CHAPTER XXII

THE LAST HEIGHTS [197] (1910–1915)

I

In the year 1910 Fame flung the gate of the harmas wide open. Coming late, she seemed anxious to repair her long neglect.

The process of reparation continued. It grew fuller, more marked, and burst into a splendid apotheosis during the following years.

Scientists as a class had accused Fabre of mixing up Horace and Virgil with his entomological adventures. He was despised for quoting these authors; he was placed upon the Index for introducing grace and passion into studies which officially were dry and cold as statistics. But in joining the Académie Française on the occasion of the jubilee of 1910, the Académie des Sciences gloriously avenged this unjust and Pharisaical disdain.

But there were yet some of “time’s revenges” to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.

We have spoken of his early struggles in the University, of his career, first hampered, then shattered, of the jealousies and persecutions evoked by this “irregular” self-taught pioneer; no doubt the work of a triumphant clique, which eventually drove him from the house and slammed the door. This was, as the reader may remember, on the occasion of his lecture to young girls at Saint-Martial.

But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into the harmas. [198] And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies” [199]—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?

And serious personages [200] from the precincts of the Académie and the Université de France lent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.

There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence: for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!

It needed the trumpet-blast of the jubilee (1910) to remind the authorities to complete the beau geste of Victor Duruy, and after forty years to replace the rosette of the Legion of the Cross. And it took the loud outcry of indignation uttered by Mistral and the strong feeling aroused by the report, which was echoed by the whole Press, of their involuntary debt to the ex-professor, to obtain for the nonagenarian a pension of two thousand francs (£80) a year, which was nearly fifty years in arrears!

The reparation was far from adequate; but it could not be made by means of money.

“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.

Fabre, who was then in his ninetieth year, and could no longer stand upright, awaited M. Poincaré sitting in a chair before the threshold of his house, surrounded by his family; on his right hand stood the Sister who was watching over his welfare.

A week before the President’s visit, I went to Sérignan to see my distinguished relative and to bless the marriage of his son Paul Henri.

In the familiar intimacy of this family celebration he told me, as a piece of good news: “It is possible that I shall soon receive a visit from Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon.” He said this with a marked satisfaction which was very unlike his usual detachment.

I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—to emancipate them from the tutelage of the clergy, [201] to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of the Musée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.

When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.

One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a plea pro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to the lycée at Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol, his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in the Revue scientifique of Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé [202] or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?

“Neither of Armagnac nor a Burgundian”; neither secular nor clerical. The truth is that if we consider the matter candidly, without bandaging our eyes and without exclusive prejudice, Fabre should serve as a bond of union rather than a bone of contention.

The ex-Director of the Beaux-Arts, Henry Roujon, who was a fervent apostle of national concord, used to say: “Statutes are only lastingly beautiful if the sons of the same mother can inaugurate them without railing at one another.”

Fabre, according to this maxim, might well have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.

“Nous voulions te fêter vivant Doux patriarche et grand savant, Et fier amant de la nature, Et le Rouergue où tu nacquis Et la Provence où tu conquis Le laurier d’or qui toujours dure.” [203]

(We wished to honour you living, Gentle patriarch and great scientist, And proud lover of Nature, Both Le Rouergue where you were born, And Provence where you won The golden laurel that lasts for ever.)

The first subscription-list was opened by the Normal College of Avignon, and a special appeal was made to the schoolmasters of Vaucluse and the rest of France. Other appeals were addressed to all without distinction, and the subscriptions flowed in from all sides, from scientists and men of letters, priests and schoolmasters, bourgeois and workers in town and country, to whom it was explained that the statue was in honour of one of themselves who had achieved greatness by his labours.

He himself, in his modesty, wished all to regard him only as a diligent student.

“Master,” ventured an intimate of the harmas one day, “they are talking of putting up a statue of you close by here.”

“Well, well! I shall see myself, but shall I recognise myself? I’ve had so little time for looking at myself!”

“What inscription would you prefer?”

“One word: Laboremus.”

What lesson was ever more necessary than this eloquent reminder of the great law of labour! But this grand old man, who by labour has achieved fame, teaches us yet another lesson of even rarer quality.

Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!” [204]

This reminds us of a remark whispered into a neighbour’s ear on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations, in the midst of all the fashionable folk by whom he was surrounded: “I must be very queer to look at!”

Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe: Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης. [205]

He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”

Here we recognise the man whom Rostand represented as follows in the verses inscribed upon a bas-relief which makes his collection of sonnets, entitled Fabre-des-Insectes, as it were the pendant of Charpentier’s monument:

“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral, Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailes Poursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”

(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial, Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings, Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)

II

The fine and unusual qualities of Fabre’s career consist in this; he has attained fame while seeking nothing but truth: and what a truth!—the truth concealed in the humblest of created things!

Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study.

In his hands and in his books, as though by magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.

It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing: Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos. [206] (It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)

Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little.

Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis of the reflections scattered through the pages of the Souvenirs.

This was his reply:

Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat.

Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.”

Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life, vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.

When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”

There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.

It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:

O Jesu corona celsior Et veritas sublimior.

III

Neither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.

This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?

To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s:

Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.... J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!... and a world-wide reputation to sustain ... and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!...

Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?

Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of his harmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.... A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”

Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind, and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.

“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.

But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.

With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.

With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.

Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of the harmas there burst of a sudden the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.

The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.

Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?

True, in his incomparable Iliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.

But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.

While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet of La Bonne Souffrance: [207]

“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères, Je crois en toi, Jésus....”

In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.

IV

More than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?

Like the oaks of his native parts, the patriarch of Sérignan continued to brave the assaults of time, and even when he began to feel that his life was declining, it seemed as though it was only withdrawing itself from its long and manifold ramifications in the external world to take refuge, as in an inexpugnable asylum, in the depths and roots of his being. He was one of those of whom people say with us that they “cannot die.”

Fabre’s work is immortal—that is agreed. But the artisan?

Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was the harmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.

His life: it was his study, his museum of natural history, his laboratory, where, with closed doors, face to face with Nature, he repeated, in order to perfect them, to consign them to writing, his open-air researches, his observations of the to-day or yesterday. Now he no longer sets foot in it, and now one saw—with what respect and tenderness—only the marks left by his footsteps upon the tiled floor, as he came and went about the big observation-table, which occupies all the middle of the room, in pursuit of the solution of the problems propounded by his insects.

And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series of Souvenirs.

Must they be left thus abandoned previous to their being dispersed or falling into other hands—all these precious fragments of an incomparable life, and these venerable premises, consecrated by such rare memories?

The great naturalist’s disciples could not resign themselves to the thought, and by a touching inspiration of filial piety they have found the means to secure these treasures, as by a love stronger than death, against this harrowing dispersal.

To keep the dead in their last dwelling, or attract them thither, the ancient Egyptians used to place there the image of their earthly dwelling, offering them at least a reduced facsimile of their life’s environment, of the objects and premises which had in some sort made part of their life and their soul.

Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they determined to acquire the Harmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.

“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking, [208] “so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of his harmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”

However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.

To see him in the twilight of the dining-room where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.

One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux [209] had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”

This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.” [210]

This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.

One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:

“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do not believe in God, because I see Him in all things and everywhere.’”

Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”

The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.

After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at the Harmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.

The old man appreciated her services so greatly that he was overcome with dejection by the very thought that she might be recalled by her superiors, according to the rule of her Order, after the lapse of a certain period of time. And he would gratefully press her hand when the good Sister sought to relieve his anxiety and inspire him with the hope that she would be allowed to remain in his service till the end of his days.

He found her simplicity, her delicacy, her good nature, and her devotion so delightful that he could not refrain from telling her so plainly in the direct, forcible manner familiar to him: “You are invaluable, Sister; you are admirable. I love religion as you practise it.”

“He has often told me,” she writes, “that when he could not sleep at night, he used to pray, to think of God, and address to Him a prayer which he would himself compose.”

In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly, so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.

On receiving the news of this alarming condition, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon hastened to the Harmas. The invalid expressed his delight and gratitude for the visit. Their relations were so cordial that the prelate decided to continue them by a series of admirable letters which have fortunately been published.

