“A cosmopolitan, blood-sucking, wingless, depressive insect of a reddish-brown color and a fetid smell, infesting houses and especially beds.” Thus the writer Henry Miller, a great runner in moth-eaten rooms, described the bed bug in one of his first novels, Moloch, in 1928. The man prided himself on frequent attendance of the creature, which reappears often in his novels. In Tropique du Capricorne (1939), we marvel at the way the beast “remains waiting infinitely behind the wallpaper”, which recalls “the trance of the yogi, the catalepsy of the pathological individual”. In Black Spring (1936), the author clarifies his views on the presumed depressiveness of the animal by evoking "my friend Carl, who has the vitality of a bed bug", because he lives, like her, "hidden in tapestry”.

Indeed: Individuals of the species Cimex lectularius live in elusive, confined spaces – interstices, crevices, folds – where they “spend most of their time waiting,” writes Brooke Borel, a science journalist spotted in Popular magazines. Science, Slate or Aeon and author of Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World, biological, social and cultural history of the bed bug, published in May by the University of Chicago Press.

In the appendices of the book, the author compiles literary extracts – from Horace to Allen Ginsberg, via Goethe, David Herbert Lawrence and John Steinbeck – as well as the titles of 80 pieces of music evoking the animal: this includes Bessie Smith (“Mean Old Bedbug Blues”, 1927), the new wave group Echo and the Bunnymen (“Bedbugs and Ballyhoo”, 1987) and the Rolling Stones (“Shattered”, 1978, postcard with punk echoes of a New frantic and degraded York). By the time these latter two bands put the bug in their songs, and by the time Henry Miller returned to it once again in his 1960 novel Nexus ("Peaceful as a bedbug, I slept"), the animal is now part of bohemian legend and faded memory. In real life, there are almost none left.

Let's think: when did we first hear about it? Five, ten years ago? Fifteen years, at the most? The phenomenon appears to us today as new. When in fact, for almost all of its history, humanity has slept with Cimex. In the Acts of John (a biblical apocrypha), the apostle speaks to the bugs, and they obey. The Talmud, which contains an entire treatise (Michna Nida) devoted to the supposed impurity of menstruating women, specifies that the prohibition is lifted if the woman demonstrates that blood has smeared her bed because of a bed bug.

And also: the oldest specimen found by archaeologists dates from 1350 BC. AD and comes from a bedroom at the Egyptian site of Tell el-Amarna, near the tomb of Pharaoh Akhenaten. The ancient Greeks ate the insect with beans to cure fevers or snakebites. In Rome, Pliny the Elder claimed that it could be used against earaches.