The Naturalist and the Cat

THAT one — oh, by all means that big tawny-brown one with the blue gloss on his wings. How much is he? I’d like to buy that one.’

‘You may — you may.’

It is the barest of concessions. The naturalist is certainly not trying to encourage me. Not at all. He nods his gray head and averts his youthful blue eyes with an air of saying, ‘This is no affair of mine. The age of prodigality may be upon us, but I wash my hands of it.’

‘He’s such a beauty! But is he expensive?’

A serious look comes into the old man’s honest face and he answers slowly, ‘Yes, that butterfly comes to quite a bit — quite a bit.’

‘But how much?’

‘Quite a bit. I’d have to ask you— well — I suppose I’d have to ask you five francs fifty.’

Five francs fifty — for five francs and a half I can have this butterfly, this fullblown velvet flower with petals burnished and shimmering in a kind of radiance that vanishes the moment one tries to seize it and then flashes again unexpectedly at the edge of a wing. What else as beautiful could you buy for five francs fifty?

The naturalist pays no further attention to me. He has gone back to his place at the other side of the long table and is hunching himself over a delicate surgical operation involving minute pincers, aseptic cotton, trayfuls of pins and pointed brushes. It is as though an aerial catastrophe had spilled its precious débris on this table: plucked wings, split wing-covers, feet like crumpled hair. All this that once moved in flight at the other end of the world lies now in the top floor of a blackened house on the Left Bank, in the workshop of a mild, slow man who has no use for Paris and pays her no attention.

The slightly funereal odor of camphor and chlorine goes well with the silence that reigns here. And there is a mixed smell of burnt wood, musk, and fish oil from remains of skunk and otter. The leap of a little stuffed flying squirrel is caught immovably in a pine branch nailed to the wall. It is as though a single all-powerful gesture had suspended forever, in the very postures of motion, the lives of a thousand creatures born to dart, to run, to fly.

A letter as blue and ragged as a dead wing is lying near me on the table; it, too, has come from the other end of the world in forty days of traveling. ‘The season is over,’ writes the hunter of Lepidoptera, ‘and I am bringing back sixty butterflies in all. No doubt it will be years before another specimen of this variety gets to France.’

Then the murderous suns, the fevers, the swamps thick with heavy flowers, crazy butterflies, and glittering insects, the warm savannahs where snakes wind through the grass — none of these held any terror for the man who had set out to capture a butterfly or a beetle resembling a gleaming bullet or a molten drop of gold.

Dry and weightless between two thin sheets of paper, their bellies wrinkled and empty, they cross the oceans and come to rest at my friend the naturalist’s. A few days in beds of damp sand and moist blotting paper and they are supple enough for the operator’s hand to unfold and shape their shrunken corpses. The butterflies resume their satanic headdresses, their dancers’ bodices, and take on that unfailing air of impatience without expectancy that goes with butterflies mounted in full wing-spread.

On a softwood plank a beetle as big as a lark spreads his slit abdomen to be stuffed with cotton like a cheap doll; I can smell the odor of insect decay across the big room. Still further away a Morpho Sulkowsky in a benzine bath is purging his splendid but ailing motherof-pearl where the lustre has turned fatty. A dead-leaf butterfly, all the more leaflike in its own death, lies with folded wings veined and mould-spotted like an autumn leaf. The Memnon I have just bought looks at me with false owleyes painted on the underside of his wings. . . . Silence. . . .

‘ Rrrrr . . .’

A warm little creature — one thoroughly alive this time — brushes against my skirt and jumps to the table in a single noiseless bound, so precise that it has not stirred the big beetle’s paper harness or jarred a heap of glittering cantharides.

‘ Ah, here she is! She’s awake! ’

She . . . the color this word takes on in the naturalist’s mouth tells clearly enough that She is the revered demon of the house. She is a Siamese, small and perfect, dove-colored except for her mask, her mittens, and her ears, where the close fur is almost black. She came to France two years ago on the boat that brings the rare butterflies, the priceless Coleoptera; and two years have not yet tamed her — in the degrading sense we give this word.

The long table is her empire, but less so than the heart of her owner — her deferential owner who says She with awe and lowers his voice to describe the caprices of this Siamese princess.

‘She has even eaten a towel, Madame. It was a client’s fault — someone who came in here to-day. He did n’t know her and simply went up and tried to stroke her under the throat. She bit him and I had to punish her. So she took herself off into the bathroom and ate half a towel out of pure rage.’

She listens to him with the suggestion of a smile at the bottom of impenetrable eyes as blue as the iridescence on the Memnon’s brown-velvet wings. Then she moves away as though in defiance, stretches herself out between a mounting board covered with fragile butterflies and a heap of glass-topped boxes, and begins to lick her shadowy belly. The old man watches her proudly.

‘She has n’t so much as harmed a butterfly in two years,’ he confides. ‘She does n’t steal, she never tells a lie. But she has no use for a collar and she won’t bear having anyone stroke her.’

I stretch my hand toward her, in temptation. . . . Instantly a ripple runs over the cat’s fur, and her pale eyes, with the dreadful candor of the unsubmissive wild creature burning in them, warn me. I refuse the hint; blood begins to darken that lovely, pure glance, a sort of intoxication troubles it, and all at once white claw and tooth together leave their print on my rash hand. The little, too-living goddess of this exotic necropolis stands up before us, very straight, on a thick otter rug, and waits for either duel or punishment.

‘What a brave little beauty she is!’

‘Sh-h-h! Don’t laugh — don’t laugh at her,’ her slave whispers.

‘Why not?’

‘Because — she knows perfectly well what it is to be made fun of. And now when you go away — when we are alone here, she and I — she’ll pay me back for this.’