Chapter 17

How he has laboured in this solitude! For he considers that he is still far from having completed his task. He feels more and more that he has scarcely done more than sketch the history of this singular and almost unknown world. "The more I go forward," he wrote to his brother in 1903, "the more clearly I see that I have struck my pick into an inexhaustible vein, well worthy of being exploited." (16/1.)

What studies he has undertaken, what observations he has carried out, "almost at the same time, the same moment!" His laboratory is crowded with these subjects of experiments. "As though I had a long future before me"-- he was then just eighty years old--"I continue indefatigably my researches into the lives of these little creatures." (16/2.)

Work in solitude seems to him, more and more, the only life possible, and he cannot even imagine any other.

"The outer world scarcely tempts me at all; surrounded by my little family, it is enough for me to go into the woods from time to time, to listen to the fluting of the blackbirds. The very idea of the town disgusts me. Henceforth it would be impossible for me to live in the little cage of a citizen. Here I am, run wild, and I shall be so till the end." (16/3.)

For him work has become more than ever an organic function, the true corollary of life. "Away with repose! For him who would spend his life properly there is nothing like work--so long as the machine will operate."

Is this not the great law for all creatures so long as life lasts?

Why should the man who has made a fortune, who has neither children nor relations, and who may die tomorrow, continue to work for himself alone, to employ his days and his energies in useless labours which will profit neither himself nor his kind?

Ask of the Halictus, which, no longer capable of becoming a mother, makes herself guardian of a city, in order still to labour within the measure of her means.

Ask of the Osmia, the Megachile, the Anthidium, which "with no maternal aim, for the sole joy of labour, strive to expend their forces in the accomplishment of their vain tasks, until the forces of life fail."

Ask of the bee, which inaction leaves passive and melancholy so that she presently dies of weariness; of the Chalicodoma, so eager a worker that she will "let herself be crushed under the feet of the passer-by rather than abandon her task."

Ask it of all nature, which knows neither halt nor repose, and who, according to the profound saying of Goethe "has pronounced her malediction upon all that retards or suspends her progress."

Let us then labour, men and beasts, "so that we may sleep in peace; grubs and caterpillars in that torpor which prepares them for the transformation into moths and butterflies, and ourselves in the supreme slumber which dissolves life in order to renew it."

Let us work, in order to nourish within ourselves that divine intuition thanks to which we leave our original impress upon nature; let us work, in order to bring our humble contribution to the general harmony of things, by our painful and meritorious labour; in order that we may associate ourselves with God, share in His creation, and embellish and adorn the earth and fill it with wonders. (16/4.)

Forward then! always erect, even amid the tombs, to forget our griefs. Fabre finds no better consolation to offer his brother, who has lost almost in succession his wife and his eldest daughter:

"Do not take it ill if I have not condoled with you on the subject of your recent losses. Tried so often by the bitterness of domestic grief, I know too well the inanity of such consolations to offer the like to my friends. Time alone does a little cicatrize such wounds; and, let us add, work. Let us keep on our feet and at work as long as we are able. I know no better tonic." (16/5.)

And this exhortation to work, which recurs so often in the first letters of his youth, was to be the last word of the last volume which so splendidly terminates the incomparable series of his "Souvenirs": "Laboremus."

...

Age has killed neither his courage nor his energies, and he continues to work with the same zeal at nearly ninety years of age, and with as much eagerness as though he were destined to live for ever.

Although his physical forces are failing him, although his limbs falter, his brain remains intact, and is giving us its last fruit in his studies on the Cabbage caterpillar and the Glow-worm, which mark a sudden rejuvenescence of thought on his part, and the commencement of a new cycle of studies, which promise to be of the greatest originality.

To him the animal world has always been full of dizzy surprises, and the insects led him "into a new and barely suspected region, which is ALMOST ABSURD." (16/6.)

The glow-worms, motionless on their twigs of thyme, light their lamps of an evening, in the cool of the beautiful summer nights. What do these fires signify? How explain the mystery of this phosphorescence? Why this slow combustion, "this species of respiration, more active than in the ordinary state"? and what is the oxidizable substance "which gives this white and gentle luminosity"? Is it a flame of love like that which lights the Agaric of the olive-tree "to celebrate its nuptials and the emission of its spores"? But what reason can the larva have for illuminating itself? Why is the egg, already enclosed in the secrecy of the ovaries, already luminous?