In these letters, with great delicacy, Monseigneur Latty avoided all that might run contrary to the naturalist’s opinions, and very gently endeavoured to induce him to die as a Christian.

To draw him more surely to the light that shines from the Cross and the grace which raises the soul above itself, he asks him to recite every evening, in unison with him, the beautiful prayer of the dying Saviour, which he calls “the prayer of the heights,” the height of Golgotha, the height of life: In manus tuus Domine commendo spiritum meum. (Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.)

However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.

During the summer of 1915 his weakness grew more marked, so that there was no hope of many more days of life. The curé of Sérignan having been mobilised, the absence of the priest at this time was a cause of great anxiety to Sister Adrienne—always on the watch for the soul ready to escape her.

Providence happily came to her assistance; and a Breton priest, who had come to the South to recover his health, and had for some time been acquainted with the master, was admitted to terms of intimacy. After some hesitation he decided to speak to the scientist of the Sacrament of Penitence. With that beautiful simplicity of his, and to the astonishment of the priest, Fabre, who seemed expecting the invitation, replied:

“Whenever you will.”

“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”

It was the 11th October 1915, at six o’clock of the evening, that the great scientist so gently surrendered his soul to God.

The obsequies, celebrated on the 16th October, “were simple and affecting, as he would have liked them to be. For a few moments before leaving the church, the old naturalist’s fine face was again exposed. It reflected an immense serenity. On his peaceful features one divined the satisfaction of the man who is departing with his work accomplished. In his parchment-like hands he clasped a wooden crucifix with ivory tips. Beside his head was a wreath of laurestinus. Beside one arm was his great black felt hat.”

The service was celebrated by the Arch-priest of Orange, in the little church; and then the harsh, rocky soil received the body of him who had so often stooped over it.

This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:

“Quos periisse putamus Præmissi sunt. Minime finis, sed limen Vitæ excelsioris.”

Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.” [211]

But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.

THE END

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In the year 1791 and on the 15th day of the month of February, in the locality of Ségur, province of Aveiron, in the presence of me, Raymond Rous, man of law and notary royal ... have been devised and concluded the following articles of marriage between Pierre-Jean Fabre, legitimate son of Pierre Fabre, landowner and farmer, and Anne Fages, husband and wife of the village of Malaval, on the one part, and Elisabeth Poujade, legitimate daughter of Antoine Poujade, landowner, and Françoise Azémar, husband and wife of the village of Mont, parish of Notre-Dame d’Arques, on the other part—the said parties acting, namely, the said future husband with the knowledge and consent of his father and mother here present, and the said future wife, she being absent, but the said Poujade for her, being here present stipulating and accepting—have in the first place promised that the said marriage shall be solemnised before the Church at the first demand of one of the

## parties, under penalty of all expenses, damages, and interests—in the

second place, the said Fabre and Fages, husband and wife, favouring and contemplating the present marriage have given and are giving by donation, declared between living persons, to the aforesaid their son, the future husband, all and each of their possessions, movable and immovable, present and future, under the clauses, conditions, and reserves hereafter following: firstly, to be fed at the same table of the same victuals as the said donor; secondly, and in case of incompatibility, they reserve to themselves the same income as Jean Fabre and Françoise Fabre, father and mother of the donor, reserved to themselves in the marriage contract of the said Fabre received by M. Dufieu, notary ...; thirdly, to settle upon their other children a portion such as by law shall pertain to them out of their possessions in money when they accept a settlement; and in case Françoise and Anne Fabre should not desire so to do, they shall enjoy the annual pension ... of three setiers each of rye, two quarters each of oats, five pounds each of butter, and five pounds each of cheese; the use of their usual bed, and of their spinning-wheel; the use of their clothes-press and the small articles of furniture necessary according to their condition; ... the said Fages, the mother, reserves to herself the sum of thirty francs to be paid once at her will to employ and dispose as she shall see fit. In the third place, the said Poujade, the father, favouring and contemplating the present marriage, has given and constituted as the dowry of his daughter, the future wife, to take the place of any right to a portion which she might claim against his goods and those of the mother aforesaid, a clothes-press with apparel valued at a hundred livres, a heifer and a cow valued the two at eighty francs, two sheep, and the sum of fifteen hundred livres, the said sum being made up of one hundred and fifty livres of the maternal parent’s and the rest of the paternal parent’s money....

