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THE LIFE OF JEAN HENRI FABRE

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BOOKS BY J. HENRI FABRE

• [THE LIFE OF THE SPIDER]
• [THE LIFE OF THE FLY]
• [THE MASON-BEES]
• [BRAMBLE-BEES AND OTHERS]
• [THE HUNTING WASPS]
• [THE LIFE OF THE CATERPILLAR]
• [THE LIFE OF THE GRASSHOPPER]
• [THE SACRED BEETLE AND OTHERS]
• [THE MASON-WASPS]
• [THE GLOW-WORM AND OTHER BEETLES]
• [MORE HUNTING WASPS]
• [THE LIFE OF THE WEEVIL]
• [INSECT ADVENTURES]

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THE LIFE OF
JEAN HENRI FABRE

THE ENTOMOLOGIST
1823–1910

BY THE ABBE
AUGUSTIN FABRE
TRANSLATED BY
Bernard Miall

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1921

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Copyright 1921
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY

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TO MY PARENTS

IN TOKEN OF GRATITUDE AND ADMIRATION
FOR THE LABOURS AND THE EXAMPLE
OF THEIR LIVES [[vii]]

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NOTE BY TRANSLATOR

Those who wish to become more fully acquainted with Jean-Henri Fabre’s delightful Souvenirs Entomologiques will find them, arranged in a different order, in the admirable series of translations from the pen of Mr. Teixeira de Mattos, published by Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York; a series which will, before long, be complete and contain the whole of the ten volumes of Souvenirs. Other translations are The Life and Love of the Insect, translated by Mr. Teixeira de Mattos; Social Life in the Insect World, translated by myself; Wonders of Instinct, translated by Mr. Teixeira and myself; and Fabre, Poet of Science (another biography), by Dr. G. V. Legros, translated by myself.

Post-war conditions have made it necessary somewhat to abridge the author’s text, which fills two volumes. If, however, as I hope, these pages send the reader to my friend Mr. Teixeira’s delightful versions of the Souvenirs, their principal aim will be fulfilled.

Bernard Miall.

1921. [[ix]]

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AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I was eighteen years old; I was dreaming of diplomas, of a doctor’s degree, of a brilliant university career. To encourage me and incite me to emulation, one of my uncles, rather more well-informed than those about him, addressed me much as follows:

“Put your back into it, my boy! Go ahead; follow the footsteps of your fellow-countryman and kinsman, Henri Fabre of Malaval, who has done what you want to do, and has become an eminent professor and a learned writer.”

It is hardly credible, but this was the first time I had heard any one mention this famous namesake of mine, whose family, nevertheless, used to live on the opposite slope of the puech against which my tiny native mas was built.

His remark was not unheeded, and the name then engraved upon my memory has never been erased from it.

A few years later, having secured my doctor’s degree, I was teaching philosophy, not in the University, but in the Grand Seminaire[1] of Lyons. The problem of instinct, which enters into the province of psychology, led me to consult the works of J. H. Fabre, [[x]]which were recommended to me by the professor of Science. My worthy colleague regarded the author of the Souvenirs Entomologiques with a sort of worship, and it was with positive delight that he used to read aloud to me the finest passages of those masterly “Essays upon the Instincts and Habits of Insects.”

A little later I chanced, in the course of my reading, on the Revue Scientifique de Bruxelles, which contained abundant extracts from the sixth volume of the Souvenirs, in which the author becomes confidential, and tells us, in the most delightful fashion, of his earliest childhood in the home of his grandparents “who tilled a poor holding on the cold granite backbone of the Rouergue tableland.” Hullo! I said to myself: so the prince of entomologists is a child of the Rouergue! What a discovery!

For a long time I thought of publishing, in the local press, a short biography of Fabre with a few extracts from his writings. I was only waiting an opportunity and a little leisure.

This leisure I had not yet found, when the opportunity offered itself in a decisive and urgent fashion, in the scientific jubilee of the great naturalist, which was celebrated [[xi]]at Sérignan on April 3, 1910. When all Provence was agog to celebrate the great man, when from all parts of France and from beyond her frontiers evidences of sympathy and admiration were pouring in, was it not only fitting that a voice should be upraised from the heart of Aveyron, and, above all, from that corner of Aveyron in which he first saw the light of day; if only to echo so many other voices, and to restore to his native countryside this unrivalled son of the Rouergue who had perhaps too readily been naturalised a Provençal? Moreover, in these times of overweening atheism, when so many pseudo-scientists are striving to persuade the ignorant that science is learning to dispense with God, would it not be a most timely thing to reveal, to the eyes of all, a scientist of undoubted genius who finds in science fresh arguments for belief, and manifold occasions for affirming his faith in the God who has created and rules the world?

And that was the origin of this book, the genesis of which will explain its character. Written especially for local readers, and consisting entirely of articles which appeared in the Journal d’Aveyron, it is fitting that it should piously gather up the most trivial local reminiscences of J. H. Fabre, and that it [[xii]]should be full of allusions to the men and the things of Aveyron. Written solely to call attention to the life and labours of Fabre, the writer seeks to co-ordinate in a single book the biographical data scattered throughout the ten volumes and four thousand pages of the Souvenirs.

The reader must not take exception to the all but invariable praise of their author nor to that spirit of enthusiasm which he will perhaps detect behind the pages of this volume. This is not to say that everything in the life and work of our hero is equally perfect and worthy of admiration. Whether knowledge or virtue be in question human activity must always fall short somewhere, must always in some degree be defective. Omnis consummationis vidi finem, said the Psalmist. But apart from the fact that it is not yet time, perhaps, to form a final judgment, the reader, I trust, will remember that this book comes to him with an echo of the jubilee celebrations of Sérignan, and the homage, still touched with enthusiasm, of a son of Aveyron and the Vezins countryside to the most illustrious of his fellow-countrymen.

La Griffoulette, near Vezins,
August 28, 1910. [[xiii]]

[1] The higher clerical seminary.—B. M. [↑]

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CONTENTS

[[xv]]

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THE LIFE OF JEAN HENRI FABRE

[[1]]

CHAPTER I

THE SÉRIGNAN JUBILEE

In a few days’ time[1] naturalists, poets, and philosophers will repair in company to Sérignan, in the neighbourhood of Orange. What is calling them from every point of the intellectual horizon, from the most distant cities and capitals, to a little Provençal village? Moussu Fabré, they would tell you yonder, in a tone of respectful sympathy.

But who is the Moussu Fabré thus cherished by the simplest as well as by the most cultivated minds? He is a sturdy old man of all but ninety years, who has spent almost the whole of his life in the company of Wasps, Bees, Gnats, Beetles, Spiders, and Ants, and has described the doings of these tiny creatures in a most wonderful fashion in ten large volumes entitled Souvenirs Entomologiques or Etudes sur l’Instinct et les Mœurs des Insectes.[2] [[2]]

One might say of this achievement what the author of Lettres Persanes said of his book: Proles sine matre. It is a child without a mother. It is, in short, unprecedented.[3] It has not its fellow, either in the Machal of Solomon, or the apologues of the old fabulists, or the treatises on natural history written by our modern scientists. The fabulists look to find man in the animal, which for them is little more than a pretext for comparisons and moral narratives, and the scientists commonly confine their curiosity to the dissection of the insect’s organs, the analysis of its functions, and the classification of species. We might even say that the insect is the least of their cares, for, like Solomon, [[3]]they delight in holding forth upon all the creatures upon the earth or in the heavens above, and all the plants “from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall” (1 Kings iv: 32–33).

Fabre, on the contrary, has eyes only for the insect. He observes it by and for itself, in the most trivial manifestations of its life: the living, active insect, with its labours and its habits, is the thing that interests him before all else, guiding his investigation of the infinite host of these tiny lives, which claim his attention on every hand; and in this world of insects wealth of artifice and capacities of the mental order seem to be in an inverse ratio to beauty of form and brilliance of colour. For this reason Fabre learns to disdain the magnificent Butterfly, applying himself by preference to the modest Fly: the two-winged Flies, which are relatives of our common House-fly, or the four-winged Flies, the numerous and infinitely various cousins of the Wasps and Bees; the Spiders, ugly indeed, but such skilful spinners, and even the Dung-beetles and Scarabæidæ of every species, those wonderful agents of terrestrial purification.

In this singular world, which affords him [[4]]the society which he prefers, he has gathered an ample harvest of unexpected facts and highly perplexing actions on the part of these little so-called inferior animals. No one has excelled him in detecting their slightest movements, and in surprising all the secrets of their lives. Darwin declared, and many others have repeated his words, that Fabre was “an incomparable observer.” The verdict is all the more significant in that the French entomologist did not scruple to oppose his observations to the theories of the famous English naturalist.

Not only in the certainty and the detailed nature of his facts, but also in the colour and reality of his descriptions is his mastery revealed. In him the naturalist is reduplicated by a man of letters and a poet, who “understands how to cast over the naked truth the magic mantle of his picturesque language,”[4] making each of his humble protagonists live again before our eyes, each with its characteristic achievements. So striking is this power of his that Victor Hugo described him as “the insects’ Homer,” while one of the most accomplished of our [[5]]scientists, Mr. Edmond Perrier, Director of the Museum of Natural History, not content with saluting him as “one of the princes of natural history,” speaks of his literary work in the following terms:

The ten volumes of his Souvenirs Entomologiques will remain one of the most intensely interesting works which have ever been written concerning the habits of insects, and also one of the most remarkable records of the psychology of a great observer of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In them the author depicts to the life not only the habits and the instincts of the insects; he gives us a full-length portrait of himself. He makes us share his busy life, amid the subjects of observation which incessantly claim his attention. The world of insects hums and buzzes about him, obsesses him, calling his attention from all directions, exciting his curiosity; he does not know which way to turn. Overwhelmed by the innumerable winged army of the drinkers of nectar who, on the fine summer days, invade his field of observation, he calls to his aid his whole household: his daughters, Claire, Aglaé, and Anna, his son Paul, his workmen, and above all his man-servant Favier, an old countryman who has spent his life in the barracks of the French colonies, a man of a thousand expedients, who watches his master with an incredulous yet admiring eye, listening to him but refusing to be convinced, and shocking him by [[6]]the assertion, which nothing will induce him to retract, that the bat is a rat which has grown wings, the slug an old snail which has lost its shell, the night-jar a toad with a passion for milk, which has sprouted feathers the better to suck the goats’ udders at night, and so forth. The cats and the dog join the company at times, and one almost regrets that one is not within reach of the sturdy old man, so that one might respond to his call.

See him lying on the sand where everything is grilling in the burning rays of the sun, watching some wasp that is digging its burrow, noting its least movement, trying to divine its intentions, to make it confess the secret of its actions, following the labours of the innumerable Scarabaei that clean the surface of the soil of all that might defile it—the droppings of large animals, the decomposing bodies of small birds, moles, or water-rats; putting unexpected difficulties in their way, slily giving these tiny life-companions of his problems of his own devising to solve.[5]

That is well-expressed, and it gives us a fairly correct idea of the vital and poetic charm of the Souvenirs.

The same writer asks, speaking of the well-defined tasks performed by all these little creatures beloved of the worthy biologist of [[7]]Sérignan: “Who has taught each one its trade, to the exclusion of any other, and allotted the parts which they fill, as a rule with a completeness unequalled, save by ‘their absolute unconsciousness of the goal at which they are aiming?’ This is a very important problem: it is the problem of the origin of things. Henri Fabre has no desire to grapple with it. Living in perpetual amazement, amid the miracles revealed by his genius, he observes, but he does not explain.”

For the moment we can no longer subscribe to the assertions of the learned Academician,[6] nor to his fashion of writing history, which is decidedly too free. The truth is that Fabre, who delights in the pageant of the living world, does not always confine himself to recording it; he readily passes from the smallest details of observation to the wide purviews of reason, and he is at times as much a philosopher as a poet and a naturalist. The truth is that he often considers the question of the origins of life, and he answers it unequivocally like the believer that he is. It is enough to cite one passage among others, a passage which testifies to a brief uplifting of the heart that presupposes many [[8]]others: “The eternal question, if one does not rise above the doctrine of dust to dust: how did the insect acquire so discerning an art?” And the following lines from the close of the same chapter: “The pill-maker’s work confronts the reflective mind with a serious problem. It offers us these alternatives: either we must grant the flattened cranium of the Dung-beetle the distinguished honour of having solved for itself the geometrical problem of the alimentary pill, or we must refer it to a harmony that governs all things beneath the eye of an Intelligence which, knowing all things, has provided for all?”[7]

And indeed, when we consider closely, with the author of the Souvenirs, all the prodigies of art, all the marks of ingenuity displayed by these sorry creatures, so inept in other respects, then, whatever hypothesis we may prefer as to the formation of species, whether with Fabre we believe them fixed and unchanging, or whether with Gaudry[8] [[9]]we believe in their evolution, we cannot refrain from proclaiming the necessity of a sovereign Mind, the creator and instigator of order and harmony, and we are quite naturally led to repeat, to the glory of God the Creator, the beautiful saying of Saint Augustine: “Fecit in cœlis angelos et in terris vermiculos, nec major in illis nec minor in istis.”

Now this venerable nonagenarian whom naturalists, poets, and philosophers are so justly about to honour in Sérignan, because his brow is radiant with the purest rays of science, poetry, and philosophy: this entomologist of real genius, he whom Edmond Perrier ranks among “the princes of natural history,” he whom Victor Hugo called “the insects’ Homer,” he whom Darwin proclaimed “an incomparable observer”: who is there in Aveyron, knowing that he was born beneath our skies and that he has dwelt upon our soil, but will rejoice to feel that he belongs to us by his birth and the whole of his youth? [[10]]

[1] The great entomologist’s jubilee was celebrated on the April 3, 1910.—Author’s Note. [↑]

[2] Paris, Delagrave. The Souvenirs, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, are in course of publication [[2]]by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton in England and Messrs. Dodd, Mead and Co. in the United States. The arrangement of the essays has been altered in the English series. See also The Life and Love of the Insect, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (A. and C. Black), Social Life in the Insect World, translated by Bernard Miall (T. Fisher Unwin), and Wonders of Instinct, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and Bernard Miall (T. Fisher Unwin).—B. M. [↑]

[3] It must in justice be admitted that Fabre had certain precursors, among whom mention must be made of the famous Réaumur and Léon Dufour, a physician who lived in the Landes (died 1865), and who was the occasion and the subject of his first entomological publication. This does not alter the fact that his great work is not only absolutely original, but an achievement sui generis which cannot be compared with the mere sketches of his predecessors. [↑]

[4] Souvenirs, Series VI., p. 65, The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” This is Fabre’s verdict upon another naturalist, Moquin-Tandon. [↑]

[5] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 76–97; The Glow-worm and Other Beetles, chap, ix., “Dung-beetles of the Pampas.” [↑]

[6] M. E. Perrier is a Member of the Institut de France. [↑]

[7] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 76, 97; The Glow-worm, chap. ix. [↑]

[8] M. Albert Gaudry is a sometime professor of palæontology in the Museum of Natural History, who, by virtue of his palæontological discoveries and works, has acquired a great authority in the scientific world. His Enchaînements du Monde Animal dans les Temps Géologiques is especially valued and often cited. Gaudry, who is a good Catholic as well as a scientist of the first rank, [[9]]very definitely accepts the evolution of species; but for him, as for Fabre, the activity of the animal kingdom, like that of the world in general, is inconceivable apart from a sovereign mind which has foreseen all things and provided for all things. [↑]

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CHAPTER II

THE URCHIN OF MALAVAL

Jean-Henri Fabre was born at Saint-Léons, the market-town and administrative centre of the canton of Vezins. In witness of which behold this extract from the register of baptisms, a certified copy transcribed by the Abbé Lafon, curé of Saint-Léons:

In the year 1823, on the 22nd September, was baptised Jean-Henri-Casimir Fabre, of the aforesaid Saint-Léons, the legitimate son of Antoine Fabre and Victoire Salgues, inhabitants of the same place:—His godfather was Pierre Ricard, primary schoolmaster. In proof of which—Fabre, vicar.[1]

Jean-Henri Casimir’s mother, by birth Victoire Salgues, was the daughter of the bailiff of Saint-Léons. His father, Antoine Fabre, was born in a little mas in the parish of Lavaysse, Malaval, where his parents were still cultivating the old family property [[11]]which since then has passed to the head of the Vaissière family.

