We now know all about it. On leaving the maternal hut, without searching, without distant expeditions which would be so dangerous at that age, the little Psyche finds in the tender beams of the roof the wherewithal to clothe himself. He is spared the perils of roaming in a state of nudity. When he leaves the house, he will be quite warm, thanks to the mother, who takes care to instal her family in the old case and gives it choice materials to work with. If the grub-worm were to drop out of the hovel, if some gust of wind swept him to a distance, most often the poor mite would be lost. Ligneous straws, rich in pith, dry and retted to a turn, are not to be found everywhere. It would mean the impossibility of any clothing and, in that dire poverty, an early death. But, if suitable materials are encountered, equal in quality to those bequeathed by the mother, how is it that the exile is unable to make use of them? Let us look into this. I segregate a few new-born grubs in a glass tube and give them for their materials some split pieces of straw, picked from among the old stalks of a sort of dandelion, Pterotheca nemausensis. Though robbed of the inheritance of the maternal manor, the grubs seem very well satisfied with my bits. Without the least hesitation, they scrape out of them a superb white pith and make it into a delicious cloak, much handsomer than that which they would have obtained with the ruins of the native house, this latter cloak being always more or less flawed with darker materials, whose colour has been impaired by long exposure to the air. On the other hand, the Nîmes dandelion, a relic of last spring, has its central part, which I myself lay bare, a spotless white; and the cotton nightcap achieves the very perfection of whiteness. I obtain an even better result with rounds of sorghum-pith taken from the kitchen-broom. This time, the work has glittering crystalline points and looks like a thing built of grains of sugar. It is my manufacturers’ masterpiece. These two successes authorize me to vary the raw material still further. In the absence of new-born caterpillars, who are not always at my disposal, I employ grubs which I have undressed, that is to say, which I have taken out of their caps. To these divested ones I give, as the only thing to work upon, a strip of paper free from paste and easy to pick to pieces, in short, a piece of blotting-paper. Here again there is no hesitation. The grubs lustily scrape this surface, new to them though it be, and make themselves a paper coat of it. Cadet Roussel, [28] of famous memory, had a coat of similar stuff, but much less fine and silky. My paper-clad charges are so well-pleased with their materials that they scorn their native case, when it is afterwards placed at their disposal, and continue to scrape lint from the industrial product.