On the fourth night I took fourteen new-comers and set them apart as they came in a room in which they spent the night. On the morrow, profiting by their diurnal immobility, I removed a little of the hair from the centre of the corselet or neck. This slight tonsure did not inconvenience the insects, so easily was the silky fur removed, nor did it deprive them of any organ which might later on be necessary in the search for the female. To them it was nothing; for me it was the unmistakable sign of a repeated visit. This time there were none incapable of flight. At night the fourteen shavelings escaped into the open air. The cage, of course, was again in a new place. In two hours I captured twenty butterflies, of whom two were tonsured; no more. As for those whose antennae I had amputated the night before, not one reappeared. Their nuptial period was over. Of fourteen marked by the tonsure two only returned. Why did the other twelve fail to appear, although furnished with their supposed guides, their antennae? To this I can see only one reply: that the Great Peacock is promptly exhausted by the ardours of the mating season. With a view to mating, the sole end of its life, the great moth is endowed with a marvellous prerogative. It has the power to discover the object of its desire in spite of distance, in spite of obstacles. A few hours, for two or three nights, are given to its search, its nuptial flights. If it cannot profit by them, all is ended; the compass fails, the lamp expires. What profit could life hold henceforth? Stoically the creature withdraws into a corner and sleeps the last sleep, the end of illusions and the end of suffering. The Great Peacock exists as a butterfly only to perpetuate itself. It knows nothing of food. While so many others, joyful banqueters, fly from flower to flower, unrolling their spiral trunks to plunge them into honeyed blossoms, this incomparable ascetic, completely freed from the servitude of the stomach, has no means of restoring its strength. Its buccal members are mere vestiges, useless simulacra, not real organs able to perform their duties. Not a sip of honey can ever enter its stomach; a magnificent prerogative, if it is not long enjoyed. If the lamp is to burn it must be filled with oil. The Great Peacock renounces the joys of the palate; but with them it surrenders long life. Two or three nights--just long enough to allow the couple to meet and mate--and all is over; the great butterfly is dead.