It was thus at Malaval that the future entomologist “passed his earliest childhood,” as he told me when writing to me ten years ago.[2] There was no wallowing in abundance at Saint-Léons. In order to relieve the poor household of one mouth, he was confided to the care of his grandmother and sent to Malaval. “There, in solitude, amid the geese, the calves, and the sheep, my mind first awoke to consciousness. What went before is for me shrouded in impenetrable darkness.”

The spot which was the scene of this first awakening deserves description. When one follows the road from Laissac to Vezins, a short distance after passing Vaysse-Rodié, just as one has almost reached the crest of the height which by reason of its rocky helmet is called the puech del Roucas, on the line of the watershed dividing the limestone basin of the Aveyron from the granitic basin [[12]]of the Viaur, on turning sharply to the right one sees before one the austere Malavallis, dominated on the one hand by the height of Lavaysse with its ancient church, and enlivened a little on the other side by the tiny hamlet of Malaval, which consists, to-day, of two farm-houses; one whiter, more cheerful-looking, and on lower ground; the other standing higher, greyer in hue, and more difficult to discover in the shade of the oak-trees and thickets of broom and blackthorn which form a dense mantle of green about it. It was there, amid these trees, in this house, three thousand feet above the sea, in sight of the sturdy belfry of Lavaysse, that Jean-Henri Fabre was “born into the true life,” the life of the mind. Here, on this hillside, which directly faces the east, he made his earliest discoveries; here, one fine morning, as he will presently tell us, he discovered the sun; here, he saw not only the dawn of day, but also “that inward dawn, so far swept clear of the clouds of unconsciousness as to leave him a lasting memory.”

Nothing could take the place of the picturesqueness and sincerity of the narrative in which he has related these earliest impressions of his childhood: [[13]]

My grandparents[3] were people whose quarrel with the alphabet was so great that they had never opened a book in their lives; and they kept a lean farm on the cold granite ridge of the Rouergue [[14]]table-land. The house, standing alone amidst the heath and broom, with no neighbour for many a mile around and visited at intervals by the wolves, was to them the hub of the universe. But for a [[15]]few surrounding villages, whither the calves were driven upon fair-days, the rest was only very vaguely known by hearsay. In this wild solitude, the mossy fens, with their quagmires oozing with iridescent pools, supplied the cows, the principal source of wealth, with plentiful pasture. In summer, on the short sward of the slopes, the sheep were penned day and night, protected from beasts of prey by a fence of hurdles propped up with pitchforks. When the grass was cropped close at one spot, the fold was shifted elsewhither. In the centre was the shepherd’s rolling hut, a straw cabin. Two watch-dogs, equipped with spiked collars, were answerable for tranquillity if the thieving wolf appeared in the night from out the neighbouring woods.

Padded with a perpetual layer of cow-dung, in which I sank to my knees, broken up shimmering puddles of dark-brown liquid manure, the farmyard also boasted a numerous population. Here the lambs skipped, the geese trumpeted, the fowls scratched the ground, and the sow grunted with her swarm of little pigs hanging to her dugs.

The harshness of the climate did not give husbandry the same chances. In a propitious season they would set fire to a stretch of moorland bristling with gorse and send the swing-plough across the ground enriched by the cinders from the fire. This yielded a few acres of rye, oats, and potatoes. The best corners were kept for hemp, which furnished the distaffs and spindles of the house with [[16]]the material for cloth, and was looked upon as grandmother’s private crop.

Grandfather, therefore, was, before all, a herdsman versed in the love of cows and sheep, but completely ignorant of aught else. How dumbfounded he would have been to learn that, in the remote future, one of his family would become enamoured of those insignificant animals to which he had never vouchsafed a glance in his life! Had he guessed that that lunatic was myself, the scapegrace seated at the table by his side, what a smack of the head I should have caught, what a wrathful look!

“The idea of wasting one’s time with that nonsense!” he would have thundered.

For the patriarch was not given to joking. I can still see his serious face, his unclipped head of hair, often brought back behind his ears with a flick of the thumb and spreading its ancient Gallic mane over his shoulders. I see his little three-cornered hat, his small-clothes buckled at the knees, his wooden shoes, stuffed with straw, that echoed as he walked. Ah, no! Once childhood’s games were past, it would never have done to rear the Grasshopper and unearth the Dung-beetle from his natural surroundings.

Grandmother, pious soul, used to wear the eccentric headdress of the Rouergue Highlanders: a large disk of black felt, stiff as a plank, adorned in the middle with a crown a finger’s-breadth high and hardly wider across than a six-franc piece. A black ribbon fastened under the chin maintained [[17]]the equilibrium of this elegant, but unstable circle. Pickles, hemp, chickens, curds and whey, butter; washing the clothes, minding the children, seeing to the meals of the household: say that and you have summed up the strenuous woman’s round of ideas. On her left side, the distaff, with its load of tow; in her right hand, the spindle turning under a quick twist of her thumb, moistened at intervals with her tongue: so she went through life, unweariedly, attending to the order and the welfare of the house. I see her in my mind’s eye, particularly on winter evenings, which were more favourable to family talk. When the hour came for meals, all of us, big and little, would take our seats round a long table, on a couple of benches, deal planks supported by four rickety legs. Each found his wooden bowl and his tin spoon in front of him. At one end of the table there always stood an enormous rye-loaf, the size of a cartwheel, wrapped in a linen cloth with a pleasant smell of washing, and there it remained until nothing was left of it. With a vigorous stroke, grandfather would cut off enough for the needs of the moment; then he would divide the piece among us with the one knife which he alone was entitled to wield. It was now each one’s business to break up his bit with his fingers and to fill his bowl as he pleased.

Next came grandmother’s turn. A capacious pot bubbled lustily and sang upon the flames in the hearth, exhaling an appetising savour of bacon and turnips. Armed with a long metal ladle, grandmother [[18]]would take from it, for each of us in turn, first the broth, wherein to soak the bread, and next the ration of turnips and bacon, partly fat and partly lean, filling the bowl to the top. At the other end of the table was the pitcher, from which the thirsty were free to drink at will. What appetites we had, and what festive meals those were, especially when a cream-cheese, home-made, was there to complete the banquet!

Near us blazed the huge fire-place, in which whole tree-trunks were consumed in the extreme cold weather. From a corner of that monumental, soot-glazed chimney, projected, at a convenient height, a slate shelf, which served to light the kitchen when we sat up late. On this we burnt slips of pine-wood, selected among the most translucent, those containing the most resin. They shed over the room a lurid red light, which saved the walnut-oil in the lamp.

When the bowls were emptied and the last crumb of cheese scraped up, grandam went back to her distaff, on a stool by the chimney-corner. We children, boys and girls, squatting on our heels and putting out our hands to the cheerful fire of furze, formed a circle round her and listened to her with eager ears. She told us stories, not greatly varied, it is true, but still wonderful, for the wolf often played a part in them. I should have very much liked to see this wolf, the hero of so many tales that made our flesh creep; but the shepherd always refused to take me into his straw hut, in the middle of the fold, at night. [[19]]When we had done talking about the horrid wolf, the dragon, and the serpent, and when the resinous splinters had given out their last gleams, we went to sleep the sweet sleep that toil gives. As the youngest of the household, I had a right to the mattress, a sack stuffed with oat-chaff. The others had to be content with straw.

I owe a great deal to you, dear grandmother: it was in your lap that I found consolation for my first sorrows. You have handed down to me, perhaps, a little of your physical vigour, a little of your love of work; but certainly you were no more accountable than grandfather for my passion for insects.

And yet in me, the observer, the inquirer into things, began to take shape almost in infancy. Why should I not describe my first discoveries? They are ingenuous in the extreme, but will serve notwithstanding to tell us something of the way in which tendencies first show themselves.

I was five or six years old. That the poor household might have one mouth less to feed, I had been placed in grandmother’s care. Here, in solitude, my first gleams of intelligence were awakened amidst the geese, the calves, and the sheep. Everything before that is impenetrable darkness. My real birth was at the moment when the dawn of personality rises, dispersing the mists of unconsciousness and leaving a lasting memory. I can see myself plainly, clad in a soiled frieze frock flapping against my bare heels; I remember the handkerchief hanging from my waist by a bit of [[20]]string, a handkerchief often lost and replaced by the back of my sleeve.

There I stand one day, a pensive urchin, with my hands behind my back and my face turned to the sun. The dazzling splendour fascinates me. I am the Moth attracted by the light of the lamp. With what am I enjoying the glorious radiance: with my mouth or my eyes? That is the question put by my budding scientific curiosity. Reader, do not smile! the future observer is already practising and experimenting. I open my mouth wide and close my eyes: the glory disappears. I open my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappears. I repeat the performance, with the same result. The question’s solved: I have learnt by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. What a discovery! That evening I told the whole house all about it. Grandmother smiled fondly at my simplicity: the others laughed at it. ’Tis the way of the world.

Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighbouring bushes, a sort of jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little bird chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter, and that quickly. True, there is the wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there, behind that clump of broom. I stand on the look-out for long, but all in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle ceases. I try [[21]]again next day and the day after. This time my stubborn watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is not a bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind-legs my playfellows have taught me to relish: a poor recompense for my prolonged ambush. The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy flavour, but what I have just learnt. I now know, from personal observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not publish my discovery for fear of the same laughter that greeted my story about the sun.

Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to smile to me with their great violet eyes. Later on I see, in their place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice, and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the summer, grandfather walks up with a spade and turns my field of observation topsy-turvy. From under ground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat-stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeon-holed in my memory for good and all.

With an ever-watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practised by himself, all unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the Large White Butterfly goes to the cabbage, and the Red Admiral to the thistle. [[22]]

It would be impossible to describe more delightfully the gradual development of tastes and aptitudes in the dawn of life.

The same freshness of impression and the same affinity for natural objects will be found in another recollection of the same period: the recollection of “a certain harmonica,” whose music to the “ear of a child of six” sounded as sweet and strange as that of the frog whom he heard emitting his limpid note in the neighbourhood of the solitary farm as the last light of evening faded from the heights. “A series of glass slips, of unequal length, fixed upon two tightly-stretched tapes, and a cork on the end of a wire, which served as a striker”: such was the instrument which some one brought the child from the latest fair. “Imagine an untutored hand striking at random upon this key-board, with the most riotous unexpectedness of octaves, discords, and inverted harmonies”: such was the chiming of the bell-ringer frogs on the sunken lanes of Malaval. “As a song it had neither head nor tail; but the purity of the sound was delightful.” How much more delightful, in the first radiance of his spontaneous childhood, this little scrap of a fellow who was beginning to play his part in the great concert of the world, [[23]]in which he was one day to fill so notable a place and to sing a new song to the glory of the Master of Nature![4] [[24]]

[1] Those journals which claim him as a native of Sérignan are therefore mistaken. “At Sérignan (Vaucluse), his native countryside, the peasants familiarly call him Moussu Fabré” (Univers, March 3, 1910). [↑]

[2] In the reminiscences of his childhood, which are intermingled with his entomological memoirs, Fabre does not mention a single proper name, whether of person or place; only the vague expression, “the table-land of the Rouergue,” which he once incidentally employs, might give an attentive reader a hint as to the place of his origin. Souvenirs, VI., p. 38; The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “Heredity.” [↑]

[3] These paternal grandparents, of whom our hero has retained so vivid a recollection, bore the names of Jean-Pierre Fabre and Elisabeth Poujade. Patient searching of the archives, assisted, fortunately, by the goodwill of M. Toscan, registrar to the Justice of the Peace for Vezins, has enabled us to reproduce their marriage contract, which is full of information hitherto unpublished, and curious details of domestic life which will not fail to interest the reader:

“In the year 1791 and on the 15th day of the month of February, in the locality of Ségur, province of Aveiron, in the presence of me, Raymond Rous, man of law and notary royal … have been devised and concluded the following articles of marriage between Pierre-Jean Fabre, legitimate son of Pierre Fabre, landowner and farmer, and Anne Fages, husband and wife of the village of Malaval, on the one part, and Elisabeth Poujade, legitimate daughter of Antoine Poujade, landowner, and Françoise Azémar, husband and wife of the village of Mont, parish of Notre-Dame d’Arques, on the other part—the said parties acting, namely, the said future husband with the knowledge and consent of his father and mother here present, and the said future wife, she being absent, but the said Poujade for her, being here present stipulating and accepting—have in the first place promised that the said marriage shall be solemnised before the Church at the first demand of one of the parties, under penalty of all expenses, damages, and interests—in the second place, the said Fabre and Fages, husband and wife, favouring and contemplating the present marriage have given and are giving by donation, declared between living persons, to the aforesaid their son, the future husband, all and each of their possessions, movable and immovable, present and future, under the clauses, conditions, and reserves hereafter following: firstly, to be fed at the same table of the same victuals as the said donor; secondly, and in case of incompatibility, [[14]]they reserve to themselves the same income as Jean Fabre and Françoise Fabre, father and mother of the donor, reserved to themselves in the marriage contract of the said Fabre received by M. Dufieu, notary …; thirdly, to settle upon their other children a portion such as by law shall pertain to them out of their possessions in money when they accept a settlement; and in case Françoise and Anne Fabre should not desire so to do, they shall enjoy the annual pension … of three setiers each of rye, two quarters each of oats, five pounds each of butter, and five pounds each of cheese; the use of their usual bed, and of their spinning-wheel; the use of their clothes-press and the small articles of furniture necessary according to their condition; … the said Fages, the mother, reserves to herself the sum of thirty francs to be paid once at her will to employ and dispose as she shall see fit. In the third place, the said Poujade, the father, favouring and contemplating the present marriage, has given and constituted as the dowry of his daughter, the future wife, to take the place of any right to a portion which she might claim against his goods and those of the mother aforesaid, a clothes-press with apparel valued at a hundred livres, a heifer and a cow valued the two at eighty francs, two sheep, and the sum of fifteen hundred livres, the said sum being made up of one hundred and fifty livres of the maternal parent’s and the rest of the paternal parent’s money.…

“Devised and rehearsed in the presence of the sieur Joseph Déjean, burgher of Moulin-Savi, and the sieur André Bourles, practitioner of Ségur, signed by the aforesaid Fabre, father and son, and the aforesaid Poujade, father, and not the aforesaid Fages, who, being requested to sign, has stated that she is not able to do so.…

“Forwarded by us, the notary undersigned, holder of the draft at Ségur, the 12th April 1807.

