PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



nx. 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 mouth- 

 fuls, another male held in her claws, impassive, his belly 

 chewed open. The male analote is much smaller and 

 weaker than the female; like his confrere 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 Margue- 

 rite 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: 

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