Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
I observe no sign of satisfaction in the females; I have never seen them tremble or sway upon their feet, though their lovers have clashed their cymbals with the most deafening vigour. My neighbours the peasants say that at harvest-time the Cigale sings to them: Sego, sego, sego!
"But love eh, ma cigale!" Then he took her eagerly, tenderly into his arms; and probably he had then the best moment in his life. Sophie Farcinelle saw them driving back together. She was sitting at early supper with Magon, when, raising her head at the sound of wheels, she saw Christine laughing and Ferrol leaning affectionately towards her.
We do not know precisely what story the reed-pen of the Hindoo may have confided to writing, in order to show the perils of a life without foresight; but it is probable that the little animal drama was nearer the truth than the conversation between the Cigale and the Ant. India, the friend of animals, was incapable of such a mistake.
From a mass of undigested knowledge he has created the living science of entomology, which had received from Réaumur a first breath of vitality, in such wise that each individual creature is presented in his work with its precise expression and the absolute truth of its character and attitudes; the inhabitants of the woods and fields, whether those which feed upon the crops or those which live in the crevices of the rocks, or the obscure workers that crawl upon the earth; all those which have a secret to tell or something to teach us; the Cigale, so different from the insect of the Fable; and above all that beetle whose name had hitherto been encountered arrayed in the most fantastic legends, the famous Scarabaeus sacer of the tombs, which Fabre preferred to place at the head of his epic as an agreeable prologue, although the inquiry relative to his amazing feats belongs chronologically to a comparatively recent period of his career.
Sometimes I go to the Luxembourg gardens to hear the band bray sad music, or to watch the little boys play diavolo, or sail their tiny boats about the fountain pond; sometimes I walk quite silently up the Avenue Gabriel, with its triste line of trees, and dream that I am a Grand Duke; in the evening there are again the terrasses of the cafés, dinner in Montmartre at the Clou, or the Cou-Cou, a revue at La Cigale, but it is all governed, my day and my night, by what happens and by whom I meet.... Have you seen Jacques Blanche's portrait of Nijinsky?"
At the moment when it issues from the earth the larva, soiled with mire, "resembles a sewer-man; its eyes are whitish, nebulous, squinting, blind." Then "it clings to some twig, it splits down the back, rejects its discarded skin, drier than horny parchment, and becomes the Cigale, which is at first of a pale grass-green hue." Then, "Half drunken with her joy, she feasts In a hail of fire";
It is as though a heap of dry walnuts were being shaken up in a bag until the shells broke. This painful concert, which is a real torment, offers only one compensation: the Cigale of the flowering ash does not begin his song so early as the common Cigale, and does not sing so late in the evening.
The first notes are heard about seven or eight o'clock in the morning, and the orchestra ceases only when the twilight fails, about eight o'clock at night. The concert lasts a whole round of the clock. But if the sky is grey and the wind chilly the Cigale is silent.
True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the frogs, croak they never so amorously, among the willows in the plains below is a poor exchange for the chant of the cigale. But these mills look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.
But these are exceptions; what the Cigale really prefers is a slender twig of a thickness varying from that of a straw to that of a pencil. It should have a thin woody layer and plenty of pith. If these conditions are fulfilled the species matters little.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking