Chapter 5
The resolute worker resumed his indefatigable labours with an ardour greater than ever, for now he was haunted by a noble ambition, that of becoming a teacher of the superior grade, and of "talking plants and animals" in a chair of the faculty. With this end in view he added to his two diplomas--those of mathematics and physics--a third certificate, that of natural sciences. His success was triumphant.
Already tenacious and fearless in affirming what he believed to be the truth, he astonished and bewildered the professors of Toulouse. Among the subjects touched upon by the examiners was the famous question of spontaneous generation, which was then so vital, and which gave rise to so many impassioned discussions. The examiner, as it chanced, was one of the leading apostles of this doctrine. The future adversary of Darwin, at the risk of failure, did not scruple to argue with him, and to put forward his personal convictions and his own arguments. He decided the vexed question in his own way, on his own responsibility. A personality already so striking was regarded with admiration; a candidate so far out of the ordinary was welcomed with enthusiasm, and but for the insufficiency of the budget which so scantily met the needs of public instruction his examination fees would have been returned. (4/1.)
Why, after this brilliant success, was Fabre not tempted to enter himself for a fellowship, which would later in his career have averted so many disappointments? It was doubtless because he felt, obscurely, that his ideal future lay along other lines, and that he would have been taking a wrong turning. Despite all the solicitations which were addressed to him he would think of nothing but "his beloved studies in natural history" (4/2.); he feared to lose precious time in preparing himself for a competitive examination; "to compromise by such labour, which he felt would be fruitless" (4/3.), the studies which he had already commenced, and the inquiries already carried out in Corsica. He was busy with his first original labours, the theses which he was preparing with a view to his doctorate in natural science, "which might one day open the doors of a faculty for him, far more easily than would a fellowship and its mathematics." (4/4.)
At heart he was utterly careless of dignities and degrees. He worked only to learn, not to attain and follow up a settled calling. What he hoped above all was to succeed in devoting all his leisure to those marvellous natural sciences in which he could vaguely foresee studies full of interest; something animated and vital; a thousand fascinating themes, and an atmosphere of poetry.
His genius, as yet invisible, was ripening in obscurity, but was ready to come forth; he lacked only the propitious circumstance which would allow him to unfold his wings.
He was seeking them in vain when a volume by Léon Dufour, the famous entomologist, who then lived in the depths of the Landes, fell by chance into his hands, and lit the first spark of that beacon which was presently to decide the definite trend of his ideas.
It was this incident which then and there developed the germs already latent within him. These had only awaited such an occasion as that which so fortunately came to pass one evening of the winter of 1854.
Fabre offers yet another example of the part so often played by chance in the manifestations of talent. How many have suddenly felt the unexpected awakening of gifts which they did not suspect, as a result of some unusual circumstance!
Was it not simply as a result of having read a note by the Russian chemist Mitscherlich on the comparison of the specific characteristics of certain crystals that Pasteur so enthusiastically took up his researches into molecular asymmetry which were the starting-point of so many wonderful discoveries?
Again, we need only recall the case of Brother Huber, the celebrated observer of the bee, who, having out of simple curiosity undertaken to verify certain experiments of Réaumur's, was so completely and immediately fascinated by the subject that it became the object of the rest of his life.
Again, we may ask what Claude Bernard would have been had he not met Magendie? Similarly Léon Dufour's little work was to Fabre the road to Damascus, the electric impulse which decided his vocation.
It dealt with a very singular fact concerning the manners of one of the hymenoptera, a wasp, a Cerceris, in whose nest Dufour had found small coleoptera of the genus Buprestis, which, under all the appearances of death, retained intact for an incredible time their sumptuous costume, gleaming with gold, copper, and emerald, while the tissues remained perfectly fresh. In a word, the victims of Cerceris, far from being desiccated or putrefied, were found in a state of integrity which was altogether paradoxical.
Dufour merely believed that the Buprestes were dead, and he gave an attempted explanation of the phenomenon.
Fabre, his curiosity and interest aroused, wished to observe the facts for himself; and, to his great surprise, he discovered how incomplete and insufficiently verified were the observations of the man who was at that time known as "the patriarch of entomologists."
