Fabre, Poet of Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the lesson which he gives his brother:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.