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Fabre, Poet of Science

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Title: Fabre, Poet of Science

Author: Georges Victor Legros

Translator: Bernard Miall


        
Release date: October 1, 2002 [eBook #3489]
                Most recently updated: October 15, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3489

Credits: This etext was produced by Sue Asscher


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FABRE, POET OF SCIENCE ***
FABRE, POET OF SCIENCE

by DR. G.-V. LEGROS.




"De fimo ad excelsa."
J.-H. Fabre.

WITH A PREFACE BY JEAN-HENRI FABRE.

TRANSLATED BY BERNARD MIALL.




PREFACE.

The good friend who has so successfully terminated the task which he felt a
vocation to undertake thought it would be of advantage to complete it by
presenting to the reader a picture both of my life as a whole and of the
work which it has been given me to accomplish.

The better to accomplish his undertaking, he abstracted from my
correspondence, as well as from the long conversations which we have so
often enjoyed together, a great number of those memories of varying
importance which serve as landmarks in life; above all in a life like mine,
not exempt from many cares, yet not very fruitful in incidents or great
vicissitudes, since it has been passed very largely, in especial during the
last thirty years, in the most absolute retirement and the completest
silence.

Moreover, it was not unimportant to warn the public against the errors,
exaggerations, and legends which have collected about my person, and thus
to set all things in their true light.

In undertaking this task my devoted disciple has to some extent been able
to replace those "Memoirs" which he suggested that I should write, and
which only my bad health has prevented me from undertaking; for I feel that
henceforth I am done with wide horizons and "far-reaching thoughts."

And yet on reading now the old letters which he has exhumed from a mass of
old yellow papers, and which he has presented and co-ordinated with so
pious a care, it seems to me that in the depths of my being I can still
feel rising in me all the fever of my early years, all the enthusiasm of
long ago, and that I should still be no less ardent a worker were not the
weakness of my eyes and the failure of my strength to-day an insurmountable
obstacle.

Thoroughly grasping the fact that one cannot write a biography without
entering into the sphere of those ideas which alone make a life
interesting, he has revived around me that world which I have so long
contemplated, and summarized in a striking epitome, and as a strict
interpreter, my methods (which are, as will be seen, within the reach of
all), my ideas, and the whole body of my works and discoveries; and despite
the obvious difficulty which such an attempt would appear to present, he
has succeeded most wonderfully in achieving the most lucid, complete, and
vital exposition of these matters that I could possibly have wished.

Jean-Henri Fabre.

Sérignan, Vaucluse,
November 12, 1911.


CONTENTS.


PREFACE.


INTRODUCTION.


CHAPTER 1. THE INTUITION OF NATURE.


CHAPTER 2. THE PRIMARY TEACHER.


CHAPTER 3. CORSICA.


CHAPTER 4. AT AVIGNON.


CHAPTER 5. A GREAT TEACHER.


CHAPTER 6. THE HERMITAGE.


CHAPTER 7. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.


CHAPTER 8. THE MIRACLE OF INSTINCT.


CHAPTER 9. EVOLUTION OR "TRANSFORMISM."


CHAPTER 10. THE ANIMAL MIND.


CHAPTER 11. HARMONIES AND DISCORDS.


CHAPTER 12. THE TRANSLATION OF NATURE.


CHAPTER 13. THE EPIC OF ANIMAL LIFE.


CHAPTER 14. PARALLEL LIVES.


CHAPTER 15. THE EVENINGS AT SÉRIGNAN.


CHAPTER 16. TWILIGHT.


NOTES.


INDEX.



INTRODUCTION.

Here I offer to the public the life of Jean-Henri Fabre; at once an
admiring commentary upon his work and an act of pious homage, such as ought
to be offered, while he lives, to the great naturalist who is even to-day
so little known.

Hitherto it was not easy to speak of Henri Fabre with exactitude. An enemy
to all advertisement, he has so discreetly held himself withdrawn that one
might almost say that he has encouraged, by his silence, many doubtful or
unfounded rumours, which in course of time would become even more
incorrect.

For example, although quite recently his material situation was presented
in the gloomiest of lights, while it had really for some time ceased to be
precarious, it is none the less true that during his whole life he has had
to labour prodigiously in order to earn a little money to feed and rear his
family, to the great detriment of his scientific inquiries; and we cannot
but regret that he was not freed from all material cares at least twenty
years earlier than was the case.

But he was not one to speak of his troubles to the first comer; and it was
only after the sixth volume of the "Souvenirs entomologiques" had appeared
that his reserve was somewhat mitigated. Yet it was necessary that he
should speak of these troubles, that he should tell everything; and, thanks
to his conversation and his letters, I have been able to revive the past.

Among the greatest of my pleasures I count the notable honour of having
known him, and intimately. As an absorbed and attentive witness I was
present at the accomplishment of his last labours; I watched his last years
of work, so critical, so touching, so forsaken, before his ultimate
resurrection. What fruitful and suggestive lessons I learned in his
company, as we paced the winding paths of his Harmas; or while I sat beside
him, at his patriarchal table, interrogating that memory of his, so rich in
remembrances that even the remotest events of his life were as near to him
as those that had only then befallen him; so that the majority of the
judgments to be found in this book, of which not a line has been written
without his approval, may be regarded as the direct emanation of his mind.

As far as possible I have allowed him to speak himself. Has he not sketched
the finest pages of his "biography of a solitary student" in those racy
chapters of his "Souvenirs": those in which he has developed his genesis as
a naturalist and the history of the evolution of his ideas?
(Introduction/1.) In all cases I have only introduced such indications as
were essential to complete the sequence of events. It would have been idle
to re-tell in the same terms what every one may read elsewhere, or to
repeat in different and less happy terms what Fabre himself has told so
well.

I have therefore applied myself more especially to filling the gaps which
he has left, by listening to his conversation, by appealing to his
memories, by questioning his contemporaries, by recording the impressions
of his sometime pupils. I have endeavoured to assemble all these data, in
order to authenticate them, and have also gleaned many facts among his
manuscripts (Introduction/2.), and have had recourse to all that portion of
his correspondence which fortunately fell into my hands.

This correspondence, to be truthful, does not appear at any time to have
been very assiduous. Fabre, as we shall see in the story of his life
(Introduction/3.), disliked writing letters, both in his studious youth and
during the later period of isolation and silence.

On the other hand, although he wrote but little, he never wrote with
difficulty or as a mere matter of duty. Among all the letters which I have
succeeded in collecting there are scarcely any that are not of interest
from one point of view or another. No frivolous narratives, no futile
acquaintances, no commonplace intimacies; everything in his life is
serious, and everything makes for a goal.

But we must set apart, as surpassing all others in interest, the letters
which Fabre addressed to his brother during the years spent as schoolmaster
at Carpentras or Ajaccio; for these are more especially instructive in
respect of the almost unknown years of his youth; these most of all reveal
his personality and are one of the finest illustrations that could be given
of his life, a true poem of energy and disinterested labour.

I have to thank M. Frédéric Fabre, who, in his fraternal piety, has
generously placed all his family records at my disposal, and also his two
sons, my dear friends Antonin Fabre, councillor at the Court of Nîmes, and
Henri Fabre, of Avignon, for these precious documents; and I take this
opportunity of expressing my profound gratitude.

Let me at the same time thank all those who have associated themselves with
my efforts by supplying me with letters in their possession and furnishing
me with personal information; and in particular Mme Henry Devillario, M.
Achard, and M. J. Belleudy, ex-prefect of Vaucluse; not forgetting M. Louis
Charrasse, teacher at Beaumont-d'Orange, and M. Vayssières, professor of
the Faculty of Sciences at Marseilles, all of whom I have to thank for
personal and intimate information.

I must also express my gratitude to M. Henri Bergson, Professor Bouvier,
and the learned M. Paul Marchal for the advice and the valuable suggestions
which they offered me during the preparation of this book.

I shall feel fully repaid for my pains if this "Life" of one of the
greatest of the world's naturalists, by enabling men to know him better,
also leads them to love him the more.


FABRE, POET OF SCIENCE.


CHAPTER 1. THE INTUITION OF NATURE.

Each thing created, says Emerson, has its painter or its poet. Like the
enchanted princess of the fairy-tales, it awaits its predestined liberator.

Every part of nature has its mystery and its beauty, its logic and its
explanation; and the epigraph given me by Fabre himself, which appears on
the title-page of this volume, is in no way deceptive. The tiny insects
buried in the soil or creeping over leaf or blade have for him been
sufficient to evoke the most important, the most fascinating problems, and
have revealed a whole world of miracle and poetry.

He saw the light at Saint-Léons, a little commune of the canton of Vezins
in the Haut Rouergue, on the 22nd December, 1823, some seven years earlier
than Mistral, his most famous neighbour, the greater lustre of whose
celebrity was to eclipse his own.

Here he essayed his earliest steps; here he stammered his first syllables.

His early childhood, however, was passed almost wholly at Malaval, a tiny
hamlet in the parish of Lavaysse, whose belfry was visible at quite a short
distance; but to reach it one had to travel nearly twenty-five rough,
mountainous miles, through a whole green countryside; green, but bare, and
lacking in charm. (1/1.)

All his paternal forebears came from Malaval, and thence one day his
father, Antoine Fabre, came to dwell at Saint-Léons, as a consequence of
his marriage with the daughter of the huissier, Victoire Salgues, and in
order to prepare himself, as working apprentice, in the tricks and quibbles
of the law. (1/2.)

In the roads of Malaval, bordered with brambles, in the glades of bracken,
and amid the meadows of broom, he received his first impressions of nature.
At Malaval too lived his grandmother, the good old woman who could lull him
to sleep at night with beautiful stories and simple legends, while she
wound her distaff or spun her bobbin.

But what were all these imaginary marvels, what were the ogres who smelt
fresh meat, or "the fairies who turned pumpkins into coaches and lizards
into footmen" beside all the marvels of reality, which already he was
beginning to perceive?

For above all things he was born a poet: a poet by instinct and by
vocation. From his earliest childhood, "the brain hardly released from the
swaddling-bands of unconsciousness," the things of the outer world left a
profound and living impression. As far back as he can remember, while still
quite a child, "a little monkey of six, still dressed in a little baize
frock," or just "wearing his first braces," he sees himself "in ecstasy
before the splendours of the wing-cases of a gardener-beetle, or the wings
of a butterfly." At nightfall, among the bushes, he learned to recognize
the chirp of the grasshopper. To put it in his own words, "he made for the
flowers and insects as the Pieris makes for the cabbage and the Vanessa
makes for the nettle." The riches of the rocks; the life which swarms in
the depth of the waters; the world of plants and animals, that "prodigious
poem; all nature filled him with curiosity and wonder." "A voice charmed
him; untranslatable; sweeter than language and vague as a dream." (1/3.)

These peculiarities are all the more astonishing in that they seem to be
absolutely spontaneous and in nowise hereditary. What his parents were he
himself has told us: small farmers, cultivating a little unprofitable land;
poor "husbandmen, sowers of rye, cowherds"; and in the wretched
surroundings of his childhood, when the only light, of an evening, came
from a splinter of pine, steeped in resin, which was held by a strip of
slate stuck into the wall; when his folk shut themselves in the byre, in
times of severe cold, to save a little firewood and while away the
evenings; when close at hand, through the bitter wind, they heard the
howling of the wolves: here, it would seem, was nothing propitious to the
birth of such tastes, if he had not borne them naturally within him.

But is it not the very essence of genius, as it is the peculiarity of
instinct, to spring from the depths of the invisible?

Yet who shall say what stores of thought unspoken, what unknown treasures
of observation never to be communicated, what patient reflections
unuttered, may be housed in those toil-worn brains, in which, perhaps,
slowly and obscurely, accumulate the germs of faculties and talents by
which some more favoured descendant may one day benefit? How many poets
have died unpublished or unperceived, in whom only the power of expression
was lacking!

When he was seven years old his parents recalled him to Saint-Léons, in
order to send him to the school kept by his godfather, Pierre Ricard, the
village schoolmaster, "at once barber, bellringer, and singer in the
choir." Rembrandt, Teniers, nor Van Ostade never painted anything more
picturesque than the room which served at the same time as kitchen,
refectory, and bedroom, with "halfpenny prints papering the walls" and "a
huge chimney, for which each had to bring his log of a morning in order to
enjoy the right to a place at the fireside."

He was never to forget these beloved places, blessed scenes of his
childhood, amid which he grew up like a little savage, and through all his
material sufferings, all his hours of bitterness, and even in the
resignation of age, their idyllic memory sufficed to make his life
fragrant. He would always see the humble paternal garden, the brook where
he used to surprise the crayfish, the ash-tree in which he found his first
goldfinch's nest, and "the flat stone on which he heard, for the first
time, the mellow ringing of the bellringer frog." (1/4.) Later, when
writing to his brother, he was to recall the good days of still careless
life, when "he would sprawl, the sun on his belly, on the mosses of the
wood of Vezins, eating his black bread and cream" or "ring the bells of
Saint-Léons" and "pull the tails of the bulls of Lavaysse." (1/5.)

For Henri had a brother, Frédéric, barely two years younger than he;
equally meditative by nature, and of a serious, upright mind; but his
tastes inclined rather to matters of administration and the understanding
of business, so that where Frédéric was bored, Henri was more than content,
thirstily drinking in science and poetry "among the blue campanulas of the
hills, the pink heather of the mountains, the golden buttercups of the
meadows, and the odorous bracken of the woods." (1/6.) Apart from this the
two brothers "were one"; they understood one another in a marvellous
fashion, and always loved one another. Henri never failed to watch over
Frédéric with a wholly fatherly solicitude; he was prodigal of advice,
helpful with his experience, doing his best to smooth away all
difficulties, encouraging him to walk in his footsteps and make his way
through the world behind him. He was his confidant, giving an ear to all
that befell him of good or ill; to his fears, his disappointments, his
hopes, and all his thoughts; and he took the keenest interest in his
studies and researches. On the other hand, he had no more sure and devoted
friend; none more proud of his first success, and in later days no more
enthusiastic admirer, and none more eager for his fame. (1/7.)

He was twelve years old when his father, "the first of all his line, was
tempted by the town," and led all his family to Rodez, there to keep a
café. The future naturalist entered the school of this town, where he
served Mass on Sunday, in the chapel, in order to pay his fees. There again
he was interested in the animal creation above all. When he began to
construe Virgil the only thing that charmed him, and which he remembered,
was the landscape in which the persons of the poem move, in which are so
many "exquisite details concerning the cicada, the goat, and the laburnum."

Thus four years went by: but then his parents were constrained to seek
their fortune elsewhere, and transported their household to Toulouse, where
again the father kept a café. The young Henri was admitted gratuitously to
the seminary of the Esquille, where he managed to complete his fifth year.
Unfortunately his progress was soon interrupted by a new exodus on the part
of his family, which emigrated this time to Montpellier, where he was
haunted for a time by dreams of medicine, to which he seemed notably
adapted. Finally, a run of bad luck persisting, he had to bid farewell to
his studies and gain his bread as best he could. We see him set out along
the wide white roads: lost, almost a wanderer, seeking his living by the
sweat of his brow; one day selling lemons at the fair of Beaucaire, under
the arcades of the market or before the barracks of the Pré; another day
enlisting in a gang of labourers who were working on the line from
Beaucaire to Nîmes, which was then in process of construction. He knew
gloomy days, lonely and despairing. What was he doing? of what was he
dreaming? The love of nature and the passion for learning sustained him in
spite of all, and often served him as nourishment; as on the day when he
dined on a few grapes, plucked furtively at the edge of a field, after
exchanging the poor remnant of his last halfpence for a little volume of
Reboul's poems; soothing his hunger by reciting the verses of the gentle
baker-poet. Often some creature kept him company; some insect never seen
before was often his greatest pleasure; such as the pine-chafer, which he
encountered then for the first time; that superb beetle, whose black or
chestnut coat is sprinkled with specks of white velvet; which squeaks when
captured, emitting a slight complaining sound, like the vibration of a pane
of glass rubbed with the tip of a moistened finger. (1/8.)

Already this young mind, romantic and classic at once, full of the ideal,
and so positive that it seemed to seek support in an intense grasp of
things and beings--two gifts well-nigh incompatible, and often mutually
destructive--already it knew, not only the love of study and a passion for
the truth, but the sovereign delight of feeling everything and
understanding everything.

It was under these conditions--that is, amid the rudest privations--that he
ventured to enter a competitive examination for a bursary at the École
Normale Primaire of Avignon; and his will-power realized this first miracle
of his career--he straightway obtained the highest place.

In those days, when education had barely reached the lower classes, the
instruction given in the primary normal school was still of the most
summary. Spelling, arithmetic, and geometry practically exhausted its
resources. As for natural history, a poor despised science, almost unknown,
no one dreamed of it, and no one learned or taught it; the syllabus ignored
it, because it led to nothing. For Fabre only, notwithstanding, it was his
fixed idea, his constant preoccupation, and "while the dictation class was
busy around him, he would examine, in the secrecy of his desk, the sting of
a wasp or the fruit of the oleander," and intoxicate himself with poetry.
(1/9.) His pedagogic studies suffered thereby, and the first part of his
stay at the normal school was by no means extremely brilliant. In the
middle of his second year he was declared idle, and even marked as an
insufficient pupil and of mediocre intelligence. Stung to the quick, he
begged as a favour that he should be given the opportunity of following the
third year's course in the six months that remained, and he made such an
effort that at the end of the year he victoriously won his superior
certificate. (1/10.)

A year in advance of the regulation studies, his curiosity might now
exercise itself freely in every direction, and little by little it became
universal. A chance chemistry lesson finally awakened in him the appetite
for knowledge, the passion for all the sciences, of which he thirsted to
know at least the elements. Between whiles he returned to his Latin,
translating Horace and re-reading Virgil. One day his director put an
"Imitation" into his hands, with double columns in Greek and Latin. The
latter, which he knew fairly well, assisted him to decipher the Greek. He
hastened to commit to memory the vocables, and idioms and phrases of all
kinds (1/11.), and in this curious fashion he learned the language. This
was his only method of learning languages. It is the process which he
recommended to his brother, who was commencing Latin:

"Take Virgil, a dictionary, and a grammar, and translate from Latin into
French for ever and for ever; to make a good version you need only common
sense and very little grammatical knowledge or other pedantic accessories.

"Imagine an old inscription half-effaced: correctness of judgment partly
supplies the missing words, and the sense appears as if the whole were
legible. Latin, for you, is the old inscription; the root of the word alone
is legible: the veil of an unknown language hides the value of the
termination: you have only the half of the words; but you have common sense
too, and you will make use of it." (1/12.)


CHAPTER 2. THE PRIMARY TEACHER.

Furnished with his superior diploma, he left the normal school at the age
of nineteen, and commenced as a primary teacher in the College of
Carpentras.

The salary of the school teacher, in the year 1842, did not exceed 28
pounds sterling a year, and this ungrateful calling barely fed him, save on
"chickpeas and a little wine." But we must beware lest, in view of the
increasing and excessive dearness of living in France, the beggarly
salaries of the poor schoolmasters of a former day, so little worthy of
their labours and their social utility, appear even more disproportionately
small than they actually were. What is more to the point, the teachers had
no pension to hope for. They could only count on a perpetuity of labour,
and when sickness or infirmity arrived, when old age surprised them, after
fifty or sixty years of a narrow and precarious existence, it was not
merely poverty that awaited them; for many there was nothing but the
blackest destitution. A little later, when they began to entertain a vague
hope of deliverance, the retiring pension which was held up to their gaze,
in the distant future, was at first no more than forty francs, and they had
to await the advent of Duruy, the great minister and liberator, before
primary instruction was in some degree raised from this ignominious level
of abasement.

It was a melancholy place, this college, "where life had something
cloistral about it: each master occupied two cells, for, in consideration
of a modest payment, the majority were lodged in the establishment, and ate
in common at the principal's table."

