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Updated: June 3, 2025
The larger of the two is the common Cigale. Let me briefly describe the mechanism with which it produces its familiar note. On the under side of the body of the male, immediately behind the posterior limbs, are two wide semicircular plates which slightly overlap one another, the right hand lying over the left hand plate. These are the shutters, the lids, the dampers of the musical-box.
All the rest of the body is a pale green, whitish in places. Heat and a prolonged air-bath are necessary to harden and colour the fragile creature. Some two hours pass without any perceptible change. Hanging to its deserted shell by the two fore limbs, the Cigale sways to the least breath of air, still feeble and still green.
Yes, the Cigale, digging its chamber, the nucleus of the future shaft, seeks out the immediate neighbourhood of a small living root; it lays bare a certain portion, which forms part of the wall, without projecting. This living spot in the wall is the fountain where the supply of moisture is renewed.
Like Fabre, he had remained faithful to his native soil; that soil which the great naturalist had never been able to leave without at once longing impatiently to return to its dusty olives where the cigale sings, its ilex trees and its thickets; and so he lived far from the cities, in a quiet village, with the same horizon of plains and hills that were balmy with thyme, leading in his little home an equal life full of wisdom and simplicity.
And all day long drinks of the sugared sap of tender bark, and is silent only at night, sated with light and heat. The song, which forms part of the majestic symphony of the harvest-tide, announces merely its delight in existence. Having passed years underground, the cigale has only a month to reign, to be happy in a world of light, under the caressing sun.
By means of its terminal thread each sounds its cymbal, by depressing it and immediately releasing it, when its own elasticity makes it spring back into shape. These two vibrating scales are the source of the Cigale's cry. Do you wish to convince yourself of the efficiency of this mechanism? Take a Cigale but newly dead and make it sing. Nothing is simpler.
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.
Would you, on the other hand, silence a living Cigale? that obstinate melomaniac, who, seized in the fingers, deplores his misfortune as loquaciously as ever he sang the joys of freedom in his tree? It is useless to violate his chapels, to break his mirrors; the atrocious mutilation would not quiet him.
I have seen, crowding around the honeyed perforation, wasps, flies, earwigs, Sphinx-moths, Pompilidæ, rose-chafers, and, above all, ants. The smallest, in order to reach the well, slip under the belly of the Cigale, who kindly raises herself on her claws, leaving room for the importunate ones to pass.
For thirty years the common Cigale and his unmusical friend the Cacan have thrust their society upon me. For two months every summer I have them under my eyes, and their voice in my ears. If I do not listen to them very willingly I observe them with considerable zeal.
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