part of its diet. But is not the material detached simply thrust back behind the excavator as the work progresses? The Cigale passes four years under ground.
I have cited La Cigale, not because it is a very good play for it is not but because it shows the present carelessness of French dramatists in regard to dramatic construction. La Cigale is a very clever bit of work, but it has the slightest of plots, and this made out of old cloth; and the situations, in so far as there are any, follow each other as best they may.
He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time.
I have even seen the grasshopper, full of audacity, launch itself in pursuit of the Cigale, who fled in terror. So the sparrow-hawk pursues the skylark in the open sky. But the bird of prey is less ferocious than the insect; it pursues a creature smaller than itself.
The miner shores up his galleries with uprights and cross-timbers; the builder of underground railways supports the sides and roofs of his tunnels with a lining of brick or masonry or segments of iron tube; the larva of the Cigale, no less prudent an engineer, plasters the walls of its burrow with cement, so that the passage is always free and ready for use.
What name are we to give to this initial phase of the Cigale a phase so strange, so unforeseen, and hitherto unsuspected? Must I amalgamate some more or less appropriate words of Greek and fabricate a portentous nomenclature? No, for I feel sure that barbarous alien phrases are only a hindrance to science.
They depend not upon the initiative of the former; for the Cigale never required the help of others in order to make her living: on the contrary, they are due to the Ant, the greedy exploiter of others, who fills her granaries with every edible she can find.
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