“Rous, notary.” [↑]

[4] This account of the naturalist’s childhood is drawn principally from The Souvenirs, vi., 32–45; see The Life of the Fly, chap, v., “Heredity.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER III

THE SCHOOLBOY: SAINT-LÉONS

With his seventh year the time came for him to go to school. The schoolmaster of Saint-Léons was the child’s godfather. Everything pointed to him as the child’s first teacher. So Jean-Henri left the ancestral home at Malaval to return to his father’s house at Saint-Léons and attend the local school, which was kept by his godfather, Pierre Ricard. He could not have done better as a start in life. Let us leave him to paint one picture of this second phase of his life. He begins with a description of the school:

What shall I call the room in which I was to become acquainted with the alphabet? It would be difficult to find the exact word, because the room served for every purpose. It was at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining-room, and, at times, a chicken-house and a piggery. Palatial schools were not dreamt of in those days; any wretched hovel was thought good enough.

A broad fixed ladder led to the floor above. [[25]]Under the ladder stood a big bed in a boarded recess. What was there upstairs? I never quite knew. I would see the master sometimes bring down an armful of hay for the ass, sometimes a basket of potatoes which the housewife emptied into the pot in which the little porker’s food was cooked. It must have been a loft of sorts, a store-house of provisions for man and beast. Those two apartments composed the whole building.

To return to the lower one, the schoolroom: a window faces south, the only window in the house, a long, narrow window whose frame you can touch at the same time with your head and both your shoulders. This sunny aperture is the only lively spot in the dwelling; it overlooks the greater part of the village, which straggles along the slopes of a tapering valley. In the window-recess is the master’s little table.

The opposite wall contains a niche in which stands a gleaming copper pail full of water. Here the parched children can relieve their thirst when they please, with a cup left within their reach. At the top of the niche are a few shelves bright with pewter plates, dishes, and drinking-vessels, which are taken down from their sanctuary on great occasions only.

More or less everywhere, at any spot which the light touches, are crudely-coloured pictures, pasted on the walls. Here is Our Lady of the Seven Dolours, the disconsolate Mother of God, opening her blue cloak to show her heart pierced with seven daggers. Between the sun and moon, which stare [[26]]at you with their great, round eyes, is the Eternal Father, Whose robe swells as though puffed out with the storm. To the right of the window, in the embrasure, is the Wandering Jew. He wears a three-cornered hat, a large, white, leather apron, hobnailed shoes, and carries a stout stick. “Never was such a bearded man seen before or after,” says the legend that surrounds the picture. The draughtsman has not forgotten this detail; the old man’s beard spreads in a snowy avalanche over the apron and comes down to his knees. On the left is Geneviève of Brabant, accompanied by the roe; with cruel Golo hiding in the bushes, sword in hand. Above hangs The Death of Mr. Credit, slain by defaulters at the door of his inn; and so on and so on, in every variety of subject, at all the unoccupied spots of the four walls.

I was filled with admiration of this picture-gallery, which held one’s eyes with its great patches of red, blue, green, and yellow. The master, however, had not set up his collection with a view to training our minds and hearts. That was the last and least of the worthy man’s ambitions. An artist in his fashion, he had adorned his house according to his taste; and we benefited by the scheme of decoration.

While the gallery of halfpenny pictures made me happy all the year round, there was another entertainment which I found particularly attractive in winter, in frosty weather, when the snow lay long on the ground. Against the far wall stands the fire-place, as monumental in size as at [[27]]my grandmother’s. Its arched cornice occupies the whole width of the room, for the enormous redoubt fulfils more than one purpose. In the middle is the hearth, but on the right and the left are two breast-high recesses, half wood and half stone. Each of them is a bed, with a mattress stuffed with husks of winnowed corn. Two sliding boards serve as shutters and close the chest if the sleeper would be alone. This dormitory, sheltered under the chimney breast, supplies couches for the favoured ones of the house, the boarders. They must lie snug in them at night, when the north wind howls at the mouth of the dark valley and sends the snow awhirl. The rest is occupied by the hearth and its accessories: the three-legged stools; the salt-box, hanging against the wall to keep its contents dry; the heavy shovel which it takes two hands to wield; lastly, the bellows, similar to those with which I used to blow out my cheeks in grandfather’s house. They consist of a big branch of pine, hollowed throughout its length with a red-hot iron. By means of this channel one’s breath is applied, from a convenient distance, to the spot which is to be revived. With a couple of stones for supports, the master’s bundle of sticks and our own logs blaze and flicker, for each of us has to bring a log of wood in the morning, if he would share in the treat.

Nevertheless, the fire was not exactly lit for us, but, most of all, to warm a row of three pots in which simmered the pigs’ food, a mixture of potatoes and bran. That, despite the tribute of [[28]]a log, was the real object of the brushwood fire. The two boarders, on their stools, in the best places, and we others, sitting on our heels, formed a semicircle around those big cauldrons full to the brim and giving off little jets of steam, with puff-puff-puffing sounds. The bolder among us, when the master’s eyes were engaged elsewhere, would dig a knife into a well-cooked potato and add it to their bit of bread; for I must say that, if we did little work at my school, at least we did a deal of eating. It was the regular custom to crack a few nuts and nibble at a crust while writing our page or setting out our rows of figures.

We, the smaller ones, in addition to the comfort of studying with our mouths full, had every now and then two other delights, which were quite as good as cracking nuts. The back-door communicated with the yard where the hen, surrounded by her brood of chicks, scratched at the dung-hill, while the little porkers, of whom there were a dozen, wallowed in their stone trough. This door would open sometimes to let one of us out, a privilege which we abused, for the sly ones among us were careful not to close it on returning. Forthwith the porkers would come running in, one after the other, attracted by the smell of the boiled potatoes. My bench, the one where the youngsters sat, stood against the wall, under the copper pail to which we used to go for water when the nuts had made us thirsty, and was right in the way of the pigs. Up they came trotting and grunting, curling their little tails; they rubbed against our [[29]]legs; they poked their cold, pink snouts into our hands in search of a scrap of crust; they questioned us with their sharp little eyes to learn if we happened to have a dry chestnut for them in our pockets. When they had gone the round, some this way and some that, they went back to the farmyard, driven away by a friendly flick of the master’s handkerchief. Next came the visit of the hen, bringing her velvet-coated chicks to see us. All of us eagerly crumbled a little bread for our pretty visitors. We vied with one another in calling them to us and tickling with our fingers their soft and downy backs. No, there was certainly no lack of distraction.[1]

Now we know the school, with all its amenities, and our curiosity, aroused to the highest pitch, inquires, not without some alarm, what was taught in such a place and in such company. After the description of the class-room, we have the programme of studies:

Let us first speak of the young ones, of whom I was one. Each of us had, or rather was supposed to have, in his hands a little penny book, the alphabet, printed on grey paper. It began, on the cover, with a pigeon or something like it. Next came a cross, followed by the letters in their [[30]]order. When we turned over, our eyes encountered the terrible ba, be, bi, bo, bu, the stumbling-block of most of us. When we had mastered that formidable page we were considered to know how to read and were admitted among the big ones. But if the little book was to be of any use, the least that was required was that the master should interest himself in us to some extent and show us how to set about things. For this the worthy man, too much taken up with the big boys, had not the time. The famous alphabet with the pigeon was thrust upon us only to give us the air of scholars. We were to contemplate it on our bench, to decipher it with the help of our next neighbours, in case he might know one or two of the letters. Our contemplation came to nothing, being every moment disturbed by a visit to the potatoes in the stewpots, a quarrel among playmates about a marble, the grunting invasion of the porkers, or the arrival of the chicks. With the aid of these diversions we would wait patiently until it was time for us to go home. That was our most serious work.

The big ones used to write. They had the benefit of the small amount of light in the room, by the narrow window where the Wandering Jew and ruthless Golo faced each other, and of the large and only table with its circle of seats. The school supplied nothing, not even a drop of ink; every one had to come with a full set of utensils. The ink-horn of those days, a relic of the ancient pen-case of which Rabelais speaks, was a long cardboard [[31]]box divided into two stages. The upper compartment held the pens, made of goose-quill trimmed with a penknife; the lower contained, in a tiny well, ink made of soot mixed with vinegar.

The master’s great business was to mend the pens—a delicate task, not without danger for inexperienced fingers—and then to trace at the head of the white page a line of strokes, single letters, or words according to the scholar’s capabilities. When that is over, keep an eye on the work of art which is coming to adorn the copy! With what undulating movements of the wrist does the hand, resting on the little finger, prepare and plan its flight! All at once the hand starts off, flies, whirls; and lo and behold, under the line of writing is unfurled a garland of circles, spirals, and flourishes, framing a bird with outspread wings; the whole, if you please, in red ink, the only kind worthy of such a pen. Large and small, we stood awestruck in the presence of such marvels. The family, in the evening, after supper, would pass from hand to hand the masterpiece brought back from school:—

“What a man!” was the comment. “What a man, to draw you a Holy Ghost with one stroke of the pen!”

What was read at my school? At most, in French, a few selections from sacred history. Latin recurred oftener, to teach us to sing vespers properly. The more advanced pupils tried to decipher manuscript, a deed of sale, the hieroglyphics of some scrivener. [[32]]

And history, geography? No one ever heard of them. What difference did it make to us whether the earth was round or square! In either case, it was just as hard to make it bring forth anything.

And grammar? The master troubled his head very little about that, and we still less. We should have been greatly surprised by the novelty and the forbidding look of such words in the grammatical jargon as substantive, indicative, and subjunctive. Accuracy of language, whether of speech or writing, must be learnt by practice. And none of us was troubled by scruples in this respect. What was the use of all these subtleties, when, on coming out of school, a lad went back to his flock of sheep!

And arithmetic? Yes, we did a little of this, but not under that learned name. We called it sums. To put down rows of figures, not too long, add them and subtract them one from the other was more or less familiar work. On Saturday evenings, to finish up the week, there was a general orgy of sums. The top boy stood up and, in a loud voice, recited the multiplication table up to twelve times. I say twelve times, for, in those days, because of our old duodecimal measures, it was the custom to count as far as the twelve-times table, instead of the ten-times of the metric system. When this recital was over, the whole class, the little ones included, shouted it in chorus, creating such an uproar that chicks and porkers took to flight if they happened to be there. [[33]]And this went on to twelve times twelve, the first in the row starting the next table and the whole class repeating it as loud as it could yell. Of all that we were taught in school, the multiplication table was what we knew best, for this noisy method ended by dinning the different numbers into our ears. This does not mean that we became skilful reckoners. The cleverest of us easily got muddled with the figures to be carried in a multiplication sum. As for division, rare indeed were they who reached such heights. In short, the moment a problem, however insignificant, had to be solved, we had recourse to mental gymnastics much rather than to the learned aid of arithmetic.

This account cannot be suspected of any malicious exaggeration: the narrator is too full of sympathy for his old master to do him anything less than justice. In any case he bears him no grudge in respect of the deficiencies of his teaching:

When all is said, our master was an excellent man who could have kept school very well but for his lack of one thing: and that was time. He devoted to us all the little leisure which his numerous functions left him. And first of all, he managed the property of an absentee landowner, who only occasionally set foot in the village. He had under his care an old castle with four towers, which had [[34]]become so many pigeon-houses; he directed the getting-in of the hay, the walnuts, the apples, and the oats. We used to help him during the summer, when the school, which was well attended in winter, was almost deserted. The few who remained, because they were not yet big enough to work in the fields, were small children, including him who was one day to set down these memorable facts. Lessons were less dull at that time of year. They were often given on the hay or the straw; oftener still, lesson-time was spent in cleaning out the dovecot or stamping on the snails that had sallied in rainy weather from their ramparts, the tall box borders of the garden belonging to the castle.

Our master was a barber. With his light hand, which was so clever at beautifying our copies with curlicue birds, he shaved the notabilities of the place: the mayor, the parish priest, the notary. Our master was a bell-ringer. A wedding or a christening interrupted the lessons; he had to ring a peal. A gathering storm gave us a holiday: the great bell must be tolled to ward off the lightning and the hail. Our master was a choir-singer. With his mighty voice he filled the church where he led the Magnificat at vespers. Our master wound up the village clock. This was his proudest function. Giving a glance at the sun, to ascertain the time more or less nearly, he would climb to the top of the steeple, open a huge cage of rafters, and find himself in a maze of wheels and springs whereof the secret was known to him alone.

[[35]]

In this picture of the schoolmaster and the school we have lost sight for a time of our little Jean-Henri. What becomes of him? What does he do in such a school, under such a master? To begin with, no one takes a greater interest in the visits of hens and piglings, no one appreciates more keenly the delights of school in the open air. In the meanwhile, his love of plants and animals finds expression in all directions, even on the cover of his penny spelling-book:

Embellished with a crude picture of a pigeon which I study and contemplate much more zealously than the A, B, C. Its round eye, with its circlet of dots, seems to smile upon me. Its wing, of which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches, raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon-friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench and wait more or less till school is over.

School out of doors has other charms. When the master takes us to kill the snails in the box borders, I do not always scrupulously fulfil my [[36]]office as exterminator. My heel sometimes hesitates before coming down upon the handful which I have gathered. They are so pretty! Just think, there are yellow ones and pink, white ones and brown, all with dark spiral streaks. I fill my pockets with the handsomest so as to feast my eyes upon them at my leisure.

On haymaking days in the master’s field, I strike up an acquaintance with the Frog. Flayed and stuck at the end of a split stick, he serves as live bait to tempt the Crayfish from his retreat by the edge of the brook. On the alder-tree I catch the Hoplia, the splendid Beetle who pales the azure of the heavens. I pick the narcissus and learn to gather, with the tip of my tongue, the tiny drops of honey that lie right at the bottom of the cleft corolla. I also learn that too-long indulgence in this quest always brings a headache; but this discomfort in no way impairs my admiration for the glorious white flower, which wears a narrow red collar at the throat of its funnel. When we go to beat the walnut-trees, the barren grass-plots provide me with Locusts, spreading their wings, some into a blue fan, others into a red.

And thus the rustic school, even in the heart of winter, furnished continuous food for my interest in things.

