The Life of the Scorpion

The Scorpion is an uncommunicative creature, secret in his practices and disagreeable to deal with, so that his history, apart from anatomical detail, amounts to little or nothing. The scalpel of the experts has made us acquainted with his organic structure; but no observer, as far as I know, has thought of interviewing him, with any sort of persistence, on the subject of his private habits. Ripped up, after being steeped in spirits of wine, he is very well-known; acting within the domain of his instincts, he is hardly known at all. And yet none of the segmented animals is more deserving of a detailed biography. He has at all times appealed to the popular imagination, even to the point of figuring among the signs of the zodiac. Fear made the gods, said Lucretius. Deified by terror, the Scorpion is immortalized in the sky by a constellation and in the almanac by the symbol for the month of October.

I made the acquaintance of the Languedocian Scorpion (Scorpio occitanus, LAT) half a century ago, in the Villeneuve hills, on the far side of the Rhone, opposite Avignon. When the thrice-blessed Thursday came, from morning till night I used to turn over the stones in quest of the Scolopendra, the chief subject of the thesis which I was preparing for my doctor’s degree. Sometimes, instead of that magnificent horror, the mighty Myriapod, I would find, under the raised stone, another and no less unpleasant recluse. It was he. With his tail turned over his back and a drop of poison gleaming at the end of the sting, he lay displaying his pincers at the entrance to a burrow. Br-r-r-r! Have done with the formidable creature! The stone fell back into its place.

Utterly tired out, I used to return from my excursions rich in Scolopendræ and richer still in those illusions which paint the future rose-colour when we first begin to bite freely into the bread of knowledge. Science! The witch! I used to come home with joy in my heart: I had found some Centipedes. What more was needed to complete my ingenuous happiness? I carried off the Scolopendræ and left the Scorpions behind, not without a secret feeling that a day would come when I should have to concern myself with them.

Fifty years have elapsed; and that day has come. It behoves me, after the Spiders, his near neighbours in organization, to cross-examine my old acquaintance, chief of the Arachnids in our district. It so happens that the Languedocian Scorpion abounds in my neighbourhood; nowhere have I seen him so plentiful as on the Sérignan hills, with their sunny, rocky slopes beloved by the arbutus and the arborescent heath. There the chilly creature finds a sub-tropical temperature and also a sandy soil, easy to dig. This is, I think, as far as he goes towards the north.

His favourite spots are the bare expanses poor in vegetation, where the rock, outcropping in vertical strata, is baked by the sun and worn by the wind and rain until it ends by crumbling into flakes. He is usually found in colonies at quite a distance from one another, as though the members of a single family, migrating in all directions, were becoming a tribe. It is not sociability, it is anything but that. Excessively intolerant and passionately devoted to solitude, they continually occupy their shelters alone. In vain do I seek them out: I never find two of them under the same stone; or, to be more accurate, when there are two, one is engaged in eating the other. We shall have occasion to see the savage hermit ending the nuptial festivities in this fashion.