"The soft light of the Agaric has confounded our ideas of optics; it does not refract, it does not form an image when passed through a lens, it does not affect ordinary photographic plates." (16/7.)

But here are other miracles:

"Another fungus, the Clathrix, with no trace of phosphorescence, affects photographic plates almost as quickly as would a ray of sunlight. The Clathrix tenebrosa does what the Agaricus olearius has no power to do." (16/8.)

And if the beacon of the Glow-worm recalls the light of the Agaric, the Clathrix reminds us of another insect, the Greater Peacock moth.

In the obscurity of a dark chamber this splendid moth emits phantasmal radiations, perhaps intermittent and reserved for the season of nuptials, signals invisible to us, and perceptible only to those children of the night, who may have found this means to communicate one with another, to call one another in the darkness, and to speak with one another. (16/9.)

Such are the interesting subjects which only yesterday were occupying this great worker; the occult properties, the radiant energies of organic matter; of phosphorescence, of light, the living symbols of the great universal Eros.

But embarrassment long ago succeeded the ephemeral prosperity which marked the first years of his installation at Sérignan, and that period of plenty was followed by a period of difficulty, almost of indigence. His class- books, which had succeeded marvellously, and from which the royalties had quickly attained to nearly 640 pounds sterling, which was the average figure for nearly ten years, were then no longer in vogue. Already the times had changed. France was in the crisis of the anti-clerical fever. Fabre made frequent allusions in his books of a spiritual nature, and many primary inspectors could not forgive what they regarded as a blemish.

We must also mention the keen competition caused by the appearance of similar books, usually counterfeit, and the more harmful for that; and as their adoption depended entirely on the caprice of commissions or the choice of interested persons, those of Fabre were gradually ceasing to sell.

It was from 1894 especially that their popularity declined so rapidly:

"Despite all my efforts here I am more anxious than ever about the future," he wrote to his publisher on the 27th of January, 1899; "two more of my books are about to disappear, a prelude to total shipwreck...I begin to despair." (16/10.)

He was not the man to have saved much money; numerous charges were always imposing themselves on him, and his first wife, careless of expenditure, had been somewhat extravagant.

While his position as teacher deteriorated his "Souvenirs" brought him little more than a nominal profit; for to most people he was still completely unknown among the potentates who monopolize the attention of the crowd.

"Work such as a Réaumur might be proud of will leave me a beggar, that goes without saying, but at least I shall have left my grain of sand. I would long ago have given up in despair, had I not, to give me courage, the continual research after truth in the little world whose historian I have become. I am hoarding ideas, and I make shift to live as I can." (16/11.)

Yet his reputation had long ago crossed the frontiers of his country. He had been a corresponding member of the Institute of France since 1887, and a Petit d'Ormoy prizeman. (16/12.) He was a member of the most celebrated foreign academies, and the entomological societies of the chief capitals of Europe; but his fame had not passed the walls of these academies and the narrow boundaries of the little world of professional biologists and philosophers.

Even in these circles, where he was almost exclusively read and appreciated, he was little known, and although he was much admired, although he was readily given credit for his admirable talent and exceptional knowledge, his readers were far from realizing the real powers of this world of life which he has called into being. His books are of those whose fertilizing virtues remain long hidden, to shine only at a distance, when much frothy writing, that has made a sudden noise in its time, has fallen into oblivion.

Every two or three years, after much fond polishing, he would open the door to yet another volume which was ready to go forth; adding astonishing chapters of the history of insects, wonderful fragments of animal psychology, but always obtaining only the same circumscribed success; that is, exciting no public curiosity, and remaining unperceived in the midst of general indifference.

His books interested only a select class, who, it is true, welcomed them eagerly, and read them with wonder and delight. If they excited the curiosity of a few philosophers, of scientists and inquirers, and here and there determined a vocation, still more, perhaps, did they charm writers and poets; they consoled Rostand at the end of a serious illness, their virtue, in some sort healing, procuring him both moral repose and a delightful relaxation. (16/13.) For all these, we may say, he has been one of those ten or twelve authors whom one would wish to take with one into a long exile, were they reduced to choosing no more before leaving civilization for ever.