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

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

“Rous, notary.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[34] Horace, Ars Poetica, 412.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[49] Souvenirs, I., pp. 221, 240–241. The Hunting Wasps, chap. xiv., “The Bembex.”

[50] Souvenirs, IV., 3–5.

[51] However, the audacious insect had other surprises in store for him: his notes speak of nests found more or less by chance near the still of a distillery, on the top of a steam-engine in a silk mill, on the walls and furniture of a farmhouse kitchen, and even in the interior of a gourd in which the farmer kept his shot on the chimney-piece; in a word, wherever there was warmth and not too much light. Souvenirs, IV., p. 8–12.

[52] Souvenirs, I., p. 122. The Hunting Wasps, chap. vii., “Advanced Theories.”

[53] Souvenirs, I., p. 136. The Hunting Wasps, chap. viii., “The Languedocian Sphex.”

[54] Souvenirs, I., pp. 50, 52; II., p. 262 et seq.

[55] Souvenirs, II., pp. 262–303, III., 194–195. The Glow-Worm, chap. ii., “The Sitaris;” The Life of the Fly, chap. iv., “Larval Dimorphism.”

[56] Horace, Ars Poetica, 409 et seq.

[57] Souvenirs, III., p. 193.

[58] Ibid., I., p. 182. The Hunting Wasps, chap. xi., “An Ascent of Mont Ventoux.”

[59] Souvenirs, I., pp. 182–3. The Hunting Wasps, chap. xi., “An Ascent of Mont Ventoux.”

[60] Souvenirs, I., p. 180.

[61] Th. Delacour and Bernard Valot of the Jardin des Plantes.

[62] Souvenirs, I., pp. 181–186. The Hunting Wasps, chap, xi., “An Ascent of Mont Ventoux.”

[63] Souvenirs, I., pp. 192–193.

[64] Souvenirs, VI., p. 166; I., p. 187.

[65] Léon Dufour (1780–1865) was an Army surgeon who in 1823 went through the Spanish campaign, and on returning to France settled in his native town, Saint-Sever, where he devoted himself chiefly to entomology.

[66] Souvenirs, I., pp. 39–41. The Hunting Wasps, chap, i., “The Buprestis-hunting Cerceris.”

[67] Fabre, Poet of Science, p. 58.

[68] Souvenirs, I., pp. 41, 44. The Hunting Wasps, chap. I., “The Buprestis-hunting Cerceris.”

[69] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 326–328.

[70] Duclaux, Pasteur, Histoire d’un Esprit, pp. 182–93.

[71] Souvenirs, IX., p. 330.

[72] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 330–331.

[73] Souvenirs, I., p. 40, 73; II., pp. 78, 83, 181, 214, 234, 235, 283; V., pp. 76, 188, 229, etc.

[74] Everybody knows to-day that heat kills, or so far enfeebles as to render inoffensive, the microbes that infect liquids and make it impossible to preserve them.

This again is one of Pasteur’s happy discoveries, as is conveyed by the very verb to pasteurise, which means “to protect against microbes by the action of heat.” We pasteurise milk, beer, wine, etc.

The ancients used to practise the heating of wines. In the house of St. John and St. Paul, discovered in Rome in 1887, beneath the church dedicated to the two martyrs, who were both officers of the Emperor Constantine, the excavators found beside the cellar and the amphoræ of wine, the little room with a fireplace known as the furnarium, which was used for heating wine and drying fruit.

The heating of wines was practised also at Mèze, near Cette, before Pasteur’s discovery.

But the ancient method of heating had nothing in common with pasteurisation. The merchants of Hérault, like the ancients, used to heat wine in order to modify its flavour, to mature it more quickly. Pasteur, on the other hand, heats it to keep it unchanged. To mature wine it is heated slowly in contact with the air. To preserve it, the wine must be rapidly heated to 122° F. in a vacuum. The object and the method are altogether different.

