The Batrachian Exchange

A Discourse upon the Trade in Princes, with Some Remarks on the Temperature of Water

I.

Let us begin, as all honest trades begin, with the raw material: the frog.

He sits on his lily pad the way a bad poem sits on a page, green, glistening, too wet for the occasion and quite sure of his own importance. His eyes stand up from his head like two small periscopes from a submarine that will never surface. His throat swells and falls with a patience that looks like wisdom and is only breathing. He is, as the old physician of Norwich put it, "that great and true Amphibium," a creature built to live in two worlds and belong to neither. He is too dry for the fish and too damp for the drawing room. Every mother whose daughter has brought one home knows the type.

The frog has qualities, and we should list them fairly before we start selling him things. He can jump many times his own length, though mostly away from things. He has a tongue of astonishing speed and no conversation. He sings, loudly and without shame, at night, to no one in particular, which is also how most men sing. He has survived three mass extinctions by keeping his expectations low and his skin moist. He is, in his own way, magnificent, the way a pawnshop is magnificent: full of other people's former promise.

But he is not a prince. That is the whole difficulty, and the whole business.

II.

For there is a business. Do not imagine that transformation is left to chance and wandering princesses. There is an industry now, a whole guild of amphibian alchemists with ring lights and microphones, who stand at the edge of the marsh and call out their prices. Forty-nine dollars for the jawline. Two hundred for the posture. A monthly subscription to the Kingdom Mindset, cancel anytime, though few cancel and fewer arrive. They sell the protocols of princely conversion: cold plunges, hot yoga, creatine, eye contact held for exactly three and a half seconds, the correct way to lean against a bar, the incorrect way to text back. They have maps of the castle, though none of them, if you look closely at the maps, has ever been inside.

Still, the trade is not wholly fraudulent. It rests on a real observation, one every biologist and every bartender has confirmed: frogs do change. The tadpole, that small swimming comma, grows legs it never ordered. Then, and this is the detail the brochures leave out, it takes in its own tail. It feeds on its past. The old self is not thrown away; it is digested and turned into the new self's first breakfast. Metamorphosis is not a costume change. It is a meal, and you are the main course.

III.

Now to the water, because every discussion of frogs ends up in hot water sooner or later.

You know the fable. Drop a frog into boiling water and he leaps out at once, offended and unharmed. Put him in cool water and warm it slowly, one polite degree at a time, and he stays, lulled and accommodating, until he is soup. The moralists love this story. They tell it to warn us about creeping tyranny, bad marriages, and the gradual tightening of the belt.

I should point out, with the pleasure of a pedant pinning a specimen, that the fable is false. Real frogs, warmed slowly, get restless and leave. The frog is smarter than the parable made about him. It is only men who stay in the pot.