But while the love of plants and animals developed automatically, without guide or example, in the child predestined to entomology, [[37]]there was one respect in which he did not make progress: the knowledge of the alphabet, which was indeed neglected for the pigeon. Consequently neither the schoolmaster nor the spelling-book had much to do with the earliest stage of his education. He tells us how he learned to read, not at Master Ricard’s, but, thanks to his father, in the school of the animals and nature:

I was still at the same stage, hopelessly behind-hand with the intractable alphabet, when my father, by a chance inspiration, brought me home from the town what was destined to give me a start along the road of reading. Despite the not insignificant part which it played in my intellectual awakening, the purchase was by no means a ruinous one. It was a large print, price six farthings, coloured and divided into compartments in which animals of all sorts taught the A, B, C by means of the first letters of their names.

I made such rapid progress that, in a few days, I was able to turn in good earnest to the pages of my little pigeon-book, hitherto so undecipherable. I was initiated; I knew how to spell. My parents marvelled. I can explain this unexpected progress to-day. Those speaking pictures, which brought me among my friends the beasts, were in harmony with my instincts. If the animal has not fulfilled all that it promised in so far as I am concerned, I have at least to thank it for teaching [[38]]me to read. I should have succeeded by other means, I do not doubt, but not so quickly or pleasantly. Animals for ever!

Luck favoured me a second time. As a reward for my prowess I was given La Fontaine’s Fables, in a popular, cheap edition, crammed with pictures, small, I admit, and very inaccurate, but still delightful. Here were the crow, the fox, the wolf, the magpie, the frog, the rabbit, the ass, the dog, the cat; all persons of my acquaintance. The glorious book was immensely to my taste, with its skimpy illustrations in which the animal walked and talked. As to understanding what it said, that was another story. Never mind, my lad! Put together syllables that say nothing to you yet; they will speak to you later and La Fontaine will always remain your friend.[2]

[[39]]

[1] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 46–68; The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]

[2] Souvenirs, IV., pp. 50–60; The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER IV

THE SCHOOLBOY: SAINT-LÉONS

To know a pupil thoroughly, it is not enough to study him in class; one must watch him at play, for it is then especially that his nascent tastes reveal themselves, and the outlines of his future personality are more plainly discerned.

We have seen Jean-Henri bending over his task under the eye of the schoolmaster, or of his father; now let us follow him in the free play of his activities, absorbed in intimate communion with the children of nature. He himself will tell us what were his favourite pastimes in the garden, by the pond, or in the fields.

All the reminiscences of the little Jean-Henri’s schooldays pall before the memory of his father’s garden:

A tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle[1] with the four turrets [[40]]that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.

There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips, and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village.

A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents’ watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother[2] and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the soil. It is the garden of monsieur le notaire.

There are beds with box-borders in that garden; [[41]]there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears!

We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.

I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recover terra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss![3]

I confess I love this little sketch of the garden, which gives evidence of a singular [[42]]clearness of perception in the gaze which this child already turns upon the things about him.

But I like still better the history of the duck-pond, graceful as an idyll and touching as an elegy, the idyll of a rustic childhood which becomes aware, simultaneously, of the family secrets and the secrets of nature; the elegy of a father’s tenderness and a son’s piety cramped and mortified by poverty, the elegy of intelligence, nay, of genius, ready to spread its wings and fettered in its flight by the heavy chains and harsh necessities of material existence:

How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.

Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips, and even a few hives in a sheltered [[43]]corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face. But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother, and its adjoining patch of garden. The meagre resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it, and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.

Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen, not to blood-curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war,[4] has set up a small tallow-factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle-grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.

“Suppose we breed some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”

“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”

That night I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I [[44]]took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.

A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbour.

To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.

A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny Shellfish nor Worms and Tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water-weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to rear; the tallow-smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he possesses the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer we have hardly water to drink!

Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty spring trickles into a basin made in the rock. Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their [[45]]water there in copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbours have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight, nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.

There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.

On the hills, the path that climbs behind the château soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, which forms a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.

You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys! The too-frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing [[46]]for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.

Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They, too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any further if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.

We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets: shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there, and everywhere. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.

What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-coloured cords. One might take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.

I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognise, on a very small scale, a familiar object: [[47]]the Tadpole, the Frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.

The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.

Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.

At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder-trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a Beetle—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.

The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects [[48]]into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machine; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.

Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else; let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.

On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saint’s day, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.

We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing-floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking [[49]]stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.

The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bend towards the light, I see something like gold-filings whirl where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.

I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.

I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat Snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s-horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?

Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late, and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters, [[50]]let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.

The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail-shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold-filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s-horn turned to stone.

Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.

“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”

Broken-hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram’s-horn, heavenly Beetle are all flung on a rubbish-heap outside the door.

Mother bewails her lot:

“A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”

Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit [[51]]it to-day. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?

A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck-pool were rock-crystal, the gold-dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite, and the sky-blue Beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the field of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favoured by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.

And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.

Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered [[52]]state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.

As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.

Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years.[5]

His excursions to the pond and the garden were little more to our little Jean-Henri than the preface to rather more distant excursions in the neighbourhood of Saint-Léons. The edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and the skirts of the beechwood which limit his horizon are the chosen spots to which his [[53]]curiosity leads him, and the favourite scene of his childish rambles. It is really delightful to watch him taking possession of these unknown territories and making the first inventory of the wealth that he will explore later on.

On that day, wealthy and leisured, with an apple for my lunch and all my time to myself, I decided to visit the brown of the neighbouring hill, hitherto looked upon as the boundary of the world. Right at the top is a row of trees which, turning their backs to the wind, bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often, from the little window in my home, have I not seen them bowing their heads in stormy weather; how often have I not watched them writhing like madmen amid the snow-dust which the north-wind’s besom raises and smooths along the hill-side! What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? I am interested in their supple backs, to-day still and upright against the blue of the sky, to-morrow shaken when the clouds pass overhead. I am gladdened by their calmness; I am distressed by their terrified gestures. They are my friends. I have them before my eyes at every hour of the day. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? I am going to climb up there; and perhaps I shall find out.

I mount the slope. It is a lean grass-sward [[54]]close-cropped by the sheep. It has no bushes, fertile in rents and tears, for which I should have to answer on returning home, nor any rocks, the scaling of which involves like dangers; nothing but large, flat stones, scattered here and there. I have only to go straight on, over smooth ground. But the sward is as steep as a sloping roof. It is long, ever so long; and my legs are very short. From time to time I look up. My friends, the trees on the hill-top, seem to be no nearer. Cheerly, sonnie! Scramble away!

What is this at my feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding-place under the eaves of a big stone. Bless us, here’s a nest made of hair and fine straw! It’s the first I have ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring me. And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and these eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.

Meanwhile the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—“Tack! Tack!”—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of [[55]]my hand. Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.

My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hill-top over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again. At the bottom I meet the parish priest’s curate reading his breviary as he takes his walk. He sees me coming solemnly along, like a relic-bearer; he catches sight of my hand hiding something behind my back:

“What have you there, my boy?” he asks.

All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.

“Ah!” says his reverence. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”

“Up there, father, under a stone.”

Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. “By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is;—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill-feathers.”

“You mustn’t do that, my little friend,” replies the priest. “You mustn’t rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God’s birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields, and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don’t touch the nest.” [[56]]

I promise; and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that plundering birds’ nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.

“Saxicola,” the priest had said, on seeing my find.

“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?”

Years passed; and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hill-sides is also called the Motteux, or Clodhopper,[6] because, in the ploughing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grub-worms. Lastly, I came upon the Provençal expression [[57]]Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird’s rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.

Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for to-day I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or Wheat-ear.

On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden-patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low, bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot-bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee-deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool, and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless seas; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.

A miller has bethought him of putting the brook, [[58]]which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economising the gradient, diverts part of the water, and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill-wheels with motor-power. This basin stands beside a frequented path, and is walled off at the end.

One day, hoisting myself on a play-fellow’s shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless, stagnant waters covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. To-day I should call it a Salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the Serpent and the Dragon, of whom we were told such blood-curdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I’ve seen enough; let’s get down again, quick!

The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.

This is the haunt of the red-necktied Minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running [[59]]water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.

On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering Rooks, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one’s first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant Hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that I have turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.

Soon I find others, differing in size, shape, and colour. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their underside with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder. [[60]]

What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the Rooks, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or the Bouturel, as we call it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how the Bouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.

As my visits to the beech-clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating flakes. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillæ on a cat’s tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.

Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve [[61]]so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.

The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the Puffball in English, but its French name is the Vesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination: Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me that Lycoperdon means Vesse-de-loup and nothing else.

How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! “Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!” said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were once the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; to-day, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along as it rushes towards the abyss.[7]

Can one imagine a more picturesque and original fashion of sketching the outline of one’s earliest memories? We have collected these memories, which he has scattered so profusely over the pages of his books, with pious care, because they so delightfully reveal [[62]]a soul and a life that are akin to our own, more especially in their beginnings, and because they so wonderfully evoke an age and a country that were once ours and are still the possession of our grand-nephews.

At the age of ten the time came for the child to bid a fresh farewell to his native village. His father was the first of his race to be tempted by the town, and he removed his home to Rodez. Jean-Henri was never again to behold the humble village where he lived “his best years,” but he bore its image indelibly stamped upon his mind, upon that part of it in which are formed those profound impressions that grow more vivid with the years instead of fading. He left it at first with a light heart, but later on he was homesick for it; and as the years went by he felt more than ever its mysterious attraction, so that one of his last wishes was to see his grave dug in the shadow of his cradle. But we will not wrong feelings so delicate by seeking to interpret them; we will let him speak for himself.

Leaving our native village is no very serious matter when we are children. We even look on it as a sort of holiday. We are going to see something new, those magic pictures of our dreams. With age come regrets; and the close of life is [[63]]spent in stirring up old memories. Then, in our dreamy moods, the beloved village reappears, embellished, transfigured by the glow of those first impressions; and the mental image, superior to the reality, stands out in amazingly clear relief. The past, the far-off past, was only yesterday; we see it, we touch it.

For my part, after three-quarters of a century, I could walk with my eyes closed straight to the flat stone where I first heard the soft chiming note of the Midwife Toad; yes, I should find it to a certainty, if time, which devastates all things, even the homes of Toads, has not moved it or perhaps left it in ruins.

I see, on the margin of the brook, the exact position of the alder-trees whose tangled roots, deep under the water, were a refuge for the Crayfish. I should say:

“It is just at the foot of this tree that I had the unutterable bliss of catching a beauty. She had horns so long … and enormous claws, full of meat, for I got her just at the right time.”

I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. Oh, what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs.

I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the [[64]]towns to which the vicissitudes of life have brought me. An exquisitely sweet link binds us to our native soil; we are like the plant that has to be torn away from the spot where it put out its first roots. Poor though it be, I should love to see my own village again; I should like to leave my bones there.[8]

[[65]]

[1] The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author [[40]]was born in 1823. Cf. The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M. [↑]

[2] The brother whom Fabre here associates with the memories of his childhood has also proved a credit to his name and his vocation. M. Frédéric Fabre is to-day Director of the Crillon Canal and assistant justice for the southern canton of Avignon. [↑]

[3] Souvenirs, VIII., pp. 126, 127; Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.” [↑]

[4] The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M. [↑]

[5] Souvenirs, pp. 260–270. The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.” [↑]

[6] The Wheat-ear, one of the Saxicolæ, is known also as the White-Tail, the meaning of both forms being the same; White-ear being a corruptive of the Anglo-Saxon name. Both correspond with the Provençal Cul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M. [↑]

[7] Souvenirs, pp. 292–300. The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.” [↑]

[8] Souvenirs, VIII., pp. 125–129. Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER V

AT THE COLLEGE OF RODEZ

We have learned what we may of the schoolboy of Saint-Léons. Let us follow him to the Lycée of Rodez, which he entered as a day-boy at the age of ten:

I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side, two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone the Domine, salvum fac regem at the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.

Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere there was talk [[66]]of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.

Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.[1]

At Rodez, as at Saint-Léons, natural objects provided him with the chief material of his recreations:

The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had [[67]]been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.

This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!

We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.

Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.

And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The [[68]]loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!

How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.

Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.[2]

The incident of which we have just read was the starting-point of the investigations which Fabre was to undertake fifty years later concerning the artificial sleep of birds and insects.

If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is, [[69]]he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:

By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.[3]

[[70]]

Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of the Bucolics and the Georgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than the Metamorphoses of Ovid or Religion of Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodez lycée with literary exercises.

All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.

In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:

The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of [[71]]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.

Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.

With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast [[72]]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning: procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.

I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.

This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.[4]

This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered [[73]]life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.

Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.

Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of the Medusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.[5]

[[74]]

[1] Souvenirs, VI., p. 60. The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]

[2] Souvenirs, VII., pp. 29, 33. The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?” [↑]

[3] Souvenirs, VI., p. 61. The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]

[4] Souvenirs, II., pp. 41–44, 46. Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.” [↑]

[5] Souvenirs, VI., p. 61. The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER VI

THE PUPIL TEACHER: AVIGNON (1841–43)

The stroke of misfortune which suddenly interrupted Jean-Henri’s studies at the Rodez lycée made him an exile from his father’s house and banished him from his native countryside.

For the second time he was, as it were, dropped upon the road like Perrault’s Tom Thumb. And the fairy-tale comes to life again in the Odyssey of the poor boy who wandered at random, picking up his food at hazard, facing misfortune with a stout heart, and smiling whenever he could at the poem of Nature, who always had some fresh surprise in store for him.

Who can fail to be moved by pity and admiration, beholding him set forth upon the broad, white highroads, a wandering child, all but lost, seeking his way, seeking his livelihood even, without other relief, in his extremity of distress, and almost without other food than his love of Nature and his passion [[75]]for learning? See him, for example, on the day when, between Beaucaire and Nîmes, he contrived to make his dinner off a few bunches of grapes “plucked furtively at the edge of a field, after exchanging the poor remnant of his last halfpence for a little volume of Réboul’s poems; soothing his hunger by intoxicating himself with the verses of the workman poet,”[1] whose inspiration was of so noble and Christian a character.

The whole Fabre is in this trait of the needy, enraptured youth, who thinks nothing of hardships or of money provided he can find the wherewithal to assuage his thirst for knowledge and the ideal.

Nevertheless, it is true that he passed through many dark and painful hours at that period. But in the end “the good fortune that never deserts the valiant” opened the doors of the Normal College of Avignon for him. Having ventured to face the examination for a bursary, he won the latter with the greatest ease. There he found a first refuge from the uncertainties of the morrow, although he had not yet achieved his ideal, nor even that place in the sun which he was [[76]]striving to prepare for himself. Imagine “between four high walls a courtyard, a sort of bear-pit in which the scholars contend for room beneath the boughs of a plane-tree; and opening on to it, on every side, the class-rooms, like so many cages for wild beasts, devoid of daylight or air.” This was the Normal College of Vaucluse.