[75] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 329–30.

[76] St. Roch (1295–1327) is represented in his statues with the dog that saved his life by discovering him in the solitude where after curing the plague-stricken Italians, he hid himself lest he should communicate the pestilence to others.—A. T. de M.

[77] The old, partly-demolished bridge at Avignon which figures in the well-known French catch:

“Sur le pont d’Avignon, Tout le monde y danse en rond.”

(A. T. de M.)

[78] Souvenirs, X., pp. 343 et seq. The Life of the Fly, chap xx., “Industrial Chemistry.”

[79] M. François Fabié, ex-professor in the lycée of Toulon, still lives in the neighbourhood of the city, in the Villa des Troènes.

[80] Journal d’Aveyron, 8 November 1908.

[81] Souvenirs, X., pp. 338–43; The Life of the Fly, chap. xx., “Industrial Chemistry.”

[82] Cf. supra, p. 135.

[83] Souvenirs, X., p. 353. The Life of the Fly, chap. xx., “Industrial Chemistry.”

[84] Revue scientifique, May 7, 1910, speech by M. Edmond Perrier.

[85] Jean Victor Duruy (1811–1894), author of a number of historical works, including a well-known Histoire des Romains, and Minister of Public Instruction under Napoleon III. from 1863 to 1869. Cf. The Life of the Fly, chap. xx.—A. T. de M.

[86] Souvenirs, II., pp. 125–126. The Mason Bees, chap. V., “The story of my Cats.”

[87] Horace, Ode xxx., Bk. iii.

[88] Souvenirs, II., pp. 202–203. The Life of the Spider, chap. i., “The Black-bellied Tarantula.”

[89] Souvenirs, II., p. 1.

[90] The Halicti produce two generations each year: one, in the spring, is the issue of mothers who, fecundated in the autumn, have passed through the winter; the other, produced in the summer, is the fruit of parthenogenesis, that is, of procreation by the maternal virtualities alone. Of the concourse of the two sexes only females are born; parthenogenesis gives rise to both males and females.

[91] Souvenirs, VIII., pp. 144–160. The Bramble-Bees, chap. xiv., “Parthenogenesis.” It was only a later date, by combining a series of successive observations which were spread over a great length of years, that he was able to define exactly the various modes of generation employed by the Halicti, as described in the preceding note.

[92] Fabre, Poet of Science, G. V. Legros, pp. 108–115.

[93] The country round Sérignan, in Provence.—A. T. de M.

[94] Souvenirs, II., pp. 1–8. The Life of the Fly, chap. i., “The Harmas.”

[95] Souvenirs, VII., pp. 270–273. The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”

[96] Ibid., VII., 260–270.

[97] Souvenirs, VIII., 278–280, 255–295. The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “The Greenbottles”; The Mason-wasps, chap. ix., “Insect Geometry”; The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Grey Flesh-Flies.”

[98] Souvenirs, VIII., p. 228. The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Greenbottles.”

[99] Mont Ventoux, an outlying summit of the Alps, 6270 feet high. Cf. Insect Life, chap. xiii.—A. T. de M.

[100] Fabre lived the first years of his life (cf. chap. i.) on the mountains of Lavaysse, which are almost of the birth and bifurcation of the two ranges of the Levezon and the Palanger. In the language of his country La Vaysse, pronounced Lo Baïsso, means “the hazel-bush.”

An alien zoology too is represented in the osier-beds of the Aygues, whose peace is never disturbed save in freshets of exceptional duration. The wild spates of the Aygues bring into our countryside and strand in the osier-thickets the largest of our Snails, the glory of Burgundy, Helix pramatias.

[101] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 26–37, 42. The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “Heredity.”

[102] A district of the province of Guienne, having Rodez for its capital. The author’s maternal grandfather, Salgues by name, was the huissier, or, as we should say, sheriff’s officer, of Saint-Léons.—A. T. de M.

[103] The author’s father kept a café at Pierrelatte and other small towns in the south of France.—A. T. de M.

[104] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 26–37, 42. The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “Heredity.”

[105] Fabre had a sort of natural horror of luxury.