Yet we must admit that this work has certain undeniable faults. The title, in the first place, has nothing alluring about it, and is calculated to deter rather than to attract purchasers, by evoking vague ideas of repulsive studies, too arduous or too special.

People have no idea of the wonderful fairyland concealed by this unpopular title; no conception that these records are intended, not merely for the scientist pure and simple, but in reality for every one.

Moreover, the first few volumes were in no way seductive. They boasted not the most elementary drawings to help the reader; not the slightest woodcut to give a direct idea of the insects described; of their shape, aspect, or physiognomy; and a simple sketch, however poor, is often worth more than long and laborious descriptions. The first volumes especially, printed economically, at the least possible expense, were not outwardly attractive.

It is also true that he had never founded any great hopes on the sale of such works.

Very few people are really interested in the lower animals, and Fabre has been reproached with wasting his time over "childish histories, unworthy of serious attention and unlikely to make money," of wasting in frivolous occupations the time which is passing so quickly and can never return. And why should he have still further wasted so many precious hours in executing minute drawings whose reproduction would have involved an expenditure which his publisher would not dare to venture upon, and which he himself could not afford?

For this universal inquirer was well fitted for such a task, and all these creatures which he had depicted he is capable of representing with brush and pencil as faithfully as with his pen. He had it in him to be not only a writer, but an excellent draughtsman, and even a great painter. He has reproduced in water-colour, with loving care, the decorations of the specimens of prehistoric pottery which his excavations have revealed, and which he has endeavoured to reconstruct, with all the science of an archaeologist. He has displayed the same skill in water-colour in that astonishing iconography, in which he has detailed, with marvellous accuracy, all the peculiarities of the mycological flora of the olive- growing districts. (16/14.)

As for those "paltry figures" insufficient or flagrantly incorrect in drawing, with which many people are satisfied, he regards them as "intolerable" in his own books, and as absolutely contradicting the rigorous accuracy of his text. (16/15.)

Of late years photography and the skill of his son Paul have supplied this deficiency. He taught his son to fix the insects on the sensitive plate in their true attitudes, in the reality of their most instantaneous gestures. However valuable such documents may be, how much we should prefer fine drawings, giving relief not only to forms and colours, but also to the most characteristic features and the whole living physiognomy of the creature! This is the function of art; but the great artist that was in Fabre was capable in this domain of rivalling the magical talent of an Audubon.

Such work was relinquished, although so many romances of nature, so much dishonest patch-work, won the applause due to success.

Fabre fell more and more into a state bordering on indigence, and finally he was quite forgotten. An opponent of evolution, he was out of the fashion. The encyclopaedias barely mentioned him. Lamarckians and Darwinians, who still made so much noise in the world, ignored him; and no one came now to open the gate behind which was ageing, in obscurity and deserted, "one of the loftiest and purest geniuses which the civilized world at that moment possessed; one of the most learned naturalists and one of the most marvellous of poets in the modern and truly legitimate sense of the word." (16/16.)

In the department of Vaucluse, where he lived for more than sixty years, in Avignon itself, where he had taught for twenty years, the prefect Belleudy, who had succeeded in approaching him, was astonished and distressed to find "so great a mind so little known"; for even those about him scarcely knew his name. (16/17.)

But what matter! The hermit of Sérignan was not discouraged; he was disturbed only by the failure of his strength, and the fear that he could not much longer exercise that divine faculty which had always consoled him for all his sorrows and his disappointments. He could scarcely drag his weary limbs across the pebbles of his Harmas; but he bore his eighty-seven years with a fine disdain for age and its failings, and although the fire of his glance and that whole, eager countenance still expressed his passion for the truth, his abrupt gestures, touched with irony, his simple bearing, and the extreme modesty of his whole person, spoke sufficiently of his profound indifference toward outside contingencies, for the baubles of fame and all the stupidities of life.

At a few miles' distance, in another village, that other great peasant, Mistral, the singer of Provence, the poet of love and joy, the minstrel of rustic labour and antique faiths, was pursuing, amid the homage of his apotheosis, the incredible cycle of his splendid existence.

This glory had come to him suddenly; this fame "whose first glances are sweeter than the fires of dawn," and which was never to desert him for fifty long years.