The description recalls, in some respects, that which was given by a sometime pupil of the Normal College of Paris, M. René Doumic, on taking his seat in the Academy, in the place of Gaston Boissier: “I loved the Normal College, and I am still faithful in my attachment to it. I hope my recollections of it will not be thought lacking in piety if I state that the building in which they penned us up, young fellows of twenty, was the most dismal place that I have ever seen anywhere. This extraordinary building, by an architectural prodigy which I will not attempt to explain, turned all four sides to the north. In three years I do not think I ever saw a single ray of sunlight enter our lecture-rooms or the cloisters in which we used to wander like so many shades. A mournful daylight expired upon the grey, grimy walls. In short, it was not a cheerful place. But at Boissier’s lectures all became [[77]]bright, full of animation and renewed life. It was a sudden metamorphoses.”

At the Normal College of Vaucluse it was not the lectures given by the masters that transformed the abode of shades or the bears’ cage into a centre of light and life for the budding biologist. It was something better than that. By good fortune the director of the College was broad-minded enough to allow him to employ in his own fashion all the time that was left to him after he had prepared his lessons and his exercises. We may imagine that he did not loiter over his classics. The school programme, for that matter, was not very heavy; the orthographic difficulties which complicated most of the exercises of the future schoolmasters were mere play to the ex-Latinist of the Rodez lycée. And “while all around him dictated passages were being minutely scanned with much searching of the dictionary, he examined, in the secrecy of his desk, the fruit of the oleander, the flower of the snapdragon, the sting of a Wasp, the wing-cover of a gardener-beetle.” Thus he treated himself to a lecture of his own fashion whose charm and fascination greatly exceeded that of anything that the college could teach him.

So much so that he left the College more [[78]]in love than ever with insects and flowers, and thoroughly determined to fill what he considered to be one of the most serious deficiencies of official instruction.

Alas! there were many deficiencies in the education received by his masters which would have to be made good in order to complete the literary education which the professors of the Rodez lycée had begun to give him, and the scientific training which he had hardly commenced at the Normal College.

We must listen to his reminiscences of his career as pupil teacher, to the inventory of the scientific equipment of a schoolboy of 1840, to the story of his first and last lesson in chemistry, to see how poor he was in acquired knowledge and how rich in the desire for knowledge, before we can estimate the length of the road which he had to travel when he had passed through the classes of the College.

In my normal school, the scientific teaching was on an exceedingly modest scale, consisting mainly of arithmetic and odds and ends of geometry. Physics was hardly touched. We were taught a little meteorology, in a summary fashion: a word or two about a red moon, a white frost, dew, snow and wind; and, with this smattering of rustic physics, we were considered to know enough of the [[79]]subject to discuss the weather with the farmer and the ploughman.

Of natural history, absolutely nothing. No one thought of telling us anything about flowers and trees, which give such zest to one’s aimless rambles, nor about insects, with their curious habits, nor about stones, so instructive with their fossil records. That entrancing glance through the windows of the world was refused us. Grammar was allowed to strangle life.

Chemistry was never mentioned either: that goes without saying. I knew the word, however. My casual reading, only half-understood for want of practical demonstration, had taught me that chemistry is concerned with the shuffle of matter, uniting or separating the various elements. But what a strange idea I formed of this branch of study! To me it smacked of sorcery, of alchemy and its search for the philosopher’s stone. To my mind, every chemist, when at work, should have had a magic wand in his hand and the wizard’s pointed, star-spangled cap on his head.

An important personage who sometimes visited the school, in his capacity as an honorary lecturer, was not the man to rid me of those foolish notions. He taught physics and chemistry at the grammar-school. Twice a week, from eight to nine o’clock in the evening, he held a free public class in an enormous building adjacent to our schoolhouse. This was the former Church of Saint-Martial, which has to-day become a Protestant meeting-house. [[80]]

It was a wizard’s cave certainly, just as I had pictured it. At the top of the steeple, a rusty weathercock creaked mournfully; in the dusk great Bats flew all around the edifice or dived down the throats of the gargoyles; at night Owls hooted upon the copings of the leads. It was inside, under the immensities of the vault, that my chemist used to perform. What infernal mixtures did he compound? Should I ever know?

It is the day for his visit. He comes to see us with no pointed cap: in ordinary garb, in fact, with nothing very queer about him. He bursts into our schoolroom like a hurricane. His red face is half-buried in the enormous stiff collar that digs into his ears. A few wisps of red hair adorn his temples; the top of his head shines like an old ivory ball. In a dictatorial voice and with wooden gestures, he questions two or three of the boys; after a moment’s bullying, he turns on his heel and goes off in a whirlwind as he came. No, this is not the man, a capital fellow at heart, to inspire me with a pleasant idea of the things which he teaches.

Two windows of his laboratory look out upon the garden of the school. One can just lean on them; and I often go and peep in, trying to make out, in my poor brain, what chemistry can really be. Unfortunately, the room into which my eyes penetrate is not the sanctuary, but a mere outhouse where the learned implements and crockery are washed. Leaden pipes with taps run down the walls; wooden vats occupy the corners. Sometimes [[81]]those vats bubble, heated by a spray of steam. A reddish powder, which looks like brick-dust, is boiling in them. I learn that the simmering stuff is a dyer’s root, known as madder, which will be converted into a purer and more concentrated product. This is the master’s pet study.

What I saw from the two windows was not enough for me. I wanted to see farther, into the very class-room. My wish was satisfied. It was the end of the scholastic year. A stage ahead of the others in the regular work, I had just obtained my certificate. I was free. A few weeks remain before the holidays. Shall I go and pass them out of doors, in all the gaiety of my eighteen summers? No, I will spend them at the school which, for two years past, has provided me with an untroubled roof and my daily crust. I will wait until a post is found for me. Employ my willing service as you think fit, do with me what you will; as long as I can study, I am indifferent to the rest.

The principal of the school, the soul of kindness, has grasped my passion for knowledge. He encourages me in my determination; he proposes to make me renew my acquaintance with Horace and Virgil, so long since forgotten. He knows Latin, he does; he will rekindle the dead spark by making me translate a few passages. He does more: he lends me an Imitation, with parallel texts in Latin and Greek. With the first text, which I am almost able to read, I will puzzle out the second [[82]]and thus increase the small vocabulary which I acquired in the days when I was translating Æsop’s Fables. It will be all the better for my future studies. What luck! Board and lodging, ancient poetry, the classical languages, all the good things at once!

I did better still. Our science-master—the real, not the honorary one—who came twice a week to discourse of the rule of three and the properties of the triangle, had the brilliant idea of letting us celebrate the end of the school year with a feast of learning. He promised to show us oxygen. As a colleague of the chemist in the grammar-school, he obtained leave to take us to the famous laboratory and there to handle the object of his lesson under our very eyes. Oxygen, yes, oxygen, the all-consuming gas; that was what we were to see on the morrow. I could not sleep all night for thinking of it.

Thursday afternoon came at last. As soon as the chemistry lesson was over, we were to go for a walk to Les Angles, the pretty village over yonder, perched on a steep rock. We were therefore in our Sunday best, our out-of-door clothes: black frock-coats and tall hats. The whole school was there, some thirty of us, in the charge of an usher, who knew as little as we did of the things which we were about to see. We crossed the threshold of the laboratory, not without excitement. I entered a great nave with a Gothic roof, an old, bare church through which one’s voice echoed, while the light penetrated discreetly through stained-glass [[83]]windows set in ribs and rosettes of stone. At the back were huge raised benches, with room for an audience of many hundreds; at the other end, where the choir once was, stood an enormous chimney-mantel; in the middle was a large massive table, corroded by the chemicals. At one end of this table was a tarred tub, lined inside with lead and filled with water. This, I at once learnt, was the pneumatic trough, the vessel in which the gases were collected.

The professor begins the experiment. He takes a sort of large, long glass bulb, bent abruptly in the region of the neck. This, he informs us, is a retort. He pours into it, from a screw of paper, some black stuff that looks like powdered charcoal. This is manganese dioxide, the master tells us. It contains in abundance, in a condensed state and retained by combination with the metal, the gas which we propose to obtain. An oily-looking liquid, sulphuric acid, an excessively powerful agent, will set it at liberty. Thus filled, the retort is placed on a lighted stove. A glass tube brings it into communication with a bell-jar full of water on the shelf of the pneumatic trough. Those are all the preparations. What will be the result? We must wait for the action of heat.

My fellow-pupils gather eagerly round the apparatus, cannot come close enough to it. Some of them play the part of the fly on the wheel and glory in contributing to the success of the experiment. They straighten the retort, which is leaning to one side; the blow with their mouths on the [[84]]coals in the stove. I do not care for these familiarities with the unknown.

Suddenly, bang! And there is running and stamping and shouting and cries of pain! What has happened? I rush up from the back of the room. The retort has burst, squirting its boiling vitriol in every direction. The wall opposite is all stained with it. Most of my fellow-pupils have been more or less struck. One poor youth has had the splashes full in his face, right into his eyes. He is yelling like a madman. With the help of a friend who has come off better than the others, I drag him outside by main force, take him to the sink, which fortunately is close at hand, and hold his face under the tap. This swift ablution serves its purpose. The horrible pain begins to be allayed, so much so that the sufferer recovers his senses and is able to continue the washing process for himself.

My prompt aid certainly saved his sight. A week later, with the help of the doctor’s lotions, all danger was over. How lucky it was that I took it into my head to keep some way off! My isolation, as I stood looking into the glass case of chemicals, left me all my presence of mind, my readiness of resource. What are the others doing, those who got splashed through standing too near the chemical bomb? I return to the lecture-hall. It is not a cheerful spectacle. The master has come off badly: his shirt-front, his waistcoat and trousers are covered with smears, which are all smouldering and burning into holes. He hurriedly [[85]]divests himself of a portion of his dangerous raiment. Those of us who possess the smartest clothes lend him something to put on so that he can go home decently.

One of the tall, funnel-shaped glasses which I was admiring just now is standing, full of ammonia, on the table. All, coughing and snivelling, dip their handkerchiefs into it and rub the moist rag over their hats and coats. In this way the red stains left by the horrible compound are made to disappear. A drop of ink will presently restore the colour completely.

And the oxygen? There was no more question, I need hardly say, of that. The feast of learning was over. Never mind: the disastrous lesson was a mighty event for me. I had been inside the chemist’s laboratory; I had had a glimpse of those wonderful jars and tubes. In teaching what matters most is not the thing taught, whether well or badly grasped: it is the stimulus given to the pupil’s latent aptitudes; it is the fulminate awaking the slumbering explosives. One day, I shall obtain on my own account that oxygen which ill-luck has denied me; one day, without a master, I shall yet learn chemistry. I do not recommend that method to anybody. Happy the man who is guided by a master’s word and example! He has a smooth and easy road before him, lying straight ahead. The other follows a rugged path, in which his feet often stumble; he goes groping into the unknown and loses his way. To recover the right road, if want of success have not discouraged him, [[86]]he can rely only on perseverance, the sole compass of the poor.[2]

We shall show what the perseverance of this son of Aveyron peasants was capable of achieving, and after realising how little he got from his masters we shall marvel to see what he acquired by dint of personal industry and application. [[87]]

[1] Fabre, Poet of Science, by G. V. Legros, translated by Bernard Miall (T. Fisher Unwin), p. 24. [↑]

[2] Souvenirs, X., pp. 323–331. The Life of the Fly, chap. xix., “A Memorable Lesson.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER VII

THE SCHOOLMASTER: CARPENTRAS

Only eighteen years old, he left the Normal College with his diploma, his brevet supérieur, and began his career as primary schoolmaster in the College of Carpentras. Merit, it seems, was recognised, and at the outset fortune did not treat him so badly. We may judge of this the better from the picture which the ex-schoolmaster has given us of his first beginnings at the College:

It was when I first began to teach, about 1843. I had left the Normal School at Vaucluse some months before, with my diploma and all the simple enthusiasm of my eighteen years, and had been sent to Carpentras, there to manage the primary school attached to the College. It was a strange school, upon my word, notwithstanding its pompous title of “upper”; a sort of huge cellar oozing with the perpetual damp engendered by a well backing on it in the street outside. For light there was the open door, when the weather permitted, and a narrow prison-window, with iron bars and lozenge panes set in lead. By way of benches there [[88]]was a plank fastened to the wall all round the room, while in the middle was a chair bereft of its straw, a blackboard and a stick of chalk.

Morning and evening, at the sound of the bell, there came rushing in some fifty young imps who, having shown themselves hopeless dunces with their Cornelius Nepos, had been relegated, in the phrase of the day, to “a few good years of French.” Those who had found mensa too much for them came to me to get a smattering of grammar. Children and strapping lads were there, mixed up together, at very different educational stages, but all incorrigibly agreed to play tricks upon the master, the boy-master, who was no older than some of them, or even younger.

To the little ones I gave their first lessons in reading; the intermediate ones I showed how they should hold their pen to write a few lines of dictation on their knees; to the big ones I revealed the secrets of fractions and even the mysteries of Euclid. And to keep this restless crowd in order, to give each mind work in accordance with its strength, to keep attention aroused, and lastly to expel dullness from the gloomy room, whose walls dripped melancholy even more than dampness, my one resource was my tongue, my one weapon my stick of chalk.

Things improved, however: a master came, and came to stay. I myself secured tables on which my pupils were able to write instead of scribbling on their knees; and, as my class was daily increasing in numbers, it ended by being divided into two. As soon as I had an assistant to look after the [[89]]younger boys, things assumed a different aspect.

A weeding-out takes place in my crowd of scatterbrains. I keep the older, the more intelligent ones; the others are to have a term in the preparatory division. From that day forward things are different. Curriculum there is none. In those happy times the master’s personality counted for something; there was no such thing as the scholastic piston working with the regularity of a machine. It was left for me to act as I thought fit. Well, what should I do to make the school earn its title of “upper primary”?

Why, of course! Among other things, I shall do some chemistry! My reading has taught me that it does no harm to know a little chemistry, if you would make your furrows yield a good return. Many of my pupils come from the country; they will go back to it to improve their land. Let us show them what the soil is made of and what the plant feeds on. Others will follow industrial careers; they will become tanners, metal-founders, distillers; they will sell cakes of soap and kegs of anchovies. Let us show them pickling, soap-making, stills, tannin, and metals. Of course I know nothing about these things, but I shall learn, all the more so as I shall have to teach them to the boys; and your schoolboy is a little demon for jeering at the master’s hesitation.

As it happens, the College boasts a small laboratory, containing just what is strictly indispensable: a receiver, a dozen glass balloons, a few tubes and a niggardly assortment of chemicals. That will [[90]]do, if I can have the run of it. But the laboratory is a sanctum reserved for the use of the sixth form. No one sets foot in it except the professor and his pupils preparing for their degree. For me, the outsider, to enter that tabernacle with my band of young imps would be most unseemly; the rightful occupant would never think of allowing it. I feel it myself: elementary teaching dare not aspire to such familiarity with the higher culture. Very well, we will not go there, so long as they will lend me the things.

