Cuvier and Jussieu, even if I had afterwards to solve that other arduous
problem: how to procure one's daily bread. Ah, young men, my successors,
what an easy time you have of it today! If you don't know it, then let
me tell you so by means of these few pages from the life of one of your
elders.

But let us not forget our insects, while listening to the echoes of
illusions and difficulties roused in my memories by the cupboard window
and the hired blackboard. Let us go back to the sunken roads of the
Legue, which have become classic, so they say, since the appearance of
my notes on the Oil beetles. Ye illustrious ravines, with your sun-baked
slopes, if I have contributed a little to your fame, you, in your turn,
have given me many fair hours of forgetfulness in the happiness of
learning. You, at least, did not lure me with vain hopes; all that you
promised you gave me and often a hundredfold. You are my promised land,
where I would have sought at the last to pitch my observer's tent. My
wish was not to be realized. Let me, at least, in passing, greet my
beloved animals of the old days.

I raise my hat to Cerceris tuberculata, whom I see engaged on that
slant, storing her Cleonus [a large species of weevil]. As I saw her
then, so I see her now: the same staggering attempts to hoist the prey
to the mouth of the burrow; the same brawls between males watching in
the brushwood of the kermes oak. The sight of them sends a younger blood
coursing through my veins; I receive as it were the breath of a new
springtime of life. Time presses; let us pass on.

Another bow on this side. I hear buzzing up above, on that ledge, a
colony of Sphex wasps, stabbing their crickets. We will give them a
friendly glance, but no more. My acquaintances here are too numerous;
I have not the leisure to renew my former relations with all of them.
Without stopping, a wave of the hat to the Philanthi [bee-hunting wasps]
who send the long avalanches of rubbish streaming down from their
nests; and to Stizus ruficornis, [a hunting wasp] who stacks her praying
mantises between two flakes of sandstone; and to the silky Ammophila
[a digger wasp] with the red legs, who collects an underground store of
loopers [also known as measuring worms, the larvae or caterpillars of
the geometrid moth] and to the Tachtyti [hunting wasps], devourers of
locusts; and to the Eumenes, builders of clay cupolas on a bough.

Here we are at last. This high, perpendicular roc