The wind of favour which had sweetened his youth continued to propel him in full sail. He had only to show himself to be at once surrounded, felicitated, worshipped; and his mere presence would sway a crowd as the black peaks of the high cypresses are swayed by the great wind that bears his name. Like Fabre, he had remained faithful to his native soil; that soil which the great naturalist had never been able to leave without at once longing impatiently to return to its dusty olives where the cigale sings, its ilex trees and its thickets; and so he lived far from the cities, in a quiet village, with the same horizon of plains and hills that were balmy with thyme, leading in his little home an equal life full of wisdom and simplicity.

The hermit of Sérignan was the Lucretius of this Provence, which had already found its Virgil. With a very different vision, each had the same rustic tastes, the same love of the free spaces of wild nature and the scenes of rural life. But Mistral, wherever he looked, saw human life as happy and simple, through the prism of his creative imagination and the optimism of his happy life. Fabre, on the contrary, behind the sombre realities which he studied, saw only the ferocious engagement of confused living forces, and a frightful tragedy.

Thus their two lives, which were like parallel lines, never meeting, were in keeping with their work. And while Mistral, still young and triumphant despite the years, was at Maillane overwhelmed with honours and consideration, the poor great man of Sérignan lived an obscure and inglorious existence.

He had the greatest trouble to live and rear his family, and almost his sole income consisted of an uncertain sum of 120 pounds sterling annually, which he had for some years received, in the guise of a pension, by the generosity of the Institute, as the Gegner prize.

Finally his situation was so precarious that he decided to sell to a museum that magnificent collection of water-colour plates in which he had represented, life-size and with an astonishing truth of colour, all the fungi which grow in Provence.

He wrote to Mistral on the subject, after the visit which the latter paid him in the spring of 1908: the only visit of the kind. Before meeting in Saint-Estelle, the Paradise of the Félibres, they had wished not to die before at least meeting on this earth.

Fabre wrote to mistral the following letter, which I owe to the kindness of the great poet:--

"I have never thought of profiting by my humble fungoid water- colours...Fate will perhaps decide otherwise.

"In this connection, permit me to make a confession, to which your nobility of character encourages me. Until latterly I had lived modestly on the product of my school-books. To-day the weathercock has turned to another quarter, and my books no longer sell. So here I am, more than ever in the grip of that terrible problem of daily bread. If you think, then, that with your help and that of your friends, my poor pictures might help me a little, I have decided to let them go, but not without bitterness. It is like tearing off a piece of my skin, and I still hold to this old skin, shabby as it may be; a little for my own sake, much more for my family's, and much more again for the sake of my entomological studies, studies which I feel obliged to pursue, persuaded that for a long time to come no one will care to resume them, so ungrateful is the calling." (16/18.)

At the instigation of the poet the prefect Belleudy took it upon him to intercede with the Minister, from whom he finally wrung a grant of 40 pounds sterling, "in encouragement of the sciences." Finally he ventured to reveal the situation to the General Council of Vaucluse, and to require it to contribute at least its share, in order to ensure a peaceful and decent old age to a man who was not only the greatest celebrity of the department, but also one of the highest glories of the nation. He pleaded so well and so nobly that the assembly granted Fabre an annual sum of 20 pounds sterling, "as the public homage which his compatriots pay to his lofty science and HIS EXCESSIVE MODESTY." (16/19.) At the same time, in a generous impulse, the Council placed at his disposal all the scientific equipment of the departmental laboratory of agricultural analysis, which was no longer used; there was indeed talk of suppressing it.

Now that the burden of his days weighed so heavily on him, and his task was virtually finished, everything, by the customary irony of things, was coming his way simultaneously: not only what was necessary and indispensable, but even something that was superfluous.

So one day all these delicate instruments, useless to a biologist who by the very nature of his labours had done without them all his life, and had never wearied of denying their utility, arrived at Sérignan. He did not possess even one modest thermometer; and as for the superb microscope over which he so often bent, the only costly instrument in his rustic laboratory, it was a precious present which, at the instigation of Duruy, Dumas the chemist had given him years before; but a simple lens very often sufficed him. "The secrets of life," he somewhere writes, "are to be obtained by simple, makeshift, inexpensive means. What did the best results of my inquiry into instinct cost me? Only time, and above all, patience."