It was a laborious life, full of distasteful and repugnant duties. We can
readily imagine, with the aid of the striking picture which Fabre has drawn
for us, what life was in these surroundings, and what the teaching was:
"Between four high walls I see the court, a sort of bear-pit where the
scholars quarrelled for the space beneath the boughs of a plane-tree; all
around opened the class-rooms, oozing with damp and melancholy, like so
many wild beasts' cages, deficient in light and air...for seats, a plank
fixed to the wall...in the middle a chair, the rushes of the seat departed,
a blackboard, and a stick of chalk." (2/1.)

Let the teachers of our spacious and well-lighted schools of to-day ponder
on these not so distant years, and measure the progress accomplished.
Evoking the memory of their humble colleague of Carpentras, may they feel
the true greatness of his example: a noble and a glorious example, of which
they may well be proud.

And what pupils! "Dirty, unmannerly: fifty young scoundrels, children or
big lads, with whom," no doubt, "he used to squabble," but whom, after all,
he contrived to manage, and by whom he was listened to and respected: for
he knew precisely what to say to them, and how, while talking lightly, to
teach them the most serious things. For the joy of teaching, and of
continually learning by teaching others, made everything endurable. Not
only did he teach them to read, write, and cipher, which then included
almost the entire programme of primary education; he endeavoured also to
place his own knowledge at their service, as he himself acquired it.

It was not only his love of the work that sustained him; it was the desire
to escape from the rut, to accomplish yet another stage; to emerge, in
short, from so unsatisfactory a position. Now nothing but physical and
mathematical science would allow him to entertain the hope of "making an
opening" in the world of secondary schoolmasters. He accordingly began to
study physics, quite alone, "with an impossible laboratory, experimenting
after his own fashion"; and it was by teaching them to his pupils that he
learned first of all chemistry, inexpensively performing little elementary
experiments before them, "with pipe-bowls for crucibles and aniseed flasks
for retorts," and finally algebra, of which he knew not a word before he
gave his first lesson. (2/2.)

How he studied, what was the secret of his method, he told his brother a
few years later, when the latter, marking time behind him, was pursuing the
same career. A very disappointing career, no doubt, and far from lucrative,
but "one of the noblest; one of those best fitted for a noble spirit, and a
lover of the good." (2/3.)

Listen to the lesson which he gives his brother:

"To-day is Thursday; nothing calls you out of doors; you choose a
thoroughly quiet retreat, where the light is not too strong. There you are,
elbows on table, your thumbs to your ears, and a book in front of you. The
intelligence awakes; the will holds the reins of it; the outer world
disappears, the ear no longer hears, the eye no longer sees, the body no
longer exists; the mind schools itself, recollects itself; it is finding
knowledge, and its insight increases. Then the hours pass quickly, quickly;
time has no measure. Now it is evening. What a day, great God! But hosts of
truths are grouped in the memory; the difficulties which checked you
yesterday have fused in the fire of reflection; volumes have been devoured,
and you are content with your day...

"When something embarrasses you do not abuse the help of your colleagues;
with assistance the difficulty is only evaded; with patience and reflection
IT IS OVERTHROWN. Moreover, one knows thoroughly only what one learns
oneself; and I advise you earnestly, as far as possible, to have recourse
to no aid other than reflection, above all for the sciences. A book of
science is an enigma to be deciphered; if some one gives you the key of the
enigma nothing appears more simple and more natural than the explanation,
but if a second enigma presents itself you will be as unskilful as you were
with the first...

"It is probable that you will get the chance of a few lessons; do not by
preference accept the easier and more lucrative, but rather the more
difficult, even when the subject is one of which as yet you know nothing.
The self-esteem which will not allow one's true character to be seen is a
powerful aid to the will. Do not forget the method of Jules Janin, running
from house to house in Paris for a few wretched lessons in Latin: 'Unable
to get anything out of my stupid pupils, with the besotted son of the
marquis I was simultaneously pupil and professor: I explained the ancient
authors to myself, and so, in a few months, I went through an excellent
course of rhetoric...'

"Above all you must not be discouraged; time is nothing provided the will
is always alert, always active, and never distracted; 'strength will come
as you travel.'

"Try only for a few days this method of working, in which the whole energy,
concentrated on one point, explodes like a mine and shatters obstacles; try
for a few days the force of patience, strength, and perseverance; and you
will see that nothing is impossible!" (2/4.)

These serious reflections show very clearly that his mind was already as
mature, as earnest, and as concentrated as it was ever to be.

Not only did he join example to precept; he looked about him and began to
observe nature in her own house. The doings of the Mason-bee, which he
encountered for the first time, aroused his interest to such a pitch that,
being no longer able to constrain his curiosity, he bought--at the cost of
what privations!--Blanchard's "Natural History of the Articulata," then a
classic work, which he was to re-read a hundred times, and which he still
retains, giving it the first place in his modest library, in memory of his
early joys and emotions.

The rocks also arrested and captivated his attention: and already the first
volumes were corpulent of what was eventually to become his gigantic
herbiary. His brother, about to leave for Vezins on vacation, was told of
the specimens which he wanted to complete his collection; for although he
had never set foot there since his first departure, he recalled, with
remarkable precision, all the plants that grew in his native countryside;
their haunts, their singularities, and the characteristics by which one
could not fail to recognize them: as well as all the places which they
chose by preference, where he used to wander as an urchin; the Parnassia
palustris, "which springs up in the damp meadows, below the beech-wood to
the west of the village; which bears a superb white flower at the top of a
slightly twisted stem, having an oval leaf about its middle"; the purple
digitalis, "whose long spindles of great red flowers, speckled with white
inside, and shaped like the fingers of a glove," border a certain road; all
the ferns that grow on the wastes, "amid which it is often no easy task to
recollect one's whereabouts," and on the arid hills all the heathers, pink,
white, and bluish, with different foliage, "of which the innumerable
species do not, however, very greatly differ." Nothing is to be neglected;
"every plant, whatever it may be, great or little, rare or common, were it
only a frond of moss, may have its interest." (2/5.)

Never weary of work, he accumulated all these treasures in his little
museum, in order to study them the better; he collected all the coins
exhumed from this ancient soil, formerly Roman, "records of humanity more
eloquent than books," and which revealed to him the only method of learning
and actually re-living history: for he saw in knowledge not merely a means
of gaining his bread, but "something nobler; the means of raising the
spirit in the contemplation of the truth, of isolating it at will from the
miseries of reality, so to find, in these intellectual regions, the only
hours of happiness that we may be permitted to taste." (2/6.)

Fabre was so steeped in this passion for knowledge that he wished to evoke
it in his brother, now teacher at Lapalud, on the Rhône, not far from
Orange. It seemed to him that he would delight in his wealth still better
could he share it with another. (2/7.) He stimulated him, pricked him on,
and sought to encourage the remarkable aptitude for mathematics with which
he believed him endowed. He employed his whole strength in breathing into
the other's mind "that taste for the true and the beautiful" which
possessed his own nature; he wished to share with him those stores of
learning "which he had for some years so painfully amassed"; he would
profit by the vacation to place them at his disposal; they would work
together "and the light would come." Above all his brother must not allow
his intelligence to slumber, must beware of "extinguishing that divine
light without which one can, it is true, attend to one's business, but
which alone can make a man honourable and respected."

Let him, on the contrary, cultivate his mind incessantly, "the only
patrimony on which either of us can count"; the reward would be his moral
well-being, and, he hoped, his physical welfare also.

Once more he reinforced his advice by that excellent counsel which was
always his own lodestar:

"Science, Frédéric, knowledge is everything...You are too good a thinker
not to say with me that no one can better employ his time than by acquiring
fresh knowledge...Work, then, when you have the opportunity...an
opportunity that very few may possess, and for which you ought to be only
too thankful. But I will stop, for I feel my enthusiasm is going to my
head, and my reasons are so good already that I have no need of still more
triumphant reasons to convince you." (2/8.)

He had only one passion: shooting; more especially the shooting of larks.
This sport delighted him, "with the mirror darting its intermittent beams
under the rays of the morning sun amid the general scintillation of the
dewdrops and crystals of hoarfrost hanging on every blade of grass." (2/9.)

His sight was admirably sure, and he rarely missed his aim. His passion for
shooting was always sustained by the same motive: the desire to acquire
fresh knowledge; to examine unknown creatures close at hand; to discover
what they ate and how they lived.

Later, when he again took up his gun, it was still because of his love of
life: it was to enable him to enumerate, inventory, and interrogate his new
compatriots, his feathered fellow-citizens of Sérignan; to inform himself
of their diet, to reveal the contents of their crops and gizzards.

At one time he suddenly ceased to employ this distraction; he seems to have
sacrificed it easily, under the stress of present necessities and cruel
anxieties as to his uncertain future. "When we do not know where we shall
be tomorrow nothing can distract us." (2/10.)

His responsibilities were increasing. He had lately married. On the 30th
October, 1844, he was wedded to a young girl of Carpentras, Marie Villard,
and already a child was born. His parents, always unlucky, met nowhere with
any success. By dint of many wanderings they had finally become stranded at
Pierrelatte, the chief town of the canton of La Drôme, sheltered by the
great rock which has given the place its name; and there again, of course,
they kept a café, situated on the Place d'Armes.

The whole family was now assembled in the same district, a few miles only
one from another: but Henri was really its head. Having heard that a
quarrel had arisen between his brother and his mother, he wrote to Frédéric
in reprimand; gently scolding him and begging him to set matters right,
"even if all the wrongs were not on his side."

"My father, in one of his letters, complains that in spite of your nearness
you have not yet been to see them. I know very well there is some reason
for sulking; but what matter? Give it up: forget everything; do your best
to put an end to all these petty and ugly estrangements. You will do so,
won't you? I count on it, for the happiness of all." (2/11.)

He was their arbitrator, their adviser, their oracle, their bond of union.

With all this, he was ready to attempt the two examinations which were to
decide his future. Very shortly, at Montpellier, he passed almost
successively, at an interval of only a few months the examinations for both
his baccalauréats; and then the two licentiate examinations in mathematics
and physical science.

While he was ardently studying for these examinations, sorrow for the first
time knocked at his door. His first-born fell suddenly ill, and in a few
days died. On this occasion all his ardent spirituality asserted itself,
though in stricken accents, in the letter which he wrote to his brother to
announce his loss:

"After a few days of a marked improvement, which made me think he was
saved, two large teeth were cut...and in three days a dreadful fever took
him, not from us, who will follow him, but from this miserable world. Ah,
poor child, I shall always see you as you were during those last moments,
turning those wide, wandering eyes toward heaven, seeking the way to your
new country. With a heart full of tears, I shall often let my thoughts go
straying after you; but alas! with the eyes of the body I shall never see
you again. I shall see you no more: yet only a few days ago I was making
the finest plans for you. I used to work for you only; in my studies I
thought only of you. Grow up, I used to say, and I will pour into your mind
all the knowledge which has cost me so dear, which I am hoarding little by
little...But reflection leads me to higher thoughts. I choke back the tears
in my heart, and I congratulate him that Heaven has mercifully spared him
this life of trials...My poor child...you will never, like your father,
have to struggle against poverty and misfortune; you will never know the
bitterness of life, and the difficulties of creating a position at a time
when there are so many paths that lead to failure...I weep for you because
we have lost you, but I rejoice because you are happy...You are happy, and
this is not the mad hope of a father broken by sorrow; no, your last glance
told me so, too eloquently for me to doubt it. Oh, how beautiful you were
in your mortal pallor; the last sigh on your lips, your gaze upon heaven,
and your soul ready to fly into the bosom of God! Your last day was the
most beautiful!" (2/12.)

Although study was his refuge, although he was thereby able to live through
these evil days without too greatly feeling their weight, his position was
hateful, and he lived a wretched life "from one day to another, like a
beggar."

In those troublous times, when education was of no account, it often
happened that his teacher's salary was several months in arrears, and the
city of Carpentras, "not being in funds," paid it only by instalments, and
even so kept him a long time waiting. "One has to besiege the paymaster's
door merely to obtain a trifle on account. I am ashamed of the whole
business, and I would gladly abandon my claim if I knew where to raise any
money." (2/13.)

The genius of Balzac has recorded some unforgettable types of those poor
and notable lives, at once so humble and so lofty. He has described the
village curé and the country doctor. But how we should have loved to
encounter in his gallery, among so many living portraits, a picture of the
university life of fifty years ago; and above all a picture of the small
schoolmaster of other days, living a life so narrow, so slavish, so
painful, and yet so full of worth, so imbued with the sense of duty, and
withal so resigned; a portrait for which Fabre might have served as model
and prototype, and for which he himself has drawn an unforgettable sketch.

He awaited impatiently the news of his removal, very modestly limiting his
ambitions to the hope of entering some lycée as professor of the sciences.
His rector was not unnaturally astonished that a young man of such unusual
worth, already twice a licentiate, should be so little appreciated by those
in high places and allowed to stagnate so long in an inferior post, and one
unworthy of him.

In the end, however, after much patient waiting, he became indignant; as
always, he could see nothing ahead. The chair of mathematics at Tournon
escaped him. Another position, at Avignon, also "slipped through his
fingers"; why or how he never knew. He "began to see clearly what life is,
and how difficult it is to make one's mark amid all this army of schemers,
beggars and imbeciles who besiege every vacant post."

But his heart was "none the less hot with indignation"; he had had enough
of "Carpentras, that accursed little hole"; and when the vacations came
round once more he "plainly considered the question" and declared "that he
would never again set foot inside a communal school." (2/14.)

He wrote to the rector: "If instead of crushing me into the narrow round of
a primary school they would give me some employment of the kind for which
my studies and ideas fit me, they would know then what is hatching in my
head and what untirable activity there is in me." (2/15.)

He resigned himself nevertheless; he cursed and swore and stormed at his
fate; but he had once more to put up with it "for want of a better." All
the same "the injustice was too unheard-of, and no one had ever seen or
would ever see the like: to give him two licentiate's diplomas, and to make
him conjugate verbs for a pack of brats! It was too much!" (2/16.)


CHAPTER 3. CORSICA.

At last the chair of physics fell vacant at the college of Ajaccio, the
salary being 72 pounds sterling, and he left for Corsica. His stay there
was well calculated to impress him. There the intense impressionability
which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be
confirmed and increased. He felt that this superb and luxuriant nature was
made for him, and that he was born for it; to understand and interpret it.
He would lose himself in a delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands,
the mountains rich with scented flowers, wandering through the maquis, the
myrtle scrub, through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his
emotion when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of
Bastelica, with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre
majesty inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious.
Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy,
listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells
which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar
forms filled him with delight.

He was soon so accustomed to his new life in peaceful Ajaccio, whose
surroundings, decked in eternal verdure, are so captivating and so
beautiful, that in spite of a vague desire for change he now dreaded to
leave it. He never wearied of admiring and exalting the beautiful and
majestic aspects of his new home. How he longed to share his enthusiasm
with his father or his brother, as he rambled through the neighbouring
maquis!

"The infinite, glittering sea at my feet, the dreadful masses of granite
overhead, the white, dainty town seated beside the water, the endless
jungles of myrtle, which yield intoxicating perfumes, the wastes of
brushwood which the ploughshare has never turned, which cover the mountains
from base to summit; the fishing-boats that plough the gulf: all this forms
a prospect so magnificent, so striking, that whosoever has beheld it must
always long to see it again." (3/1.)

"What is their rock of Pierrelatte, that enormous block of stone which
overhangs the place where they dwell, a reef which rises from the surface
of the ancient sea of alluvium, compared with these blocks of uprooted
granite which lie upon the hillsides here?"

And what were the Aubrac hills which traversed his native country; what was
the Ventoux even, that famous Alp, "beside the peaks which rise about the
gulf of Ajaccio, always crowned with clouds and whitened with snow, even
when the soil of the plains is scorching and rings like a fired brick?"

Time did nothing to abate these first impressions, and after more than a
year on the island he was still full of wonder "at the sight of these
granite crests, corroded by the severities of the climate, jagged,
overthrown by the lightning, shattered by the slow but sure action of the
snows, and these vertiginous gulfs through which the four winds of heaven
go roaring; these vast inclined planes on which snow-drifts form thirty,
sixty, and ninety feet in depth, and across which flow winding watercourses
which go to fill, drop by drop, the yawning craters, there to form lakes,
black as ink when seen in the shadow, but blue as heaven in the light...

"But it would be impossible for me to give you the least idea of this dizzy
spectacle, this chaos of rocks, heaped in frightful disorder. When, closing
my eyes, I contemplate these results of the convulsion of the soil in my
mind's eye, when I hear the screaming of the eagles, which go wheeling
through the bottomless abysses, whose inky shadows the eye dares hardly
plumb, vertigo seizes me, and I open my eyes to reassure myself by the
reality."

And he sends with his letter a few leaves of the snow immortelle--the
edelweiss--plucked on the highest summits, amid the eternal snows; "you
will put this in some book, and when, as you turn the leaves, the
immortelle meets your eyes, it will give you an excuse for dreaming of the
beautiful horrors of its native place." (3/2.)

What a misfortune for him, what regret he would feel, "if he had now to go
to some trivial country of plains, where he would die of boredom!"

For him everything was unfamiliar: not only the flora, but the maritime
wealth of this singular country. He would set out of a morning, visiting
the coves and creeks, roving along the beaches of this magnificent gulf, a
lump of bread in his pocket, quenching his thirst with sea-water in default
of fresh!

They were mornings full of rosy illusions, whose smiling hopes were
revealed in his admirable letters to his brother. Already he meditated a
conchology of Corsica, a colossal history of all the molluscs which live
upon its soil or in its waters. (3/3.) He collected all the shells he could
procure. He analysed, described, classed, and co-ordinated not only the
marine species, but the terrestrial and freshwater shells also, extant or
fossil. He asked his brother to collect for him all the shells he could
find in the marshes of Lapalud, in the brooks and ditches of the
neighbourhood of Orange. In his enthusiasm he tried to convince him of the
immense interest of these researches, which might perhaps seem ridiculous
or futile to him; but let him only think of geology; the humblest shell
picked up might throw a sudden light upon the formation of this or that
stratum. None are to be disdained: for men have considered, with reason,
that they were honouring the memory of their eminent fellows by giving
their names to the rarest and most beautiful. Witness the magnificent Helix
dedicated to Raspail, which is found only in the caverns where the
strawberry-tree grows amid the high mountains of Corsica. (3/4.)

Moreover, he said, "the infinitesimal calculus of Leibnitz will show you
that the architecture of the Louvre is less learned than that of a snail:
the eternal geometer has unrolled his transcendent spirals on the shell of
the mollusc that you, like the vulgar profane, know only seasoned with
spinach and Dutch cheese." (3/5.)

For all that, he did not neglect his mathematics, in which, on the
contrary, he found abundant and suggestive recreation. The properties of a
figure or a curve which he had newly discovered prevented his sleep for
several nights.

"All this morning I have been busy with star-shaped polygons, and have
proceeded from surprise to surprise...perceiving in the distance, as I
advanced, unforeseen and marvellous consequences."

Here, among others, is one question which suddenly presented itself to his
mind "in the midst of the spikes" of his polygons: what would be the period
of the rotation of the sun on its own centre if its atmosphere reached as
far as the earth? And this question gave rise to another, "without which
the sequence stops then and there; number, space, movement, and order form
a single chain, the first link of which sets all the rest in motion."
(3/6.) And the hours went by quickly, so quickly with "x," the plants and
the shells, that "literally there was no time to eat."

For Fabre was born a poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in
algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical
geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the
Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending
from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with
repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite
tentacles, approaching closer and closer to a straight line, the asymptote,
without ever finally attaining it"; the Parabola, "which seeks fruitlessly
in the infinite for its second, lost centre: it is the trajectory of the
bomb: it is the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun,
then flee into the depths whence they never return." (3/7.)