[106] Souvenirs, I., pp. 134–136. The Hunting Wasps, chap. viii., “The Languedocian Sphex.”

[107] Souvenirs, p. 319, viii., p. 1.

[108] Ibid., p. 294.

[109] Souvenirs, VI., p. 295.

[110] Souvenirs, II., pp. 80, 81, 90, 91. The Mason Wasps, chap. ii., “The Odyneri.”

[111] Souvenirs, I., p. 115. The Hunting Wasps, chap. vi., “The Larva and the Nymph.”

[112] The 14th of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.—A. T. de M.

[113] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 196–203, 246–247. The Life of the Grasshopper, chap. xiv., “The Green Grasshopper.”

[114] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 94–97, 231, 299–310. The Life and Love of the Insect, chaps. xvii., xviii.

[115] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 300–301. The Life and Love of the Insect, chap. xvii.

[116] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 302–312. The Life and Love of the Insect, chap. xxii.

[117] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 377–378. The Life of the Caterpillar, chap. v., “The Moth.”

[118] Souvenirs, III., p. 14.

[119] 26th March 1910.

[120] E. Perrier, Revue hebdomadaire, October 22, 1910.

[121] E. Perrier, loc cit.

[122] Souvenirs, I., pp. 304–306, 320; II., pp. 112, 130, 131; III., p. 16; IV., pp. 142, 167, 183; VI., p. 15; VIII., p. 159.

[123] Souvenirs, IV., pp. 167–168, 182–183. The Mason Wasps, chap. viii., “The Nest-building Odynerus.”

[124] Ibid., VI., pp. 4, 118–119, 249, 383; VIII., p. 295; X., pp. 15, 86, 112, etc.

[125] Souvenirs, I., p. 246; VI., p. 249; VIII., p. 3; X., p. 11, etc.

[126] Ibid., VII., p. 29; VIII., pp. 5, 272; X., pp. 111, 254, etc. For Lucie, his grand-daughter, aged six, see II., p. 149.

[127] Souvenirs, VII., pp. 139–41. The Life of the Caterpillar, chap. xi., “The Great Peacock”; also Social Life in the Insect World, chap. xiv.

[128] Souvenirs, X., p. 111.

[129] Souvenirs, VII., 360.

[130] Souvenirs, V., pp. 43–44. The Sacred Beetle and Others, chap. iv., “The Sacred Beetle: The Pear.”

[131] Souvenirs, V., pp. 27–29. The Sacred Beetle and Others, chap. i., “The Sacred Beetle.”

[132] It is exceedingly curious that neither Fabre nor the silk-growers knew what every English schoolboy knows so well—that silkworms thrive upon lettuce leaves, the ordinary substitute, in England, for the mulberry-leaf. Botany, of course, would not suggest such a substitute.—B. M.

[133] Souvenirs, III., pp. 297–299.

[134] Souvenirs, X., pp. 102–109.

[135] Souvenirs, II., pp. 1 to 19.

[136] Ibid., p. 104.

[137] Souvenirs, III., pp. 12–14.

[138] Souvenirs, IV., pp. 59–60.

[139] Darwin died at Down, in Kent, on the 19th of April, 1882.—A. T. de M.

[140] Souvenirs, II., p. 99.

[141] Souvenirs, II., p. 160. He makes this declaration in respect of an error which he had incorrectly attributed to Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin, on the faith of an unfaithful translation due to the entomologist Lacordaire. The mistake, which is really Lacordaire’s, not Erasmus Darwin’s, consisted in confusing the Sphex with a common Wasp. Charles Darwin, having informed Fabre that his grandfather had said “a wasp,” the French naturalist immediately inserted this correction in a note, in the second volume of the Souvenirs, which I had not yet come across when I cited the passage in question. I can therefore say with M. Fabre: “May this note amend, within the proper limits, the assertions which I made in all good faith.”

[142] Darwin died in 1882, and the second volume of the Souvenirs appeared in 1883.

[143] Souvenirs, I., pp. 188, 189; II., pp. 103; VI., pp. 25, 166, 203; VII., pp. 8, 9, 57, 161, etc.

