CHAPTER IV

[Contents]CHAPTER IVTHE SCHOOLBOY: SAINT-LÉONSTo know a pupil thoroughly, it is not enough to study him in class; one must watch him at play, for it is then especially that his nascent tastes reveal themselves, and the outlines of his future personality are more plainly discerned.We have seen Jean-Henri bending over his task under the eye of the schoolmaster, or of his father; now let us follow him in the free play of his activities, absorbed in intimate communion with the children of nature. He himself will tell us what were his favourite pastimes in the garden, by the pond, or in the fields.All the reminiscences of the little Jean-Henri’s schooldays pall before the memory of his father’s garden:A tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle1with the four turrets[40]that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips, and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village.A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents’ watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother2and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the soil. It is the garden ofmonsieur le notaire.There are beds with box-borders in that garden;[41]there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears!We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recoverterra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss!3I confess I love this little sketch of the garden, which gives evidence of a singular[42]clearness of perception in the gaze which this child already turns upon the things about him.But I like still better the history of the duck-pond, graceful as an idyll and touching as an elegy, the idyll of a rustic childhood which becomes aware, simultaneously, of the family secrets and the secrets of nature; the elegy of a father’s tenderness and a son’s piety cramped and mortified by poverty, the elegy of intelligence, nay, of genius, ready to spread its wings and fettered in its flight by the heavy chains and harsh necessities of material existence:How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips, and even a few hives in a sheltered[43]corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face. But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother, and its adjoining patch of garden. The meagre resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it, and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen, not to blood-curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war,4has set up a small tallow-factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle-grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.“Suppose we breed some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”That night I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I[44]took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbour.To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny Shellfish nor Worms and Tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water-weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to rear; the tallow-smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he possesses the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer we have hardly water to drink!Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty spring trickles into a basin made in the rock. Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their[45]water there in copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbours have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight, nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.On the hills, the path that climbs behind the château soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, which forms a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys! The too-frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing[46]for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They, too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any further if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets: shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there, and everywhere. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-coloured cords. One might take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognise, on a very small scale, a familiar object:[47]the Tadpole, the Frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder-trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a Beetle—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects[48]into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machine; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else; let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saint’s day, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing-floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking[49]stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bend towards the light, I see something like gold-filings whirl where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat Snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s-horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late, and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters,[50]let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail-shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold-filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s-horn turned to stone.Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”Broken-hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram’s-horn, heavenly Beetle are all flung on a rubbish-heap outside the door.Mother bewails her lot:“A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit[51]it to-day. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck-pool were rock-crystal, the gold-dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite, and the sky-blue Beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the field of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favoured by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered[52]state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years.5His excursions to the pond and the garden were little more to our little Jean-Henri than the preface to rather more distant excursions in the neighbourhood of Saint-Léons. The edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and the skirts of the beechwood which limit his horizon are the chosen spots to which his[53]curiosity leads him, and the favourite scene of his childish rambles. It is really delightful to watch him taking possession of these unknown territories and making the first inventory of the wealth that he will explore later on.On that day, wealthy and leisured, with an apple for my lunch and all my time to myself, I decided to visit the brown of the neighbouring hill, hitherto looked upon as the boundary of the world. Right at the top is a row of trees which, turning their backs to the wind, bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often, from the little window in my home, have I not seen them bowing their heads in stormy weather; how often have I not watched them writhing like madmen amid the snow-dust which the north-wind’s besom raises and smooths along the hill-side! What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? I am interested in their supple backs, to-day still and upright against the blue of the sky, to-morrow shaken when the clouds pass overhead. I am gladdened by their calmness; I am distressed by their terrified gestures. They are my friends. I have them before my eyes at every hour of the day. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? I am going to climb up there; and perhaps I shall find out.I mount the slope. It is a lean grass-sward[54]close-cropped by the sheep. It has no bushes, fertile in rents and tears, for which I should have to answer on returning home, nor any rocks, the scaling of which involves like dangers; nothing but large, flat stones, scattered here and there. I have only to go straight on, over smooth ground. But the sward is as steep as a sloping roof. It is long, ever so long; and my legs are very short. From time to time I look up. My friends, the trees on the hill-top, seem to be no nearer. Cheerly, sonnie! Scramble away!What is this at my feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding-place under the eaves of a big stone. Bless us, here’s a nest made of hair and fine straw! It’s the first I have ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring me. And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and these eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.Meanwhile the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—“Tack! Tack!”