Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He ascends those tracks of flame, where on high

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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