>From that moment he saw his way ahead; he suspected that there was still much to discover and much to revise in this vast department of nature, and conceived the idea of resuming the work so splendidly outlined by Réaumur and the two Hubers, but almost completely neglected since the days of those illustrious masters. He divined that here were fresh pastures, a vast unexplored country to be opened up, an entire unimagined science to be founded, wonderful secrets to be discovered, magnificent problems to be solved, and he dreamed of consecrating himself unreservedly, of employing his whole life in the pursuit of this object; that long life whose fruitful activity was to extend over nearly ninety years, and which was to be so "representative" by the dignity of the man, the probity of the expert, the genius of the observer, and the originality of the writer.
The year 1855 saw the first appearance, in the "Annales des sciences naturelles," of the famous memoir which marked the beginning of his fame: the history, which might well be called marvellous and incredible, of the great Cerceris, a giant wasp and "the finest of the Hymenoptera which hunt for booty at the foot of Mont Ventoux." (4/5.)
Fabre was now thirty-two years old, and his situation as assistant- professor of physics was somewhat precarious. From the 72 pounds sterling which he drew at Ajaccio, an overseas post, his salary was reduced, on his return to the mainland, to 64 pounds sterling, and during the whole of his stay at Avignon he obtained neither promotion nor the smallest increase of pay, excepting a few additional profits which were unconnected with his habitual duties. When he left the university after twenty well-filled years, he left as he had entered, with the same title, rank, and salary of a mere assistant-professor.
Yet all about him "everywhere and for every one, all was black indeed": his family had increased and therewith his expenses; there were now seven at table every day. Very shortly his modest salary would no longer suffice; he was obliged to supplement it by all sorts of hack-work--classes, "repetitions," private lessons; tasks which repelled him, for they absorbed all his available time; they prevented him from giving himself up to his favourite studies, to his silent and solitary observations. Nevertheless, he acquitted himself of these duties patiently and conscientiously, for at heart he loved his profession, and was rather a fellow-disciple than a master to his pupils. For this reason all those about him worked with praiseworthy assiduity; even the worst elements, the black sheep, the "bad eggs" of other classes, with him were suddenly transformed and as attentive as the rest. Although he knew how to keep order, how to make himself respected, and could on occasion deal severely and speak sternly, so that very few dared to forget themselves before him, he knew also how to be merry with his pupils, chatting with them familiarly, putting himself in their place, entering into their ideas, and making himself their rival. If life was laborious under his ferula, it was also merry. The best proof of this is the fact that of all his colleagues at the lycée he was the only one who had no nickname, a rarity in scholastic annals.
He did not therefore object to these lessons; but while at Carpentras he was made much of and praised by the principal, was a general favourite, and had perfect liberty to follow his inspiration during his partly gratuitous classes, here the hours and the programme tied him down, which was precisely what he found insupportable.
Everything made things difficult for him here: his external self; his character, ever so little shy and unsocial; his temperament, which was made for solitude.
In the thick of this hierarchical society of university professors he remained independent; he knew nothing of what was said or what was happening in the college, and his colleagues were always better informed than he. (4/6.) As he was not a fellow, he was made to feel the fact and was treated as a subordinate; the others, who prided themselves on the title, and who were incapable of recognizing his merit, which was a little beyond them, were jealous of him, all the more inasmuch as his name was momentarily noised abroad, and they revenged themselves by calling him "the fly" among themselves, by way of allusion to his favourite subject. (4/7.)
Indifferent to distinctions, as well as to those who bore them, contemptuous of etiquette, and incapable of putting constraint upon his nature, he remained an "outsider," and refused to comply with a host of factitious or worldly obligations which he regarded as useless or disgusting. Thus even at Ajaccio he managed to escape the customary ceremonies of New Year's Day.
"Good society I avoid as much as possible; I prefer my own company. So I have seen no one; I did not respond to the principal's invitation to make the official round of visits." (4/8.)
When obliged to accept some invitation, apart from occasions of too great solemnity, when he was really constrained to dress himself in the complete livery of circumstance and ceremony, he remained faithful to his black felt hat, which made a blot among all the carefully polished "toppers" of his colleagues. He was called to order; he was reprimanded; he obeyed unwillingly, or worse, he resisted; he revolted, and threatened to send in his resignation. To pay court to people, to endeavour to make himself pleasant, to grovel before a superior, were to him impossibilities. He could neither solicit, nor sail with the wind, nor force himself on others, nor even make use of his relations.