—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of[55]my hand. Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hill-top over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again. At the bottom I meet the parish priest’s curate reading his breviary as he takes his walk. He sees me coming solemnly along, like a relic-bearer; he catches sight of my hand hiding something behind my back:“What have you there, my boy?” he asks.All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.“Ah!” says his reverence. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”“Up there, father, under a stone.”Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. “By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is;—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill-feathers.”“You mustn’t do that, my little friend,” replies the priest. “You mustn’t rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God’s birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields, and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don’t touch the nest.”[56]I promise; and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that plundering birds’ nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.“Saxicola,” the priest had said, on seeing my find.“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?”Years passed; and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hill-sides is also called theMotteux, or Clodhopper,6because, in the ploughing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grub-worms. Lastly, I came upon the Provençal expression[57]Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird’s rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for to-day I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or Wheat-ear.On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden-patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low, bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot-bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee-deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool, and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless seas; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.A miller has bethought him of putting the brook,[58]which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economising the gradient, diverts part of the water, and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill-wheels with motor-power. This basin stands beside a frequented path, and is walled off at the end.One day, hoisting myself on a play-fellow’s shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless, stagnant waters covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. To-day I should call it a Salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the Serpent and the Dragon, of whom we were told such blood-curdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I’ve seen enough; let’s get down again, quick!The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.This is the haunt of the red-necktied Minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running[59]water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering Rooks, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one’s first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant Hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that I have turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.Soon I find others, differing in size, shape, and colour. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their underside with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder.[60]What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the Rooks, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or theBouturel, as we call it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how theBouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.As my visits to the beech-clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating flakes. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillæ on a cat’s tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve[61]so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the Puffball in English, but its French name is theVesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination:Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me thatLycoperdonmeansVesse-de-loupand nothing else.How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! “Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!” said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were once the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; to-day, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along as it rushes towards the abyss.7Can one imagine a more picturesque and original fashion of sketching the outline of one’s earliest memories? We have collected these memories, which he has scattered so profusely over the pages of his books, with pious care, because they so delightfully reveal[62]a soul and a life that are akin to our own, more especially in their beginnings, and because they so wonderfully evoke an age and a country that were once ours and are still the possession of our grand-nephews.At the age of ten the time came for the child to bid a fresh farewell to his native village. His father was the first of his race to be tempted by the town, and he removed his home to Rodez. Jean-Henri was never again to behold the humble village where he lived “his best years,” but he bore its image indelibly stamped upon his mind, upon that part of it in which are formed those profound impressions that grow more vivid with the years instead of fading. He left it at first with a light heart, but later on he was homesick for it; and as the years went by he felt more than ever its mysterious attraction, so that one of his last wishes was to see his grave dug in the shadow of his cradle. But we will not wrong feelings so delicate by seeking to interpret them; we will let him speak for himself.Leaving our native village is no very serious matter when we are children. We even look on it as a sort of holiday. We are going to see something new, those magic pictures of our dreams. With age come regrets; and the close of life is[63]spent in stirring up old memories. Then, in our dreamy moods, the beloved village reappears, embellished, transfigured by the glow of those first impressions; and the mental image, superior to the reality, stands out in amazingly clear relief. The past, the far-off past, was only yesterday; we see it, we touch it.For my part, after three-quarters of a century, I could walk with my eyes closed straight to the flat stone where I first heard the soft chiming note of the Midwife Toad; yes, I should find it to a certainty, if time, which devastates all things, even the homes of Toads, has not moved it or perhaps left it in ruins.I see, on the margin of the brook, the exact position of the alder-trees whose tangled roots, deep under the water, were a refuge for the Crayfish. I should say:“It is just at the foot of this tree that I had the unutterable bliss of catching a beauty. She had horns so long … and enormous claws, full of meat, for I got her just at the right time.”I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. Oh, what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs.I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the[64]towns to which the vicissitudes of life have brought me. An exquisitely sweet link binds us to our native soil; we are like the plant that has to be torn away from the spot where it put out its first roots. Poor though it be, I should love to see my own village again; I should like to leave my bones there.8[65]1The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author[40]was born in 1823. Cf.The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M.↑2The 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.↑3Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 126, 127;Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.”↑4The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M.↑5Souvenirs, pp. 260–270.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑6The 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 ProvençalCul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M.↑7Souvenirs, pp. 292–300.The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.”↑8Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 125–129.Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.”↑

