The Life of the Weevil 
The haricot has a reputation of another 
kind, a reputation more flatulent than flatter- 
ing. You eat it and then, as the saying goes, 
the sooner you are off the better. It there- 
fore lends itself to the coarse jests loved by 
the rabble, especially when these are put into 
words by the shameless genius of an 
Aristophanes or a Plautus. What stage 
effects could have been produced by the 
merest allusion to the noisy bean, raising 
guffaws of laughter from the mariners of 
Athens or the street-porters of Rome! Did 
the two comic poets, in the unfettered gaiety 
of a language less reserved than ours, ever 
refer to the virtues of the haricot? Not 
once. They are quite silent on the subject 
of the sonorous bean. 
The word haricot itself sets us thinking. 
It is an outlandish term, related to none of 
our expressions. Its turn of language, which 
is alien to our combinations of sounds, 
suggests to the mind some West-Indian 
jargon, as do caoutchouc and cocoa. Does 
the word, as a matter of fact, come from the 
American Redskins? Did we receive, to- 
gether with the bean, the name by which it is 
called in its native country? Perhaps so; 
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