I confide my plan to the principal, the supreme dispenser of those riches. He is a classics man, knows hardly anything of science—at that time held in no great esteem—and does not quite understand the object of my request. I humbly insist and exert my powers of persuasion. I discreetly emphasise the real point of the matter. My group of pupils is a numerous one. It takes more meals at the schoolhouse—the real concern of a principal—than any other section of the College. This group must be encouraged, lured on, increased if possible. The prospect of disposing of a few more platefuls of soup wins the battle for me; my request is granted. Poor Science! All that diplomacy to gain your entrance among the despised ones, who have not been nourished on Cicero and Demosthenes!

I am authorised to move, once a week, the material required for my ambitious plans. From the first floor, the sacred dwelling of the scientific things, I shall take them down to a sort of cellar where I give my lessons. The troublesome part [[91]]is the pneumatic trough. It has to be emptied before it is carried downstairs and to be filled again afterwards. A day-scholar, a zealous acolyte, hurries over his dinner and comes to lend me a hand an hour or two before the class begins. We effect the move between us.

What I am after is oxygen, the gas which I once saw fail so lamentably. I thought it all out at my leisure, with the help of a book. I will do this, I will do that, I will go to work in this or the other fashion. Above all, we will run no risks, perhaps of blinding ourselves; for it is once more a question of heating manganese dioxide with sulphuric acid. I am filled with misgivings at the recollection of my old school-fellow yelling like mad. Who cares? Let us try for all that: fortune favours the brave! Besides, we will make one prudent condition from which I shall never depart: no one but myself shall come near the table. If an accident happen, I shall be the only one to suffer; and, in my opinion, it is worth a burn or two to make acquaintance with oxygen.

Two o’clock strikes, and my pupils enter the class-room. I purposely exaggerate the likelihood of danger. They are all to stay on their benches and not stir. This is agreed. I have plenty of elbow-room. There is no one by me, except my acolyte, standing by my side, ready to help me when the time comes. The others look on in profound silence, reverent towards the unknown.

Soon the bubbles come “gloo-glooing” through the water in the bell-jar. Can it be my gas? My [[92]]heart beats with excitement. Can I have succeeded without any trouble at the first attempt? We will see. A candle blown out that moment and still retaining a red tip to its wick is lowered by a wire into a small test-jar filled with my product. Capital! The candle lights with a little explosion and burns with extraordinary brilliancy. It is oxygen right enough.

The moment is a solemn one. My audience is astounded and so am I, but more at my own success than at the relighted candle. A puff of vainglory rises to my brow; I feel the fire of enthusiasm run through my veins. But I say nothing of these inner sensations. Before the boys’ eyes, the master must appear an old hand at the things he teaches. What would the young rascals think of me if I allowed them to suspect my surprise, if they knew that I myself am beholding the marvellous subject of my demonstration for the first time in my life? I should lose their confidence, I should sink to the level of a mere pupil.

Sursum corda! Let us go on as if chemistry were a familiar thing to me. It is the turn of the steel ribbon, an old watch-spring rolled cork-screw-fashion and furnished with a bit of tinder. With this simple lighted bait, the steel should take fire in a jar filled with my gas. And it does burn; it becomes a splendid firework, with cracklings and a blaze of sparks and a cloud of rust that tarnishes the jar. From the end of the fiery coil a red drop breaks off at intervals, shoots quivering through the layer of water left at the bottom of the vessel [[93]]and embeds itself in the glass which has suddenly grown soft. This metallic tear, with its indomitable heat, makes every one of us shudder. They stamp and cheer and applaud. The timid ones place their hands before their faces and dare not look except through their fingers. My audience exults; and I myself triumph. Ha, my friend, isn’t it grand, this chemistry!

All of us have red-letter days in our lives. Some, the practical men, have been successful in business; they have made money and hold their heads high in consequence. Others, the thinkers, have gained ideas; they have opened a new account in the ledger of nature and silently taste the hallowed joys of truth. One of my great days was that of my first acquaintance with oxygen. On that day, when my class was over and all the materials put back in their place, I felt myself grow several inches taller. An untrained workman, I had shown, with complete success, that which was unknown to me a couple of hours before. No accident whatever, not even the least stain of acid.

It is, therefore, not so difficult nor so dangerous as the pitiful finish of the Saint-Martial lesson might have led me to believe. With a vigilant eye and a little prudence, I shall be able to continue. The prospect is enchanting.

And so, in due season, comes hydrogen, carefully contemplated in my reading, seen and reseen with the eye of the mind before being seen with the eyes of the body. I delight my little rascals by making the hydrogen-flame sing in a glass tube, [[94]]which trickles with the drops of water resulting from the combustion; I make them jump with the explosions of the thunderous mixture. Later, I show them, with the same invariable success, the splendours of phosphorus, the violent powers of chlorine, the loathsome smells of sulphur, the metamorphoses of carbon, and so on. In short, in a series of lessons, the principal non-metallic elements and their compounds are passed in review during the course of the year.

The thing was bruited abroad. Fresh pupils came to me, attracted by the marvels of the school. Some more places were laid in the dining-hall; and the principal, who was more interested in the profits on his beans and bacon than in chemistry, congratulated me on this accession of boarders.[1]

However, we must make it clear, without wishing in any way to belittle the importance or the magical results of chemistry, that the latter was not the only attraction of the young schoolmaster’s teaching, any more than it was the sole subject on his programme.

Among the other subjects taught, one in especial had the power of interesting master and pupil alike:

This was open-air geometry, practical surveying. The College had none of the necessary outfit; but, with my fat pay—seven hundred francs a year, if [[95]]you please!—I could not hesitate over the expense. A surveyor’s chain and stakes, arrows, level, square, and compass were bought with my money. A microscopic graphometer, not much larger than the palm of one’s hand and costing perhaps five francs, was provided by the establishment. There was no tripod to it; and I had one made. In short, my equipment was complete.

And so, when May came, once every week we left the gloomy schoolroom for the fields. It was a regular holiday. The boys disputed for the honour of carrying the stakes, divided into bundles of three; and more than one shoulder, as we walked through the town, felt the reflected glory of those erudite rods. I myself—why conceal the fact?—was not without a certain satisfaction as I piously carried that most delicate and precious apparatus, the historic five-franc graphometer. The scene of operations was an untilled, flinty plain, a harmas, as we call it in the district. Here, no curtain of green hedges or shrubs prevented me from keeping an eye upon my staff; here—an indispensable condition—I had not the irresistible temptation of the unripe apricots to fear for my scholars. The plain stretched far and wide, covered with nothing but flowering thyme and rounded pebbles. There was ample scope for every imaginable polygon; trapezes and triangles could be combined in all sorts of ways. The inaccessible distances had ample elbow-room; and there was even an old ruin, once a pigeon-house, that lent its perpendicular to the graphometer’s performances.

[[96]]

These exercises in open-air geometry, which had their charm, discounted beforehand, had also their delightful surprises and unexpected consequences which place them among the happiest experiences of the life which we are describing:

Well, from the very first day, my attention was attracted by something suspicious. If I sent one of the boys to plant a stake, I would see him stop frequently on his way, bend down, stand up again, look about and stoop once more, neglecting his straight line and his signals. Another, who was told to pick up the arrows, would forget the iron pin and take up a pebble instead; and a third, deaf to the measurements of angles, would crumble a clod of earth between his fingers. Most of them were caught licking a bit of straw. The polygon came to a full stop, the diagonals suffered. What could the mystery be?

I inquired; and everything was explained. A born searcher and observer, the scholar had long known what the master had not yet heard of, namely, that there was a big black Bee who made clay nests on the pebbles of the harmas. These nests contained honey; and my surveyors used to open them and empty the cells with a straw. The honey, although rather strong-flavoured, was most acceptable. I acquired a taste for it myself and joined the nest-hunters, putting off the polygon till later. It was thus that I first saw Réaumur’s [[97]]Mason Bee,[2] knowing nothing of her history and nothing of her historian.

The magnificent Bee herself, with her dark-violet wings and black-velvet raiment, her rustic edifices on the sun-blistered pebbles amid the thyme, her honey, providing a diversion from the severities of the compass and the square, all made a great impression on my mind; and I wanted to know more than I had learnt from the schoolboys, which was just how to rob the cells of their honey with a straw. As it happened, my bookseller had a gorgeous work on insects for sale. It was called Histoire naturelle des animaux articulés, by de Castelnau, E. Blanchard, and Lucas, and boasted a multitude of most attractive illustrations; but the price of it, the price of it! No matter: was not my splendid income supposed to cover everything, food for the mind as well as food for the body? Anything extra that I gave to the one I could save upon the other; a method of balancing painfully familiar to those who look to science for their livelihood. The purchase was effected. That day my [[98]]professional emoluments were severely strained: I devoted a month’s salary to the acquisition of the book. I had to resort to miracles of economy for some time to come before making up the enormous deficit.

The book was devoured; there is no other word for it. In it I learnt the name of my black Bee; I read for the first time various details of the habits of insects; I found, surrounded in my eyes with a sort of halo, the revered names of Réaumur, Huber, and Léon Dufour; and, while I turned over the pages for the hundredth time, a voice within me seemed to whisper:

“You also shall be of their company!”[3]

[[99]]

[1] Souvenirs, X., 332–336. The Life of the Fly, chap. xix., “A Memorable Lesson.” [↑]

[2] Chalicodoma, meaning a house of pebbles, concrete or mortar, would be a most satisfactory title, were it not that it has an odd sound to any one unfamiliar with Greek. The name is given to bees who build their cells with materials similar to those which we employ for our own dwellings. The work of these insects is masonry; only it is turned out by a rustic mason more used to hard clay than to hewn stone. Réaumur, who knew nothing of scientific classification—a fact which makes many of his papers very difficult to understand—named the worker after her work and called our builders in dried clay Mason Bees, which describes them exactly. [↑]

[3] Souvenirs, I., pp. 278–280. The Mason Bees, chap, i., “The Mason Bee.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER VIII

THE SCHOOLMASTER: CARPENTRAS (CONTINUED)

If he had hearkened only to his tastes, the young schoolmaster of Carpentras would have devoted to the world of animals all the time that was not taken up by his pupils. But his profession itself and the requirements of his future prevented him from following the dominant attraction unchecked. He had formed a resolve “to raise himself above the level of the primary school, which at that time barely fed its teachers,” and to make a place for himself in the ranks of secondary instruction. He had, therefore, to renounce his natural history, since that as yet had no place in the curriculum, and he had to take up mathematics.

So we see him submerged in conic sections and the differential and integral calculus, without a guide, without advice, confronted for days on end by some obscure difficulty which tenacious meditation eventually robbed of its mystery. Mathematics, however, [[100]]formed only the first part of his programme, which comprised also physics and chemistry. These, no doubt, were less abstruse sciences, but the necessary equipment was also less simple. He needed a laboratory; he could not run to the expense of one; so he made one, an “impossible” one, by force of industry.

In this desperate struggle what became of the favourite branch of science of this great nature-lover? It was necessarily sacrificed.

“I reprimanded myself,” he says, “at the slightest longing for emancipation, fearing to let myself be seduced by some new grass, some unknown beetle. I did violence to myself. My books on natural history were condemned to oblivion, relegated to the bottom of a trunk.”

A fine lesson in perseverance in work and sacrifice, which all those who are inspired by some noble desire or merely by some legitimate ambition will find useful and comforting to contemplate:

“Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam

Multa tulit fecitque puer, sudavit et alsit;

Abstinuit venere et vino.”[1]

But this matter must be expounded in greater detail, were it only to confirm the [[101]]courage of other students disinherited by fortune, reduced as was Fabre to shaping themselves in the “harsh school of isolation.” They will witness miracles of perseverance; and they will realise that opportunities of exercising the mind and strengthening the will are seldom lacking to those who understand how to seize them.

When I left the Normal School, my stock of mathematics was of the scantiest (writes Fabre). How to extract a square root, how to calculate and prove the surface of a sphere: these represented to me the culminating points of the subject. Those terrible logarithms, when I happened to open a table of them, made my head swim, with their columns of figures; actual fright, not unmixed with respect, overwhelmed me on the very threshold of that arithmetical cave. Of algebra I had no knowledge whatever. I had heard the name; and the syllables represented to my poor brain the whole whirling legion of the abstruse.

Besides, I felt no inclination to decipher the alarming hieroglyphics. They made one of those indigestible dishes which we confidently extol without touching them. I greatly prefer a fine line of Virgil, whom I was now beginning to understand; and I should have been surprised indeed had any one told me that, for long years to come, I should be an enthusiastic student of the formidable science. Good fortune procured me my first lesson [[102]]in algebra, a lesson given and not received, of course.

A young man of about my own age came to me and asked me to teach him algebra. He was preparing for his examination as a civil engineer; and he came to me because, ingenuous youth that he was, he took me for a well of learning. The guileless applicant was very far out in his reckoning.

His request gave me a shock of surprise, which was forthwith repressed on reflection:

“I give algebra lessons?” said I to myself. “It would be madness: I don’t know anything about it!”

And I left it at that for a moment or two, thinking hard, drawn now this way, now that by my indecision:

“Shall I accept? Shall I refuse?” continued the inner voice.

Pooh, let’s accept! An heroic method of learning to swim is to leap boldly into the sea. Let us hurl ourselves head first into the algebraical gulf; and perhaps the imminent danger of drowning will call forth efforts capable of bringing me to land. I know nothing of what he wants. It makes no difference: let’s go ahead and plunge into the mystery. I shall learn by teaching.

It was a fine courage that drove me full tilt into a province which I had not yet thought of entering. My twenty-year-old confidence was an incomparable lever.

“Very well,” I replied. “Come the day after to-morrow at five, and we’ll begin.” [[103]]

This twenty-four hours’ delay concealed a plan. It secured me the respite of a day, the blessed Thursday, which would give me time to collect my forces.

Thursday comes. The sky is grey and cold. In this horrid weather a grate well-filled with coke has its charms. Let’s warm ourselves and think.

Well, my boy, you’ve landed yourself in a nice predicament! How will you manage to-morrow? With a book, plodding all through the night, if necessary, you might scrape up something resembling a lesson, just enough to fill the dread hour more or less. Then you could see about the next: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. But you haven’t the book. And it’s no use running out to the bookshop. Algebraical treatises are not current wares. You’ll have to send for one, which will take a fortnight at least. And I’ve promised for to-morrow, for to-morrow certain! Another argument and one that admits of no reply: funds are low; my last pecuniary resources lie in the corner of a drawer. I count the money: it amounts to twelve sous, which is not enough.

Must I cry off? Rather not! One resource suggests itself: a highly improper one, I admit, not far removed, indeed, from larceny. O quiet paths of algebra, you are my excuse for this venial sin! Let me confess the temporary embezzlement.

