"A blackbeetle?"

"Black or brown; it matters little. Have her ready for use in your
handkerchief: pull a long face: and says you--'Excuse me, sir, I have
THE MISFORTUNE not to know the Greek name of this merchandise here.' Say
that, and behold him launched. He will christen you the beast in Hebrew
and Latin as well as Greek, and tell you her history down from the
flood: next he will beg her of you, and out will come a cork and a pin,
and behold the creature impaled. For that is how men love beetles. He
has a thousand pinned down at home--beetles, butterflies, and so forth.
When I go near the rubbish with my duster he trembles like an aspen.
I pretend to be going to clean them, but it is only to see the face he
makes, for even a domestic must laugh now and then--or die. But I never
do clean them, for after all he is more stupid than wicked, poor man: I
have not therefore the sad courage to make him wretched."

"Let us return to our beetle--what will his tirades about its antiquity
advance me?"

"Oh! one begins about a beetle, but one ends Heaven knows where."

Riviere profited by this advice. He even improved on it. In due
course he threw himself into Aubertin's way. He stopped the doctor
reverentially, and said he had heard he was an entomologist. WOULD he
be kind enough to tell him what was this enormous chrysalis he had just
found?

"The death's head moth!" cried Aubertin with enthusiasm--"the death's
head moth! a great rarity in this district. Where found you this?"
Riviere undertook to show him the place.