It was impossible to make out what they wished. Were they enjoying a festival of love? Were they devouring one another? Right through this distraught multitude of _fiancés_ who had lost their senses passed other and wingless ants, which threw themselves without mercy on the most embarrassed individuals, bit them, and treated them so severely, that we thought we could see them crunching the lovers. But no! They wanted nothing more than to force them to obey, and to recall them to their senses. Their vivid pantomime was the counsel of prudence translated into action. The wingless ants were the wise and irreproachable nurses, who, having no children, bring up those of the others, and bear all the burden of the toil and management of the city. * * * * * These virgins maintained a surveillance over the amorous and slothful, and rigidly inspected the marriage-festival as a public act, which, every year, renews the nation. Their natural fear was lest the winged fools should be wooed and won elsewhere, and create other tribes, without any thought of the parent community. Numbers of the winged ones submitted, and allowed themselves to be carried below towards their country and virtue. But many tore themselves away, and flew afar, obedient only to the dictates of love and caprice. It was an astonishing vision, a fantastic dream, which can never be forgotten. In the morning nothing remained as a memorial of the excesses of the preceding evening, except the fragments of some severed wings, in which no one could have divined the trace of a unique _soirée d'amour_. [Illustration] [Illustration: III.--THE ANTS: THEIR FLOCKS AND THEIR SLAVES.] [Illustration] CHAPTER III. THE ANTS:--THEIR FLOCKS AND THEIR SLAVES. When I learned for the first time, from the pages of Huber, the strange and prodigious fact that certain ants keep slaves, I was greatly astonished--as everybody has been by this singular revelation--but I was especially saddened and wounded. What! I turn aside from the history of man in search of innocence. I hope at least to discover among the brute creation the even-handed justice of nature, the primitive rectitude of the plan of creation. I seek in this people, whom I had previously loved and esteemed for their laboriousness and temperateness, the severe and touching image of republican virtues--and I find among them this thing without a name! What a joy, what a triumph for the partisans of slavery, for all the friends of evil! Hell and tyranny, laugh ye, and make merry! A black spot is revealed in the brightness of Nature. I had flung aside Huber, and no book had ever seemed to me more hateful. Pardon, illustrious observer! your grandfather and your father had enraptured and charmed me. The first of the clan--Huber, the great historian of the bees--has inspired with new warmth the religion of man, and lifted up his heart. But Huber of the ants has broken mine.