It was then that a few of his disciples, finally affected by such abandonment, decided to celebrate his jubilee, hoping thus to reveal both his name and his wonderful books to the crowd that knew nothing of him. (16/20.)

It was time; a little longer, and, according to his racy phrase, "the violins would have come too late." The old master is daily nearer his decline; his sight, once so piercing, is now so obscured that he can barely see to sign his name, in a small, tremulous hand, confused and illegible. His muscles are so feeble now that he can walk only in short steps, on his wife's arm, leaning on a cane; and he would soon be piteously exhausted were not some seat available within immediate reach. Very soon now he will no longer hope to make the tour of this Harmas, which his feet have trodden daily for thirty years. In this failure of the body, all that survives are the two sparkling cavities of his eyes and his extraordinary memory.

But he is far from being mournful: he feels only an immense lassitude, and an infinite regret that perhaps he will not be able to bring his series of "Souvenirs" to the point he had desired; not wishing to die until he has pushed his career as far as is in his power; without having worked, on his feet, until the very hour when the light of this world is suddenly withdrawn, and his eyes open upon the infinite life, beyond the infinite worlds of space.

The festival took place on the 3rd of April of the year 1910, and was touching in its simplicity.

What an unforgettable day in the life of Fabre! That morning the gate of the Harmas was left open to all, and many of the people of Sérignan who invaded the garden were able to look for the first time on the face of their fellow-citizen, who had so long lived among them, and whom they had now, to their astonishment, discovered.

But among the crowd of friends and admirers who, coming from all parts, pressed around the little pink house, the most amazed of all was Marius, the blind cabinet-maker, unable to contain his intense delight at the sudden burning of so much incense before his idol, for to him it had seemed that this day of apotheosis would never dawn!

For nothing was certain, although the day of the jubilee had long been fixed. In the first place there had been serious defections in the ranks of the official personages who were to take part in the ceremony. Then the weather was terrible for the time of year; the spring had commenced gloomily, a season of floods and catastrophes. But on this morning the rain of days had ceased to fall, and suddenly the sun appeared.

Among other compliments and marks of homage the old man was presented with a golden plaque, on one side of which Sicard, who stood revealed as a master of the burin, had engraved his portrait with rare fidelity. The reverse was resplendent with one of the most beautiful syntheses which the history of art has known; a surprising allegory, in which the imagination of the artist evoked the man of science, the singer of the insects, the landscape which had seen the birth of so many little lives, and the village amid the olive-trees, in front of the sun-steeped Ventoux.

At this festival, the jubilee of a scientist, the scientists were least numerous.

The banquet was given in the large room of a cafe in the midst of Sérignan; in order, no doubt, that in this humble life even glory should be modest.

As Fabre could not walk, he was helped into the carriage of ceremony, which was sent expressly from Orange, and the little procession, which was swelled by the municipal choral society, spurred on by Marius, moved slowly off along the sole central street.

It was a great family repast: one of those love-feasts in which all communicate in a single thought.

Edmond Perrier brought the naturalist the homage of the Institute, and expressed in unaffected terms the just admiration which he himself felt. The better to praise him, he gave a summary of his admirable career, and his immortal work. At the evocation of this long past of labour Fabre regretted his poor vanished joys, "the sole moments of happiness in his life."

Moved to tears, by his memories and by the simple and pious homage at last rendered to his genius, he wept, and many, seeing him weep, wept with him.

Others spoke in the name of the great anonymous crowd of friends, of all those who had found a source of infinite enjoyment in his works. At the same time the greatest writers, the greatest poets sent on the same day, at the same hour, their salutation or eloquent messages to the "Virgil of the insects" (16/21.), to the "good magician who knew the language of the myriad little creatures of the fields." (16/22.)

Doubtless he would sooner or later have received full justice; but without this circumstance it is permissible to add that the end of his life would have passed amidst the completest oblivion, and that he would have taken leave of the world without attracting any particular attention. His death would have occurred unperceived, and when the little vault of Vaison stone, up in the small square enclosure of pebbles which serves as the village cemetery, where those he has loved await him, came to be opened for the last time, they would hardly have troubled to close it again.

Yet the honours paid him were far from being such as he merited.

Why, at this jubilee of the greatest of the entomologists, was not a single appointed representative of entomology present? (16/22.)

