This wasp shuts its egg up in a large, prison-like cell, with a pile of live caterpillars beside it, to serve as its food, first half-paralyzing these victims so they will keep still. Alive but unable to move, the caterpillars lie there till the grub hatches out. (Dead caterpillars wouldn't do because this little grub loves fresh meat.)
The grub, hanging by a thread from the ceiling, now begins having dinner. "Head downward it is digging into the limp belly of one of the caterpillars," says Fabre. "The caterpillars grow restless," he adds. (There's a fine brutal touch!) The grub thereupon, to Fabre's delight, climbs back up its thread. It is only a baby; it's tender; and when those wretched caterpillars get to thrashing around, they might hurt the sweet infant. Not till "peace" is restored, Fabre adds, does Baby dare to come down again. Hideous infantile epicure! It takes another good juicy bite.
And if its dinner moans again, or wriggles, it again climbs back up.
Imagine some caterpillar reader shuddering at this horror--this lethal chamber where prominent caterpillars are slowly eaten alive. Yet scenes like this occur all through Fabre, and are described with great relish. If he wrote of them in a dry professional way, it would sound scientific, and I could read it in a cool, detached spirit with never a flutter. But he does it so humanly that you get to be friends with these creatures, and then he springs some grisly little scene on you that gives you the creeps, and explains to you that the said little scene is going on all the time; and it makes you feel as though there were nothing but red fangs in the world.
Fabre at one time was offered the post of tutor to Napoleon III's son, but he preferred to live in poverty in the country, where he could keep up his studies. No money, no honors could tempt him away from his work. Perhaps this was noble. But it seems to me he made a mistake. In fact, this was the greatest and most fatal mistake of his life.
If he had gone to Napoleon, he might have moped awhile at first, and felt guilty. But he would have gone right on loving insects and wanting to study them. Hence he would have soon begun looking around the palace for specimens. And this might have led to his discovering riches indoors.