Girault and the bed bugs

Alexandre Arsène Girault checked into an elegantly furnished room in one of the best hotels in Cincinnati on October 29, 1907. It was close to midnight. Later he would have occasion to ask the hotel manager if anyone had slept in his room the night before.

Girault worked for the U.S. Bureau of Entomology. He was 23. His major work on chalcid wasps — and the many “eccentricities” that were to shape his tragic life — were in the future.

He takes pains to describe the events of the night in detail. This is his description of the room:

This room was on the second floor, and proved to be a rather small one, about 18 feet long and about 12 feet wide. It was elegantly and neatly furnished, with the walls painted a dark gray and ornamented with mural paintings of flowers; the floor was well carpeted. The bed was of iron, painted black, and the whole room, including the rest of the furniture, presented the usual neat, cleanly, and attractive appearance found in hotels of this class. The room was lighted with two 16-candle power electric globes on a chandelier suspended from the middle of the ceiling, and about six and a half feet above the floor. Also these lights were just about four feet above the bottom third of the iron bedstead; the bed was therefore in full glare of the light. A neat, bronzed steam radiator supplied heat.

The temperature in the room was 75dF.

I found a photograph of a (comparable?) hotel room, c. 1910:

A room in the Chittenden Hotel, Columbus, Ohio, c. 1910 - Library of Congress

And this is Cincinnati in 1907:

(And for more history, this is the lobby of the Hotel Havlin, one of the grand Cincinnati hotels of this time, but perhaps too grand for the account in question.)

At 12:30 am Girault noticed a third instar nymph on the bedspread:

[T]his nymph was pale. I killed it. After this, I looked the bed over, and finally decided not to get into it, but to lie across it after disrobing, leave the lights on and obtain such sleep as possible under the circumstances.

He left the light on. Like all of us have done.

This lasted half an hour before he saw several bed bugs crawling away from him “swollen with blood” — they were 2nd, 3rd, and 4th instars:

The time was about 1:20 A. M. Between this hour and 3:30 A. M., I dozed off from time to time, lying in the same place, but distinctly remember waking at 2 A. M. and 3:20 A. M. and discovering numerous specimens hurrying away over the coverlid. Each time I arose and killed all of the bugs in sight, and also those, which having been glutted from the host, had left it, crawled 2 or 3 feet away, and were hiding in the bed linen; these latter were discovered after a brief search, and were evidently hiding temporarily. At both of these times, the majority of the insects were in instars III and IV, but two were found in V, and one in I, the latter discovered coolly feeding from my fingers, and from its color, evidently obtaining its first meal. At 2 o’clock, I also killed one or two rather pale nymphs of about instar III, crawling toward the host. No adults were observed.

No adults. And one first instar.

At 3:30 am he called it quits and slept in a rocking chair until 6:00 am.

At 9:00 am he conducted a search of the bed and the room but could not find any bed bugs. There was a suitable crevice at the head of the bed but there were no bed bugs there either. The mattress was a hair mattress with covered springs. He thought they were hiding in the spring coverings. He found no bed bugs and no eggs.

And the previous night’s guests?

I learned through the kindness of the hotel management that the room had been occupied on Oct. 28th by two persons, but in spite of that fact, the bedbugs which I encountered did not seem to have been recently fed. Unfortunately, I could not ascertain whether the bed had been utilized, or whether they spent the night there.

Incredibly, this was not Girault’s first account of what he called “very unpleasant experiences” with old Cimex l. There’s a great deal more, as always! Hopefully we can review some of it next.

A. Arsène Girault, Notes on the Feeding Habits of Cimex lectularius Linnaeus, Psyche, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 85-87, 1908. doi:10.1155/1908/85427

These pages may be of related interest:

1. Girault, cont’d
2. The poet and the bed bugs
3. The extravagant optimism of the DDT era
4. You have been on a Dundee tram, I perceive
5. Johnson’s hut