And one fine morning we behold him mounting, thrilled by a lyric passion,
to the lofty regions in which Number, "irresistible, omnipotent, keystone
of the vault of the universe, rules at once Time and Space." He ascends, he
rushes forward, farther than the chariot--

"Beyond the Husbandman who ploughs in space
And sows the suns in furrows of the skies."

He ascends those tracks of flame, where on high

    "in those lists inane
Wise regulator, Number holds the reins
  Of those indomitable steeds;
Number has set a bit i' the foaming mouths
Of these Leviathans, and with nervous hand
  Controls them in their tracks;

Their smoking flanks beneath the yoke in vain
Quiver; their nostrils vainly void as foam
Dense tides of lava; and in vain they rear;
For Number on their mettled haunches poised
Holds them, or duly with the rein controls,
Or in their flanks buries his spur divine." (3/8.)

Later he confessed all that he owed, as a writer, to geometry, whose severe
discipline forms and exercises the mind, gives it the salutary habit of
precision and lucidity, and puts it on its guard against terms which are
incorrect or unduly vague, giving it qualities far superior to all the
"tropes of rhetoric."

It was then that he became the pupil of Requien of Avignon, the retired
botanist, a lofty but somewhat limited mind, who was hardly capable of
opening up other horizons to him. But Requien did at least enrich his
memory by a prodigious quantity of names of plants with which he had not
been acquainted. He revealed to him the immense flora of Corsica, which he
himself had come to study, and for which Fabre was to gather such a vast
amount of material.

Fabre found in Requien more especially a friend "proof against anything";
and when the latter died almost suddenly at Bonifacio, Fabre was
overwhelmed by the sad news. On that very day he had on the table before
him a parcel of plants gathered for the dead botanist. "I cannot let my
eyes rest upon it," he wrote at the time, "without feeling my heart wrung
and my sight dim with tears." (3/9.)

But the most admirably fruitful encounter, as it exercised the profoundest
influence upon his destiny, was his meeting with Moquin-Tandon, a Toulouse
professor who followed Requien to Corsica, to complete the work which the
latter had left unfinished: the complete inventory of the prodigious wealth
of vegetation, of the innumerable species and varieties which Fabre and he
collected together, on the slopes and summits of Monte Renoso, often
botanizing "up in the clouds, mantle on back and numb with cold." (3/10.)

Moquin-Tandon was not merely a skilful naturalist; he was one of the most
eloquent and scholarly scientists of his time. Fabre owed to him, not his
genius, to be sure, but the definite indication of the path he was finally
to take, and from which he was never again to stray.

Moquin-Tandon, a brilliant writer and "an ingenious poet in his
Montpellerian dialect," (3/11.) taught Fabre never to forget the value of
style and the importance of form, even in the exposition of a purely
descriptive science such as botany. He did even more, by one day suddenly
showing Fabre, between the fruit and the cheese, "in a plate of water," the
anatomy of the snail. This was his first introduction to his true destiny
before the final revelation of which I shall presently speak. Fabre
understood then and there that he could do decidedly better than to stick
to mathematics, though his whole career would feel the effects of that
study.

"Geometers are made; naturalists are born ready-made," he wrote to his
brother, still excited by this incident, "and you know better than any one
whether natural history is not my favourite science." (3/12.)

>From that time forward he began to collect not only dead, inert, or
dessicated forms, mere material for study, with the aim of satisfying his
curiosity; he began to dissect with ardour, a thing he had never done
before. He housed his tiny guests in his cupboard; and occupied himself, as
he was always to do in the future, with the smaller living creatures only.

"I am dissecting the infinitely little; my scalpels are tiny daggers which
I make myself out of fine needles; my marble slab is the bottom of a
saucer; my prisoners are lodged by the dozen in old match-boxes; maxime
miranda in minimis." (3/13.)

Roaming at night along the marshy beaches, he contracted fever, and several
terrible attacks, accompanied by alarming tremors, left him so bloodless
and feeble that, much against his will, he had to beg for relief, and even
insist upon his prompt return to the mainland. in the meantime he obtained
sick-leave, and returned to Provence after a terrible crossing which lasted
no less than three days and two nights, on a sea so furious that he gave
himself up for lost. (3/14.)

Slowly he recovered his health, and after a second but brief stay at
Ajaccio he received the news of his appointment to the lycée of Avignon.
(3/15.)

He returned with his imagination enriched and his mind expanded, with
settled ideas, and thoroughly ripe for his task.


CHAPTER 4. AT AVIGNON.

The resolute worker resumed his indefatigable labours with an ardour
greater than ever, for now he was haunted by a noble ambition, that of
becoming a teacher of the superior grade, and of "talking plants and
animals" in a chair of the faculty. With this end in view he added to his
two diplomas--those of mathematics and physics--a third certificate, that
of natural sciences. His success was triumphant.

Already tenacious and fearless in affirming what he believed to be the
truth, he astonished and bewildered the professors of Toulouse. Among the
subjects touched upon by the examiners was the famous question of
spontaneous generation, which was then so vital, and which gave rise to so
many impassioned discussions. The examiner, as it chanced, was one of the
leading apostles of this doctrine. The future adversary of Darwin, at the
risk of failure, did not scruple to argue with him, and to put forward his
personal convictions and his own arguments. He decided the vexed question
in his own way, on his own responsibility. A personality already so
striking was regarded with admiration; a candidate so far out of the
ordinary was welcomed with enthusiasm, and but for the insufficiency of the
budget which so scantily met the needs of public instruction his
examination fees would have been returned. (4/1.)

Why, after this brilliant success, was Fabre not tempted to enter himself
for a fellowship, which would later in his career have averted so many
disappointments? It was doubtless because he felt, obscurely, that his
ideal future lay along other lines, and that he would have been taking a
wrong turning. Despite all the solicitations which were addressed to him he
would think of nothing but "his beloved studies in natural history" (4/2.);
he feared to lose precious time in preparing himself for a competitive
examination; "to compromise by such labour, which he felt would be
fruitless" (4/3.), the studies which he had already commenced, and the
inquiries already carried out in Corsica. He was busy with his first
original labours, the theses which he was preparing with a view to his
doctorate in natural science, "which might one day open the doors of a
faculty for him, far more easily than would a fellowship and its
mathematics." (4/4.)

At heart he was utterly careless of dignities and degrees. He worked only
to learn, not to attain and follow up a settled calling. What he hoped
above all was to succeed in devoting all his leisure to those marvellous
natural sciences in which he could vaguely foresee studies full of
interest; something animated and vital; a thousand fascinating themes, and
an atmosphere of poetry.

His genius, as yet invisible, was ripening in obscurity, but was ready to
come forth; he lacked only the propitious circumstance which would allow
him to unfold his wings.

He was seeking them in vain when a volume by Léon Dufour, the famous
entomologist, who then lived in the depths of the Landes, fell by chance
into his hands, and lit the first spark of that beacon which was presently
to decide the definite trend of his ideas.

It was this incident which then and there developed the germs already
latent within him. These had only awaited such an occasion as that which so
fortunately came to pass one evening of the winter of 1854.

Fabre offers yet another example of the part so often played by chance in
the manifestations of talent. How many have suddenly felt the unexpected
awakening of gifts which they did not suspect, as a result of some unusual
circumstance!

Was it not simply as a result of having read a note by the Russian chemist
Mitscherlich on the comparison of the specific characteristics of certain
crystals that Pasteur so enthusiastically took up his researches into
molecular asymmetry which were the starting-point of so many wonderful
discoveries?

Again, we need only recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated
observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to
verify certain experiments of Réaumur's, was so completely and immediately
fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest of his
life.

Again, we may ask what Claude Bernard would have been had he not met
Magendie? Similarly Léon Dufour's little work was to Fabre the road to
Damascus, the electric impulse which decided his vocation.

It dealt with a very singular fact concerning the manners of one of the
hymenoptera, a wasp, a Cerceris, in whose nest Dufour had found small
coleoptera of the genus Buprestis, which, under all the appearances of
death, retained intact for an incredible time their sumptuous costume,
gleaming with gold, copper, and emerald, while the tissues remained
perfectly fresh. In a word, the victims of Cerceris, far from being
desiccated or putrefied, were found in a state of integrity which was
altogether paradoxical.

Dufour merely believed that the Buprestes were dead, and he gave an
attempted explanation of the phenomenon.

Fabre, his curiosity and interest aroused, wished to observe the facts for
himself; and, to his great surprise, he discovered how incomplete and
insufficiently verified were the observations of the man who was at that
time known as "the patriarch of entomologists."

>From that moment he saw his way ahead; he suspected that there was still
much to discover and much to revise in this vast department of nature, and
conceived the idea of resuming the work so splendidly outlined by Réaumur
and the two Hubers, but almost completely neglected since the days of those
illustrious masters. He divined that here were fresh pastures, a vast
unexplored country to be opened up, an entire unimagined science to be
founded, wonderful secrets to be discovered, magnificent problems to be
solved, and he dreamed of consecrating himself unreservedly, of employing
his whole life in the pursuit of this object; that long life whose fruitful
activity was to extend over nearly ninety years, and which was to be so
"representative" by the dignity of the man, the probity of the expert, the
genius of the observer, and the originality of the writer.

The year 1855 saw the first appearance, in the "Annales des sciences
naturelles," of the famous memoir which marked the beginning of his fame:
the history, which might well be called marvellous and incredible, of the
great Cerceris, a giant wasp and "the finest of the Hymenoptera which hunt
for booty at the foot of Mont Ventoux." (4/5.)

Fabre was now thirty-two years old, and his situation as assistant-
professor of physics was somewhat precarious. From the 72 pounds sterling
which he drew at Ajaccio, an overseas post, his salary was reduced, on his
return to the mainland, to 64 pounds sterling, and during the whole of his
stay at Avignon he obtained neither promotion nor the smallest increase of
pay, excepting a few additional profits which were unconnected with his
habitual duties. When he left the university after twenty well-filled
years, he left as he had entered, with the same title, rank, and salary of
a mere assistant-professor.

Yet all about him "everywhere and for every one, all was black indeed": his
family had increased and therewith his expenses; there were now seven at
table every day. Very shortly his modest salary would no longer suffice; he
was obliged to supplement it by all sorts of hack-work--classes,
"repetitions," private lessons; tasks which repelled him, for they absorbed
all his available time; they prevented him from giving himself up to his
favourite studies, to his silent and solitary observations. Nevertheless,
he acquitted himself of these duties patiently and conscientiously, for at
heart he loved his profession, and was rather a fellow-disciple than a
master to his pupils. For this reason all those about him worked with
praiseworthy assiduity; even the worst elements, the black sheep, the "bad
eggs" of other classes, with him were suddenly transformed and as attentive
as the rest. Although he knew how to keep order, how to make himself
respected, and could on occasion deal severely and speak sternly, so that
very few dared to forget themselves before him, he knew also how to be
merry with his pupils, chatting with them familiarly, putting himself in
their place, entering into their ideas, and making himself their rival. If
life was laborious under his ferula, it was also merry. The best proof of
this is the fact that of all his colleagues at the lycée he was the only
one who had no nickname, a rarity in scholastic annals.

He did not therefore object to these lessons; but while at Carpentras he
was made much of and praised by the principal, was a general favourite, and
had perfect liberty to follow his inspiration during his partly gratuitous
classes, here the hours and the programme tied him down, which was
precisely what he found insupportable.

Everything made things difficult for him here: his external self; his
character, ever so little shy and unsocial; his temperament, which was made
for solitude.

In the thick of this hierarchical society of university professors he
remained independent; he knew nothing of what was said or what was
happening in the college, and his colleagues were always better informed
than he. (4/6.) As he was not a fellow, he was made to feel the fact and
was treated as a subordinate; the others, who prided themselves on the
title, and who were incapable of recognizing his merit, which was a little
beyond them, were jealous of him, all the more inasmuch as his name was
momentarily noised abroad, and they revenged themselves by calling him "the
fly" among themselves, by way of allusion to his favourite subject. (4/7.)

Indifferent to distinctions, as well as to those who bore them,
contemptuous of etiquette, and incapable of putting constraint upon his
nature, he remained an "outsider," and refused to comply with a host of
factitious or worldly obligations which he regarded as useless or
disgusting. Thus even at Ajaccio he managed to escape the customary
ceremonies of New Year's Day.

"Good society I avoid as much as possible; I prefer my own company. So I
have seen no one; I did not respond to the principal's invitation to make
the official round of visits." (4/8.)

When obliged to accept some invitation, apart from occasions of too great
solemnity, when he was really constrained to dress himself in the complete
livery of circumstance and ceremony, he remained faithful to his black felt
hat, which made a blot among all the carefully polished "toppers" of his
colleagues. He was called to order; he was reprimanded; he obeyed
unwillingly, or worse, he resisted; he revolted, and threatened to send in
his resignation. To pay court to people, to endeavour to make himself
pleasant, to grovel before a superior, were to him impossibilities. He
could neither solicit, nor sail with the wind, nor force himself on others,
nor even make use of his relations.

However, when he went to Paris to take his doctor's degree in natural
sciences, he did not forget Moquin-Tandon, who had formerly, in Corsica,
revealed to him the nature of biology, and whom he himself had received and
entertained in his humble home.

The ex-professor of Toulouse, who was now eminent in his speciality,
occupied the chair of natural history in the faculty of medicine in Paris.
What better occasion could he wish of introducing himself to a highly
placed official? Fabre had formerly been his host; he could recall the
happy hours they had spent together; he could explain his plans, and ask
for the professor's assistance! Fate pointed to him as a protector. But if
Fabre had been capable of climbing the professor's stairs with some such
ambitious desires, he would quickly have been disabused.

The "dear master" had long ago forgotten the little professor of Ajaccio,
and his welcome was by no means such as Fabre had the right to expect. Far
from insisting, he was disheartened, perhaps a little humiliated, and
hastened to take his leave.

The theses which Fabre brought with him, and which, he had thought, ought
to lead him one day to a university professorship, did not, as a matter of
fact, contain anything very essentially original.

He had been attracted, indeed fascinated, by all the singularities
presented by the strange family of the orchids; the asymmetry of their
blossoms, the unusual structure of their pollen, and their innumerable
seeds; but as for the curious rounded and duplicated tubercles which many
of them bore at their base, what precisely were they? The greatest
botanists--de Candolle, A. de Jussieu--had perceived in them nothing more
than roots. Fabre demonstrated in his thesis that these singular organs are
in reality merely buds, true branches or shoots, modified and disguised,
analogous to the metamorphosed tubercle of the potato. (4/9.)

He added also a curious memoir on the phosphorescence of the agaric of the
olive-tree, a phenomenon to which he was to return at a later date.

In the field of zoology his scalpel revealed the complicated structure of
the reproductive organs of the Centipedes (Millepedes), hitherto so
confused and misunderstood; as also certain peculiarities of the
development of these curious creatures, so interesting from the point of
view of the zoological philosopher (4/10.), for he had become expert in
handling not only the magnifying glass, which was always with him, but also
the microscope, which discovers so many infinite wonders in the lowest
creatures, yet which was not of particular service in any of the beautiful
observations upon which his fame is built.

Returning to Avignon, in the possession of his new degree, he commenced an
important task which took him nearly twenty years to complete: a
painstaking treatise on the Sphaeriaceae of Vaucluse, that singular family
of fungi which cover fallen leaves and dead twigs with their blackish
fructifications; a remarkable piece of work, full of the most valuable
documentation, as were the theses whose subjects I have just detailed; but
without belittling the fame of their author, one may say that another, in
his place, might have acquitted himself as well.

Although he continued to undertake researches of limited interest and
importance, although he persisted in dissecting plants, and, although he
disliked it, in "disembowelling animals," the fact was that apart from
Thursdays and Sundays it was scarcely possible for him to escape from his
week's work; hardly possible to snatch sufficient leisure to undertake the
studies toward which he felt himself more particularly drawn. Tied down by
his duties, which held him bound to a discipline that only left him brief
moments, and by the forced hack-work imposed upon him by the necessity of
earning his daily bread, he had scarcely any time for observation excepting
vacations and holidays.

Then he would hasten to Carpentras, happy to hold the key to the meadows,
and wander across country and along the sunken lanes, collecting his
beautiful insects, breathing the free air, the scent of the vines and
olives, and gazing upon Mont Ventoux, close at hand, whose silver summit
would now be hidden in the clouds and now would glitter in the rays of the
sun.

Carpentras was not merely the country in which his wife's parents dwelt: it
was, above all, a unique and privileged home for insects; not on account of
its flora, but because of the soil, a kind of limestone mingled with sand
and clay, a soft marl, in which the burrowing hymenoptera could easily
establish their burrows and their nests. Certain of them, indeed, lived
only there, or at least it would have been extremely difficult to find them
elsewhere; such was the famous Cerceris; such again, was the yellow-winged
Sphex, that other wasp which so artistically stabs and paralyses the
cricket, "the brown violinist of the clods."

At Carpentras too the Anthophorae lived in abundance; those wild bees with
whom the vexed and enigmatic history of the Sitaris and the Meloë is bound
up; those little beetles, cousins of the Cantharides, whose complex
metamorphoses and astonishing and peculiar habits have been revealed by
Fabre. This memoir marked the second stage of his scientific career, and
followed, at an interval of two years, the magnificent observations on the
Cerceris.

These two studies, true masterpieces of science, already constituted two
excellent titles to fame, and would by themselves have sufficed to fill a
naturalist's whole lifetime and to make his name illustrious.

>From that time forward he had no peer. The Institute awarded him one of its
Montyon prizes (4/11.), "an honour of which, needless to say, he had never
dreamed." (4/12.) Darwin, in his celebrated work on the "Origin of
Species," which appeared precisely at this moment, speaks of Fabre
somewhere as "the inimitable observer." (4/13.)

Exploring the immediate surroundings of Avignon, he very soon discovered
fresh localities frequented almost exclusively by other insects, whose
habits in their turn absorbed his whole attention.

First of these was the sandy plateau of the Angles, where every spring, in
the sunlit pastures so beloved of the sheep, the Scarabaeus sacer, with his
incurved feet and clumsy legs, commences to roll his everlasting pellet,
"to the ancients the image of the world." His history, since the time of
the Pharaohs, had been nothing but a tissue of legends; but stripping it of
the embroidery of fiction, and referring it to the facts of nature, Fabre
demonstrated that the true story is even more marvellous than all the tales
of ancient Egypt. He narrated its actual life, the object of its task, and
its comical and exhilarating performances. But such is the subtlety of
these delicate and difficult researches that nearly forty years were
required to complete the study of its habits and to solve the mystery of
its cradle. (4/14.)

On the right bank of the Rhône, facing the embouchure of the Durance, is a
small wood of oak-trees, the wood of Des Issarts. This again, for many
reasons, was one of his favourite spots. There, "lying flat on the ground,
his head in the shadow of some rabbit's burrow," or sheltered from the sun
by a great umbrella, "while the blue-winged locusts frisked for joy," he
would follow the rapid and sibilant flight of the elegant Bembex, carrying
their daily ration of diptera to her larvae, at the bottom of her burrow,
deep in the fine sand." (4/15.)

He did not always go thither alone: sometimes, on Sundays, he would take
his pupils with him, to spend a morning in the fields, "at the ineffable
festival of the awakening of life in the spring." (4/16.)

Those most dear to him, those who in the subsequent years have remained the
object of a special affection, were Devillario, Bordone, and Vayssières
(4/17.), "young people with warm hearts and smiling imaginations,
overflowing with that springtime sap of life which makes us so expansive
and so eager to know.