However, when he went to Paris to take his doctor's degree in natural sciences, he did not forget Moquin-Tandon, who had formerly, in Corsica, revealed to him the nature of biology, and whom he himself had received and entertained in his humble home.
The ex-professor of Toulouse, who was now eminent in his speciality, occupied the chair of natural history in the faculty of medicine in Paris. What better occasion could he wish of introducing himself to a highly placed official? Fabre had formerly been his host; he could recall the happy hours they had spent together; he could explain his plans, and ask for the professor's assistance! Fate pointed to him as a protector. But if Fabre had been capable of climbing the professor's stairs with some such ambitious desires, he would quickly have been disabused.
The "dear master" had long ago forgotten the little professor of Ajaccio, and his welcome was by no means such as Fabre had the right to expect. Far from insisting, he was disheartened, perhaps a little humiliated, and hastened to take his leave.
The theses which Fabre brought with him, and which, he had thought, ought to lead him one day to a university professorship, did not, as a matter of fact, contain anything very essentially original.
He had been attracted, indeed fascinated, by all the singularities presented by the strange family of the orchids; the asymmetry of their blossoms, the unusual structure of their pollen, and their innumerable seeds; but as for the curious rounded and duplicated tubercles which many of them bore at their base, what precisely were they? The greatest botanists--de Candolle, A. de Jussieu--had perceived in them nothing more than roots. Fabre demonstrated in his thesis that these singular organs are in reality merely buds, true branches or shoots, modified and disguised, analogous to the metamorphosed tubercle of the potato. (4/9.)
He added also a curious memoir on the phosphorescence of the agaric of the olive-tree, a phenomenon to which he was to return at a later date.
In the field of zoology his scalpel revealed the complicated structure of the reproductive organs of the Centipedes (Millepedes), hitherto so confused and misunderstood; as also certain peculiarities of the development of these curious creatures, so interesting from the point of view of the zoological philosopher (4/10.), for he had become expert in handling not only the magnifying glass, which was always with him, but also the microscope, which discovers so many infinite wonders in the lowest creatures, yet which was not of particular service in any of the beautiful observations upon which his fame is built.
Returning to Avignon, in the possession of his new degree, he commenced an important task which took him nearly twenty years to complete: a painstaking treatise on the Sphaeriaceae of Vaucluse, that singular family of fungi which cover fallen leaves and dead twigs with their blackish fructifications; a remarkable piece of work, full of the most valuable documentation, as were the theses whose subjects I have just detailed; but without belittling the fame of their author, one may say that another, in his place, might have acquitted himself as well.
Although he continued to undertake researches of limited interest and importance, although he persisted in dissecting plants, and, although he disliked it, in "disembowelling animals," the fact was that apart from Thursdays and Sundays it was scarcely possible for him to escape from his week's work; hardly possible to snatch sufficient leisure to undertake the studies toward which he felt himself more particularly drawn. Tied down by his duties, which held him bound to a discipline that only left him brief moments, and by the forced hack-work imposed upon him by the necessity of earning his daily bread, he had scarcely any time for observation excepting vacations and holidays.
Then he would hasten to Carpentras, happy to hold the key to the meadows, and wander across country and along the sunken lanes, collecting his beautiful insects, breathing the free air, the scent of the vines and olives, and gazing upon Mont Ventoux, close at hand, whose silver summit would now be hidden in the clouds and now would glitter in the rays of the sun.
Carpentras was not merely the country in which his wife's parents dwelt: it was, above all, a unique and privileged home for insects; not on account of its flora, but because of the soil, a kind of limestone mingled with sand and clay, a soft marl, in which the burrowing hymenoptera could easily establish their burrows and their nests. Certain of them, indeed, lived only there, or at least it would have been extremely difficult to find them elsewhere; such was the famous Cerceris; such again, was the yellow-winged Sphex, that other wasp which so artistically stabs and paralyses the cricket, "the brown violinist of the clods."
At Carpentras too the Anthophorae lived in abundance; those wild bees with whom the vexed and enigmatic history of the Sitaris and the Meloë is bound up; those little beetles, cousins of the Cantharides, whose complex metamorphoses and astonishing and peculiar habits have been revealed by Fabre. This memoir marked the second stage of his scientific career, and followed, at an interval of two years, the magnificent observations on the Cerceris.