[Contents]CHAPTER IVTHE SCHOOLBOY: SAINT-LÉONSTo know a pupil thoroughly, it is not enough to study him in class; one must watch him at play, for it is then especially that his nascent tastes reveal themselves, and the outlines of his future personality are more plainly discerned.We have seen Jean-Henri bending over his task under the eye of the schoolmaster, or of his father; now let us follow him in the free play of his activities, absorbed in intimate communion with the children of nature. He himself will tell us what were his favourite pastimes in the garden, by the pond, or in the fields.All the reminiscences of the little Jean-Henri’s schooldays pall before the memory of his father’s garden:A tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle1with the four turrets[40]that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips, and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village.A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents’ watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother2and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the soil. It is the garden ofmonsieur le notaire.There are beds with box-borders in that garden;[41]there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears!We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recoverterra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss!3I confess I love this little sketch of the garden, which gives evidence of a singular[42]clearness of perception in the gaze which this child already turns upon the things about him.But I like still better the history of the duck-pond, graceful as an idyll and touching as an elegy, the idyll of a rustic childhood which becomes aware, simultaneously, of the family secrets and the secrets of nature; the elegy of a father’s tenderness and a son’s piety cramped and mortified by poverty, the elegy of intelligence, nay, of genius, ready to spread its wings and fettered in its flight by the heavy chains and harsh necessities of material existence:How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips, and even a few hives in a sheltered[43]corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face. But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother, and its adjoining patch of garden. The meagre resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it, and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen, not to blood-curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war,4has set up a small tallow-factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle-grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.“Suppose we breed some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”That night I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I[44]took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbour.To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny Shellfish nor Worms and Tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water-weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to rear; the tallow-smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he possesses the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer we have hardly water to drink!Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty spring trickles into a basin made in the rock. Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their[45]water there in copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbours have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight, nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.On the hills, the path that climbs behind the château soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, which forms a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys! The too-frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing[46]for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They, too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any further if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets: shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there, and everywhere. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-coloured cords. One might take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognise, on a very small scale, a familiar object:[47]the Tadpole, the Frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder-trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a Beetle—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects[48]into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machine; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else; let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saint’s day, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing-floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking[49]stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bend towards the light, I see something like gold-filings whirl where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat Snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s-horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late, and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters,[50]let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail-shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold-filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s-horn turned to stone.Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”Broken-hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram’s-horn, heavenly Beetle are all flung on a rubbish-heap outside the door.Mother bewails her lot:“A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit[51]it to-day. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck-pool were rock-crystal, the gold-dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite, and the sky-blue Beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the field of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favoured by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered[52]state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years.5His excursions to the pond and the garden were little more to our little Jean-Henri than the preface to rather more distant excursions in the neighbourhood of Saint-Léons. The edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and the skirts of the beechwood which limit his horizon are the chosen spots to which his[53]curiosity leads him, and the favourite scene of his childish rambles. It is really delightful to watch him taking possession of these unknown territories and making the first inventory of the wealth that he will explore later on.On that day, wealthy and leisured, with an apple for my lunch and all my time to myself, I decided to visit the brown of the neighbouring hill, hitherto looked upon as the boundary of the world. Right at the top is a row of trees which, turning their backs to the wind, bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often, from the little window in my home, have I not seen them bowing their heads in stormy weather; how often have I not watched them writhing like madmen amid the snow-dust which the north-wind’s besom raises and smooths along the hill-side! What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? I am interested in their supple backs, to-day still and upright against the blue of the sky, to-morrow shaken when the clouds pass overhead. I am gladdened by their calmness; I am distressed by their terrified gestures. They are my friends. I have them before my eyes at every hour of the day. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? I am going to climb up there; and perhaps I shall find out.I mount the slope. It is a lean grass-sward[54]close-cropped by the sheep. It has no bushes, fertile in rents and tears, for which I should have to answer on returning home, nor any rocks, the scaling of which involves like dangers; nothing but large, flat stones, scattered here and there. I have only to go straight on, over smooth ground. But the sward is as steep as a sloping roof. It is long, ever so long; and my legs are very short. From time to time I look up. My friends, the trees on the hill-top, seem to be no nearer. Cheerly, sonnie! Scramble away!What is this at my feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding-place under the eaves of a big stone. Bless us, here’s a nest made of hair and fine straw! It’s the first I have ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring me. And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and these eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.Meanwhile the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—“Tack! Tack!”