Among them he was "the eldest, their master, but still more their companion
and friend"; lighting in them his own sacred fire, and amazing them by the
deftness of his fingers and the acuteness of his lynx-like eyes. Furnished
with a notebook and all the tools of the naturalist--lens, net, and little
boxes of sawdust steeped in anaesthetic for the capture of rare specimens--
they would wander "along the paths bordered with hawthorn and hyaebla,
simple and childlike folk," probing the bushes, scratching up the sand,
raising stones, running the net along hedge and meadow, with explosions of
delight when they made some splendid capture or discovered some unrecorded
marvel of the entomological world.

It was not only on the banks of the Rhône or the sandy plateau of Avignon
that they sought adventure thus, "discussing things and other things," but
as far as the slopes of Mont Ventoux, for which Fabre had always felt an
inexplicable and invincible attraction, and whose ascent he accomplished
more than twenty times, so that at last he knew all its secrets, all the
gamut of its vegetation, the wealth of the varied flora which climb its
flanks from base to summit, and which range "from the scarlet flowers of
the pomegranate to the violet of Mont Cenis and the Alpine forget-me-not"
(4/18.), as well as the antediluvian fauna revealed amid its entrails, a
vast ossuary rich in fossils.

His disciples, all of whom, without exception, regarded him with absolute
worship, have retained the memory of his wit, his enthusiasm, his geniality
and his infectious gaiety, and also of the singular uncertainty of his
temperament; for on some days he would not speak a word from the beginning
to the end of his walk.

Even his temper, ordinarily gentle and easy, would suddenly become hasty
and violent, and would break out into terrible explosions when a sudden
annoyance set him beside himself; for instance, when he was the butt of
some ill-natured trick, or when, in spite of the lucidity of his
explanations, he felt that he had not been properly understood. Perhaps he
inherited this from his mother, a rebellious, crotchety, somewhat fantastic
person, by whose temper he himself had suffered.

But the young people who surrounded him were far from being upset by these
contrasts of temperament, in which they themselves saw nothing but natural
annoyance, and the corollary, as it were, of his abounding vitality.
(4/19.)

It was because he was the only university teacher in Avignon to occupy
himself with entomology that Pasteur visited him in 1865. The illustrious
chemist had been striving to check the plague that was devastating the
silkworm nurseries, and as he knew nothing of the subject which he proposed
to study, not even understanding the constitution of the cocoon or the
evolution of the silkworm, he sought out Fabre in order to obtain from his
store of entomological wisdom the elementary ideas which he would find
indispensable. Fabre has told us, in a moving page (4/20), with what a
total lack of comprehension of "poverty in a black coat" the great
scientist gazed at his poor home. Preoccupied by another problem, that of
the amelioration of wines by means of heat, Pasteur asked him point-blank--
him, the humble proletarian of the university caste, who drank only the
cheapest wine of the country--to show him his cellar. "My cellar! Why not
my vaults, my dusty bottles, labelled according to age and vintage! But
Pasteur insisted. Then, pointing with my finger, I showed him, in a corner
of the kitchen, a chair with all the straw gone, and on this chair a two-
gallon demijohn: 'There is my cave, monsieur!'"

If the country professor was embarrassed by the chilliness of the other, he
was none the less shocked by his attitude. It would seem, from what Fabre
has said, that Pasteur treated him with a hauteur which was slightly
disdainful. The ignorant genius questioned his humble colleague, distantly
giving him his orders, explaining his plans and his ideas, and informing
him in what directions he required assistance.

After this, we cannot be surprised if the naturalist was silent. How could
sympathetic relations have survived this first meeting? Fabre could not
forgive it. His own character was too independent to accommodate itself to
Pasteur's. Yet never, perhaps, were two men made for a better
understanding. They were equally expert in exercising their admirable
powers of vision in the vast field of nature, equally critical of self,
equally careful never to depart from the strict limits of the facts; and
they were, one may say, equally eminent in the domain of invention,
different though their fortunes may have been; for the sublimity of
scientific discoveries, however full of genius they may be, is often
measured only by the immediate consequences drawn therefrom and the
practical importance of their results.

In reality, were they not two rivals, worthy of being placed side by side
in the paradise of sages? Both of them, the one by demolishing the theory
of spontaneous generation, the other by refuting the mechanical theory of
the origin of instincts, have brought into due prominence the great unknown
and mysterious forces which seem destined to hold eternally in suspense the
profound enigma of life.

Now he was anxious not to leave the Vaucluse district, the scene of his
first success, and a place so fruitful in subjects of study. He wished to
remain close to his insects, and also near the precious library and the
rich collections which Requien had left by will to the town of Avignon. In
spite of the meagreness of his salary, he asked for nothing more; and, what
is more, by an inconsequence which is by no means incomprehensible, he
avoided everything that might have resulted in a more profitable position
elsewhere, and evaded all proposals of further promotion. Twice, at
Poitiers and Marseilles, he refused a post as assistant professor, not
regarding the advantages sufficient to balance the expenses of removal.
(4/21.)

It is true that his modest position was slightly improved; at the lycée he
had just been appointed drawing-master, thanks to his knowledge of design,
for he could draw--indeed, what could he not do? The city, on the other
hand, appointed him conservator of the Requien Museum, and presently
municipal lecturer, so that his earnings were increased by 48 pounds
sterling per annum, and he was at last able to abandon "those abominable
private lessons" (4/22.), which the insufficiency of his income had
hitherto forced him to accept. These new duties, which naturally demanded
much time and much labour, kept him almost as badly tied as he had been
before.

To be rich enough to set himself free; to be master of all his time, to be
able to devote himself entirely to his chosen work: this was his dream, his
constant preoccupation: it haunted him; it was a fixed idea.

Such was the principal motive of his inquiry into the properties of madder,
the colouring principle of which he succeeded in extracting directly, by a
perfectly simple method, which for a time very advantageously replaced the
extremely primitive methods of the old dyers, who used a simple extract of
madder; a crude preparation which necessitated long and expensive
manipulations. (4/23.)

He had been working at this for eight years when Victor Duruy, Minister of
Public Instruction and Grand Master of the University, came to surprise him
in his laboratory at Saint-Martial, in the full fever of research. Whatever
was Duruy's idea in entering into relations with him, it seems that from
their first meeting the two men were really taken with one another: there
were, between them, so many close affinities of taste and character. Duruy
found in Fabre a man of his own temper; for his, like Fabre's, was a modest
and simple nature. Both came of the people, and the principal motive of
each was the same ideal of work, emancipation, and progress.

A little later Duruy summoned the modest sage of Avignon to Paris, with
particular insistence; he was full of attentions and of forethought, and
made him there and then a chevalier of the Legion of Honour; a distinction
of which Fabre was far from being proud, and which he was careful never to
obtrude; but he nevertheless always thought of it with a certain
tenderness, as a beloved "relic" in memory of this illustrious friend.

On the following day the naturalist was conveyed to the Tuileries to be
presented to the Emperor. You must not suppose that he was in the least
disturbed at the idea of finding himself face to face with royalty. In the
presence of all these bedizened folk, in his coat of a cut which was
doubtless already superannuated, he cared little for the impression he
might produce. As good an observer of men as of beasts, he gazed quietly
about him; he exchanged a few words with the Emperor, who was "quite
simple," almost suppressed, his eyes always half-closed; he watched the
coming and going of "the chamberlains with short breeches and silver-
buckled shoes, great scarabaei, clad with café au lait wing-cases, moving
with a formal gait." Already he sighed regretfully; he was bored; he was on
the rack, and for nothing in the world would he have repeated the
experience. He did not even feel the least desire to visit the vaunted
collections of the Museum. He longed to return; to find himself once more
among his dear insects; to see his grey olive-trees, full of the frolicsome
cicadae, his wastes and commons, which smelt so sweet of thyme and cypress;
above all, to return to his furnace and retorts, in order to complete his
discovery as quickly as possible.

But others profited by his happy conceptions. Like the cicada, the Cigale
of his fable (See "Social Life in the Insect World," by Jean-Henri Fabre
(T. Fisher Unwin, 1912).), which makes a "honeyed reek" flow from--

    "the bark
Tender and juicy, of the bough,"

on which it is quickly supplanted by

"Fly, drone, wasp, beetle too with hornèd head" (4/24.),

who

"Now lick their honey'd lips, and feed at leisure,"

so, after he had painfully laboured for twelve years in his well, he saw
others, more cunning than he, come to his perch, who by dint of "stamping
on his toe," succeeded in ousting him. Pending the appearance of artificial
alizarine, which was presently to turn the whole madder industry upside
down, these more sophisticated persons were able to benefit at leisure by
the ingenious processes discovered by Fabre, so that the practical result
of so much assiduity, so much patient research, was absolutely nil, and he
found himself as poor as ever.

So faded his dream: and, if we except his domestic griefs, this was
certainly the deepest and cruellest disappointment he had ever experienced.

Thenceforth he saw his salvation only in the writing of textbooks, which
were at last to throw open the door of freedom. Already he had set to work,
under the powerful stimulus of Duruy, preoccupied as he always was by his
incessant desire for freedom. The first rudiments of his "Agricultural
Chemistry," which sounded so fresh a note in the matter of teaching, had
given an instance and a measure of his capabilities.

But he did not seriously devote himself to this project until after the
industrial failure and the distressing miscarriage of his madder process;
and not until he had been previously assured of the co-operation of Charles
Delagrave, a young publisher, whose fortunate intervention contributed in
no small degree to his deliverance. Confident in his vast powers of work,
and divining his incomparable talent as POPULARIZER, Delagrave felt that he
could promise Fabre that he would never leave him without work; and this
promise was all the more comforting, in that the University, despite his
twenty-eight years of assiduous service, would not accord him the smallest
pension.

Victor Duruy was the great restorer of education in France, from elementary
and primary education, which should date, from his great ministry, the era
of its deliverance, to the secondary education which he himself created in
every part. He was also the real initiator of secular instruction in
France, and the Third Republic has done little but resume his work, develop
his ideas, and extend his programme. Finally, by instituting classes for
adults, the evening classes which enabled workmen, peasants, bourgeois, and
young women to fill the gaps in their education, he gave reality to the
generous and fruitful idea that it is possible for all to divide life into
two parts, one having for its object our material needs and our daily
bread, and the other consecrated to the spiritual life and the delights of
the Ideal.

At the same time he emancipated the young women of France, formerly under
the exclusive tutelage of the clergy, and opened to them for the first time
the golden gates of knowledge; an audacious innovation, and formidable
withal, for it shrewdly touched the interests of the Church, struck a blow
at her ever-increasing influence, and clashed with her consecrated
privileges and age-long prejudices. (4/25.)

At Avignon Fabre was instructed to give his personal services. He gave them
with all his heart; and it was then that he undertook, in the ancient Abbey
of Saint-Martial, those famous free lectures which have remained celebrated
in the memory of that generation. There, under the ancient Gothic vault,
among the pupils of the primary Normal College, an eager crowd of listeners
pressed to hear him; and among the most assiduous was Roumanille, the
friend of Mistral, he who so exquisitely wove into his harmonies "the
laughter of young maidens and the flowers of springtime." No one expounded
a fact better than Fabre; no one explained it so fully and so clearly. No
one could teach as he did, in a fashion so simple, so animated, so
picturesque, and by methods so original.

He was indeed convinced that even in early childhood it was possible for
both boys and girls to learn and to love many subjects which had hitherto
never been proposed; and in particular that Natural History which to him
was a book in which all the world might read, but that university methods
had reduced it to a tedious and useless study in which the letter "killed
the life."

He knew the secret of communicating his conviction, his profound faith, to
his hearers: that sacred fire which animated him, that passion for all the
creatures of nature.

These lectures took place in the evening, twice a week, alternately with
the municipal lectures, to which Fabre brought no less application and
ardour. In the intention of those who instituted them these latter were
above all to be practical and scientific, dealing with science applied to
agriculture, the arts, and industry.

But might he not also expect auditors of another quality, in love only with
the ideal, "who, without troubling about the possible applications of
scientific theory, desired above all to be initiated into the action of the
forces which rule nature, and thereby to open to their minds more wondrous
horizons"?

Such were the noble scruples which troubled his conscience, and which
appeared in the letter which he addressed to the administration of the
city, when he was entrusted by the latter with what he regarded as a lofty
and most important mission.

"...Is it to be understood that every purely scientific aspect, incapable
of immediate application, is to be rigorously banished from these lessons?
Is it to be understood that, confined to an impassable circle, the value of
every truth must be reckoned at so much per hundred, and that I must
silently pass over all that aims only at satisfying a laudable desire of
knowledge? No, gentlemen, for then these lectures would lack a very
essential thing: the spirit which gives life!" (4/26.)

Physically, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, he was
already as an admirable photograph represents him twenty years later: he
wore a large black felt hat; his face was shaven, the chin strong and
wilful, the eyes vigilant, deep-set and penetrating; he hardly changed, and
it was thus I saw him later, at a more advanced age.

The ancient Abbey of Saint-Martial, where these lectures were given, was
occupied also by the Requien Museum, of which Fabre had charge. It was here
that he one day met John Stuart Mill.

The celebrated philosopher and economist had just lost his wife: "the most
precious friendship of his life" was ended. (4/27.) It was only after long
waiting that he had been able to marry her. Subjected at an early age by a
father devoid of tenderness and formidably severe to the harshest of
disciplines, he had learned in childhood "what is usually learned only by a
man." Scarcely out of his long clothes, he was construing Herodotus and the
dialogues of Plato, and the whole of his dreary youth was spent in covering
the vast field of the moral and mathematical sciences. His heart, always
suppressed, never really expanded until he met Mrs. Harriett Taylor.

This was one of those privileged beings such as seem as a rule to exist
only in poetry and literature; a woman as beautiful as she was
astonishingly gifted with the rarest faculties; combining with the most
searching intelligence and the most persuasive eloquence so exquisite a
sensitiveness that she seemed often to divine events in advance.

Mill possessed her at last for a few years only, and he had resigned his
post in the offices of the East India Company to enjoy a studious retreat
in the enchanted atmosphere of southern Europe when suddenly at Avignon
Harriett Mill was carried off by a violent illness. (Mill retired in 1858,
when the government of India passed to the Crown. He had married Mrs. John
Taylor in 1851. [Tr.])

>From that time the philosopher's horizon was suddenly contracted to the
limit of those places whence had vanished the adored companion and the
beneficent genius who had been the sole charm of his entire existence.
Overwhelmed with grief, he acquired a small country house in one of the
least frequented parts of the suburbs of Avignon, close to the cemetery
where the beloved dead was laid to rest for ever. A silent alley of planes
and mulberry-trees led to the threshold, which was shaded by the delicate
foliage of a myrtle. All about he had planted a dense hedge of hawthorn,
cypress, and arborvitae, above which, from the vantage of a small terrace,
built, under his orders, at the level of the first floor, he could see, day
by day and at all hours, the white tomb of his wife, and a little ease his
grief.

Thus he cloistered himself, "living in memory," having no companion but the
daughter of his wife; trying to console himself by work, recapitulating his
life, the story of which he has told in his remarkable "Memoirs." (4/28.)

Fabre paid a few visits to this Thebaïd. A solitary such as Mill had become
could be attracted only by a man of his temper, in whom he found, if not an
affinity of nature, at least tastes like his own, and immense learning, as
great as his. For Mill also was versed in all the branches of human
knowledge: not only had he meditated on the high problems of history and
political economy, but he had also probed all branches of science:
mathematics, physics, and natural history. It was above all botany which
served them as a bond of union, and they were often seen to set forth on a
botanizing expedition through the countryside.

This friendship, which was not without profit for Fabre (4/29.), was still
more precious to Mill, who found, in the society of the naturalist, a
certain relief from his sorrow. The substance of their conversation was far
from being such as one might have imagined it. Mill was not highly sensible
to the festival of nature or the poetry of the fields. He was hardly
interested in botany, except from the somewhat abstract point of view of
classification and the systematic arrangement of species. Always
melancholy, cold, and distant, he spoke little; but Fabre felt under this
apparent sensibility a rigorous integrity of character, a great capacity
for devotion, and a rare goodness of heart.

So the two wandered across country, each thinking his own thoughts, and
each self-contained as though they were walking on parallel but distant
paths.

However, Fabre was not at the end of his troubles; and secret ill-feeling
began to surround him. The free lectures at Saint-Martial offended the
devout, angered the sectaries, and excited the intolerance of the pedants,
"whose feeble eyelids blink at the daylight," and he was far from
receiving, from his colleagues at the lycée, the sympathy and encouragement
which were, at this moment especially, so necessary to him. Some even went
so far as to denounce him publicly, and he was mentioned one day from the
height of the pulpit, to the indignation of the pupils of the upper Normal
College, as a man at once dangerous and subversive.

Some found it objectionable that this "irregular person, this man of
solitary study," should, by his work and by the magic of his teaching,
assume a position so unique and so disproportionate. Others regarded the
novelty of placing the sciences at the disposal of young girls as a heresy
and a scandal.

Their bickering, their cabals, their secret manoeuvres, were in the long
run to triumph. Duruy had just succumbed under the incessant attacks of the
clericals. In him Fabre lost a friend, a protector, and his only support.
Embittered, defeated, he was now only waiting for a pretext, an incident, a
mere nothing, to throw up everything.

One fine morning his landladies, devout and aged spinsters, made themselves
the instruments of the spite of his enemies, and abruptly gave him notice
to quit. he had to leave before the end of the month, for, simple and
confident as usual, he had obtained neither a lease nor the least written
agreement.

At this moment he was so poor that he had not even the money to meet the
expenses of his removal. The times were troublous: the great war had
commenced, and Paris being invested he could no longer obtain the small
earnings which his textbooks were beginning to yield him, and which had for
some time been increasing his modest earnings. On the other hand, having
always lived far from all society, he had not at Avignon a single relation
who could assist him, and he could neither obtain credit nor find any one
to extricate him from his embarrassments and save him from the extremity of
need with which he was threatened. He thought of Mill, and in this
difficult juncture it was Mill who saved him. The philosopher was then in
England; he was for the time being a member of the House of Commons, and he
used to vary his life at Avignon by a few weeks' sojourn in London. His
reply, however, was not long in coming: almost immediately he sent help; a
sum of some 120 pounds sterling, which fell like manna into the hands of
Fabre; and he did not, in exchange, demand the slightest security for this
advance.

Then, filled with disgust, the "irregular person" shook off the yoke and
retired to Orange. At first he took shelter where he could, anxious only to
avoid as far as possible any contact with his fellow-men; then, having
finally discovered a dwelling altogether in conformity with his tastes, he
moved to the outskirts of the city, and settled at the edge of the fields,
in the middle of a great meadow, in an isolated house, pleasant and
commodious, connected with the road to Camaret by a superb avenue of tall
and handsome plane-trees. This hermitage in some respects recalled that of
Mill in the outskirts of Avignon; and thence his eyes, embracing a vast
horizon, from the pediment of the ancient theatre to the hills of Sérignan,
could already distinguish the promised land.


CHAPTER 5. A GREAT TEACHER.

It was in 1871. Fabre had lived twenty years at Avignon. This date
constitutes an important landmark in his career, since it marks the precise
moment of his final rupture with the University.

At this time the preoccupations of material life were more pressing than
ever, and it was then that he devoted himself entirely and with
perseverance to the writing of those admirable works of introduction and
initiation, in which he applied himself to rendering science accessible to
the youngest minds, and employed all his profound knowledge to the thorough
teaching of its elements and its eternal laws.

To this ungrateful task--ungrateful, but in reality pleasurable, so
strongly had he the vocation, the feeling, and the genius of the teacher--
Fabre applied himself thenceforth with all his heart, and for nine years
never lifted his hand.

How insipid, how forbidding were the usual classbooks, the second-rate
natural histories above all, stuffed with dry statements, with raw
knowledge, which brought nothing but the memory into play! How many
youthful faces had grown pale above them!

What a contrast and a deliverance in these little books of Fabre's, so
clear, so luminous, so simple, which for the first time spoke to the heart
and the understanding; for "work which one does not understand disgusts
one." (5/1.)