Life at my College is more or less cloistered. In return for a modest payment, most of us masters are lodged in the building; and we take our meals at the principal’s table. The science-master, who is the big gun of the staff and lives in the town, [[104]]has nevertheless, like ourselves, his own two cells, in addition to a balcony, or leads, where the chemical preparations give forth their suffocating gases in the open air. For this reason, he finds it more convenient to hold his class here during the greater part of the year. The boys come to these rooms in winter, in front of a grate stuffed full of coke, like mine, and there find a blackboard, a pneumatic trough, a mantelpiece covered with glass receivers, panoplies of bent tubes on the walls and, lastly, a certain cupboard in which I remember seeing a row of books, the oracles consulted by the master in the course of his lessons.

“Among those books,” said I to myself, “there is sure to be one on algebra. To ask the owner for the loan of it does not appeal to me. My amiable colleague would receive me superciliously and laugh at my ambitious aims. I am sure he would refuse my request.”

I decide to help myself to the book which I should never get by asking. This is the half-holiday. The science-master will not put in an appearance to-day; and the key of my room is practically the same as his. I go, with eyes and ears on the alert. My key does not quite fit; it sticks a little, then goes in; and an extra effort makes it turn in the lock. The door opens. I inspect the cupboard and find that it does contain an algebra book, one of the big, fat books which men used to write in those days, a book nearly half a foot thick. My legs give way beneath me. You poor specimen of a housebreaker, suppose you were caught at it! [[105]]However, all goes well. Quick, let’s lock the door again, and hurry back to our own quarters with the pilfered volume.

A chapter catches my attention in the middle of the volume; it is headed, Newton’s Binomial Theorem. The title allures me. What can a binomial theorem be, especially one whose author is Newton, the great English mathematician who weighed the worlds? What has the mechanism of the sky to do with this? Let us read and seek for enlightenment. With my elbows on the table and my thumbs behind my ears, I concentrate all my attention.

I am seized with astonishment, for I understand! There are a certain number of letters, general symbols which are grouped in all manner of ways, taking their places here, there, and elsewhere by turns; there are, as the text tells me, arrangements, permutations, and combinations. Pen in hand, I arrange, permute, and combine. It is a very diverting exercise, upon my word, a game in which the test of the written result confirms the anticipations of logic and supplements the shortcomings of one’s thinking-apparatus.

“It will be plain sailing,” said I to myself, “if algebra is no more difficult than this.”

I was to recover from the illusion later, when the binomial theorem, that light, crisp biscuit, was followed by heavier and less digestible fare. But, for the moment, I had no foretaste of the future difficulties, of the pitfalls in which one becomes more and more entangled the longer one persists [[106]]in struggling. What a delightful afternoon that was, before my fire, amid my permutations and combinations! By the evening, I had nearly mastered my subject. When the bell rang, at seven, to summon us to the common meal at the principal’s table, I went downstairs puffed up with the joys of the newly-initiated neophyte. I was escorted on my way by a, b, and c, intertwined in cunning garlands.

Next day, my pupil is there. Blackboard and chalk, everything is ready. Not quite so ready is the master. I bravely broach my binomial theorem. My hearer becomes interested in the combinations of letters. Not for a moment does he suspect that I am putting the cart before the horse and beginning where we ought to have finished. I relieve the dryness of my explanations with a few little problems, so many halts at which the mind takes breath awhile and gathers strength for fresh flights.

We try together. Discreetly, so as to leave him the merit of the discovery, I shed a little light upon the path. The solution is found. My pupil triumphs; so do I, but silently, in my inner consciousness, which says:

“You understand, because you succeed in making another understand.”

The hour passed quickly and very pleasantly for both of us. My young man was contented when he left me; and I no less so, for I perceived a new and original way of learning things.

The ingenious and easy arrangement of the binomial [[107]]gave me time to tackle my algebra book from the proper commencement. In three or four days I had rubbed up my weapons. There was nothing to be said about addition and subtraction: they were so simple as to force themselves upon one at first sight. Multiplication spoilt things. There was a certain rule of signs which declared that minus multiplied by minus made plus. How I toiled over that wretched paradox! It would seem that the book did not explain this subject clearly, or rather employed too abstract a method. I read, reread, and meditated in vain: the obscure text retained all its obscurity. That is the drawback of books in general: they tell you what is printed in them and nothing more. If you fail to understand, they never advise you, never suggest an attempt along another road which might lead you to the light. The merest word would sometimes be enough to put you on the right track; and that word the books, hide-bound in a regulation phraseology, never give you.

My pupil was bound to suffer the effects. After an attempt at an explanation in which I made the most of the few gleams that reached me, I asked him:

“Do you understand?”

It was a futile question, but useful for gaining time. Myself not understanding, I was convinced beforehand that he did not understand either.

“No,” he replied, accusing himself, perhaps, in his simple mind, of possessing a brain incapable of taking in those transcendental verities. [[108]]

“Let us try another method.”

And I start again this way and that way and yet another way. My pupil’s eyes serve as my thermometer and tell me of the progress of my efforts. A blink of satisfaction announces my success. I have struck home, I have found the joint in the armour. The product of minus multiplied by minus surrenders its mysteries to us.[2]

The study of algebra was pursued in this fashion without any undue impediments as far as the pupil was concerned, but at the cost of a prodigious exertion of patience and penetration on the part of the primary schoolmaster who was so venturesome as to act as a professor of the higher mathematics. Audaces fortuna juvat. The young schoolmaster had not too greatly presumed on his powers. His pupil was accepted upon examination, and he himself was able to return the book to its place, having completely assimilated its contents.

But he had made too good a start to stop midway. He was burning with eagerness to attack geometry, which was not so unfamiliar to him, but of which he had yet a great deal to learn: “At my normal school,” writes [[109]]Fabre, “I had learnt a little elementary geometry under a master. From the first few lessons onwards, I rather enjoyed the subject. I divined in it a guide for one’s reasoning faculties through the thickets of the imagination; I caught a glimpse of a search after truth that did not involve too much stumbling on the way, because each step forward is well braced by the step already taken. We start from a brilliantly-lighted spot and gradually travel farther and farther into the darkness, which kindles into radiance as it sheds fresh beams of light for a higher ascent.

It is an excellent thing to regard geometry as what it really is, before all things: a superb intellectual gymnastic. By forcing the mind to proceed from the known to the unknown, always explaining what follows in the light of what has gone before, it exercises it and familiarises it with the logical laws of thought. To be sure, “it does not give us ideas, those delicate flowers which unfold one knows not how, and are not able to flourish in every soil,” but it teaches us to present them in a lucid and orderly manner. Fabre tells us:

At that time, the College in which, two years before, I had made my first appearance as a teacher [[110]]had just halved the size of its classes and largely increased its staff. The newcomers all lived in the building, like myself, and we had our meals in common at the principal’s table. I had as a neighbour, in the next cell to mine, a retired quartermaster who, weary of barrack-life, had taken refuge in education. When in charge of the books of his company, he had become more or less familiar with figures; and it was now his ambition to take a mathematical degree. His cerebrum appears to have hardened while he was with his regiment. According to my dear colleagues, those amiable retailers of the misfortunes of others, he had already twice been plucked. Stubbornly, he returned to his books and exercises, refusing to be daunted by two reverses.

It was not that he was allured by the beauties of mathematics: far from it; but the step to which he aspired favoured his plans. He hoped to have his own boarders and dispense butter and vegetables to lucrative purpose.

I had often surprised our friend sitting, in the evening, by the light of a candle, with his elbows on the table and his head between his hands, meditating at great length in front of a big exercise-book crammed with cabalistic signs. From time to time, when an idea came to him, he would take his pen and hastily put down a line of writing wherein letters, large and small, were grouped without any grammatical sense. The letters x and y often recurred, intermingled with figures. Every row ended with the sign of equality and a naught. [[111]]Next came more reflection, with closed eyes, and a fresh row of letters arranged in a different order and likewise followed by a naught. Page after page was filled in this queer fashion, each line winding up with 0.

“What are you doing with all those rows of figures amounting to zero?” I asked him one day.

The mathematician gave me a leery look, picked up in barracks. A sarcastic droop in the corner of his eye showed how he pitied my ignorance. My colleague of the many naughts did not, however, take an unfair advantage of his superiority. He told me that he was working at analytical geometry.

The phrase had a strange effect upon me. I ruminated silently to this purpose: there was a higher geometry, which you learnt more particularly with combinations of letters in which x and y played a prominent part. How would the alphabetical signs, arranged first in one and then in another manner, give an image of actual things, an image visible to the eyes of the mind alone? It beat me.

“I shall have to learn analytical geometry some day,” I said. “Will you help me?”

“I’m quite willing,” he replied, with a smile in which I read his lack of confidence in my determination.

No matter: we struck a bargain that same evening. We would together break up the stubble of algebra and analytical geometry, the foundation of the mathematical degree; we would make common [[112]]stock: he would bring long hours of calculation, I my youthful ardour. We would begin as soon as I had finished with my arts degree, which was my main preoccupation for the moment.

We begin in my room, in front of a blackboard. After a few evenings, prolonged into the peaceful watches of the night, I become aware, to my great surprise, that my teacher, the past master in these hieroglyphics, is really, more often than not, my pupil. He does not see the combinations of the abscissæ and ordinates very clearly. I make bold to take the chalk in hand myself, to seize the rudder of our algebraical boat. I comment on the book, interpret it in my own fashion, expound the text, sound the reefs, until daylight comes and leads us to the haven of the solution. Besides, the logic is so irresistible, it is all such easy going and so lucid that often one seems to be remembering rather than learning.

And so we proceed, with our positions reversed. My comrade—I can now allow myself to speak of him on equal terms—my comrade listens, suggests objections, raises difficulties which we try to solve in unison.

After fifteen months of this exercise, we went up together for our examination at Montpellier; and both of us received our degrees as bachelors of mathematical science. My companion was a wreck; I, on the other hand, had refreshed my mind with analytical geometry.[3]

[[113]]

The quartermaster declared himself satisfied with this achievement. Analytic geometry did not precisely strike him as a recreation. He knew enough of it for what he had to do; he did not want to know any more.

In vain I hold out the glittering prospect of a new degree, that of licentiate of mathematical science, which would lead us to the splendours of the higher mathematics and initiate us into the mechanics of the heavens: I cannot prevail upon him, cannot make him share my audacity. He calls it a mad scheme, which will exhaust us and come to nothing. I am free to go and break my neck in distant countries; he is more prudent and will not follow me.

My partner, therefore, leaves me. Henceforth, I am alone, alone and wretched. There is no one left with whom I can sit up and thresh out the subject in exhilarating discussion.[4]

And now let us note the words and the emotions with which he approaches for the last time, in his declining years, this town of Carpentras, where, from his earliest [[114]]youth, he suffered so greatly and laboured so valiantly:

Once more, here am I, somewhat late in life, at Carpentras, whose rude Gallic name sets the fool smiling and the scholar thinking. Dear little town where I spent my twentieth year and left the first bits of my fleece upon life’s bushes, my visit of to-day is a pilgrimage; I have come to lay my eyes once more upon the place which saw the birth of the liveliest impressions of my early days. I bow, in passing, to the old College where I tried my prentice hand as a teacher. Its appearance is unchanged; it still looks like a penitentiary. Those were the views of our mediæval educational system. To the gaiety and activity of boyhood, which were considered unwholesome, it applied the remedy of narrowness, melancholy, and gloom. Its houses of instruction were, above all, houses of correction. The freshness of Virgil was interpreted in the stifling atmosphere of a prison. I catch a glimpse of a yard between four high walls, a sort of bear-pit, where the scholars fought for room for their games under the spreading branches of a plane-tree. All around were cells that looked like horse-boxes, without light or air; those were the class-rooms. I speak in the past tense, for doubtless the present day has seen the last of this academic destitution.

Here is the tobacco-shop where, on Wednesday evening, coming out of the college, I would buy on credit the wherewithal to fill my pipe and thus [[115]]to celebrate on the eve the joys of the morrow, that blessed Thursday[5] which I considered so well employed in solving difficult equations, experimenting with new chemical reagents, collecting and identifying my plants. I made my timid request, pretending to have come out without my money, for it is hard for a self-respecting man to admit that he is penniless. My candour appears to have inspired some little confidence; and I obtained credit, an unprecedented thing, with the representative of the revenue.

How I should love to see that room again where I pored over differentials and integrals, where I calmed my poor burning head by gazing at Mont Ventoux, whose summit held in store for my coming expedition[6] those denizens of Arctic climes, the saxifrage and the poppy! And to see my familiar friend, the blackboard, which I hired at five francs a year from a crusty joiner, that board whose value I paid many times over, though I could never buy it outright, for want of the necessary cash! The conic sections which I described on that blackboard, the learned hieroglyphics![7]

Fabre has somewhere written, lamenting the dearth of family reminiscences which [[116]]does not enable him to go back beyond the second generation of his ancestry, this touching passage, full of modesty and filial feeling: “The populace has no history. Strangled by the present, it cannot give its mind to cherishing the memories of the past.” Yet how instructive would those records be.

Let us bow our heads before this child of the peasantry who labours so unremittingly and drives so deep a furrow; let us bow our heads before this humble primary schoolmaster who seeks to uplift himself, not as so many have done, by futile political agitation or the criminal fatuities of irreligion, but solely by virtue of knowledge and personal worth.

We shall see later on with what vindictive energy Fabre scourges the pseudo-scientists, “hateful malefactors,” maufatan de malur, who, in the name of a false science, rob men’s souls of the true and ancient Christian faith, thereby leading society toward the most terrible catastrophes. For the moment our only desire is to do homage to our worthy schoolmasters in the person of one of their old comrades who has become one of our greatest national glories. There are others, too, among us who have exalted by their virtues or their talents the humble nature [[117]]of their origin or their calling. Of such, as every Frenchman knows, to mention only one of the best known and best beloved, is the author of the Poésie des Bêtes, of Voix rustiques, of La Bonne Terre, of Le Clocher, etc.—François Fabié, that poet who, by his original style, his career, and his genius, which has been too much obscured by his modesty, may in so many respects be compared with Jean-Henri Fabre.[8] Of such, too, and among the most eminent writers of the language d’oc, is Antonin Perbosc,[9] who does honour to our primary schools, in one of which he is still teaching, by the remarkable works of literature which place him beside his friend, the Abbé Besson,[10] in the first rank of the Occitanian Félibrige. [[118]]

[1] Horace, Ars Poetica, 412. [↑]

[2] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 164–170. The Life of the Fly, chap. xii., “Mathematical Memories: The Binomial Theorem.” [↑]

[3] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 172–183 passim. The Life of the [[113]]Fly, chap. xii., “Mathematical Memories: The Binomial Theorem.” [↑]

[4] Souvenirs, IX., p. 184 passim. The Life of the Fly, chap. xii., “Mathematical Memories: The Binomial Theorem.” [↑]

[5] The weekly half-holiday in the French schools.—A. T. de M. [↑]

[6] The Hunting Wasps, chap. xi., “An Ascent of Mont Ventoux.” [↑]

[7] Souvenirs, III., pp. 191–193. The Life of the Fly, chap. iv., “Larval Dimorphism.” [↑]

[8] M. Fabié was never officially a schoolmaster, but he was trained as one, and was a pupil at the Normal College at Rodez. [↑]

[9] M. Perbosc is a schoolmaster at Lavilledien (Tarnet-Garonne). He has published through Privat of Toulouse: Lo Got occitan, Cansous del Got occitan, Contes populars Gascons, Guilhem de Tolosa, Remembransa, l’Arada, etc., and has repeatedly been crowned by the Académie des Jeux Floraux of Toulouse. [↑]

[10] M. Besson is also a laureate of the Académie des Jeux Floraux, and is at present Canon of Rodez. He has published through Carrère of Rodez: Dal Brès à la Tounbo, Bagateletos, Besucarietos, Countes de la Tata Mannou, Countes de l’Ouncle Janet, etc. This last volume is dedicated: A mon Amic Antouni Perbosc. [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER IX

THE PROFESSOR: AJACCIO

Virgil has truly said:

… labor omnia vincit

Improbus.