—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of[55]my hand. Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hill-top over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again. At the bottom I meet the parish priest’s curate reading his breviary as he takes his walk. He sees me coming solemnly along, like a relic-bearer; he catches sight of my hand hiding something behind my back:“What have you there, my boy?” he asks.All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.“Ah!” says his reverence. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”“Up there, father, under a stone.”Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. “By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is;—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill-feathers.”“You mustn’t do that, my little friend,” replies the priest. “You mustn’t rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God’s birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields, and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don’t touch the nest.”[56]I promise; and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that plundering birds’ nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.“Saxicola,” the priest had said, on seeing my find.“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?”Years passed; and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hill-sides is also called theMotteux, or Clodhopper,6because, in the ploughing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grub-worms. Lastly, I came upon the Provençal expression[57]Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird’s rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for to-day I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or Wheat-ear.On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden-patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low, bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot-bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee-deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool, and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless seas; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.A miller has bethought him of putting the brook,[58]which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economising the gradient, diverts part of the water, and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill-wheels with motor-power. This basin stands beside a frequented path, and is walled off at the end.One day, hoisting myself on a play-fellow’s shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless, stagnant waters covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. To-day I should call it a Salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the Serpent and the Dragon, of whom we were told such blood-curdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I’ve seen enough; let’s get down again, quick!The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.This is the haunt of the red-necktied Minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running[59]water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering Rooks, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one’s first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant Hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that I have turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.Soon I find others, differing in size, shape, and colour. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their underside with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder.[60]What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the Rooks, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or theBouturel, as we call it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how theBouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.As my visits to the beech-clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating flakes. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillæ on a cat’s tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve[61]so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the Puffball in English, but its French name is theVesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination:Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me thatLycoperdonmeansVesse-de-loupand nothing else.How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! “Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!” said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were once the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; to-day, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along as it rushes towards the abyss.7Can one imagine a more picturesque and original fashion of sketching the outline of one’s earliest memories? We have collected these memories, which he has scattered so profusely over the pages of his books, with pious care, because they so delightfully reveal[62]a soul and a life that are akin to our own, more especially in their beginnings, and because they so wonderfully evoke an age and a country that were once ours and are still the possession of our grand-nephews.At the age of ten the time came for the child to bid a fresh farewell to his native village. His father was the first of his race to be tempted by the town, and he removed his home to Rodez. Jean-Henri was never again to behold the humble village where he lived “his best years,” but he bore its image indelibly stamped upon his mind, upon that part of it in which are formed those profound impressions that grow more vivid with the years instead of fading. He left it at first with a light heart, but later on he was homesick for it; and as the years went by he felt more than ever its mysterious attraction, so that one of his last wishes was to see his grave dug in the shadow of his cradle. But we will not wrong feelings so delicate by seeking to interpret them; we will let him speak for himself.Leaving our native village is no very serious matter when we are children. We even look on it as a sort of holiday. We are going to see something new, those magic pictures of our dreams. With age come regrets; and the close of life is[63]spent in stirring up old memories. Then, in our dreamy moods, the beloved village reappears, embellished, transfigured by the glow of those first impressions; and the mental image, superior to the reality, stands out in amazingly clear relief. The past, the far-off past, was only yesterday; we see it, we touch it.For my part, after three-quarters of a century, I could walk with my eyes closed straight to the flat stone where I first heard the soft chiming note of the Midwife Toad; yes, I should find it to a certainty, if time, which devastates all things, even the homes of Toads, has not moved it or perhaps left it in ruins.I see, on the margin of the brook, the exact position of the alder-trees whose tangled roots, deep under the water, were a refuge for the Crayfish. I should say:“It is just at the foot of this tree that I had the unutterable bliss of catching a beauty. She had horns so long … and enormous claws, full of meat, for I got her just at the right time.”I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. Oh, what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs.I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the[64]towns to which the vicissitudes of life have brought me. An exquisitely sweet link binds us to our native soil; we are like the plant that has to be torn away from the spot where it put out its first roots. Poor though it be, I should love to see my own village again; I should like to leave my bones there.8[65]1The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author[40]was born in 1823. Cf.The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M.↑2The 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.↑3Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 126, 127;Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.”↑4The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M.↑5Souvenirs, pp. 260–270.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑6The 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 ProvençalCul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M.↑7Souvenirs, pp. 292–300.The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.”↑8Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 125–129.Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.”↑