To initiate others into science or art, it is not enough to have understood
them oneself; it is not enough even that one should be an artist or a
scientist. Scientists of the highest flight are sometimes very unskilful
teachers, and very indifferent hands at explaining the alphabet. It is not
given to the first comer to educate the young; to understand how to
identify his understanding with theirs, to measure their powers. It is a
matter of instinct and good sense rather than of memory or erudition, and
Fabre, who had never in his life been the pupil of any one, could better
than any remember the phases through which his mind had passed, could
recollect by what detours of the mind, by what secret labours of thought,
by what intuitive methods he had succeeded in conquering, one by one, all
the difficulties in his path, and in gradually attaining to knowledge.

It is wonderful to watch the mastery with which he conducts his
demonstrations, the simplest as well as the most involved, singling out the
essential, little by little evoking the sense of things, ingeniously
seeking familiar examples, finding comparisons, and employing picturesque
and striking images, which throw a dazzling light upon the obscurest
question or the most difficult problem. How in such matters can one
dispense with figurative speech, when one is reduced, as a rule, to an
inability to show the things themselves, but only their images and their
symbols?

Follow him, for example, in the "The Sky" (5/2.), which seems to thrill
with the ardent and comprehensive genius of a Humboldt, and admire the ease
with which he surmounts all the difficulties and smooths the way for the
vast voyage on which he conducts you, past the infinity of the suns and the
stars in their millions, scintillating in the cold air of night, to descend
once more to our humble "Earth" (5/3.); first an ocean of fire, rolling its
heavy waves of molten porphyry and granite, then "slowly hardening into
strange floes and bergs, hotter than the red iron in the fire of the
forge," rounding its back, all covered with gaping pustules, eruptive
mountains and craters, and the first folds of its calcined crust, until the
day when the vast mist of densest vapours, heaped up on every hand and of
immeasurable depth, begins gradually to show rifts, giving rise at last to
an infinite storm, a stupendous deluge, and forming the strange universal
sea, "a mineral sludge, veiled by a chaos of smoke," whence at length the
primitive soil emerges, "and at last the green grass."

And although "a little animal proteid, capable of pleasure and pain,
surpasses in interest the whole immense creation of dead matter," he does
not forget to show us the spectacle of life flowing through matter itself;
and he animates even the simple elementary bodies, celebrating the
marvellous activities of the air, the violence of Chlorine, the
metamorphoses of Carbon, the miraculous bridals of Phosphorus, and "the
splendours which accompany the birth of a drop of water." (5/4.)

A man must indeed love knowledge deeply before he can make others love it,
or render it easy and attractive, revealing only the smiling highways; and
Fabre, above all things the impassioned professor, was the very man to lead
his disciples "between the hedges of hawthorn and sloe," whether to show
them the sap, "that fruitful current, that flowing flesh, that vegetable
blood," or how the plant, by a mysterious transubstantiation, makes its
wood, "and the delicate bundle of swaddling-bands of its buds," or how
"from a putrid ordure it extracts the flavour and the fragrance of its
fruits"; or whether he seeks to evoke the murderous plants that live as
parasites at the cost of others; the white Clandestinus, "which strangles
the roots of the alders beside the rivers," the Cuscuta, "which knows
nothing of labour," the wicked Orobanche, plump, powerful and brazen, the
skin covered with ugly scales, "with sombre flowers that wear the livery of
death, which leaps at the throat of the clover, stifling it, devouring it,
sucking its blood." (5/5.)

Botany, by this genial treatment, becomes a most interesting study, and I
know of no more captivating reading than "The Plant" and "The Story of the
Log," the jewels of this incomparable series.

Employ Fabre's method if you wish to learn by yourself, or to evoke in your
children a love of science, and, according to the phrase of the gentle
Jean-Jacques, to help them "to buy at the best possible of prices." Give
them as sole guides these exquisite manuals, which touch upon everything,
initiating them into everything, and bringing within the reach of all, for
their instruction or amusement, the heavens and the earth, the planets and
their moons, the mechanism of the great natural forces and the laws which
govern them, life and its materials, agriculture and its applications. For
more than a quarter of a century these catechisms of science, models of
lucidity and good sense, effected the education of generations of
Frenchmen. Abridgments of all knowledge, veritable codes of rural wisdom,
these perfect breviaries have never been surpassed.

It was after reading these little books, it is said, that Duruy conceived
the idea of confiding to this admirable teacher the education of the
Imperial heir; and it is very probable that this was, in reality, the
secret motive which would explain why he had so expressly summoned Fabre to
Paris. What an ideal tutor he had thought of, and how proud might others
have been of such a choice! But the man was too zealous of his
independence, too difficult to tame, to bear with the environment of a
court, and God knows whether he was made for such refulgence! We need not
be surprised that Fabre never heard of it; it must have sufficed the
minister to speak with him for a few minutes to realize that the most
tempting offers and all the powers of seduction would never overcome his
insurmountable dislike of life in a capital, nor prevail against his
inborn, passionate, exclusive love of the open.

For these volumes Fabre was at first rather wretchedly paid; at all events,
until public education had definitely received a fresh impulse; and for a
long time his life at Orange was literally a hand-to-mouth existence.

As soon as he was able to realize a few advances, he had nothing so much at
heart as the repayment of Mill, and he hastened to call on the philosopher;
all the more filled with gratitude for his generosity in that the loan,
although of the comparatively large amount of three thousand francs, was
made without security, practically from hand to hand, with no other
warranty than his probity.

For this reason this episode was always engraven on his memory. Thirty
years later he would relate the affair even to the most insignificant
details. How many times has he not reminded me of the transaction,
insisting that I should make a note of it, so anxious was he that this
incident in his career should not be lost in oblivion! How often has he not
recalled the infinite delicacy of Mill, and his excessive scrupulousness,
which went so far that he wished to give a written acknowledgment of the
repayment of the debt, of which there was no record whatever save in the
conscience of the debtor!

Scarcely two years later Mill died suddenly at Avignon. Grief finally
killed him; for this unexpected death seemed to have been only the ultimate
climax of the secret malady which had so long been undermining him.

It was in the outskirts of Orange that Fabre for the last time met him and
accompanied him upon a botanizing expedition. He was struck by his weakness
and his rapid decline. Mill could hardly drag himself along, and when he
stooped to gather a specimen he had the greatest difficulty in rising. They
were never to meet again.

A few days later--on the 8th May, 1873--Fabre was invited to lunch with the
philosopher. Before going to the little house by the cemetery he halted, as
was his custom, at the Libraire Saint-Just. It was there that he learned,
with amazement, of the tragic and sudden event which set a so unexpected
term to a friendship which was doubtless a little remote, but which was, on
both sides, a singularly lofty and beautiful attachment.

His class-books were now bringing in scarcely anything; their preparation,
moreover, involved an excessive expenditure of time, and gave him a great
deal of trouble; it is impossible to imagine what scrupulous care, what
zeal and self-respect Fabre brought to the execution of the programme which
he had to fulfil.

To begin with, he considered that he could not enjoy a more splendid
opportunity to give children a taste for science and to stimulate their
curiosity than by finding a means to interest them, from their earliest
infancy, in their simple playthings, even the crudest and most inexpensive;
so true is it that "in the smallest mechanical device or engine, even in
its simplest form, as conceived by the industry of a child, there is often
the germ of important truths, and, better than books, the school of the
playroom, if gently disciplined, will open for the child the windows of the
universe."

"The humble teetotum, made of a crust of rye-bread transfixed by a twig,
silently spinning on the cover of a school-book, will give a correct enough
image of the earth, which retains unmoved its original impulse, and travels
along a great circle, at the same time turning on itself. Gummed on its
disc, scraps of paper properly coloured will tell us of white light,
decomposable into various coloured rays...

"There will be the pop-gun, with its ramrod and its two plugs of tow, the
hinder one expelling the foremost by the elasticity of the compressed air.
Thus we get a glimpse of the ballistics of gunpowder, and the pressure of
steam in engines..."

The little hydraulic fountain made of an apricot stone, patiently hollowed
and pierced with a hole at either side, into which two straws are fitted,
one dipping into a cup of water and the other duly capped, "expelling a
slender thread of water in which the sunlight flickers," will introduce us
to the true syphon of physics.

"What amusing and useful lessons" a well-balanced scheme of education might
extract from this "academy of childish ingenuity"! (5/6.)

At this time he was undertaking the education of his own children. His
chemistry lessons especially had a great success. (5/7.) With apparatus of
his own devising and of the simplest kind, he could perform a host of
elementary experiments, the apparatus as a rule consisting of the most
ordinary materials, such as a common flask or bottle, an old mustard-pot, a
tumbler, a goose-quill or a pipe-stem.

A series of astonishing phenomena amazed their wondering eyes. He made them
see, touch, taste, handle, and smell, and always "the hand assisted the
word," always "the example accompanied the precept," for no one more fully
valued the profound maxim, so neglected and misunderstood, that "to see is
to know."

He exerted himself to arouse their curiosity, to provoke their questions,
to discover their mistakes, to set their ideas in order; he accustomed them
to rectify their errors themselves, and from all this he obtained excellent
material for his books.

For those more especially intended for the education of girls he took
counsel with his daughter Antonia, inviting her collaboration, begging her
to suggest every aspect of the matter that occurred to her; for instance,
in respect of the chemistry of the household, "where exact science should
shed its light upon a host of facts relating to domestic economy" (5/8.),
from the washing of clothes to the making of a stew.

Even now, to his despair, although freed from the cares of school life, he
was always almost wholly without leisure to devote himself to his chosen
subjects.

It was at this period above all that he felt so "lonely, abandoned,
struggling against misfortune; and before one can philosophize one has to
live." (5/9.)

And his incessant labour was aggravated by a bitter disappointment. In the
year of Mill's death Fabre was dismissed from his post as conservator of
the Requien Museum, which he had held in spite of his departure from
Avignon, going thither regularly twice a week to acquit himself of his
duties. The municipality, working in the dark, suddenly dismissed him
without explanation. To Fabre this dismissal was infinitely bitter; "a
sweeper-boy would have been treated with as much ceremony." (5/10.) What
afflicted him most was not the undeserved slight of the dismissal, but his
unspeakable regret at quitting those beloved vegetable collections,
"amassed with such love" by Requien, who was his friend and master, and by
Mill and himself; and the thought that he would henceforth perhaps be
unable to save these precious but perishable things from oblivion, or
terminate the botanical geography of Vaucluse, on which he had been thirty
years at work!

For this reason, when there was some talk of establishing an agronomic
station at Avignon, and of appointing him director, he was at first warmly
in favour of the idea. (5/11.) Already he foresaw a host of fascinating
experiments, of the highest practical value, conducted in the peace and
leisure and security of a fixed appointment. It is indeed probable that in
so vast a field he would have demonstrated many valuable truths, fruitful
in practical results; he was certainly meant for such a task, and he would
have performed it with genuine personal satisfaction. He had already
exerted his ingenuity by trying to develop, among the children of the
countryside, a taste for agriculture, which he rightly considered the
logical complement of the primary school, and which is based upon all the
sciences which he himself had studied, probed, taught, and popularized.

It will be remembered how patiently he devoted himself for twelve years to
the study of madder, multiplying his researches, and applying himself not
only to extracting the colouring principle, but also to indicating means
whereby adulteration and fraud might be detected.

He had published memoirs of great importance dealing with entomology in its
relations to agriculture. Impressed with the importance of this little
world, he suggested valuable remedies, means of preservation; which were
all the more logical in that the destruction of insects, if it is to be
efficacious, must be based not upon a gross empiricism, but on a previous
study of their social life and their habits.

With what patience he observed the terribly destructive weevils, and those
formidable moths with downy wings, which fly without sound of a night, and
whose depredations have often been valued at millions of francs! How
meticulously he has recorded the conditions which favour or check the
development of those parasitic fungi whose mortal blemishes are seen on
buds and flowers, on the green shoots and clusters that promise a
prosperous vintage!

But then he became anxious. Was it all worth the sacrifice of his liberty?
"Would he not suffer a thousand annoyances from pretentious nobodies?" for
as things were, all ideas of again "enregimenting" himself "filled him with
horror." (5/12.)

Slowly, however, the first instalment of the work which he had spent nearly
twenty-five years in planning, creating, and polishing, began to take
shape. At the end of the year 1878 he was able to assemble a sufficient
number of studies to form material for what was to be the first volume of
his "Souvenirs entomologiques." (A selection of which forms "Social Life in
the Insect World" (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912).)

Let us stop for a moment to consider this first book, whose publication
constitutes a truly historical date, not only in the career of Fabre, but
in the annals of universal science. It was at once the foundation and the
keystone of the marvellous edifice which we shall watch unfolding and
increasing, but to which the future was in reality to add nothing
essential. The cardinal ideas as to instinct and evolution, the necessity
of experimenting in the psychology of animals, and the harmonic laws of the
conservation of the individual, are here already expounded in their final
and definite form. This fruitful and decisive year brought Fabre a great
grief. He lost his son Jules, that one of all his children whom he seems
most ardently to have loved.

He was a youth of great promise, "all fire, all flame"; of a serious
nature; an exquisite being, of a precocious intelligence, whose rare
aptitudes both for science and literature were truly extraordinary. Such
too was the subtlety of his senses that by handling no matter what plant,
with his eyes closed, he could recognize and define it merely by the sense
of touch. This delightful companion of his father's studies had scarcely
passed his fifteenth year when death removed him. A terrible void was left
in his heart, which was never filled. Thirty years later the least allusion
to this child, however tactful, which recalled this dear memory to his
mind, would still wring his heart, and his whole body would be shaken by
his sobs. As always, work was his refuge and consolation; but this terrible
blow shattered his health, until then so robust. In the midst of this
disastrous winter he fell seriously ill. He was stricken with pneumonia,
which all but carried him off, and every one gave him up for lost. However,
he recovered, and issued from his convalescence as though regenerated, and
with strength renewed he attacked the next stage of his labours.

But what are the most fruitful resolutions, and what poor playthings are we
in the hands of the unexpected! A vulgar incident of every-day life had
sufficed to make Fabre decide to break openly with the University, and to
leave Avignon. The secret motive of his departure from Orange was scarcely
more solid. His new landlord concluded one day, either from cupidity or
stupidity, to lop most ferociously the two magnificent rows of plane-trees
which formed a shady avenue before his house, in which the birds piped and
warbled in the spring, and the cicadae chorused in the summer. Fabre could
not endure this massacre, this barbarous mutilation, this crime against
nature. Hungry for peace and quiet, the enjoyment of a dwelling-place could
no longer content him; at all costs he must own his own home.

So, having won the modest ransom of his deliverance, he waited no longer,
but quitted the cities for ever; retiring to Sérignan, to the peaceful
obscurity of a tiny hamlet, and this quiet corner of the earth had
henceforth all his heart and soul in keeping.


CHAPTER 6. THE HERMITAGE.

Goethe has somewhere written: Whosoever would understand the poet and his
work should visit the poet's country.

Let us, then, the latest of many, make the pilgrimage which all those who
are fascinated by the enigma of nature will accomplish later, with the same
piety that has led so many and so fervent admirers to the dwelling of
Mistral at Maillane.

Starting from Orange and crossing the Aygues, a torrent whose muddy waters
are lost in the Rhône, but whose bed is dried by the July and August suns,
leaving only a desert of pebbles, where the Mason-bee builds her pretty
turrets of rock-work, we come presently to the Sérignaise country; an arid,
stony tract, planted with vines and olives, coloured a rusty red, or
touched here and there with almost a hue of blood; and here and there a
grove of cypress makes a sombre blot. To the north runs a long black line
of hills, covered with box and ilex and the giant heather of the south. Far
in the distance, to the east, the immense plain is closed in by the wall of
Saint-Amant and the ridge of the Dentelle, behind which the lofty Ventoux
rears its rocky, cloven bosom abruptly to the clouds. At the end of a few
miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful breath of the mistral, we
suddenly reach a little village. It is a curious little community, with its
central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping
fountains, and its almost Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with
flat roofs; and sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling,
we see the unexpected curves of a loggia. At a distance the facade of the
church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close at hand
is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower surmounted by a narrow
mitre wrought in hammered iron, in the midst of which are seen the black
profiles of the bells.

I shall never forget my first visit. It was in the month of August; and the
whole countryside was ringing with the song of the cicadae. I had applied
to a job-master of Orange, counting on him to take me thither; but he had
never driven any one to Sérignan, had hardly heard of Fabre, and did not
know where his house was. At length, however, we contrived to find it. At
the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in the centre
of an enclosure of lofty walls, which were taller than the crests of the
pines and cypresses, his dwelling was hidden away. No sound proceeded from
it; but for the baying of the faithful Tom I do not think I should have
dared to knock on the great door, which turned slowly on its hinges. A pink
house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at
the end of an alley of lilacs, "which sway in the spring under the weight
of their balmy thyrsi." Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where
during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the
deafening cacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere
with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of
this solitude.

Before us, beyond a little wall of a height to lean upon, on an isolated
lawn, beneath the shade of great trees with interwoven boughs, a circular
basin displays its still surface, across which the skating Hydrometra
traces its wide circles. Then, suddenly, we see an opening into the most
extraordinary and unexpected of gardens; a wild park, full of strenuous
vegetation, which hides the pebbly soil in all directions; a chaos of
plants and bushes, created throughout especially to attract the insects of
the neighbourhood.

Thickets of wild laurel and dense clumps of lavender encroach upon the
paths, alternating with great bushes of coronilla, which bar the flight of
the butterfly with their yellow-winged flowers, and whose searching
fragrance embalms all the air about them.

It is as though the neighbouring mountain had one day departed, leaving
here its thistles, its dogberry-trees, its brooms, its rushes, its juniper-
bushes, its laburnums, and its spurges. There too grows the "strawberry
tree," whose red fruits wear so familiar an appearance; and tall pines, the
giants of this "pigmy forest." There the Japanese privet ripens its black
berries, mingled with the Paulownia and the Cratoegus with their tender
green foliage. Coltsfoot mingles with violets; clumps of sage and thyme mix
their fragrance with the scent of rosemary and a host of balsamic plants.
Amid the cacti, their fleshy leaves bristling with prickles, the periwinkle
opens its scattered blossoms, while in a corner the serpent arum raises its
cornucopia, in which those insects that love putrescence fall engulfed,
deceived by the horrible savour of its exhalations.

It is in the spring above all that one should see this torrent of verdure,
when the whole enclosure awakens in its festival attire, decked with all
the flowers of May, and the warm air, full of the hum of insects, is
perfumed with a thousand intoxicating scents. It is in the spring that one
should see the "Harmas," the open-air observatory, "the laboratory of
living entomology" (6/1.); a name and a spot which Fabre has made famous
throughout the world.

I enter the dining-room, whose wide, half-closed shutters allow only a
half-light to enter between the printed curtains. Rush-bottomed chairs, a
great table, about which seven persons daily take their places, a few poor
pieces of furniture, and a simple bookcase; such are all the contents. On
the mantel, a clock in black marble, a precious souvenir, the only present
which Fabre received at the time of his exodus from Avignon; it was given
by his old pupils, the young girls who used to attend the free lectures at
Saint-Martial's.

There, every afternoon, half lying on a little sofa, the naturalist has the
habit of taking a short siesta. This light repose, even without sleep, was
of old enough to restore his energies, exhausted by hours of labour.
Thenceforth he was once more alert, and ready for the remainder of the day.

But already he is on his feet, bareheaded, in his waistcoat, his silk
necktie carelessly fastened under the soft turned-down collar of his half-
open shirt, his gesture, in the shadowy chamber, full of welcome.