These two studies, true masterpieces of science, already constituted two excellent titles to fame, and would by themselves have sufficed to fill a naturalist's whole lifetime and to make his name illustrious.
>From that time forward he had no peer. The Institute awarded him one of its Montyon prizes (4/11.), "an honour of which, needless to say, he had never dreamed." (4/12.) Darwin, in his celebrated work on the "Origin of Species," which appeared precisely at this moment, speaks of Fabre somewhere as "the inimitable observer." (4/13.)
Exploring the immediate surroundings of Avignon, he very soon discovered fresh localities frequented almost exclusively by other insects, whose habits in their turn absorbed his whole attention.
First of these was the sandy plateau of the Angles, where every spring, in the sunlit pastures so beloved of the sheep, the Scarabaeus sacer, with his incurved feet and clumsy legs, commences to roll his everlasting pellet, "to the ancients the image of the world." His history, since the time of the Pharaohs, had been nothing but a tissue of legends; but stripping it of the embroidery of fiction, and referring it to the facts of nature, Fabre demonstrated that the true story is even more marvellous than all the tales of ancient Egypt. He narrated its actual life, the object of its task, and its comical and exhilarating performances. But such is the subtlety of these delicate and difficult researches that nearly forty years were required to complete the study of its habits and to solve the mystery of its cradle. (4/14.)
On the right bank of the Rhône, facing the embouchure of the Durance, is a small wood of oak-trees, the wood of Des Issarts. This again, for many reasons, was one of his favourite spots. There, "lying flat on the ground, his head in the shadow of some rabbit's burrow," or sheltered from the sun by a great umbrella, "while the blue-winged locusts frisked for joy," he would follow the rapid and sibilant flight of the elegant Bembex, carrying their daily ration of diptera to her larvae, at the bottom of her burrow, deep in the fine sand." (4/15.)
He did not always go thither alone: sometimes, on Sundays, he would take his pupils with him, to spend a morning in the fields, "at the ineffable festival of the awakening of life in the spring." (4/16.)
Those most dear to him, those who in the subsequent years have remained the object of a special affection, were Devillario, Bordone, and Vayssières (4/17.), "young people with warm hearts and smiling imaginations, overflowing with that springtime sap of life which makes us so expansive and so eager to know.
Among them he was "the eldest, their master, but still more their companion and friend"; lighting in them his own sacred fire, and amazing them by the deftness of his fingers and the acuteness of his lynx-like eyes. Furnished with a notebook and all the tools of the naturalist--lens, net, and little boxes of sawdust steeped in anaesthetic for the capture of rare specimens-- they would wander "along the paths bordered with hawthorn and hyaebla, simple and childlike folk," probing the bushes, scratching up the sand, raising stones, running the net along hedge and meadow, with explosions of delight when they made some splendid capture or discovered some unrecorded marvel of the entomological world.
It was not only on the banks of the Rhône or the sandy plateau of Avignon that they sought adventure thus, "discussing things and other things," but as far as the slopes of Mont Ventoux, for which Fabre had always felt an inexplicable and invincible attraction, and whose ascent he accomplished more than twenty times, so that at last he knew all its secrets, all the gamut of its vegetation, the wealth of the varied flora which climb its flanks from base to summit, and which range "from the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate to the violet of Mont Cenis and the Alpine forget-me-not" (4/18.), as well as the antediluvian fauna revealed amid its entrails, a vast ossuary rich in fossils.
His disciples, all of whom, without exception, regarded him with absolute worship, have retained the memory of his wit, his enthusiasm, his geniality and his infectious gaiety, and also of the singular uncertainty of his temperament; for on some days he would not speak a word from the beginning to the end of his walk.
Even his temper, ordinarily gentle and easy, would suddenly become hasty and violent, and would break out into terrible explosions when a sudden annoyance set him beside himself; for instance, when he was the butt of some ill-natured trick, or when, in spite of the lucidity of his explanations, he felt that he had not been properly understood. Perhaps he inherited this from his mother, a rebellious, crotchety, somewhat fantastic person, by whose temper he himself had suffered.