CHAPTER IVTHE SCHOOLBOY: SAINT-LÉONS

To know a pupil thoroughly, it is not enough to study him in class; one must watch him at play, for it is then especially that his nascent tastes reveal themselves, and the outlines of his future personality are more plainly discerned.We have seen Jean-Henri bending over his task under the eye of the schoolmaster, or of his father; now let us follow him in the free play of his activities, absorbed in intimate communion with the children of nature. He himself will tell us what were his favourite pastimes in the garden, by the pond, or in the fields.All the reminiscences of the little Jean-Henri’s schooldays pall before the memory of his father’s garden:A tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle1with the four turrets[40]that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips, and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village.A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents’ watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother2and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the soil. It is the garden ofmonsieur le notaire.There are beds with box-borders in that garden;[41]there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears!We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recoverterra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss!3I confess I love this little sketch of the garden, which gives evidence of a singular[42]clearness of perception in the gaze which this child already turns upon the things about him.But I like still better the history of the duck-pond, graceful as an idyll and touching as an elegy, the idyll of a rustic childhood which becomes aware, simultaneously, of the family secrets and the secrets of nature; the elegy of a father’s tenderness and a son’s piety cramped and mortified by poverty, the elegy of intelligence, nay, of genius, ready to spread its wings and fettered in its flight by the heavy chains and harsh necessities of material existence:How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips, and even a few hives in a sheltered[43]corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face. But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother, and its adjoining patch of garden. The meagre resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it, and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen, not to blood-curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war,4has set up a small tallow-factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle-grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.“Suppose we breed some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”That night I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I[44]took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbour.To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny Shellfish nor Worms and Tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water-weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to rear; the tallow-smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he possesses the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer we have hardly water to drink!Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty spring trickles into a basin made in the rock. Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their[45]water there in copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbours have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight, nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.On the hills, the path that climbs behind the château soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, which forms a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys! The too-frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing[46]for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They, too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any further if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets: shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there, and everywhere. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-coloured cords. One might take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognise, on a very small scale, a familiar object:[47]the Tadpole, the Frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder-trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a Beetle—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects[48]into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machine; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else; let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saint’s day, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing-floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking[49]stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bend towards the light, I see something like gold-filings whirl where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat Snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s-horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late, and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters,[50]let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail-shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold-filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s-horn turned to stone.Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”Broken-hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram’s-horn, heavenly Beetle are all flung on a rubbish-heap outside the door.Mother bewails her lot:“A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit[51]it to-day. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck-pool were rock-crystal, the gold-dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite, and the sky-blue Beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the field of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favoured by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered[52]state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years.5His excursions to the pond and the garden were little more to our little Jean-Henri than the preface to rather more distant excursions in the neighbourhood of Saint-Léons. The edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and the skirts of the beechwood which limit his horizon are the chosen spots to which his[53]curiosity leads him, and the favourite scene of his childish rambles. It is really delightful to watch him taking possession of these unknown territories and making the first inventory of the wealth that he will explore later on.On that day, wealthy and leisured, with an apple for my lunch and all my time to myself, I decided to visit the brown of the neighbouring hill, hitherto looked upon as the boundary of the world. Right at the top is a row of trees which, turning their backs to the wind, bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often, from the little window in my home, have I not seen them bowing their heads in stormy weather; how often have I not watched them writhing like madmen amid the snow-dust which the north-wind’s besom raises and smooths along the hill-side! What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? I am interested in their supple backs, to-day still and upright against the blue of the sky, to-morrow shaken when the clouds pass overhead. I am gladdened by their calmness; I am distressed by their terrified gestures. They are my friends. I have them before my eyes at every hour of the day. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? I am going to climb up there; and perhaps I shall find out.I mount the slope. It is a lean grass-sward[54]close-cropped by the sheep. It has no bushes, fertile in rents and tears, for which I should have to answer on returning home, nor any rocks, the scaling of which involves like dangers; nothing but large, flat stones, scattered here and there. I have only to go straight on, over smooth ground. But the sward is as steep as a sloping roof. It is long, ever so long; and my legs are very short. From time to time I look up. My friends, the trees on the hill-top, seem to be no nearer. Cheerly, sonnie! Scramble away!What is this at my feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding-place under the eaves of a big stone. Bless us, here’s a nest made of hair and fine straw! It’s the first I have ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring me. And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and these eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.Meanwhile the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—“Tack! Tack!”