The fact is that the majority of those who "amid the living seek only for corpses," according to the expression of Bacon, unwilling to see in Fabre anything more than an imaginative writer, and being themselves incapable of understanding the beautiful and of distinguishing it in the true, reproached him, perhaps with more jealousy than conviction, with having introduced literature into the domains of science.

Other entomological specialists accuse him of presenting in the guise of science discoveries which have been made by others. But in the first place, as he has read very little, he certainly did not know all that had been done by others; and what matter if he had discovered nothing essential concerning this or that insect if the result of his study of it has been to impregnate it with something new, or to touch it with the breath of life?

Others, finally, who wished to see with their own eyes the proof of his statements, have reproached him with a few errors; but he observed so skilfully that these errors, if any have really slipped into his books, cannot be very serious.

He was one of the glories of the University, but it failed to add to the brilliance of this ceremony, and it is to be regretted that the Government could not amid its temporary preoccupations have done with all the spontaneity that might have been looked for the one thing which might on this memorable date have atoned for its unjust obliviousness. Since Duruy had created Fabre a chevalier of the Empire more than forty years had gone by, and in this long interval Fabre was absolutely ignored by the authorities. While the State daily raises so many commonplace men to the highest honours, it was afterwards needful to procure the intervention of influential persons, to justify his worth and to prove his deserts, in order to obtain his promotion through one degree of rank in that Legion of Honour which his eminent services had so long adorned.

This tardy reparation at least had the result of shedding a twilight of glory over the evening of his life, and from that day he suddenly appeared in his true place and took his rank as a man of the first order. Everybody began to read him, and presently no one was willing to seem ignorant of him, for more of his "Souvenirs entomologiques" were sold in a few months than had been disposed of in more than twenty years. (16/24.)

At last Fabre experienced not only glory and renown, but also popularity. This was only justice, for his is essentially a popular genius. Has he not striven all his life to place the marvels of science within reach of all? And has he not written above all for the children of the people?

So at last people have learned the way to the Harmas; they go thither now in crowds, to visit the enclosure and the modest laboratory, as to a veritable place of pilgrimage which attracts from afar many fervent admirers.

Some, it is true, go thither to see him simply as an object of curiosity; but even among these there are those who on returning thence, full of enthusiasm for what they have seen, find the flowers of the fields more sweet and fragile, and the wild fragrance of the woods and hedges more voluptuous, and the green of the trees more tender. They have learnt to look at the earth and to "kneel in the grass."

Scientists come to chat with the scientist. Others come to salute the primary schoolman, the lay instructor, the great pedagogue whose glory is reflected upon all the primary schools of France.

Those who cannot visit him write, telling him of all the pleasure which they owe him, thanking him for long and delightful hours passed in the reading of his books, expressing the hope that he may yet live many years, and still further increase the number of his "Souvenirs."

Some ask him a host of questions relating to entomology or philosophy; others ask him for impossible answers to some of the fascinating and mysterious problems which he has expounded; women confide in him their little private griefs or their intimate sorrows, a naive form of homage; but a thousand times more touching than any other, and one that shows how profound has been the beneficent influence of his books upon certain isolated minds, and what consolation can be derived from science when it finds a sufficiently eloquent voice to interpret it.

As he can work no longer, these visits now fill his life, formally so occupied; and in the midst of all the sympathy extended to him he is sensible, not of the twilight, but of a sunrise; he feels that his work has been good, that an infinity of minds are learning through him to regard plants and animals with greater affection; and that the consideration of men, finally directed upon his work, will not readily exhaust it, for it is one of the Bibles of Nature.

NOTES.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION.

Introduction/1. Letters to his brother, 1898-1900.

Introduction/2. I have made some valuable "finds" here; among other pieces cited the fragment on "Playthings," the curious description of the "Eclipse," and the poem on "Number" are here published for the first time.

Introduction/3. This negligence in the matter of correspondence is not least among the causes which have mitigated against his popularity.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1.

1/1. "It is a country that has very little charm." To his brother, 18th August, 1846.

1/2. "Practicien, homme d'affaires ou de chicane": roughly, "practitioner, man of business or law": so his father is described in his birth certificate.

1/3. "Souvenirs entomologiques," 2nd series, chapter 4, and 7th series,