But the young people who surrounded him were far from being upset by these contrasts of temperament, in which they themselves saw nothing but natural annoyance, and the corollary, as it were, of his abounding vitality. (4/19.)
It was because he was the only university teacher in Avignon to occupy himself with entomology that Pasteur visited him in 1865. The illustrious chemist had been striving to check the plague that was devastating the silkworm nurseries, and as he knew nothing of the subject which he proposed to study, not even understanding the constitution of the cocoon or the evolution of the silkworm, he sought out Fabre in order to obtain from his store of entomological wisdom the elementary ideas which he would find indispensable. Fabre has told us, in a moving page (4/20), with what a total lack of comprehension of "poverty in a black coat" the great scientist gazed at his poor home. Preoccupied by another problem, that of the amelioration of wines by means of heat, Pasteur asked him point-blank-- him, the humble proletarian of the university caste, who drank only the cheapest wine of the country--to show him his cellar. "My cellar! Why not my vaults, my dusty bottles, labelled according to age and vintage! But Pasteur insisted. Then, pointing with my finger, I showed him, in a corner of the kitchen, a chair with all the straw gone, and on this chair a two- gallon demijohn: 'There is my cave, monsieur!'"
If the country professor was embarrassed by the chilliness of the other, he was none the less shocked by his attitude. It would seem, from what Fabre has said, that Pasteur treated him with a hauteur which was slightly disdainful. The ignorant genius questioned his humble colleague, distantly giving him his orders, explaining his plans and his ideas, and informing him in what directions he required assistance.
After this, we cannot be surprised if the naturalist was silent. How could sympathetic relations have survived this first meeting? Fabre could not forgive it. His own character was too independent to accommodate itself to Pasteur's. Yet never, perhaps, were two men made for a better understanding. They were equally expert in exercising their admirable powers of vision in the vast field of nature, equally critical of self, equally careful never to depart from the strict limits of the facts; and they were, one may say, equally eminent in the domain of invention, different though their fortunes may have been; for the sublimity of scientific discoveries, however full of genius they may be, is often measured only by the immediate consequences drawn therefrom and the practical importance of their results.
In reality, were they not two rivals, worthy of being placed side by side in the paradise of sages? Both of them, the one by demolishing the theory of spontaneous generation, the other by refuting the mechanical theory of the origin of instincts, have brought into due prominence the great unknown and mysterious forces which seem destined to hold eternally in suspense the profound enigma of life.
Now he was anxious not to leave the Vaucluse district, the scene of his first success, and a place so fruitful in subjects of study. He wished to remain close to his insects, and also near the precious library and the rich collections which Requien had left by will to the town of Avignon. In spite of the meagreness of his salary, he asked for nothing more; and, what is more, by an inconsequence which is by no means incomprehensible, he avoided everything that might have resulted in a more profitable position elsewhere, and evaded all proposals of further promotion. Twice, at Poitiers and Marseilles, he refused a post as assistant professor, not regarding the advantages sufficient to balance the expenses of removal. (4/21.)
It is true that his modest position was slightly improved; at the lycée he had just been appointed drawing-master, thanks to his knowledge of design, for he could draw--indeed, what could he not do? The city, on the other hand, appointed him conservator of the Requien Museum, and presently municipal lecturer, so that his earnings were increased by 48 pounds sterling per annum, and he was at last able to abandon "those abominable private lessons" (4/22.), which the insufficiency of his income had hitherto forced him to accept. These new duties, which naturally demanded much time and much labour, kept him almost as badly tied as he had been before.
To be rich enough to set himself free; to be master of all his time, to be able to devote himself entirely to his chosen work: this was his dream, his constant preoccupation: it haunted him; it was a fixed idea.
Such was the principal motive of his inquiry into the properties of madder, the colouring principle of which he succeeded in extracting directly, by a perfectly simple method, which for a time very advantageously replaced the extremely primitive methods of the old dyers, who used a simple extract of madder; a crude preparation which necessitated long and expensive manipulations. (4/23.)