—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of[55]my hand. Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hill-top over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again. At the bottom I meet the parish priest’s curate reading his breviary as he takes his walk. He sees me coming solemnly along, like a relic-bearer; he catches sight of my hand hiding something behind my back:“What have you there, my boy?” he asks.All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.“Ah!” says his reverence. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”“Up there, father, under a stone.”Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. “By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is;—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill-feathers.”“You mustn’t do that, my little friend,” replies the priest. “You mustn’t rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God’s birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields, and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don’t touch the nest.”[56]I promise; and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that plundering birds’ nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.“Saxicola,” the priest had said, on seeing my find.“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?”Years passed; and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hill-sides is also called theMotteux, or Clodhopper,6because, in the ploughing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grub-worms. Lastly, I came upon the Provençal expression[57]Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird’s rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for to-day I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or Wheat-ear.On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden-patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low, bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot-bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee-deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool, and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless seas; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.A miller has bethought him of putting the brook,[58]which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economising the gradient, diverts part of the water, and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill-wheels with motor-power. This basin stands beside a frequented path, and is walled off at the end.One day, hoisting myself on a play-fellow’s shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless, stagnant waters covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. To-day I should call it a Salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the Serpent and the Dragon, of whom we were told such blood-curdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I’ve seen enough; let’s get down again, quick!The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.This is the haunt of the red-necktied Minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running[59]water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering Rooks, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one’s first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant Hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that I have turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.Soon I find others, differing in size, shape, and colour. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their underside with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder.[60]What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the Rooks, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or theBouturel, as we call it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how theBouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.As my visits to the beech-clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating flakes. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillæ on a cat’s tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve[61]so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the Puffball in English, but its French name is theVesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination:Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me thatLycoperdonmeansVesse-de-loupand nothing else.How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! “Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!” said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were once the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; to-day, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along as it rushes towards the abyss.7Can one imagine a more picturesque and original fashion of sketching the outline of one’s earliest memories? We have collected these memories, which he has scattered so profusely over the pages of his books, with pious care, because they so delightfully reveal[62]a soul and a life that are akin to our own, more especially in their beginnings, and because they so wonderfully evoke an age and a country that were once ours and are still the possession of our grand-nephews.At the age of ten the time came for the child to bid a fresh farewell to his native village. His father was the first of his race to be tempted by the town, and he removed his home to Rodez. Jean-Henri was never again to behold the humble village where he lived “his best years,” but he bore its image indelibly stamped upon his mind, upon that part of it in which are formed those profound impressions that grow more vivid with the years instead of fading. He left it at first with a light heart, but later on he was homesick for it; and as the years went by he felt more than ever its mysterious attraction, so that one of his last wishes was to see his grave dug in the shadow of his cradle. But we will not wrong feelings so delicate by seeking to interpret them; we will let him speak for himself.Leaving our native village is no very serious matter when we are children. We even look on it as a sort of holiday. We are going to see something new, those magic pictures of our dreams. With age come regrets; and the close of life is[63]spent in stirring up old memories. Then, in our dreamy moods, the beloved village reappears, embellished, transfigured by the glow of those first impressions; and the mental image, superior to the reality, stands out in amazingly clear relief. The past, the far-off past, was only yesterday; we see it, we touch it.For my part, after three-quarters of a century, I could walk with my eyes closed straight to the flat stone where I first heard the soft chiming note of the Midwife Toad; yes, I should find it to a certainty, if time, which devastates all things, even the homes of Toads, has not moved it or perhaps left it in ruins.I see, on the margin of the brook, the exact position of the alder-trees whose tangled roots, deep under the water, were a refuge for the Crayfish. I should say:“It is just at the foot of this tree that I had the unutterable bliss of catching a beauty. She had horns so long … and enormous claws, full of meat, for I got her just at the right time.”I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. Oh, what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs.I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the[64]towns to which the vicissitudes of life have brought me. An exquisitely sweet link binds us to our native soil; we are like the plant that has to be torn away from the spot where it put out its first roots. Poor though it be, I should love to see my own village again; I should like to leave my bones there.8[65]