François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has
succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged,
shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with
originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality
and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for
ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the
strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled
lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth.
The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high,
rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what
graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed
from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what
Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black
eyes, those dilated pupils: the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide
and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as
though made expressly to scrutinize Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above
the orbits, two short, bristling eyebrows seem set there to guide the
vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass, has
retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the
contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of
foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.
Such is this striking physiognomy, which one who has seen it cannot forget.

There, in this "hermit's retreat," as he himself has defined it, the sage
is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only
on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that
even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was
he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring
mountain, where he would often spend whole days alone with wild nature.

It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the
vain agitations and storms of the world, that his life has been passed, in
unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute
labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous
observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to
accumulate.

Let us indeed remember how much time has been required and what effort has
been expended to complete the long and patient inquiries which he had
hitherto accomplished; obliged, as he was, to allow himself to be
interrupted at any moment, and to postpone his observations often at the
most interesting moment, in order to undertake some enervating labour, or
the disagreeable and mechanical duties of his profession. Remember that his
first labours already dated from twenty-five years earlier, and at the
moment when we observe him in his solitude at Sérignan he had only just
painfully gathered together the material for his first book. What a
contrast to the thirty fruitful years that were to follow! Now nearly ten
volumes, no less overflowing with the richest material, were to succeed one
another at almost regular intervals--about one in every three years.

To be sure, he would have gathered his harvest in no matter what corner of
the world, provided he had found within his reach, in whatever sphere of
life he had been placed, any subject of inquiry whatever; such was
Rousseau, botanizing over the bunch of chickweed provided for his canary;
such was Bernardin Saint-Pierre, discovering a world in a strawberry-plant
which had sprouted by chance at the corner of his window. (6/2.) But the
field in which he had hitherto been able to glean was indeed barren. That
he was able, later on, to narrate the wonderful history of the Pelopaeus,
whose habits he had observed at Avignon, was due to the fact that this
curious insect had come to lodge with him, having chosen Fabre's chamber
for its dwelling. None the less he threw himself eagerly upon all such
scraps of information as happened to come under his notice; witness the
observations which he embodied in a memoir touching the phosphorescence of
certain earth-worms which, abounding in a little courtyard near his
dwelling, were so rare elsewhere that he was never again able to find them.
(6/3.) It was therefore fortunate, if not for himself, at least for his
genius, that he did not become, as he had wished, a professor in a faculty;
there, to be sure, he would have found a theatre worthy of his efforts, in
which he might even have demonstrated, in all its magnificence, his
incomparable gift of teaching; but it is probable too that he would have
been stranded in shoal waters; that in the official atmosphere of a city
his still more marvellous gifts of observation would scarcely have found
employment.

It was only by belonging fully to himself that he could fruitfully exercise
his talents. Necessary to every scholar, to every inquirer, to an open-air
observer like Fabre liberty and leisure were more than usually essential;
failing these he might never have accomplished his mission. How many lives
are wasted, how many minds expended in sheer loss, in default of this
sufficiency of leisure! How many scholars tied to the soil, how many
physicians absorbed by an exigent practice, who perhaps had somewhat to
say, have succeeded only in devising plans, for ever postponing their
realization to some miraculous tomorrow, which always recedes!

But we must not fall into illusions. How many might be tempted to imitate
him, hoping to see some unknown talent awaken or expand within them, only
to find themselves incapable of producing anything, and to consume
themselves in an insurmountable and barren ennui! One must be rich in one's
own nature, rich in will and in ability, to live apart and seek new paths
in solitude, and it is not without reason that the majority prefer the
turmoil of cities and the murmur of men to the silence of the country.

The atmosphere of a great capital, for instance, is singularly conducive to
work. Living constantly within the circle of light shed by the masters,
within reach of the laboratories and the great libraries, we are less
likely to go astray; we are stimulated by the contact of others; we profit
by their advice and experience; and it is easy to borrow ideas if we lack
them. Then there is the stimulant of self-respect, the sense of rivalry,
the eager desire to advance, to distinguish oneself, to shine, to attract
attention, to become in one's turn an arbiter, an object of wonder and
envy, without which stimulus many would merely have existed, and would
never have become what they are.

On the other hand, a man needs an intrinsic radio-activity, and a real
talent; and the aid, moreover, of exceptional circumstances, if fame is to
consent to come to him and take him by the hand in the depths of some
unknown Maillane, some obscure Sérignan; even, as in the case of Fabre, at
the end only of a long life.

But he, by a kind of fatality inherent in his nature, loved "to
circumscribe himself," according to the happy expression of Rousseau; and
he profited, rather than otherwise, by living entirely to himself; for he
had long been, indeed he always was, the man who, at twenty-five, writing
to his brother, had said, in speaking of his native countryside:

"For a impassioned botanist, it is a delightful country, in which I could
pass a month, two months, three months, a year even, alone, quite alone,
with no other companion than the crows and the jays which gossip among the
oak-trees; without being weary for a moment; there would be so many
beautiful fungi, orange, rosy, and white, among the mosses, and so many
flowers in the fields." (6/4.)

His work having brought him at last just enough to enable him to give
himself the pleasure of becoming, in his turn, a proprietor, he had
acquired, for a modest sum, this dilapidated dwelling and this deserted
spot of ground; barren land, given over to couch-grass, thistles, and
brambles; a sort of "accursed spot, to which no one would have confided
even a pinch of turnip-seed." A piece of water in front of the house
attracted all the frogs in the neighbourhood; the screech-owl mewed from
the tops of the plane-trees, and numerous birds, no longer disturbed by the
presence of man, had domiciled themselves in the lilacs and the cypresses.
A host of insects had seized upon the dwelling, which had long been
deserted.

He restored the house, and to some extent reduced confusion to order. In
the uncultivated and pebbly plain where the plough had been long a stranger
he established plants of a thousand varieties, and, the better to hide
himself, he had walls built to shut himself in.

Why was he drawn by preference to this village of Sérignan?--for he did not
go thither without making some inquiries as to the possibility of obtaining
shelter elsewhere, and the Carpentras cemetery had tempted him also; but
what had particularly seduced and drawn him thither was the nearness of the
mountain with its Mediterranean flora, so rich that it recalled the
Corsican maquis; full of beautiful fungi and varied insects, where, under
the flat stones exposed to the burning sun, the centipede burrowed and the
scorpion slept; where a special fauna abounded--of curious dung-beetles,
scarabaei, the Copris, the Minotaur, etc.--which only a little farther
north grow rapidly scarcer and then altogether disappear.

He had thus at last arrived in port; he had found his "Eden."

He had realized, "after forty years of desperate struggles," the dearest,
the most ardent, the longest cherished of all his desires. He could observe
at leisure "every day, every hour," his beloved insects; "under the blue
sky, to the music of the cigales." He had only to open his eyes and to see;
to lend an ear and hear; to enjoy the great blessing of leisure to his
heart's content.

Doffing the professor's frock-coat for the peasant's blouse, planting a
root of sweet basil in his "topper," and finally kicking it to pieces, he
snapped his fingers at his past life.

Liberated at last, far from all that could irritate or disturb him or make
him feel dependent, satisfied with his modest earnings, reassured by the
ever-increasing popularity of his little books, he had obtained entire
possession of his own body and mind, and could give himself without reserve
to his favourite subjects.

So, with Nature and her inexhaustible book before him, he truly commenced a
new life.

But would this life have been possible without the support and comfort of
those intimate feelings which are at the root of human nature? Man is
seldom the master of these feelings, and they, with reason or despite
reason, force themselves on his notice as the question of questions.

This delicate problem Fabre had to resolve after suffering a fresh grief.
Hardly had he commenced to enjoy the benefits of this profound peace, when
he lost his wife. At this moment his children were already grown up; some
were married and some ready to leave him; and he could not hope much longer
to keep his old father, the ex-café-keeper of Pierrelatte, who had come to
rejoin him; and who might be seen, even in his extreme old age, going forth
in all weathers and dragging his aged limbs along all the roads of
Sérignan. (6/5.) The son, moreover, had inherited from his father his
profound inaptitude for the practical business of life, and was equally
incapable of managing his interests and the economics of the house. This is
why, after two years of widowerhood, having already passed his sixtieth
year, although still physically quite youthful, he remarried. Careless of
opinion, obeying only the dictates of his own heart and mind, and following
also the intuitions of unerring instinct, which was superior to the
understanding of those who thought it their duty to oppose him, he married,
as Boaz married Ruth, a young woman, industrious, full of freshness and
life, already completely devoted to his service, and admirably fitted to
satisfy that craving for order, peace, quiet, and moral tranquillity, which
to him were above all things indispensable.

His new companion, moreover, was in all things faithful to her mission, and
it was thanks to the benefits of this union, as the future was to show,
that Fabre was in a position to pursue his long-delayed inquiries.

Three children, a son and two daughters, were born in swift succession, and
reconstituted "the family," which was very soon increased by the youngest
of his daughters by his first wife, who had not married; this was that
Aglaë, who so often helped her father with her childlike attentions, and,
"her cheek blooming with animation," collaborated in some of his most
famous observations (6/6.); an unobtrusive figure, a soul full of devotion
and resignation, heroic and tender. Having in vain ventured into the world,
she had returned to the beloved roof at Sérignan, unable to part from the
father she so admired and adored.

Later, when the shadow of age grew denser and heavier, the young wife and
the younger children of the famous poet-entomologist took part in his
labours also; they gave him their material assistance, their hands, their
eyes, their hearing, their feet; he in the midst of them was the
conceiving, reasoning, interpreting, and directing brain.

>From this time forward the biography of Fabre becomes simplified, and
remains a statement of his inner life. For thirty years he never emerged
from his horizon of mountains and his garden of shingle; he lived wholly
absorbed in domestic affections and the tasks of a naturalist. None the
less, he still exercised his vocation as teacher, for neither pure science
nor poetry was sufficient to nourish his mind, and he was still Professor
Fabre, untiringly pursuing his programme of education, although no longer
applying himself thereto exclusively.

This long active period was also the most silent period of his life,
although not an hour, not a minute of his many days was left unoccupied.

In the first few months at his new home he resumed his hymn to labour.

"You will learn in your turn," he writes to his son Émile, "you will learn,
I hope, that we are never so happy as when work does not leave us a
moment's repose. To act is to live." (6/7.)

The better to belong to himself, he eluded all invitations, even those from
his nearest or most intimate friends; he hated to go away even for a few
hours, preferring to enjoy in his own house their presence amidst his
habitual and delightful surroundings. Everything in this still unexplored
country was new to him. What would he do elsewhere, even in his beloved
Carpentras, whither his faithful friend and pupil Devillario, who had
formerly followed him in his walks around Avignon, would endeavour from
time to time to draw him? Devillario was a magistrate, a collector and
palaeontologist; his simple tastes, his wide culture, and his passion for
natural history would surely have decided Fabre to accept his invitations,
but that he forbade himself the pleasure. "I am afraid the hospitable
cutlet that awaits me at your table will have time to grow cold; I am up to
the neck in my work (6/8.)...But you, when you can, escape from your
courts, and we will philosophize at random, as is our custom when we can
manage to pass a few hours together. As for me, it is very doubtful whether
the temptation will seize me to come to Carpentras. A hermit of the Thebaïd
was no more diligent in his cell than I in my village home." (6/9.)


CHAPTER 7. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.

Was there not indeed a sufficiency of captivating matters all about him,
and beneath his very feet?

In his deep, sunny garden a thousand insects fly, creep, crawl, and hum,
and each relates its history to him. A golden gardener-beetle trots along
the path. Rose-beetles pass, in snoring flight, on every hand, the gold and
emerald of their elytra gleaming; now and again one of them alights for a
moment on the flowering head of a thistle; he seizes it carefully with the
tips of his nervous, pointed fingers, seems to caress it, speaks to it, and
then suddenly restores it to freedom.

Wasps are pillaging the centauries. On the blossoms of the camomile the
larvae of the Meloë are waiting for the Anthophorae to carry them off to
their cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies
"spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly
Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead
bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy
tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis,
rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly,
on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one
praying," and paralyses the great grey locust, nailed to its place by fear.

Nothing here is insignificant; what the world would smile at or deride will
provide the sage with food for thought and reflection. "Nothing is trivial
in the majestic problem of nature; our laboratory acquaria are of less
value than the imprint which the shoe of a mule has left in the clay, when
the rain has filled the primitive basin, and life has peopled it with
marvels"; and the least fact offered us by chance on the most thoroughly
beaten track may possibly open prospects as vast as all the starry sky.

Tell yourself that everything in nature is a symbol of something like a
specimen of an abstruse cryptogram, all the characters of which conceal
some meaning. But when we have succeeded in deciphering these living texts,
and have grasped the allusion; when, beside the symbol, we have succeeded
in finding the commentary, then the most desolate corner of the earth
appears to the solitary seeker as a gallery full of the masterpieces of an
unsuspected art. Fabre puts into our hands the golden key which opens the
doors of this marvellous museum.

Let us consider the terebinth louse; it is just a little yellow mite; but
is it nothing else? Its genealogical history teaches us "by what amazing
essays of passion and variety the universal law which rules the
transmission of life is evolved. Here is neither father nor eggs; all these
mites are mothers; and the young are born living, just like their mothers."
To this end "almost the whole of the maternal substance is disintegrated
and renewed and conglobated to form the ovarium...the whole creature has
become an egg, which has, for its shell, the dry skin of the tiny creature,
and the microscope will show a whole world in formation...a nebulosity as
of white of egg, in which fresh centres of life are forming, as the suns
are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens." (7/1.)

What is this fleck of foam, like a drop of saliva, which we see in
springtime on the weeds of the meadows; among others on the spurge, when
its stems begin to shoot, and its sombre flowers open in the sunlight? "It
is the work of an insect. It is the shelter in which the Cicadellina
deposits her eggs. What a miraculous chemist! Her stiletto excels the
finest craft of the botanical anatomist" by its sovereign art of separating
the acrid poison which flows with the sap in the veins of the most venomous
plants, and extracting therefrom only an inoffensive fluid. (7/2.)

At every step the insects set us problems equally varied. The other
creatures are nearer to us; they resemble us in many respects. But insects,
almost the first-born of creation, form a world apart, and contain, in
their tiny bodies, as Réaumur has admirably said, "more parts than the most
gigantic animals." They have senses and faculties of their own, which
enable them to accomplish actions, which are doubtless very simply related
in reality, but which seem, to our minds, as extraordinary as the habits of
the inhabitants of Mars might, if by chance they were to descend in our
midst. We do not know how they hear, nor how they see through their
compound eyes, and our ignorance concerning the majority of their senses
still further increases the difficulty, which so often arrests us, of
interpreting their actions.

The tubercled Cerceris "finds by the hundred" and almost immediately a
species of weevil, the Cleona ophthalmica, on which it feeds its larvae,
and which the human eye, though it searches for hours, can scarcely find
anywhere. The eyes of the Cerceris are like magnifying glasses, veritable
microscopes, which immediately distinguish, in the vast field of nature, an
object that human vision is powerless to discover. (7/3.)

How does the Ammophila, hovering over the turf and investigating it far and
wide, in its search for a grey grub, contrive to discern the precise point
in the depth of the subsoil where the larva is slumbering in immobility?
"Neither touch nor sight can come into play, for the grub is sealed up in
its burrow at a depth of several inches; nor the scent, since it is
absolutely inodorous; nor the hearing, since its immobility is absolute
during the daytime." (7/4.)

The Processional caterpillar of the pine-trees, "endowed with an exquisite
hygrometric sensibility," is a barometer more infallible than that of the
physicists. "It foresees the tempests preparing afar, at enormous
distances, almost in the other hemisphere," and announces them several days
before the least sign of them appears on the horizon. (7/5.)

A wild bee, the Chalicodoma, and a wasp, the Cerceris, carried in the dark
far from their familiar pastures, to a distance of several miles, and
released in spots which they have never seen, cross vast and unknown spaces
with absolute certainty, and regain their nests; even after long absence,
and in spite of contrary winds and the most unexpected obstacles. It is not
memory that guides them, but a special faculty whose astonishing results we
must admit without attempting to explain them, so far removed are they from
our own psychology. (7/6.) But here is another example:

The Greater Peacock moths cross hills and valleys in the darkness, with a
heavy flight of wings spotted with inexplicable hieroglyphics. They hasten
from the remotest depths of the horizon to find their "sleeping beauties,"
drawn thereto by unknown odours, inappreciable by our senses, yet so
penetrating that the branch of almond on which the female has perched, and
which she has impregnated with her effluvium, exerts the same extraordinary
attraction. (7/7.)

Considering these creatures, we end by discovering more things than are
contained in all the philosophies...if we know how to look for them.

Among so many unimaginable phenomena, which bewilder us, "because there is
nothing analogous in us," we succeed in perceiving, here and there, a few
glimpses of day, which suddenly throw a singular light upon this black
labyrinth, in which the least secret we can surprise "enters perhaps more
directly into the profound enigma of our ends and our origins than the
secret of the most urgent and most closely studied of our passions." (7/8.)

Fabre explains by hypnosis one of those curious facts which have hitherto
been so poorly interpreted. When surprised by abnormal conditions, we see
insects suddenly fall over, drop to the ground, and lie as though struck by
lightning, gathering their limbs under their bodies. A shock, an unexpected
odour, a loud noise, plunges them instantly into a sort of lethargy, more
or less prolonged. The insect "feigns death," not because it simulates
death, but in reality because this MAGNETIC condition resembles that of
death. (7/9.) Now the Odynerus, the Anthidium, the Eucera, the Ammophila,
and all the hymenoptera which Fabre has observed sleeping at the fall of
night, "suspended in space solely by the strength of their mandibles, their
bodies tense, their limbs retracted, without exhaustion or collapse"; and
the larva of the Empusa, "which for some ten months hangs to a twig by its
limbs, head downwards": do not these present a surprising analogy with
those hypnotized persons who possess the faculty of remaining fixed in the
most painful poses, and of supporting the most unusual attitudes, for an
extremely long time; for instance, with one arm extended, or one foot
raised from the ground, without appearing to experience the least fatigue,
and with a persevering and unfaltering energy? (7/10.)

That the ex-schoolmaster was able to penetrate so far into this new world,
and that he has been able to interest us in so many fascinating problems,
was due to the fact that he had also "taken a wide bird's-eye view through
all the windows of creation." His universal capabilities, his immense
culture and almost encyclopaedic science have enabled him to utilize,
thanks to his studies, all the knowledge allied to his subject. He is not
one of those who understand only their speciality and who, knowing nothing
outside their own province and their particular labours, refuse to grasp at
anything beyond the narrow limits within which they stand installed.

All plants are to him so familiar that the flowers, for him, assume the
airs of living persons. But without a profound knowledge of botany, who
would hope to grasp the profound, perpetual, and intimate relations of the
plant and the insect?

He has turned over strata and interrogated the schistous deposits, whose
archives preserve the forms of vanished organizations, but "keep silence as
to the origin of the instincts." Bending over his reagents, he has sought
to discover, according to the phrase of a philosopher, those secret
retreats in which Nature is seated before her furnaces, in the depths of
her laboratory; following up the metamorphoses of matter even to the wings
of the Scarabaei, and observing how life, returning to her crucible the
debris and ashes of the organism, combines the elements anew, and from the
elements of the urine can derive, for example, by a simple displacement of
molecules, "all this dazzling magic of colours of innumerable shades: the
amethystine violet of Geotrupes, the emerald of the rose-beetle, the gilded
green of the Cantharides, the metallic lustre of the gardener-beetles, and
all the pomp of the Buprestes and the dung-beetles." (7/11.)

His books are steeped in all the ideas of modern physics. The highest
mathematical knowledge has been referred to with profit in his marvellous
description of the hunting-net of the Epeïra. Whose "terribly scientific"
combinations realize "the spiral logarithm of the geometers, so curious in
its properties" (7/12.); a splendid observation, in which Fabre makes us
admire, in the humble web of a spider, a masterpiece as astonishing and
incomprehensible as and even more sublime than the honeycomb.