He had been working at this for eight years when Victor Duruy, Minister of Public Instruction and Grand Master of the University, came to surprise him in his laboratory at Saint-Martial, in the full fever of research. Whatever was Duruy's idea in entering into relations with him, it seems that from their first meeting the two men were really taken with one another: there were, between them, so many close affinities of taste and character. Duruy found in Fabre a man of his own temper; for his, like Fabre's, was a modest and simple nature. Both came of the people, and the principal motive of each was the same ideal of work, emancipation, and progress.
A little later Duruy summoned the modest sage of Avignon to Paris, with particular insistence; he was full of attentions and of forethought, and made him there and then a chevalier of the Legion of Honour; a distinction of which Fabre was far from being proud, and which he was careful never to obtrude; but he nevertheless always thought of it with a certain tenderness, as a beloved "relic" in memory of this illustrious friend.
On the following day the naturalist was conveyed to the Tuileries to be presented to the Emperor. You must not suppose that he was in the least disturbed at the idea of finding himself face to face with royalty. In the presence of all these bedizened folk, in his coat of a cut which was doubtless already superannuated, he cared little for the impression he might produce. As good an observer of men as of beasts, he gazed quietly about him; he exchanged a few words with the Emperor, who was "quite simple," almost suppressed, his eyes always half-closed; he watched the coming and going of "the chamberlains with short breeches and silver- buckled shoes, great scarabaei, clad with café au lait wing-cases, moving with a formal gait." Already he sighed regretfully; he was bored; he was on the rack, and for nothing in the world would he have repeated the experience. He did not even feel the least desire to visit the vaunted collections of the Museum. He longed to return; to find himself once more among his dear insects; to see his grey olive-trees, full of the frolicsome cicadae, his wastes and commons, which smelt so sweet of thyme and cypress; above all, to return to his furnace and retorts, in order to complete his discovery as quickly as possible.
But others profited by his happy conceptions. Like the cicada, the Cigale of his fable (See "Social Life in the Insect World," by Jean-Henri Fabre (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912).), which makes a "honeyed reek" flow from--
"the bark Tender and juicy, of the bough,"
on which it is quickly supplanted by
"Fly, drone, wasp, beetle too with hornèd head" (4/24.),
who
"Now lick their honey'd lips, and feed at leisure,"
so, after he had painfully laboured for twelve years in his well, he saw others, more cunning than he, come to his perch, who by dint of "stamping on his toe," succeeded in ousting him. Pending the appearance of artificial alizarine, which was presently to turn the whole madder industry upside down, these more sophisticated persons were able to benefit at leisure by the ingenious processes discovered by Fabre, so that the practical result of so much assiduity, so much patient research, was absolutely nil, and he found himself as poor as ever.
So faded his dream: and, if we except his domestic griefs, this was certainly the deepest and cruellest disappointment he had ever experienced.
Thenceforth he saw his salvation only in the writing of textbooks, which were at last to throw open the door of freedom. Already he had set to work, under the powerful stimulus of Duruy, preoccupied as he always was by his incessant desire for freedom. The first rudiments of his "Agricultural Chemistry," which sounded so fresh a note in the matter of teaching, had given an instance and a measure of his capabilities.
But he did not seriously devote himself to this project until after the industrial failure and the distressing miscarriage of his madder process; and not until he had been previously assured of the co-operation of Charles Delagrave, a young publisher, whose fortunate intervention contributed in no small degree to his deliverance. Confident in his vast powers of work, and divining his incomparable talent as POPULARIZER, Delagrave felt that he could promise Fabre that he would never leave him without work; and this promise was all the more comforting, in that the University, despite his twenty-eight years of assiduous service, would not accord him the smallest pension.
Victor Duruy was the great restorer of education in France, from elementary and primary education, which should date, from his great ministry, the era of its deliverance, to the secondary education which he himself created in every part. He was also the real initiator of secular instruction in France, and the Third Republic has done little but resume his work, develop his ideas, and extend his programme. Finally, by instituting classes for adults, the evening classes which enabled workmen, peasants, bourgeois, and young women to fill the gaps in their education, he gave reality to the generous and fruitful idea that it is possible for all to divide life into two parts, one having for its object our material needs and our daily bread, and the other consecrated to the spiritual life and the delights of the Ideal.
At the same time he emancipated the young women of France, formerly under the exclusive tutelage of the clergy, and opened to them for the first time the golden gates of knowledge; an audacious innovation, and formidable withal, for it shrewdly touched the interests of the Church, struck a blow at her ever-increasing influence, and clashed with her consecrated privileges and age-long prejudices. (4/25.)
