to its search, its nuptial
flights. If it cannot profit by them, all is ended; the compass fails,
the lamp expires. What profit could life hold henceforth? Stoically the
creature withdraws into a corner and sleeps the last sleep, the end of
illusions and the end of suffering.

The Great Peacock exists as a butterfly only to perpetuate itself. It
knows nothing of food. While so many others, joyful banqueters, fly from
flower to flower, unrolling their spiral trunks to plunge them into
honeyed blossoms, this incomparable ascetic, completely freed from the
servitude of the stomach, has no means of restoring its strength. Its
buccal members are mere vestiges, useless simulacra, not real organs
able to perform their duties. Not a sip of honey can ever enter its
stomach; a magnificent prerogative, if it is not long enjoyed. If the
lamp is to burn it must be filled with oil. The Great Peacock renounces
the joys of the palate; but with them it surrenders long life. Two or
three nights--just long enough to allow the couple to meet and mate--and
all is over; the great butterfly is dead.

What, then, is meant by the non-appearance of those whose antennae I
removed? Did they prove that the lack of antennae rendered them incapable
of finding the cage in which the prisoner waited? By no means. Like
those marked with the tonsure, which had undergone no damaging
operation, they proved only that their time was finished. Mutilated or
intact, they could do no more on account of age, and their absence meant
nothing. Owing to the delay inseparable from the experiment, the part
played by the antennae escaped me. It was doubtful before; it remained
doubtful.

My prisoner under the wire-gauze cover lived for eight days. Every night
she attracted a swarm of visitors, now to one part of the house, now to
another. I caught them with the net and released them as soon as
captured in a closed room, where they passed the night. On the next day
they were marked, by means of a slight tonsure on the thorax.

The total number of butterflies attracted on these eight nights amounted
to a hundred and fifty; a stupendous number when I consider what
searches I had to undertake during the two following years in order to
collect the specimens necessary to the continuation of my investigation.
Without being absolutely undiscoverable, in my immediate neighbourhood
the cocoons of the Great Peacock are at least extremely rare, as the
trees on which they are fo