Caterpillars

Caterpillars appear in Simone de Beauvoir’s account as the vulnerable creatures in Henry de Montherlant’s apologue, an episode that clarifies his pleasure in domination. As he urinates on them, he chooses which to spare and which to exterminate; their exposure to his arbitrary power makes his act, in her reading, a miniature display of sovereignty without reciprocity.

The Apologue of Life and Death

The act gives an otherwise ordinary bodily function the force of a decision over life and death. Montherlant takes laughing pity on caterpillars that persist in living and generally lets them go, while delighting in the game of deciding their fate. The insects’ vulnerability creates the stage on which he can experience himself as uniquely free: he gives or withdraws life without having to answer to the beings beneath him.

Beauvoir’s emphasis falls on the asymmetry of the encounter. The caterpillars cannot resist, return his judgment, or make claims on him; in their presence, the man experiences what she calls God’s despotic solitude. The scene therefore makes power appear absolute precisely because its objects are unable to reciprocate.

From Insects to Human Hierarchies

Beauvoir presents the apologue as a key to Montherlant’s treatment of women. The caterpillars must remain animals, she argues: their weaknesses are deliberately indulged, but their condition is enforced until they accept it. The parallel is not that women are literally insects, but that the same structure of domination can make a subordinated group’s vulnerability serve as proof of the ruler’s superiority.

She extends the comparison to the racial hierarchy of Louisiana and Georgia, where white observers were charmed by Black people’s petty thefts and lies because these confirmed their sense of racial superiority; those who persisted in honesty were treated worse. She also invokes the systematic degradation of people in concentration camps, through which a ruling race treated abjection as evidence of its supposedly superhuman essence. The caterpillars’ enforced helplessness thus belongs to a broader argument about how domination manufactures the apparent inferiority it claims merely to observe.

Interpretive Significance

The episode is significant not as an account of animal life on its own terms, but as a concentrated image of power that permits tenderness and cruelty to coexist under the ruler’s sole discretion. Sparing some caterpillars does not undo the violence: mercy, like destruction, remains an exercise of unanswerable control. Beauvoir uses that unstable mixture of pity and extermination to illuminate a social order in which the dominant party can appear kind or cruel while the subordinated have no power to refuse the role assigned to them.