PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



them and to grind them. Nothing appears more clear 

 than maternal love, and nothing is more widespread 

 throughout all nature: yet nothing gives a falser inter- 

 pretation of the acts which these two words pretend to 

 explain. One makes a virtue of it, that is to say, in the 

 Christian sense, a voluntary act; one seems to think that 

 it depends on the mother to love or not to love her 

 children, and one considers culpable those who relax or 

 forget their motherly cares. Like generation, motherly 

 love is a commandment; it is the second condition of the 

 perpetuity of life. Mothers sometimes are without it; 

 some mothers also are sterile: the will intervenes neither 

 in one case nor in the other. As the rest of nature, as 

 ourselves, animals live submitted to necessity, they do 

 what they ought to do, so far as their organs permit them. 

 The mantis who eats her husband is an excellent egg-layer 

 who prepares, passionately, the future of her progeny. 



After Fabre's observations of couples of these insects 

 caged, the female much stronger than the male mantes, 

 are the predatory ones, who do combat for love. The 

 combats are deadly, the vanquished female is eaten at 

 once. The male is bashful. At the moment of desire he 

 limits himself to posing, to making sheep's eyes, which 

 the female seems to consider with indifference or disdain. 

 Tired of parade, he finally decides, and with spread wings, 

 leaps trembling upon the back of the ogress. The mating 

 lasts five or six hours; when the knot is loosed, the suitor 

 is, regularly, eaten. The terrible female is polyandrous. 

 Other insects refuse the male when their ovaries have 

 been fecundated, the mantis accepts two, three, four, up 

 to seven; and Bluebeard, eats them regularly after the 

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