I have wished for a few things in my life, none of them capable of interfering with the common weal. I have longed to possess a pond, screened from the indiscretion of the passers by, close to my house, with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed. Here, in my leisure hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have meditated upon aquatic life, a primitive life, easier than our own, simpler in its affections and its brutalities. I should have watched the unalloyed happiness of the mollusk, the frolics of the Whirligig, the figure-skating of the Hydrometra [a water bug known as the Pond skater], the dives of the Dytiscus beetle, the veering and tacking of the Notonecta [the water boatman], who, lying on her back, rows with two long oars, while her short forelegs, folded against her chest, wait to grab the coming prey. I should have studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein focuses of life are condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens.
I should have admired the nascent creature that turns, slowly turns in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the draft, perhaps, of the future shell. No planet circles round its center of attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.
I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to the pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of water. I have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of glass. A poor shift! Our laboratory aquariums are not even equal to the print left in the mud by a mule's hoof, when once a shower has filled the humble basin and life has stocked it with its marvels.
In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the crickets at their concerts, a second wish often came to me. Along the road, I light upon a dead mole, a snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly. The mole was draining the soil and purging it of its vermin. Finding him under his spade, the laborer broke his back for him and flung him over the hedge. The snake, roused from her slumber by the soft warmth of April, was coming into the sun to shed her skin and take on a new one. Man catches sight of her:
'Ah, would you? ' says he. 'See me do something for which the world will thank me!'
And the harmless beast, our auxiliary in the terrible battle which husbandry wages against the insect, has its head smashed in and dies.
The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoever approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave death's artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most deserving work.
To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life's treasure house: these are things that long haunted my mind. Iregretfully left the mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophizing over a stench. What would people say who passed and saw me!
And what will the reader himself say, if I invite him to that sight? Surely, to busy one's self with those squalid sextons means soiling one's eyes and mind? Not so, if you please! Within the domain of our restless curiosity, two questions stand out above all others: the question of the beginning and the question of the end.
How does matter unite in order to assume life? How does it separate when returning to inertia? The pond, with its Planorbis eggs turning round and round, would have given us a few data for the first problem; the Mole, going bad under conditions not too repulsive, will tell us something about the second: he will show us the working of the crucible wherein all things are melted to begin anew. A truce to nice delicacy! Odi profanum vulgus et arceo;hence, ye profane: you would not understand the mighty lesson of the rag tank.
I am now in a position to realize my second wish. I have space, air and quiet in the solitude of the harmas. None will come here to trouble me, to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So far, so good; but observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of passers by, I have to fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who, finding my preparations, will not fail to spoil and scatter them.
In anticipation of their misdeeds, I establish workshops in midair, whither none but genuine corruption agents can come, flying on their wings. At different points in the enclosure, I plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their free ends, form a stable tripod. From each of these supports, I hang, at a man's height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at the bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain. Igarnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The snake, the lizard, the toad receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which enable me better to follow the first attack and the work of the invaders. I ring the changes with furred and feathered beasts. Afew children of the neighborhood, allured by pennies, are my regular purveyors. Throughout the good season, they come running triumphantly to my door, with a snake at the end of a stick, or a lizard in a cabbage leaf. They bring me the rat caught in a trap, the chicken dead of the pip, the mole slain by the gardener, the kitten killed by accident, the rabbit poisoned by some weed. The business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and buyer.
No such trade had ever been known before in the village nor ever will be again.
