The Flea.
Par Jean Painlevé
There are various types of flea, including the tongue flea, common among emotional people. Of the aphaniptera order (which means “dark wing”… maybe they fly at night – is this why it’s so difficult to catch them?), the human flea, pulex irritans, is jumpy and prickly in temperament.
The flea is the record holder of the animal world: only 2-3 millimetres in size, it can clear a height of 12 centimetres and a distance of 25 centimetres (50 times its own size). All this physical training has completely deformed it, however, and it is far from streamlined in shape. Quite the opposite indeed: it is ugly, badly designed, the back end too high, too fat, with a small head, legs out of proportion with the rest of its body, a bit of a hotchpotch in construction.
With small stubborn eyes, a dispassionate mouth which twists into the grimace of an introverted intellectual, the flea has nevertheless a strong attachment to man. And by showing affection towards them, we can train performing fleas to pull little carriages; however, their uses are fairly minimal.
Red-brown in colour, and lightly covered in hairs, the flea has given its name to a colour (puce, in English as in as French), just as the expression comme le noir de l’ongle (wafer-thin), often used by a famous beauty product designer, gives us a means of measurement. It would be delightful to name fashion colours after such characteristics: puce suit, louse-coloured boxer shorts, bug-coloured shirt. The boss might give you a flea in your ear if you turned up at work dressed like that!
The flea is renowned in France for its lightness of touch, since we say, in talking about an intellectual who has had an influence on our experience: “Oh! He gave me a coup de puce”, meaning a bit of a boost, a nudge in the right direction.
After an uneventful love-life, the female, fit as the proverbial flea, lays around twenty elongated eggs, from which yellowy grubs will emerge. Rustic in their tastes, the larvae weave a delightful cocoon all by themselves without the help of a spindle, and live on detritus, which they will remain reduced to eating even as adults when they are abandoned by heartless animals; thin and weak for eating only dust bacteria (vitamin E), they aren’t even strong enough to bite when a dense army of them makes a mad dash to the ill-advised tenant returning to his abandoned house after two months away - they die on their breakfast.
We have already rung alarm bells for the disappearance of fleas: the species is in steep decline and if we are not careful we will soon have to find another means of transmitting plague.
In order to make up for this sad prospect, consider the merry, villainous little cocoon, a millimetre in length, whose female swells up like a balloon when carrying eggs. The most famous, Chiquita del Aouahouah, is a dog flea.
Fleas are nice enough, but you can have too many of them. Getting rid of them is a problem for the meticulous housewife, because the flea finds a perverse pleasure in not being caught: there it is one minute minding its own business, strolling around, then suddenly, you sneak up on it, fingers at the ready to pounce upon it, squish it - and boing! … with a tremendous leap it is airborn. On the other hand, tedious repetitive training is probably needed to persuade them to commit suicide, by sneezing next to a stone which has been sprinkled with pepper and skillfully edged towards them.
Making an example of one flea is not enough; a general solution is preferable. The most effective is to frighten them off. A big fire will make them never want to come back.
Jean Painlevé
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