This explains why Fabre has always energetically denied that he is properly
speaking an entomologist; and indeed the term appears often wrongly to
describe him. He loves, on the contrary, to call himself a naturalist; that
is, a biologist; biology being, by definition, the study of living
creatures considered as a whole and from every point of view. And as
nothing in life is isolated, as all things hold together, and as each part,
in all its relations, presents itself to the gaze of the observer under
innumerable aspects, one cannot be a true naturalist without being at the
same time a philosopher.

But it is not enough to know and to observe.

To be admitted to the spectacle of these tiny creatures, to become familiar
with their habits, to grasp the mysterious threads which connect them one
with another and with the vast universe: for this the cold and deliberate
vision of the specialist would often be insufficient. There is an art of
observation, and the gift of observation is a true function of that
constantly alert intelligence, continually dominated by the need of delving
untiringly down to the ultimate truth accessible, "allowing ourselves to
pass over nothing without seeking its reason, and habitually following up
every response with another question, until we come to the granite wall of
the Unknowable." Above all we need an ardent and interested sympathy, for
"we penetrate farther into the secret of things by the heart than by the
reason," as Toussenel has said; and "it is only by intuition that we can
know what life truly is," adds Bergson profoundly. (7/13.) Now Fabre loves
these little peoples and knows how to make us love them. How tenderly he
speaks of them; with what solicitude he observes them; with what love he
follows the progress of their nurslings; the young grubs wriggling in his
test-tubes, with doddering heads, are happy; and he himself is happy to see
them "well-fed and shining with health." He pities the bee stabbed by the
Philanthus "in the holy joys of labour." He sympathizes with the sufferings
of these little creatures and their hard labours. If, in his search for
ideas, he has to overturn their dwellings, "he repents of subjecting
maternal love to such tribulations," and if he is constrained to put them
to the question, to torment them in order to extract their secrets, he is
grieved to have provoked "such miseries!" (7/14.) Having provided for their
needs, and satisfied with the secrets which they have revealed to him, it
is not without regret and difficulty that he parts from them and restores
them "to the delights of liberty."

He is thoroughly convinced, moreover, that all the creatures that share the
face of the earth with us are accomplishing an august and appointed task.
He welcomes the swallows to his dwelling, even surrendering his workroom to
them, at the risk of jeopardizing his notes and books. He pleads for the
frog, and applies himself to setting forth his unknown qualities; he
rehabilitates the bat, the hedgehog, and the screech-owl, persecuted,
defamed, crushed, stoned, and crucified! (7/15.)

So intimate is the life which he leads among them all that he makes himself
truly their companion, and relates his own history in narrating theirs;
pleased to discover in their joys and sorrows his own trials and delights;
mingling in their annals his memories and his impressions; delightful
fragments of a childlike autobiography, encrusted in his learned work;
moving and delightful pages in which all the ingenuity of this noble mind
reveals itself with a touching sincerity, in which all the freshness of
this charming and so profoundly unworldly nature is seen as through a pure
crystal.

There is no real communion with nature without sentiment, without an
illuminating passion: often the sole and effectual grace which enables its
true meaning to appear. Neither taste, nor intelligence, nor logic, nor all
the science of the schools can suffice alone. To see further there is
needed something like a gift of correspondence, surpassing the limits of
observation and experience, which enables us to foresee and to divine the
profound secrets of life which lie beneath appearances. Those who are so
gifted have often only to open their eyes in order to grasp matters in
their true light.

A great observer is in reality a poet who imagines and creates. The
microscope, the magnifying glass, the scalpel, are as it were the strings
of a lyre. "The felicitous and fruitful hypothesis which constitutes
scientific invention is a gift of sentiment" in the words of Claude
Bernard; and of this king of physiology, who commenced by proving himself
in works of pure imagination, and whose genius finally took for its theme
the manifold variations of living flesh, of him too may we not say that he
has explored the labyrinths of life with "the torch of poetry in his hand"?

Similarly, do not the harmonious sequences which run through all the
admirable discoveries of Pasteur give us the sensation of a veritable and
gigantic poem?

In Fabre also it seems that the passion which he brings to all his patient
observations is in itself truly creative: "his heart beats with emotion,
the sweat drips from his brow to the soil, making mortar of the dust"; he
forgets food and drink, and "thus passes hours of oblivion in the happiness
of learning." I have seen him in his laboratory studying the spawning of
the bluebottle, when I, at his side, could scarcely support the horrible
stench which rose from the putrefying adders and lumps of meat; he,
however, was oblivious of the frightful odour, and his face was inundated
with smiles of delight.

Intelligence, then, must here be the servant of feeling and intuition; a
kind of primitive faculty, mysterious and instinctive, which alone makes a
great naturalist like Fabre, a great historian like Michelet, a great
physician like Boherhaave or Bretonneau.

These last are not always the most scholarly nor the most learned nor the
most patient, but they are those who possess in a high degree that special
vision, that gift, properly speaking poetic, which is known as the clinical
eye, which at the first glance perceives and confirms the diagnosis in all
its detail.

Fabre has a mind propitious to such processes; and if, by chance,
circumstances had directed his attention to medicine, that science which is
based upon an abundant provision of facts, but in which good sense and a
kind of divination play a still wider part, there is no doubt that he would
have been capable of becoming a shining light in this new arena.

He was full of admiration for that other illustrious Vauclusian, François
Raspail (7/16.), whose medical genius anticipated Pasteur and all the
conceptions of modern medicine. It would seem that he found in him his own
temper, his own fashion of seeing and representing things. He loved
Raspail's books and his prescriptions, full of reason and a most judicious
good sense, distrusting for himself and for his family the complicated
formulae and cunning remedies of an art too considered and still unproved.
At Carpentras, while his first-born, Émile, was hovering between life and
death, and the physician who came to see him, "being at the end of his
resources," did nothing more for him and soon ceased to come, thinking that
the child would not last till the morrow, Fabre flew to the works of
Raspail.

"I searched to discover what his malady was. I found it, and he was treated
day and night accordingly. To-day he is convalescent; and his appetite has
returned. I believe he is saved, and I shall say, like Ambroise Paré, 'I
have nursed him; God has cured him.'" (7/17.)

The episode which he relates, when, at the primary school of Avignon, a
retort had just burst, "spurting in all directions its contents of
vitriol," right in the midst of the suddenly interrupted chemistry lesson,
and when, thanks to his prompt action, he saved the sight of one of his
comrades, does honour to his initiative and presence of mind. (7/18.)

While "all physicians should bow before the facts which he excels in
discovering" (7/19.), he has also been able to make direct application of
the marvels of entomology to some of the problems of hygiene and medicine.
He has shown that the irritant poison secreted by certain caterpillars,
"which sets the fingers which handle them on fire," is nothing but a waste
product of the organism, a derivative of uric acid; he does not hesitate to
perform painful experiments on himself in order to furnish the proof of his
theory; and he explains thus the curious cases of dermatitis which are
often observed among silkworm-breeders. (7/20.) He proves the uselessness
of our meat-safes of metallic gauze, intended to preserve meat against
contamination, and the efficacy of a mere envelope of paper, not only to
preserve meat from flies, but also our garments from the clothes-moth.
(7/21.) He recommends the curious Provençal recipe, which consists in
boiling suspected mushrooms in salt and water before eating them. Finally
he suggests to members of the medical profession that they might perhaps
extract heroic remedies from these treacherous vegetables. (7/22.)

He had need of that indefinite leisure which had hitherto been so wholly
lacking, for the events of ephemeral lives occur at indeterminate hours, at
unexpected moments, and are of brief duration.

So, attentive to their least movements, Fabre goes forth to observe them at
the earliest break of day, in the red dawn, when the bee "pops her head out
of her attic window to see what the weather is," and the spiders of the
thickets lie in wait under the whorls of their nets, "which the tears of
night have changed into chaplets of dewdrops, whose magic jewellery,
sparkling in the sun," is already attracting moths and midges.

Seated for hours before a sprig of terebinth, his eye, armed with the
magnifying glass, follows the slow manoeuvres of the terebinth louse, whose
proboscis "cunningly distils the venom which causes the leaf to swell and
produces those enormous tumours, those misshapen and monstrous galls, in
which the young pass their period of slumber."

He watches at night, by the dim light of a lantern, to copy the Scolopendra
at her task, seeking to surprise the secret of her eggs (7/23.); to observe
the Cione constructing her capsule of goldbeater's skin, or the
Processional caterpillars travelling head to tail along their satin trail,
extinguishing his candle only when sleep at last sets his eyelids blinking.
He will wake early to witness the fairy-like resurrection of the silkworm
moth (7/24.); "in order not to lose the moment when the nymph bursts her
swaddling-bands," or when the wing of the locust issues from its sheath and
"commences to sprout"; no spectacle in the world is more wonderful than the
sight of "this extraordinary anatomy in process of formation," the
unrolling of these "bundles of tissue, cunningly folded and reduced to the
smallest possible compass" in the insignificant alar stumps, which
gradually unfold "like an immense set of sails," like the "body-linen of
the princess" of the fairy-tale, which was contained in one single hemp-
seed. (7/25.)

In his Harmas he is like a stranger discovering an unknown world; "like a
kindly giant from Sirius, holding a magnifying glass to his eye, retaining
his breath, lest it should overturn and sweep away the pigmies which he is
observing."

His passion for interrogating the Sphinx of life, everywhere and at all
moments, sufficed to fill his days from one end of the year to the other.
When some distant subject interested him, even on the most scorching days,
he would put "his lunch in his pocket, an apple and a crust of bread," and
sit out in the hot sunlight, accompanied by his dog, Vasco, Tom, or Rabbit;
fearing only that some importunate third person might come between nature
and himself.

When he walked in his garden he would let nothing escape him; witness those
precise notes of an eclipse of the sun, and of the effects which that
phenomenon produces upon animal life as a whole.

While his children followed the progress of the moon across the sun through
a pane of smoked glass, he attentively observed all that occurred in the
countryside.

"It is four; the day grows pale; the temperature is fresher; the cocks
crow, surprised by this kind of twilight which comes before the hour. A few
dogs are baying...The swallows, numerous before, have all disappeared...a
couple have taken refuge in my study, one window of which is open...when
the normal light returns they will come outdoors once more...The
nightingale, which had so long importuned me by his interminable song, is
silent at last (7/26.); the black-capped skylarks, which were warbling
continually, are suddenly still...only the young house-sparrows under the
tiles of the roof are mournfully chirping...Peace and silence, the daylight
more than half gone...In the Harmas I can no longer see the insects flying;
I find only one bee pillaging the rosemary; all life has disappeared.

"Only a weevil, the Lixus," which he is observing in a cage, "continues,
step by step, without the slightest emotion, his amorous by-play, as though
nothing unusual were happening...The nightingale and the skylark may be
silent, oppressed by fear; the bee may re-enter her hive; but is a weevil
to be upset because the sun threatens to go out?" (7/27.)

He was no less curious concerning the resurrection of the sun, and every
time he made an excursion to the Ventoux he was careful not to miss this
spectacle; setting out at an early hour from the foot of the mountain, so
that he might see the dawn grow bright from the summit of its rocky mass;
then the sun, suddenly rising in the morning breeze, and setting fire,
little by little, to the Alps of Dauphiné and the hills of Comtat; and the
Rhône, far below, slender as a silver thread.

He took infinite pleasure too in drinking his fill of the sublime terrors
of the thunderstorm, which he regarded as one of the most magnificent
spectacles which nature can offer; not content with observing it through
glass, he would open wide the windows at night the better to enjoy the
phosphorescence of the atmosphere, the conflagration of the clouds, the
bursts of thunder, and all the solemn pomp with which the great purifying
phenomenon manifests itself.

But pure observation, as practised by his predecessors, Réaumur and Huber,
is often insufficient, or "furnishes only a glimpse of matters."

He had recourse, therefore, to artificial observation of the kind known as
experimentation, and we may say that Fabre was really the first to employ
the experimental method in the study of the minds of animals.

Near the field of observation, therefore, is the naturalist's workshop,
"the animal laboratory," in which such inductions as may be suggested by
the doings and the movements of the insects "which roam at liberty amidst
the thyme and lavender" are subjected to the test of experiment. It is a
great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two windows facing
south, upon the garden, one at least of which is always kept open that the
insects may come and go at liberty.

In the glass-topped boxes of pine which occupy almost the entire height of
the whitewashed walls are carefully arranged the collections so patiently
amassed; all the entomological fauna of the South of France, and the sea-
shells of the Mediterranean; an abundant wealth also of divers rarities;
numismatical treasures and fragments of pottery and other prehistorical
documents, of which the numerous ossuaries in the neighbourhood of
Sérignan, scattered here and there upon the hills, contain many specimens.

At the top, crowning the facade of glass-topped cases like an immense
frieze, is the colossal herbarium, the first volumes of which go back to
the early youth of their owner; all the flora, both of the Midi and the
North, those of the plains and those of the mountains, and all the algae of
fresh and salt water.

But it must not be supposed that Fabre attaches any great value to these
collections, enormous though the sum of labour which they represent. To him
they have been a means of education, a means of organizing and arranging
his knowledge, and not of satisfying an idle curiosity; not the amusement
of one content with the rind of things. In order to identify at first sight
such specimens as one encounters and proposes to examine, one must first of
all learn to observe and to see thoroughly, and to school the eyes in the
colours and forms peculiar to each individual species.

One may fairly complain of Réaumur, for example, that his knowledge was
uncertain and incomplete. Too often he leaves his readers undecided as to
the nature of the species whose habits he describes. Fabre himself, by dint
of criticizing with so much humour the abuse of classifications, has
sometimes allowed himself to fall into the same fault. (7/28.) He has taken
good care, however, not to neglect the systematic study of species; witness
his "Flora of the Vaucluse" and that careful catalogue of Avignon which he
has not disdained to republish. (7/29.) The truth is that "if we do not
know their names the knowledge of the things escapes us" (7/30.), and he
was profoundly conscious of the truth of this precept of the great
Linnaeus.

The middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of walnut-
wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old sardine-boxes,
which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution of a thousand nameless
or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of their larvae, the creation and
the hatching of cocoons, and the little miracles of metamorphosis, "after a
germination more wonderful than that of the acorn which makes the oak."

Covers of metallic gauze resting on earthenware saucers full of sand, a few
carboys and flower-pots or sweetmeat jars closed with a square of glass;
these serve as observation or experimental cages in which the progress and
the actions of "these tiny living machines" can be examined.

Fabre has revealed himself as a psychologist without rival, of a consummate
skill in the difficult and delicate art of experimentation; the art of
making the insect speak, of putting questions to it, of forcing it to
betray its secrets; for experiment is "the only method which can throw any
light upon the nature of instincts."

His resources being slender and his mind inventive, he has ingeniously
supplemented the poverty of his equipment, and has discovered less costly
and less complex means of conducting his experiments; knowing the secret of
extracting the sublimest truth from clumsy combinations of "trivial,
peasant-made articles."

He has succeeded, in his rustic laboratory, in applying the rigorous rules
of investigation and experimentation established by the great biologists.
He has therefore been able to establish his beautiful observations in a
manner so indisputable that those who come after him and are tempted to
study the same things can but arrive at the same results, and derive
inspiration from his researches.

To note with care all the details of a phenomenon is the first essential,
so that others may afterwards refer to them and profit by them; the
difficult thing is to interpret them, to discover the circumstances, the
whys and wherefores, the consequences, and the connecting links.

But a single fact observed by chance at the wayside, and which would not
even attract the attention of another, will be instantly luminous to this
searching understanding, it will suggest questions unforeseen, and will
evoke, by anticipation, preconceived ideas and sudden flashes of intuition,
which will necessitate the test of experiment.

Why, for example, does the Philanthus, that slender wasp, which captures
the honey-bee upon the blossoms in order to feed her larvae; why, before
she carries her prey to her offspring, does she "outrage the dying insect,"
by squeezing its crop in order to empty it of honey, in which she appears
to delight, and does indeed actually delight?

"The bandit greedily takes in her mouth the extended and sugared tongue of
the dead insect; then once more she presses the neck and the thorax, and
once more applies the pressure of her abdomen to the honey-sac of the bee.
The honey oozes forth and is instantly licked up. Thus the bee is gradually
compelled to disgorge the contents of the crop. This atrocious meal lasts
often half an hour and longer, until the last trace of honey has
disappeared."

The detailed answer is obtained by experiment, which perfectly explains
this "odious feast," the excuse for which is simply maternity. The
Philanthus knows, instinctively, without having learned it, that honey,
which is her ordinary fare, is, by a very singular "inversion," a mortal
poison to her larvae. (7/31.)

As an accomplished physiologist, Fabre conducts all kinds of experiments.
Behind the wires of his cages, he provokes the moving spectacle of the
scorpion at grip with the whole entomological fauna, in order to test the
effects of its terrible venom upon various species; and thus he discovers
the strange immunity of larvae; the virus, "the reagent of a transcendent
chemistry, distinguishes the flesh of the larva from that of the adult; it
is harmless to the former, but mortal to the latter"; a fresh proof that
"metamorphosis modifies the substance of the organism to the point of
changing its most intimate properties." (7/32.)

You may judge from this that he knows through and through the history of
the creatures which form the subjects of his faithful narratives. He is
informed of the smallest events of their lives. He possesses a calendar of
their births; he records their chronology and the succession of
generations; he has noted their methods of work, examined their diet, and
recorded their meals. He discovers the motives which dictate their
peculiarities of choice; why the Cerceris, for instance, among all the
victims at its disposal, never selects anything but the Buprestis and the
weevils. He is familiar too with their tactics of warfare and their methods
of conflict.

His gaze has penetrated even the most hidden dwellings; those in which the
Halictus "varnishes her cells and makes the round loaf which is to receive
the egg"; in which, under the cover of cocoons, murderous grubs devour
slumbering nymphs; even the depths of the soil are not hidden from him, for
there, thanks to his artifices, he has surprised the astonishing secret of
the Minotaur.

He sifts all doubtful stories; anecdotes, statements of supposed habits;
all that is incoherent, or ill observed, or misinterpreted; all the cliches
which the makers of books pass from hand to hand.

In place of repetition he gives us laws, constant facts, fixed rules.

With incomparable skill, he repeats and tests the ancient experiments of
Réaumur.

He is not content to show us that Erasmus Darwin is mistaken; he points out
how it is that he has fallen into error. (7/33.)

He sets himself to decipher the meaning of old tales, skilfully disengaging
the little parcel of truth which usually lies beneath a mass of incorrect
or even false statements. He criticises La Fontaine, and questions the
statements of Horus Apollo and Pliny. From a mass of undigested knowledge
he has created the living science of entomology, which had received from
Réaumur a first breath of vitality, in such wise that each individual
creature is presented in his work with its precise expression and the
absolute truth of its character and attitudes; the inhabitants of the woods
and fields, whether those which feed upon the crops or those which live in
the crevices of the rocks, or the obscure workers that crawl upon the
earth; all those which have a secret to tell or something to teach us; the
Cigale, so different from the insect of the Fable; and above all that
beetle whose name had hitherto been encountered arrayed in the most
fantastic legends, the famous Scarabaeus sacer of the tombs, which Fabre
preferred to place at the head of his epic as an agreeable prologue,
although the inquiry relative to his amazing feats belongs chronologically
to a comparatively recent period of his career.

How moderate he is in such suppositions as he ventures; how cautious when
his persistent patience has at last struck against "the inaccessible wall
of the Unknowable"! Then, with admirable frankness, tranquil and sincere,
he simply owns that "he does not know," unlike so many others, whose
uncritical minds are contented with a fragmentary vision, and run so far
ahead of the facts that they can only promote indefinite illusion and
error.