At Avignon Fabre was instructed to give his personal services. He gave them with all his heart; and it was then that he undertook, in the ancient Abbey of Saint-Martial, those famous free lectures which have remained celebrated in the memory of that generation. There, under the ancient Gothic vault, among the pupils of the primary Normal College, an eager crowd of listeners pressed to hear him; and among the most assiduous was Roumanille, the friend of Mistral, he who so exquisitely wove into his harmonies "the laughter of young maidens and the flowers of springtime." No one expounded a fact better than Fabre; no one explained it so fully and so clearly. No one could teach as he did, in a fashion so simple, so animated, so picturesque, and by methods so original.
He was indeed convinced that even in early childhood it was possible for both boys and girls to learn and to love many subjects which had hitherto never been proposed; and in particular that Natural History which to him was a book in which all the world might read, but that university methods had reduced it to a tedious and useless study in which the letter "killed the life."
He knew the secret of communicating his conviction, his profound faith, to his hearers: that sacred fire which animated him, that passion for all the creatures of nature.
These lectures took place in the evening, twice a week, alternately with the municipal lectures, to which Fabre brought no less application and ardour. In the intention of those who instituted them these latter were above all to be practical and scientific, dealing with science applied to agriculture, the arts, and industry.
But might he not also expect auditors of another quality, in love only with the ideal, "who, without troubling about the possible applications of scientific theory, desired above all to be initiated into the action of the forces which rule nature, and thereby to open to their minds more wondrous horizons"?
Such were the noble scruples which troubled his conscience, and which appeared in the letter which he addressed to the administration of the city, when he was entrusted by the latter with what he regarded as a lofty and most important mission.
"...Is it to be understood that every purely scientific aspect, incapable of immediate application, is to be rigorously banished from these lessons? Is it to be understood that, confined to an impassable circle, the value of every truth must be reckoned at so much per hundred, and that I must silently pass over all that aims only at satisfying a laudable desire of knowledge? No, gentlemen, for then these lectures would lack a very essential thing: the spirit which gives life!" (4/26.)
Physically, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, he was already as an admirable photograph represents him twenty years later: he wore a large black felt hat; his face was shaven, the chin strong and wilful, the eyes vigilant, deep-set and penetrating; he hardly changed, and it was thus I saw him later, at a more advanced age.
The ancient Abbey of Saint-Martial, where these lectures were given, was occupied also by the Requien Museum, of which Fabre had charge. It was here that he one day met John Stuart Mill.
The celebrated philosopher and economist had just lost his wife: "the most precious friendship of his life" was ended. (4/27.) It was only after long waiting that he had been able to marry her. Subjected at an early age by a father devoid of tenderness and formidably severe to the harshest of disciplines, he had learned in childhood "what is usually learned only by a man." Scarcely out of his long clothes, he was construing Herodotus and the dialogues of Plato, and the whole of his dreary youth was spent in covering the vast field of the moral and mathematical sciences. His heart, always suppressed, never really expanded until he met Mrs. Harriett Taylor.
This was one of those privileged beings such as seem as a rule to exist only in poetry and literature; a woman as beautiful as she was astonishingly gifted with the rarest faculties; combining with the most searching intelligence and the most persuasive eloquence so exquisite a sensitiveness that she seemed often to divine events in advance.
Mill possessed her at last for a few years only, and he had resigned his post in the offices of the East India Company to enjoy a studious retreat in the enchanted atmosphere of southern Europe when suddenly at Avignon Harriett Mill was carried off by a violent illness. (Mill retired in 1858, when the government of India passed to the Crown. He had married Mrs. John Taylor in 1851. [Tr.])
>From that time the philosopher's horizon was suddenly contracted to the limit of those places whence had vanished the adored companion and the beneficent genius who had been the sole charm of his entire existence. Overwhelmed with grief, he acquired a small country house in one of the least frequented parts of the suburbs of Avignon, close to the cemetery where the beloved dead was laid to rest for ever. A silent alley of planes and mulberry-trees led to the threshold, which was shaded by the delicate foliage of a myrtle. All about he had planted a dense hedge of hawthorn, cypress, and arborvitae, above which, from the vantage of a small terrace, built, under his orders, at the level of the first floor, he could see, day by day and at all hours, the white tomb of his wife, and a little ease his grief.
