France 1892-1893.
Edward Harrison Barker, Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside, 1894.
Chapter: In the Viscounty of Turenne. But there were myriads of flies, and too many hornets for my comfort, for some of them followed me with impertinent curiosity.
Chapter: In Upper Perigord. The flies then awoke, refreshed but hungry, and determined to make the most of a good opportunity. The house-flies of the North, when compared to those of the South, seem to have been well brought up, and trained to live with human beings on terms of civility, if not of friendship. The flies of Southern France must be descended from those that were sent to worry Pharaoh, and when one has lived with them during the months of August and September, one can quite believe that their ancestors exasperated the Egyptian king to the point of promising anything so that they might be taken from him.
….
While I was seated at the table, the old woman, who now dozed over her distaff in the chimneycorner, would start up every five minutes or so, as if from the beginning of a nightmare, and rush at the flies, which were ravenously busy upon the grapes and pears that I had set aside for them. She hated them with a hatred so fierce and bitter that I thought it rather unbecoming at her time of life.
‘On ne pent rien manger,‘ she said, ‘sans que ces diables y touchent.‘
This was quite true; but it was not the flies’ fault that their parents were prolific, and that they had been hatched in a climate eminently conducive to their vigour and happiness. Their numbers and their voracity showed that they, too, were compelled by the struggle for life to be active and enterprising.