[144] Souvenirs, VI., p. 70. The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. ix., “Dung-beetles of the Pampas.” There is also mention of Brother Judulien in a long note in vol. V., p. 131; The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, p. 238.

[145] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 184–186. The Life of the Fly, chap. xiii., “Mathematical Memories: My Little Table.”

[146] E. Perrier, Revue hebdomadaire, October 22, 1910.

[147] Revue Scientifique, May 7, 1910.

[148] Our eminent compatriot will forgive the writer for quoting the following passage from a letter of his, which so fully expresses both his admiration for our hero and his profound affection for the land of our fathers: “For the second time, on reading in the Journal d’Aveyron your comprehensive and loving study of the life and work of your illustrious namesake, I was agreeably surprised to see that you compared our characters and our work. This comparison is extremely flattering to me, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.... It is indeed a somewhat curious thing that two Rouergats should have conceived the idea of celebrating the Animals; that both should have been led by their destiny to Provence; that both should have had the course of their lives affected by the intervention of Duruy, etc. It is true that one must not push these analogies too far. Duruy merely advanced me from the Normal College of Rodez to that of Cluny; and in so doing, alas! he uprooted me.... As for the Animals, what are the poetic fancies which I have dedicated to them beside the masterly essays of the man who has been called ‘the Homer of the insects!’” M. Fabié does not dispute, any more than we ourselves, that Fabre’s fame quite legitimately belongs to Provence, which has become his second country; he merely regrets that we in our “loyal kingdom” have too long allowed our good friends of the Empire to monopolise him.

[149] Cours élémentaire d’histoire naturelle: Zoologie, p. 1, 5th edition.

[150] Cours élémentaire d’Astronomie, p. 272, 7th edition.

[151] Op. cit., “Avertissement ou Avant-Propos du Directeur de la collection, couronnée par l’Académie française.”

[152] Souvenirs, II., p. 3. The Life of the Fly, chap. i., “The Harmas.”

[153] Dedication of vol. II. of the Souvenirs.

[154] Souvenirs, II., p. 4. The Life of the Fly, chap. i., “The Harmas.”

[155] The Cicada is the Cigale, an insect akin to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the south of France. Cf. Social Life in the Insect World, chaps. i.–iv., and The Life of the Grasshopper, chaps. i.–v.—A. T. de M.

[156] F. Marguet, Revue des Deux Mondes, December 15, 1910.

[157] Ibid.

[158] F. Marguet, op. cit.

[159] F. Marguet, op. cit.

[160] Souvenirs, IV., p. 222.

[161] Fabre, Poet of Science, G. V. Legros, pp. 147, 149.

[162] F. Marguet, op. cit.

[163] Fabre, Poet of Science, G. V. Legros, translated by Bernard Miall, pp. 159–160.

[164] Souvenirs, X., pp. 100, 101.

[165] Souvenirs, VI., p. 296.

[166] Souvenirs, IX., pp. 176–178. The Mason Bees, chap. xi., “The Jeucoopes.”

[167] J. P. Lafitte, La Nature, March 26, 1910.

[168] Jean Aicard, Eloge de F. Coppée.

[169] Souvenirs, X., p. 79.

[170] Souvenirs, VIII., p. 346. The Life of the Spider, chap. II., “The Banded Epeira.”

[171] Souvenirs, X., pp. 78–79.

[172] Souvenirs, X., p. 92.

[173] Revue des Deux-Mondes, Dec. 1910, p. 875.

[174] Souvenirs, I., pp. 265, 314; V., p. 99; VII., p. 48.

[175] Ibid., I., 171–175. The Hunting Wasps, chap. X., “The Ignorance of Instinct.”

[176] Souvenirs, I., pp. 297–298. The Mason-Bees, chap. ii., “Experiments.”

[177] Souvenirs, I., p. 165. The Hunting Wasps, chap. x., “The Ignorance of Instinct.” Ibid., IV., p. 238; V., p. 90. The Sacred Beetle and Others, chap. vii., “The Broad-necked Scarabæus.”