One is surprised indeed to remark how few even of the most learned and
well-informed of men have a real aptitude for observation, and a highly
instructive book might be written concerning the discrepancies and the weak
points in our knowledge. If they were subjected to a sufficiently severe
test, how threadbare would appear many of those problems which nature and
the world present, and which are regarded as resolved!

How long, for instance, was needed to destroy the legend of the cuckoo,
incessantly repeated down to the days of Xavier Raspail, and to us so
familiar; to elucidate its history, and to set it in its true light!
(7/34.)

It is by means of such data as these that a science is founded, for
theories decay, and only well-observed facts remain irrefragable. With
stones such as these, which are hewn by the great artisan, the structures
of the future will be built, and our own science, perhaps, will one day be
refashioned.

For this reason Fabre's books are an education for all those who wish to
devote themselves to observation; a manual of mental discipline, a true
"essay upon method," which should be read by every naturalist, and the most
interesting, instructive, familiar and delightful course of training that
has ever been known.

On the other hand, it is impossible to conceive what labour this delicate
work demands; what perseverance Fabre has required painfully to extract one
grain of gold; to glean and unite the definite factors, the positive
documents, which served as foundations for each of his essays; lucid,
limpid, and captivating as the most delightful of fairy-tales. We are
charmed, fascinated, and astonished; we see nothing of the groping advance,
the checks, and all the toil and the patience demanded. We do not suspect
the long waiting, the hesitation, the desperate length of the inquiries.
For example, to establish the curious relations which exist between the
wasps and the Volucellae, what long and repeated experiments were needful!
His notebooks, in which he records, from day to day, all that he sees, are
evidence of this. What watches in the alley of lilacs, year after year, to
decipher the mechanism and the mode of construction of the hunting-net of
the Epeïra! Some of these histories, like that of the hyper-metamorphosis
of the Meloë, were only completed as the result of twenty-five years of
assiduous inquiry, while forty years were required to complete that of the
Scarabaeus sacer, for his observation of it was always partial; it is
almost always impossible to divine what one cannot see from the little that
one does see; and as a rule one must return to the same point over and over
again in order to fill up lacunae.

The majority of the insects which Fabre has studied are solitary, and are
only to be encountered singly, scattered over wide areas of country. Some
live only in determined spots, and not elsewhere, such as the famous
Cerceris, or the yellow-winged Sphex, of which no trace is to be found
beyond the limits of the Carpentras countryside.

The proper season must be watched for; one must be ready at any moment to
profit by a lucky chance, and resign oneself to interminable watches at the
bottom of a ravine, or keep on the alert for hours under a fiery sun. Often
the chance goes by, or the trail followed proves false; but the season is
over, and one must wait for the return of another spring. The trade of
observer in many cases resembles the exhausting labours of the Sisyphus
beetle, painfully pushing his pellet up a rough and stony path; so that the
team halts and staggers at every moment, the load spills over and rolls
away, and all has to be commenced over again.

We can now cast back, in order to consider at leisure the immortal study
which marked the beginning of his fame, with the greater interest and
profit in that Fabre has been able, during his retirement, to generalize
and extend his discovery. (7/35.)

Let us first of all note how the observation which Dufour had made of the
nest of the Cerceris was transformed in his hands, and what developments he
was able to evolve therefrom.

Since they have been definitely established by Fabre these curious facts
have been well-known. They form perhaps the greatest prodigy presented by
entomology, that science so full of marvels.

These wasps nourish themselves only on the nectar of flowers; but their
larvae, which they will never behold, must have fresh and succulent flesh
still palpitating with life.

The insect digs a tunnel in the soil, in which she places her eggs, and
having provisioned the cell with selected game--cricket, spider,
caterpillar, or beetle--she finally closes the entrance, which she does not
again cross.

Like nearly all insects, the young wasp is born in the larval state, and
from the moment of its hatching to the end of its growth--that is to say,
for a period of many days--the grub enclosed in its cell can look for no
help from without.

Here then is a fascinating problem: either the victims deposited by the
mother are dead, and desiccation or putrefaction attacks them promptly, or
else they are living, as indeed the larvae require; but then "what will
become of this fragile creature, which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in
the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end
working their long spurred legs; or at grips with a monstrous caterpillar
making play with its flanks and mandibles, rolling and unrolling its
tortuous folds?"

Such is the thrilling mystery of which Fabre discovered the key.

With inconceivable ingenuity, the victim is seized and thrown to the
ground, and the wasp plunges her sting, not at random into the body, which
would involve the risk of death, but at determined points, exactly into the
seat of those invisible nervous ganglions whose mechanism commands the
various movements of the creature.

Immediately after these subtle wounds the prey is paralysed throughout its
body; its members appear to be disarticulated, "as though all the springs
were broken"; the true corpse is not more motionless.

But the wound is not mortal; not only does the insect continue to live, but
it has acquired the strange prerogative of being able to live for a very
long period without taking any nourishment, thanks precisely to the
condition of immobility, in some sort vegetative, which paralysis confers
upon it.

When the hour strikes the hungry larva will find its favourite meat served
to its liking; and it will attack this defenceless prey with all the
circumspection of a refined eater; "with an exquisitely delicate art,
nibbling the viscera of its victim little by little, with an infallible
method; the less essential parts first of all, and only in the last
instance those which are necessary to life. Here then is an
incomprehensible spectacle; the spectacle of an animal which, eaten alive,
mouthful by mouthful, during nearly a fortnight, is hollowed out, grows
less and less, and finally collapses," while retaining to the end its
succulence and its freshness.

The fact is that the mother has taken care to deposit her egg "at a point
always the same" in the region which her sting has rendered insensible, so
that the first mouthfuls are only feebly resented. But as the enemy goes
deeper and deeper "it sometimes happens that the cricket, bitten to the
quick, attempts to retaliate; but it only succeeds in opening and closing
the pincers of its mandibles on the empty air, or in uselessly waving its
antennae." Vain efforts: "for now the voracious beast has bitten deep into
the spot, and can with impunity ransack the entrails." What a slow and
horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of
consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for
the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so
far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which sheltered its retreat!

To paralyse without killing, "to deliver the prey to the larvae inert but
living": that is the end to be attained; only the method varies according
to the species of the hunter and the structure of the prey; thus the
Cerceris, which attacks the coleoptera, and the Scolia, which preys upon
the larvae of the rose-beetle, sting them only once and in a single place,
because there is concentrated the mass of the motor ganglions.

The Pompilus, which selects a spider for its victim, no less than the
redoubtable Tarantula, knows that its quarry "has two nervous centres which
animate respectively the movements of the limbs and those of the terrible
fangs; hence the two stabs of the sting." (7/36.)

The Sphex plunges her dagger three times into the breast of the cricket,
because she knows, by an intuition that we cannot comprehend, that the
locomotor innervation of the cricket is actuated by three nervous centres,
which lie wide apart. (7/37.)

Finally, the Ammophila, "the highest manifestation of the logic of
instinct, whose profound knowledge leaves us confounded, stabs the
caterpillar in nine places, because the body of the victim with which it
feeds its larvae is a series of rings, set end to end, each of which
possesses its little independent nervous centre." (7/38.)

This is not all; the genius of the Sphex is not yet at the end of its
foresight. You have doubtless heard of the comatose state into which the
wounded fall when, after a fracture of the skull, the brain is compressed
by a violent haemorrhage or a bony splinter. The physiologists imitate this
process of nature when they wish, for example, to obtain, in animals under
experiment, a state of complete immobility. But did the first surgeon who
thought of trepanning the skull in order to exert on the brain, by means of
a sponge, a certain degree of compression, ever imagine that an analogous
procedure had long been employed in the insect world, and that these clumsy
methods were merely child's play beside the astonishing feats of the
Unconscious?

For the stab in the thoracic ganglions, however efficacious, is often
insufficient. Although the six limbs are paralysed, although the victim
cannot move, its mandibles, "pointed, sharp, serrated, which close like a
pair of scissors, still remain a menace to the tyrant; they might at least,
by gripping the surrounding grasses, oppose a more or less effectual
resistance to the process of carrying off." So the preceding manoeuvres are
consummated by a kind of garrotting; that is, the insect "takes care to
compress the brain of its victim, but so as to avoid wounding it; producing
only a stupor, a simple torpor, a passing lethargy." Is not the ingenious
observer justified in concluding that "this is alarmingly scientific"?

Between the dry statements of Dufour, which served Fabre as his original
theme, and the unaccustomed wealth of this vast physiological poetry, what
a distance has been covered!

How far have we outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches!
Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the
Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an
inventory of the nest of a Cerceris.

For him the Buprestes were dead, and their state of preservation was
explained simply as a kind of embalming, due to some special action of the
venom of the Hymenoptera.

These facts, therefore, were stated as simple curiosities.

Fabre proved that these victims possessed all the attributes of life
excepting movement, by provoking contractions in their members under the
influence of various stimulants, and by keeping them alive artificially for
an indefinite period.

On the other hand, he demonstrated the comparative innocuousness of the
venom of these wasps, some of which, like the great Cerceris or the
beautiful and formidable Scolia, alarm by their enormous size and their
terrifying aspect; so that the conservation of the prey could not be due to
any occult quality, to some more or less active antiseptic virtue of the
venomous fluid, but simply to the precision of the stab and the miraculous
deftness of the "surgeon."

He also pointed out the fact that the sting of the insect is able
immediately to dissociate the nervous system of the vegetative life from
that of the correlative life, sparing the former, and taking care not to
wound the abdomen, which contains the ganglions of the great sympathetic
nerve, while it annihilates the latter, which is more or less concentrated
along the ventral face of the thoracic region.

He completed this splendid demonstration, not only by provoking under his
own eyes the "murderous manoeuvres, the intimate and passionate drama," but
also by reproducing experimentally all these astonishing phenomena;
expounding their mechanism and their variations with a logic and lucidity,
an art and sagacity which raise this marvellous observation, one of the
most beautiful known to science, to the height of the most immortal
discoveries of physiology. Claude Bernard, in his celebrated experiments,
certainly exhibited no greater invention, no truer genius.


CHAPTER 8. THE MIRACLE OF INSTINCT.

"The Spirit Bloweth Whither it Listeth."

What is this instinct, which guides the insect to such marvellous results?
Is it merely a degree of intelligence, or some absolutely different form of
activity?

Is it possible, by studying the habits of animals, to discover some of
those elementary springs of action whose knowledge would enable us to dive
more deeply into our own natures?

Fabre has presented us to his Sphex, the "infallible paralyser." Are we to
credit her not only with memory, but also with the faculty of associating
ideas, of judgment, and of pursuing a train of reasoning in respect of her
astonishingly co-ordinated actions?

Put to the question by the malice of the operator, the "transcendent"
anatomist trips over a mere trifle, and the slightest novelty confounds
her.

Without the circle of her ordinary habits, what stupidity, "what darkness
wraps her round"! She retreats; she refuses to understand; "she washes her
eyes, first passing her hands across her mouth; she assumes a dreamy,
meditative air." What can she be pondering? Under what form of thought,
illusion, or mirage does the unfamiliar problem which has obtruded itself
into her customary life present itself behind those faceted eyes? (8/1.)

How can we tell? We can only attain to knowledge of ourselves by direct
intuition. It is only the idea of our ego which enables us to conjecture
what is passing in the brains of our fellows. Between the insect and
ourselves no understanding is possible, so remote are the analogies between
its organization and our own; and we can only form idle hypotheses as to
its states of consciousness and the real motive of its actions.

Consider only that unknown and mysterious energy which the insects display
in their operations and their labours, as it is in itself, and let us
content ourselves, first of all, with comparing it to our own intelligence,
such as we conceive it to be.

In seeking to appreciate whereby it differs perhaps we shall gain more than
by vainly seeking points of resemblance. We shall discover, in fact, behind
the insect and its prodigious instincts, a vast and remote horizon, a
region at once more profound, more extensive, and more fruitful than that
of the intelligence; and if Fabre is able to help us to decipher a few
pages of "the most difficult of all volumes, the book of ourselves," it is
precisely, as a philosopher told him, because "man has remained instinctive
in process of becoming intelligent." (8/2.)

The work of Fabre is from this point of view an invaluable treasury of
observations and experiments, and the richest contribution which has ever
been made to the study of these fascinating problems.

"The function of the intelligence is to reflect, to be conscious; that is,
to relate the effect to its cause, to add a "because" to a "why"; to remedy
the accidental; to adapt a new course of conduct to new circumstances."

In relation to the human intelligence thus defined Fabre has considered
these nervous aptitudes, so well adjusted, according to the evolutionists,
by ancient habit, that they have finally become impulsive and unconscious,
and, properly speaking, innate. He has demonstrated, with an abundance of
proof and a power of argument that we must admire, the blind mechanism
which determines all the manifestations, even the most extraordinary, of
that which we call instinct, and which heredity has fixed in a species of
unchangeable automatism, like the rhythm of the heart and the lungs. (8/3.)

Let us, from this wealth of material, from among the most suggestive
examples, select some of his most striking demonstrations, which are
classics of their kind.

Fabre has not attempted to define instinct, for it is indefinable; nor to
probe its essential nature, which is impenetrable. But to recognize the
order of nature is in itself a sufficiently fascinating study, without
striving to crack an unbreakable bone or wasting time in pondering
insoluble enigmas. The important matter is to avoid the introduction of
illusions, to beware of exceeding the data of observation and experiment,
of substituting our own inferences for the facts, of outstripping reality
and amplifying the marvellous.

Let us listen to the scrupulous analysis whose lessons, scattered through
four thousand pages, teach us more concerning instinct and its innumerable
variations than all the most learned treatises and speculations of the
philosophers.

Nothing in the world perplexes the mind of the observer like the spectacle
of the birth and growth of the instincts.

At precisely the right moment, just as failure or disaster seems
foreordained by the previously established circumstances, Fabre shows us
his insects as suddenly mastered by an irresistible force.

"At the right moment" they invincibly obey some sort of mysterious and
inflexible prescription. Without apprenticeship, they perform the very
actions required, and blindly accomplish their destiny.

Then, the moment having passed, the instincts "disappear and do not
reawaken. A few days more or less modify the talents, and what the young
insect knew the adult has often forgotten." (8/4.)

Among the Lycosae, at the moment of exodus, a sudden instinct is evolved
which a few hours later disappears never to return. It is the climbing
instinct, unknown to the adult spider, and soon forgotten by the
emancipated young, who are destined to roam upon the face of the earth. But
the young Lycosae, anxious to leave the maternal home and to travel, become
suddenly ardent climbers and aeronauts, each releasing a long, light thread
which serves it as parachute. The voyage accomplished, no trace of this
ingenuity is left. Suddenly acquired, the climbing instinct no less
suddenly disappears. (8/5.)

The great historiographer of instinct has thrown a wonderful light, by his
beautiful experiments relating to the nidification of the mason-bee, upon
the indissoluble succession of its different phases; the lineal
concatenation, the inevitable and necessary order which presides over each
of these nervous discharges of which the total series constitutes, properly
speaking, a mode of action.

The mason-bee continues to build upon the ready-completed nest presented to
her. She obstinately insists upon provisioning a cell already duly filled
with the quantity of honey required by the larva, because, in this case as
in the other, the impulse which incites her to build or to provision the
nest has not yet been exhausted.

On the other hand, if we empty the little cup of its contents when she has
filled it she will not recommence her labours. "The process of provisioning
being complete, the secret impulse which urged her to collect her honey is
no longer active. The insect therefore ceases to store her honey, and, in
spite of this accident, lays her egg in the empty cell, thus leaving the
future nursling without nourishment." (8/6.)

In the case of the Pelopaeus, Fabre calls our attention to one of the most
instructive physiological spectacles that can be imagined.

While the mason-bee does not notice that her cell has been emptied, the
Pelopaeus cannot perceive that the tricks of the experimenter have resulted
in the disappearance of her progeny; and she "continues to store away
spiders for a germ that no longer exists; she perseveres untiringly in her
useless hunting, as though the future of her larva depended on it; she
amasses provisions which will feed no one; more, she pushes aberration to
the extent of plastering even the place where her nest was if we remove it,
giving the last strokes of the trowel to an imaginary building, and putting
her seals upon empty nothing." (8/7.)

>From these facts, and others, no less celebrated, which show "the inability
of insects to escape from the routine of their customs and their habitual
labours," Fabre derives so many proofs of their lack of intelligence.

The Epeïra fasciata is incapable of replacing a single radial thread in the
geometrical structure of its web, when broken; it recommences the entire
web every evening, and weaves it at one stretch with the most beautiful
mastery, as though merely amusing itself.

The caterpillar of the Greater Peacock moth teaches us the same lesson;
when occupied in weaving its cocoon it does not know how to repair an
artificial rent; and "in spite of the certainty of its death, or rather
that of the future butterfly, it quietly continues to spin, without
troubling to cover the rent; devoting itself to a superfluous task, and
ignoring the treacherous breach, which leaves the cocoon and its inhabitant
at the mercy of the first thief that finds it." (8/8.)

Thus "because one action has just been performed, another must inevitably
be performed to complete the first; what is done is done, and is never
repeated. Like the watercourse, which cannot climb the hills and return to
its source, the insect does not retrace its steps or repeat its actions,
which follow one another invariably, and are inevitably connected in a
necessary order, like a series of echoes, one of which awakens
another...The insect knows nothing of its marvellous talents, just as the
stomach knows nothing of its cunning chemistry. It builds like a
bricklayer, weaves, hunts, stabs, and paralyses, as it secretes the venom
of its weapons, the silk of its cocoon, the wax of its comb, or the threads
of its web; always without the slightest knowledge of the means and the
end." (8/9.)

Thus instinct is one thing and intelligence is another; and for Fabre there
is no transition which can transform the one into the other.

But how profound and abundant, how infinite is the source from which this
manifold activity derives, distributed as it is throughout the entire
animal kingdom; and which in ourselves commands the profoundest part of our
nature; unconscious, or even in opposition to our wonderful intelligence,
which it often silences or altogether overwhelms.

Although the insect "has no need of lessons from its elders" in order to
accomplish its beautiful masterpieces, the comprehensive concept of the
genius which rises spontaneously and at a single step to the loftiest
conceptions is not always a product of pure reason.

Compare the sublime logic of animal maternity, the impeccable dictates of
instinct, with the hesitations, the gropings, the uncertainties, the errors
and tragic failures of human maternity, when it seeks to replace the
unerring commands of instinct by the clumsy efforts of the intelligence!

If all is darkness to the animal, apart from its habitual paths, how feeble
and hesitating, how faltering and unequal is reason when it seeks to oppose
its laborious inductions to the infallible wisdom of the unconscious!

It is, in fact, to this concatenation of actions, narrowly connected by a
mutual dependence, that we owe this inexhaustible series of cunning
industries and wonderful arts. To Fabre they are so many feats of a learned
unconsciousness.

"See the nest, the accustomed masterpiece of mothers; it is more often than
otherwise an animal fruit, a coffer full of germs, containing eggs in place
of seeds."

The satin bag of the Epeïra fasciata, in which her eggs are enclosed,
"breaks at the caress of the sun, like the skin of an over-ripe
pomegranate."

The Dorthesia, the louse inhabiting the euphorbia, "trebles the length of
her body, prolonging its hinder part into a pouch, comparable to that of
the opossum, into which the eggs are dropped, and in which the young are
hatched, to leave it afterwards at will." (8/10.)

The Chermes of the ilex "hardens into a rampart of ebony, whence an
innumerable legion of vermin bursts forth one day without changing their
place."

The capsule of gold-beater's skin, in which the grubs of the Cione are
enclosed, divides itself, at the moment of liberation, into two hemispheres
"of a regularity so perfect that they recall exactly the bursting of the
pyxidium when the seed is distributed." (8/11.)

Here and there, however, we catch a glimpse of a rudiment of what we
understand by consciousness, in the shape of a "vague discrimination."

Each plant has its lover, drawn to it by a kind of elective affinity and
invariable t

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