Persistent labour, in the service of a keen intelligence, knows no insuperable obstacles: it always achieves its ends. Success, accordingly, could not fail to befall the intrepid virtuosity of the youthful Carpentras schoolmaster. The degree of licentiate in the mathematical sciences was won, like the rest, at the point of the sword, and the valiant champion of the cosine and the laboratory was appointed Professor of Physics and Chemistry in the lycée of Ajaccio.

Here, by a happy concatenation of circumstances, and under the inward impulsion of the providential vocation, the destiny of the famous entomologist was to be finally determined.

In this novel environment, in “this paradise [[119]]of glorious Nature,” everything stimulated the alert curiosity of the predestined biologist; the sea, full of marvels, the beach, where the waves threw up such beautiful shells, the maquis of myrtle, arbutus, and lentisk!… This time the temptation was too great! He surrendered. His leisure was divided into two parts. One was still devoted to mathematics, the basis of his future in the university. The other was already spent in botanising and in investigating the wonders of the sea.

What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I had not been obsessed by x and y I should have surrendered wholly to my inclinations!

Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien[1] by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations, and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector. [[120]]Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the woes of novices.

In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon,[2] with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments; [[121]]and there we were for a fortnight, chatting at table de omni re scibili, after the botanical excursion was over.

With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that:

“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.”

We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,[3] with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans call erba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm [[122]]than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.

On the day before his departure, he said to me:

“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”

And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.[4]

Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open, but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of Lavaysse; the [[123]]star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble vestiges.

Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was [[124]]being fêted, one of his visitors asked him the question:

“Do you believe in God?”

To which he replied emphatically:

“I can’t say I believe in God; I see Him. Without Him I understand nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this conviction; I have … aggravated or ameliorated it, whichever you please. Every period has its manias. I regard Atheism as a mania. It is the malady of the age. You could take my skin from me more easily than my faith in God.”

We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this belief with almost all our great scientists.

Corsica, which vouchsafed Fabre the revelation of his vocation as naturalist, inspired him also with such love and enthusiasm as he had never hitherto known.

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 [[125]]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.

Not that he had time to make a very rich harvest of facts and observations in this wonderful country. The most visible result of his sojourn in the “isle of beauty,” and the greatest benefit which he derived from it, seems to have been the fact that it brought his heart and mind—if I may be permitted the expression—into a state of entomological grace; I mean into a state of living and acting truly and beautifully in accordance with his vocation as a naturalist.

So it is that the name of this radiant daughter of the Mediterranean, which is so often written by his pen, seems to find its way thither in order to evoke one of the brightest [[126]]and most joyful periods of his life, rather than to localise observations or circumstantial experiences.

There is, however, one of these reminiscences which, despite the extreme sobriety of the characteristics recorded, denotes, in the youthful entomologist, a mind peculiarly attentive to the slightest indications and the least movements of his future clients of the animal world. It deals with the Spider,[5] that ill-famed creature whom all hasten to crush underfoot as an odious and maleficent insect, but which the entomologist holds in high esteem for its talents as a spinner, its hunting expedients, and other highly interesting characteristics. The author has just explained, on behalf of the poor, supposedly poisonous insect, that for us its bite has no serious results, producing less effect than the bite of a gnat: “Nevertheless, a few are to be feared; and foremost among these is the Malmignatte, the terror of the Corsican peasantry.”

By good fortune the only Tarantula that bit him in Corsica was the Tarantula of natural history.

But while he was not injured by the spiders, [[127]]he was less fortunate in defending himself against the mosquitoes, from whose bites he contracted an attack of malaria, in the myrtle maquis which he doubtless haunted more persistently than was wise.

This unfortunate incident persuaded him to apply for an appointment in France. [[128]]

[1] Esprit Requien (1788–1851), a French naturalist and collector, director of the museum and botanical gardens at Avignon and author of several works on botany and conchology.—A. T. de M. [↑]

[2] Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon (1804–63), a distinguished naturalist, for twenty years director of the botanical gardens at Toulouse. He was commissioned by the French Government in 1850 to compile a flora of Corsica, and is the author of several important works on botany and zoology.—A. T. de M. [↑]

[3] A mountain 7730 feet high, about twenty-five miles from Ajaccio.—A. T. de M. [↑]

[4] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 63–66. The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]

[5] Souvenirs, I., pp. 178–180. The Life of the Spider, chap. ii., “The Black-bellied Tarantula.” [↑]

[[Contents]]

CHAPTER X

THE PROFESSOR: AVIGNON (1852–1870)

In 1852 the Professor of Physics and Chemistry in the lycée of Ajaccio was transferred to the lycée of Avignon.

Fabre was not yet twenty-seven. His youth, his enthusiasm, his good humour, the simplicity of his manners, and the vivacity of his mind naturally endeared him to young people eager for knowledge and the ideal. A few lines from the Souvenirs give us some idea of the relations between master and pupils: “There were five or six of us: I was the oldest, their master, but still more their companion and their friend; they were young fellows with warm hearts and cheerful imaginations, overflowing with that springtide sap of life which makes us so expansive, so desirous of knowledge.”

One guesses that he is speaking of one of those country walks on which, with a guide such as Fabre, everything became a source of instruction and an object of wonder and admiration. [[129]]

These excursions into the world of the fields, the delight of his youth and his earliest childhood, were henceforth to form the first item on his programme of studies. Mathematics were dropped, as Moquin-Tandon had advised. Physics and chemistry were put in their proper place, in the teaching of the lycée, and the whole of the young professor’s free energies were expended upon the research work of the naturalist.

Necessarily limited by his occupation as a teacher, his investigations could not at ordinary times extend beyond the neighbourhood of Avignon. One of his favourite localities for observation, by reason of its nearness and its entomological wealth, was the table-land of Les Angles, opposite the town on the right bank of the Rhône. Morning or evening, he made quick work of crossing the river and climbing the cliff which divides it from the barren table-land which he calls his “little Arabia Petræa.”

Presently his Thursdays and holidays were devoted to more distant and more prolonged observations. His steps took him, by preference, down-stream from Avignon, along the right bank of the Rhône, opposite the embouchure of the Durance, to a spot known as the Bois des Issarts. Not that he was [[130]]drawn thither by the mossy carpets or the twilight of lofty forest trees which form the charm of our woodlands. The burning plains where the Cicada shrilled and the olive flourished know nothing of these delightful retreats, so full of shadow and coolness. Here is Fabre’s own description:

The Bois des Issarts is a coppice of holm-oaks no higher than one’s head and sparingly distributed in scanty clumps which, even at their feet, hardly temper the force of the sun’s rays. When I used to settle myself in some part of the coppice suitable for my observations, on certain afternoons in the dog-days of July and August, I had the shelter of a large umbrella. If I neglected to furnish myself with this embarrassing adjunct to a long walk, my only resource against sunstroke was to lie down at full length behind some sandy knoll; and, when the veins in my temples were throbbing to bursting point, my last hope lay in putting my head down a rabbit-burrow. Such are one’s means of keeping cool in the Bois des Issarts.

What was there to draw him and retain him in such places, so unpropitious for the holiday of a professor on vacation? Ah! they are the favourite resort of the Bembex, one of his favourite insects. “A blazing sun, a sky magnificently blue, sandy slopes [[131]]to dig in, game in abundance to feed the larvæ, a peaceful spot hardly ever disturbed by a passing step”: all things combined to attract the digger-wasp to such localities.

I was, however, not the only one to profit by the shade of my umbrella; I was generally surrounded by numerous companions. Gad-flies of various species would take refuge under the silken dome, and sit peacefully on every part of the tightly-stretched cover. I was rarely without their society when the heat became overpowering. To while away the hours when I had nothing to do, it amused me to watch their great gold eyes, which shone like carbuncles under my canopy; I loved to follow their solemn progress when some part of the ceiling became too hot and obliged them to move a little way on.

One day, bang! The tight cover resounded like the skin of a drum. Perhaps an oak had dropped an acorn on the umbrella. Presently, one after the other, bang, bang, bang! Can some practical joker have come to disturb my solitude and fling acorns or little pebbles at my umbrella? I leave my tent and inspect the neighbourhood: nothing! The same sharp sound is repeated. I look up at the ceiling, and the mystery is explained. The Bembex of the vicinity, who all consume Gad-flies, had discovered the rich provender that was keeping me company, and were impudently penetrating my shelter to seize the flies on the ceiling. [[132]]Things were going to perfection; I had only to sit still and look.

Every moment a Bembex would enter, swift as lightning, and dart up to the silken ceiling, which resounded with a sharp thud. Some rumpus was going on aloft, where the eye could, no longer distinguish between attacker and attacked, so lively was the fray. The struggle did not last for an appreciable time: the Wasp would retire forthwith with a victim between her legs.

Obviously this suddenness of attack, followed by the swift removal of the prey, does not allow the Bembex to regulate her dagger-play.[1]

With ever-increasing accuracy, by the combined efforts of observation and experiment, that rich entomological material was amassed which was one day to serve for the erection of one of the finest and most enduring monuments of contemporary science.

We should form but a very incomplete idea of the sort of work to which the future author of the Souvenirs began to devote himself at this early stage of his professorship were we merely to note his frequent visits to Les Angles and his long sessions beneath his umbrella in the Bois des Issarts.

Apart from this favourite field of observation, [[133]]the enthusiastic curiosity of the naturalist found scope for its exercise on every hand.

Whether at home or abroad, whether passing along the public highway or visiting a friend, it was enough for an insect to appear to capture and retain his attention without regard for the circumstances and without a thought as to what might be said of him. On one occasion a Pelopæus, that is, a Potter-wasp (πηλοποίος) holding her pellet of mud in her jaws, came to his fireside one washing-day, seeking access to the nest which she was building behind the breast of the fireplace. More anxious about the Wasp than about the washing, he controlled the fire so that it should not too greatly incommode the little mason by eddies of smoke or flame, and for two good hours he followed the coming and going of the Pelopæus, and the progress of her nest-building. This was in the early days of his Avignon professorship.[2]

Another day it was once again the strange mud-worker which attracted his attention, not in his own house this time but in the kitchen of Roberty, one of the chief farmhouses on the outskirts of Avignon. Returning to dinner from their work in the fields, the farm [[134]]hands had hung, on pegs driven into the wall, one his blouse and another his hat. While they were devoting their attention to the soup, the guest had his eyes fixed upon the Pelopæi which came prowling about the men’s clothes and found them so well adapted to their needs that they began to build their nests upon them. Unfortunately for the builders and the spectator, the men soon rose from the table and shook their belongings, dislodging masses of mud already as large as an acorn. Ah! If he had been the owner of those garments, how gladly he would have allowed the Pelopæi to work their will, in order to learn the fate of a nest built upon the shifting surface of a smock-frock.[3]

The unavoidable limitations imposed by observations undertaken at home are not more disappointing to the investigator than the possible disturbance caused by passers-by should he attempt to watch the insect on the public highways. Here is an example. The professor, on one of his “days off,” is quietly [[135]]strolling along a narrow footpath on the banks of the Rhône:

A Yellow-winged Sphex appears, hopping along, dragging her prey. What do I see? The prey is not a Cricket, but a common Acridian, a Locust! And yet the Wasp is really the Sphex with whom I am so familiar, the Yellow-winged Sphex, the keen Cricket-huntress. I can hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes.

The burrow is not far off: the insect enters it and stores away the booty. I sit down, determined to wait for a new expedition, to wait hours if necessary, so that I may see if the extraordinary capture is repeated. My sitting attitude makes me take up the whole width of the path. Two raw conscripts heave in sight, their hair newly cut, wearing that inimitable automaton look which the first days of barrack-life bestow. They are chatting together, talking no doubt of home and the girl they left behind them; and each is innocently whittling a willow-switch with his knife. I am seized with a sudden apprehension. I therefore got up without speaking and trusted to my lucky star. Alas and alack, my star betrayed me: the heavy regulation boot came straight down upon the ceiling of the Sphex! A shudder ran through me as though I myself had received the impress of the hobnailed sole.[4]

[[136]]

And the unfortunate observer cries, with an emotion which he does not attempt to conceal:

Alas! It is no easy matter to experiment on the public road, where, when the long-waited event occurs at last, the arrival of a wayfarer is likely to disturb or ruin opportunities that may never return!

But the entomological hero does not allow himself to be discouraged by those unfortunate encounters with the profane, nor does he shrink from the humiliation which they sometimes inflict upon him. The following is a characteristic example:

Ever since daybreak I have been ambushed, sitting on a stone, at the bottom of a ravine. The subject of my matutinal visit is the Languedocian Sphex. Three women, vine-pickers, pass in a group, on the way to their work. They give a glance at the man seated, apparently absorbed in reflection. At sunset the same pickers pass again, carrying their full baskets on their heads. The man is still there, sitting on the same stone, with his eyes fixed on the same place. My motionless attitude, my long persistency in remaining at that deserted spot, must have impressed them deeply. As they passed by me, I saw one of them tap her forehead and heard her whisper to the others: [[137]]

“Un paouré inoucént, pécaïre!”

And all three made the sign of the Cross.[5]

This last scene was enacted on one of the deeply-sunken roads on the outskirts of Carpentras, whither Fabre was fond of repairing for his researches. From an early period, indeed, his craze for exploration had led him far beyond the Avignon district. On this third stage of his excursions, he struck out to some extent in all directions, but the locality which he preferred for his insect-hunting was undoubtedly the “Sunken Road,” as it was called, in the neighbourhood of Carpentras. A lonely valley with a sandy soil, with high, steep slopes on either hand, its flanks deeply scored into ravines and burned by the sun, the “Sunken Road” was an ideal home for the Hymenoptera, those lovers of sunny slopes and soils that are easily worked; and this was enough to make it the favourite haunt of the intrepid biologist.[6]

Among the Hymenoptera that frequent the slopes and embankments of the “Sunken Road,” in addition to the Hunting-wasps, which feed their larvæ on living flesh, there are other species which provide them with [[138]]honey. These also attracted the naturalist’s attention; these also provided a protracted test for his ingenuity and patience, and finally rewarded his pains beyond all hopes.