Fabre was unable to see the mating of the green grass-hopper, which takes place at night, but he observed the long preludes; he has seen the slow play of soft antennæ. The result of the coupling is the same as with all locustians; the female chews and swallows the genital ampulla. She is a terrible beast of prey who eats alive a huge cicada, who fearlessly sucks the entrails of a wriggling cockchafer. One can't say whether she eats her male, dead or alive; it is very probable for he is quite timid. Another dectic, the Alpine analote, has given Fabre the alarming spectacle: a male on his back, a female on his belly, the genital organs joining end to end in this single contact, and while she was receiving the fecundative caress, the enigmatic female, with the fore part of her body raised, was gnawing with little mouthfuls, another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly chewed open. The male analote is much smaller and weaker than the female; like his confrère the spider, he flees with greatest possible speed after the end of coition; he is very often nipped. In the case observed by Fabre, the meal was doubtless the end of a preceding amour: these locustians have the habit, rare among insects, of receiving several suitors. Truly this cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne is a fine type of beast, and gives a fine spectacle, not of immorality, an empty term, but of the serenity of nature, which permits all things, wills all things, and for whom there are neither vices nor virtues, but only movements and chemic reactions. The spermatophore of the ephippiger is enormous, nearly half the size of the animal. The nuptial feast is finished according to the same rite, and the female, having finished the leather-bottle spermatophore, adds thereto the poor emptied male. She does not even wait until he is dead; she chops him up, as he is dying, limb by limb: having fecundated her with all his blood, he must feed her with all his flesh.