Thus he cloistered himself, "living in memory," having no companion but the daughter of his wife; trying to console himself by work, recapitulating his life, the story of which he has told in his remarkable "Memoirs." (4/28.)
Fabre paid a few visits to this Thebaïd. A solitary such as Mill had become could be attracted only by a man of his temper, in whom he found, if not an affinity of nature, at least tastes like his own, and immense learning, as great as his. For Mill also was versed in all the branches of human knowledge: not only had he meditated on the high problems of history and political economy, but he had also probed all branches of science: mathematics, physics, and natural history. It was above all botany which served them as a bond of union, and they were often seen to set forth on a botanizing expedition through the countryside.
This friendship, which was not without profit for Fabre (4/29.), was still more precious to Mill, who found, in the society of the naturalist, a certain relief from his sorrow. The substance of their conversation was far from being such as one might have imagined it. Mill was not highly sensible to the festival of nature or the poetry of the fields. He was hardly interested in botany, except from the somewhat abstract point of view of classification and the systematic arrangement of species. Always melancholy, cold, and distant, he spoke little; but Fabre felt under this apparent sensibility a rigorous integrity of character, a great capacity for devotion, and a rare goodness of heart.
So the two wandered across country, each thinking his own thoughts, and each self-contained as though they were walking on parallel but distant paths.
However, Fabre was not at the end of his troubles; and secret ill-feeling began to surround him. The free lectures at Saint-Martial offended the devout, angered the sectaries, and excited the intolerance of the pedants, "whose feeble eyelids blink at the daylight," and he was far from receiving, from his colleagues at the lycée, the sympathy and encouragement which were, at this moment especially, so necessary to him. Some even went so far as to denounce him publicly, and he was mentioned one day from the height of the pulpit, to the indignation of the pupils of the upper Normal College, as a man at once dangerous and subversive.
Some found it objectionable that this "irregular person, this man of solitary study," should, by his work and by the magic of his teaching, assume a position so unique and so disproportionate. Others regarded the novelty of placing the sciences at the disposal of young girls as a heresy and a scandal.
Their bickering, their cabals, their secret manoeuvres, were in the long run to triumph. Duruy had just succumbed under the incessant attacks of the clericals. In him Fabre lost a friend, a protector, and his only support. Embittered, defeated, he was now only waiting for a pretext, an incident, a mere nothing, to throw up everything.
One fine morning his landladies, devout and aged spinsters, made themselves the instruments of the spite of his enemies, and abruptly gave him notice to quit. he had to leave before the end of the month, for, simple and confident as usual, he had obtained neither a lease nor the least written agreement.
At this moment he was so poor that he had not even the money to meet the expenses of his removal. The times were troublous: the great war had commenced, and Paris being invested he could no longer obtain the small earnings which his textbooks were beginning to yield him, and which had for some time been increasing his modest earnings. On the other hand, having always lived far from all society, he had not at Avignon a single relation who could assist him, and he could neither obtain credit nor find any one to extricate him from his embarrassments and save him from the extremity of need with which he was threatened. He thought of Mill, and in this difficult juncture it was Mill who saved him. The philosopher was then in England; he was for the time being a member of the House of Commons, and he used to vary his life at Avignon by a few weeks' sojourn in London. His reply, however, was not long in coming: almost immediately he sent help; a sum of some 120 pounds sterling, which fell like manna into the hands of Fabre; and he did not, in exchange, demand the slightest security for this advance.
Then, filled with disgust, the "irregular person" shook off the yoke and retired to Orange. At first he took shelter where he could, anxious only to avoid as far as possible any contact with his fellow-men; then, having finally discovered a dwelling altogether in conformity with his tastes, he moved to the outskirts of the city, and settled at the edge of the fields, in the middle of a great meadow, in an isolated house, pleasant and commodious, connected with the road to Camaret by a superb avenue of tall and handsome plane-trees. This hermitage in some respects recalled that of Mill in the outskirts of Avignon; and thence his eyes, embracing a vast horizon, from the pediment of the ancient theatre to the hills of Sérignan, could already distinguish the promised land.