This is sublime. The reason that, nevertheless, makes me regret the little world of Birds,--those charming companions which bore me aloft on their wings not long ago,--is not their harmonious concerts, is not even the spectacle of their airy and sublime life--but because they understood me! We comprehended and we loved one another; we interchanged our languages. I spoke for the Bird, and the Bird sang for me. Having fallen from heaven at the threshold of the sombre kingdom, and in the presence of the mute and mysterious sons of night, what language am I to invent, and what signs of intelligence? How am I to exercise my wits to discover a mode of communicating with them? My voice and gestures do but drive them away. There is no glance of recognition in their eyes; no emotion visible on their inscrutable mask. Under its warrior-cuirass the Insect remains impenetrable. Does its heart--for it has one--beat after the fashion of mine? Its senses are infinitely subtle, but do they resemble _my_ senses? It seems as if they still remained apart, unknown, ay, and without a name. [Illustration] It escapes us; Nature has created for it, with respect to man, a perpetual _alibi_. If she reveals it to us for a moment in a single gleam of love, she hides it for years in the depths of the shadowy earth or in the discreet bosom of the oaks. And even when discovered, captured, opened, dissected, and examined by a microscope in every detail, it still remains to us an enigma. And an enigma of by no means reassuring character,--whose singularity almost scandalizes, while it so confuses our ideas. What shall we say of a being which breathes through its side and flanks? of a paradoxical walker, which, contrary to all other organisms, presents its back to the earth and its belly to the sky? In many respects, we may look upon the insect as a creature of contradictions. Add, moreover, that its littleness contributes to the misunderstanding. Every organ appears to us fantastic and threatening, because our weak eyes do not see it with sufficient clearness to be able to explain its structure and utility. What is imperfectly seen always perplexes; and therefore provisionally, we kill it! And it is so little, too, that we do not trouble ourselves to be just towards it. We are in no want of systems. We could willingly accept the definitive decree of a German dreamer, who sums up the whole matter in a word: "The good God made the world; but the devil made the insect!" [Illustration] The Insect, nevertheless, does not look upon itself as vanquished. To the systems of the philosopher and the terror of the child (which are, perhaps, both the same thing), this is its answer:-- In the first place, that Justice is universal, that size has nothing to do with Right; that if one could suppose the Right to be unequal in its application, and the Universal Love to incline the balance, it would be on the side of the little.