[178] Souvenirs, II., p. 157. The Mason-Bees, chap. vii., “Reflections upon Insect Psychology.” Ibid., VI., pp. 116, 131, 148. The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xii., “The Burying Beetles: Experiments;” also Wonders of Instinct, chap. vi.

[179] Souvenirs, VI., pp. 130, 143. The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xii., “The Burying Beetles: Experiments.”

[180] Souvenirs, V., pp. 141, 142, 150. The Sacred Beetle and others, chap. xvi., “The Lunary Copris.” The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xi., “The Burying Beetles.”

[181] Souvenirs, II., p. 159. The Mason-Bees, chap. vii. “Reflections upon Insect Psychology.” Souvenirs, VI., 116. The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xi. “The Burying Beetles”; see also Wonders of Instinct, chap. vi.

[182] Souvenirs, IV., p. 238.

[183] Souvenirs, II., p. 138; VI., pp. 98, 117.

[184] Souvenirs, I., p. 220. The Hunting Wasps, chap. xiii, “The Ammophila.”

[185] Souvenirs, V., p. 130. The Sacred Beetle and Others, chap. xvi., “The Lunary Copris.” Souvenirs, VI., p. 97. The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. x., “Insect Colouring.” Souvenirs, VII., p. 193.

[186] Souvenirs, I., p. 220. The Hunting Wasps, chap. xiii., “The Ammophila.” Souvenirs, V., p. 322. The Life of the Grasshopper, chap. viii., “The Mantis: The Nest.”

[187] E. Tavernier.

[188] Souvenirs, X., pp. 92, 214.

[189] Revue hebdomadaire, October 22, 1910.

[190] La Nature, March 26, 1910. “It will be to M. Fabre’s lasting honour that he has never known any idleness of this kind or, indeed, any kind of idleness.”

[191] Souvenirs, VI., p. 75.

[192] Fabre denies “by the light of the facts” almost all the ideas which evolution invokes to explain the formation of species. (Revue des Deux Mondes, p. 891.) He says: “The facts as I see them lead me away from Darwin’s theories. Whenever I try to apply selection to the facts observed, it leaves me whirling in the void. It is majestic, but sterile: evolution asserts as regards the past; it asserts as regards the future; but it tells us as little as possible about the present. Of the three terms of duration one only escapes it, and that is the very one which is free from the fantastic imaginings of hypothesis.”

[193] Fabre appears to conceive a relation between instinct and the organ analogous to that which obtains between the soul and the body; for him the first element of instinct is an incorporeal element which he does not otherwise define, which he characterises merely as a native impulse, irresistible, infallible and superior to the organism as well as to the sensibility of the insect, although it is not separated from nor completely independent of these.

For the rest, instinct remains a mystery. What it is at bottom, “I do not know, I shall never know. It is an inviolable secret.” Like all true scientists, Fabre recognised the narrow limits of human knowledge and did not fear to admit them. According to him, neither life nor instinct results from matter; we must seek for an explanation not below but above it, and of all the marvels created that compel us to look upward and proclaim the Supreme Intelligence whence they are derived, this is one of the most striking and persuasive: “The more I see, the more I observe, the more this Intelligence shines forth behind the mystery of things.”

Fabre thus joins hands with Pasteur, and may fitly be mentioned in the same breath with him, as one of the most distinguished defenders of spiritual science and belief against materialistic science and atheism. This is all the more remarkable in that Fabre has never attempted to make any apologia, but simply stated whither all his observations and reflections tended.

[194] Quoted from Mgr. Mignot, Lettres sur les Etudes ecclésiastiques, p. 248.

[195] Souvenirs, III., p. 91.

[196] Session of the 8th December 1910.

[197] This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.

[198] This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of the Université des Annales politiques et littéraires.

[199] The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.” Cousin = cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.

[200] Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.

[201] E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros, op. cit., p. 81.

[202] M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.

[203] François Fabié.

[204] In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known as santi belli = beautiful saints.—B. M.

[205] The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to the Discours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom: Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)

[206] Psalm 100, verse 3.

[207] Françoise Coppée.

[208] Dr. Legros, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.

[209] The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.

[210] J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.

[211] E. Laguet, Annales politiques et littéraires, April 6, 1914.