To know a pupil thoroughly, it is not enough to study him in class; one must watch him at play, for it is then especially that his nascent tastes reveal themselves, and the outlines of his future personality are more plainly discerned.

We have seen Jean-Henri bending over his task under the eye of the schoolmaster, or of his father; now let us follow him in the free play of his activities, absorbed in intimate communion with the children of nature. He himself will tell us what were his favourite pastimes in the garden, by the pond, or in the fields.

All the reminiscences of the little Jean-Henri’s schooldays pall before the memory of his father’s garden:

A tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle1with the four turrets[40]that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips, and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village.A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents’ watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother2and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the soil. It is the garden ofmonsieur le notaire.There are beds with box-borders in that garden;[41]there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears!We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recoverterra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss!3

A tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle1with the four turrets[40]that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.

There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips, and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village.

A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents’ watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother2and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the soil. It is the garden ofmonsieur le notaire.

There are beds with box-borders in that garden;[41]there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears!

We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.

I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recoverterra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss!3

I confess I love this little sketch of the garden, which gives evidence of a singular[42]clearness of perception in the gaze which this child already turns upon the things about him.

But I like still better the history of the duck-pond, graceful as an idyll and touching as an elegy, the idyll of a rustic childhood which becomes aware, simultaneously, of the family secrets and the secrets of nature; the elegy of a father’s tenderness and a son’s piety cramped and mortified by poverty, the elegy of intelligence, nay, of genius, ready to spread its wings and fettered in its flight by the heavy chains and harsh necessities of material existence:

How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips, and even a few hives in a sheltered[43]corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face. But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother, and its adjoining patch of garden. The meagre resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it, and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen, not to blood-curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war,4has set up a small tallow-factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle-grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.“Suppose we breed some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”That night I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I[44]took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbour.To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny Shellfish nor Worms and Tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water-weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to rear; the tallow-smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he possesses the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer we have hardly water to drink!Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty spring trickles into a basin made in the rock. Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their[45]water there in copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbours have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight, nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.On the hills, the path that climbs behind the château soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, which forms a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys! The too-frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing[46]for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They, too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any further if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets: shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there, and everywhere. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-coloured cords. One might take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognise, on a very small scale, a familiar object:[47]the Tadpole, the Frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder-trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a Beetle—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects[48]into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machine; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else; let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saint’s day, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing-floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking[49]stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bend towards the light, I see something like gold-filings whirl where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat Snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s-horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late, and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters,[50]let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail-shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold-filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s-horn turned to stone.Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”Broken-hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram’s-horn, heavenly Beetle are all flung on a rubbish-heap outside the door.Mother bewails her lot:“A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit[51]it to-day. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck-pool were rock-crystal, the gold-dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite, and the sky-blue Beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the field of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favoured by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered[52]state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years.5

How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.

Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips, and even a few hives in a sheltered[43]corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face. But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother, and its adjoining patch of garden. The meagre resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it, and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.

Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen, not to blood-curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war,4has set up a small tallow-factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle-grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.

“Suppose we breed some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”

“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”

That night I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I[44]took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.

A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbour.

To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.

A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny Shellfish nor Worms and Tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water-weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to rear; the tallow-smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he possesses the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer we have hardly water to drink!

Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty spring trickles into a basin made in the rock. Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their[45]water there in copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbours have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight, nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.

There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.

On the hills, the path that climbs behind the château soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, which forms a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.

You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys! The too-frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing[46]for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.

Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They, too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any further if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.

We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets: shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there, and everywhere. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.

What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-coloured cords. One might take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.

I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognise, on a very small scale, a familiar object:[47]the Tadpole, the Frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.

The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.

Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.

At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder-trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a Beetle—not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.

The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects[48]into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machine; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.

Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else; let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.

On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saint’s day, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.

We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing-floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking[49]stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.

The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bend towards the light, I see something like gold-filings whirl where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.

I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.

I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat Snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s-horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?

Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late, and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters,[50]let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.

The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail-shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold-filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s-horn turned to stone.

Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.

“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”

Broken-hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram’s-horn, heavenly Beetle are all flung on a rubbish-heap outside the door.

Mother bewails her lot:

“A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”

Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit[51]it to-day. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?

A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck-pool were rock-crystal, the gold-dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite, and the sky-blue Beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the field of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favoured by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.

And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.

Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered[52]state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.

As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.

Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years.5

His excursions to the pond and the garden were little more to our little Jean-Henri than the preface to rather more distant excursions in the neighbourhood of Saint-Léons. The edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and the skirts of the beechwood which limit his horizon are the chosen spots to which his[53]curiosity leads him, and the favourite scene of his childish rambles. It is really delightful to watch him taking possession of these unknown territories and making the first inventory of the wealth that he will explore later on.

On that day, wealthy and leisured, with an apple for my lunch and all my time to myself, I decided to visit the brown of the neighbouring hill, hitherto looked upon as the boundary of the world. Right at the top is a row of trees which, turning their backs to the wind, bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often, from the little window in my home, have I not seen them bowing their heads in stormy weather; how often have I not watched them writhing like madmen amid the snow-dust which the north-wind’s besom raises and smooths along the hill-side! What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? I am interested in their supple backs, to-day still and upright against the blue of the sky, to-morrow shaken when the clouds pass overhead. I am gladdened by their calmness; I am distressed by their terrified gestures. They are my friends. I have them before my eyes at every hour of the day. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? I am going to climb up there; and perhaps I shall find out.I mount the slope. It is a lean grass-sward[54]close-cropped by the sheep. It has no bushes, fertile in rents and tears, for which I should have to answer on returning home, nor any rocks, the scaling of which involves like dangers; nothing but large, flat stones, scattered here and there. I have only to go straight on, over smooth ground. But the sward is as steep as a sloping roof. It is long, ever so long; and my legs are very short. From time to time I look up. My friends, the trees on the hill-top, seem to be no nearer. Cheerly, sonnie! Scramble away!What is this at my feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding-place under the eaves of a big stone. Bless us, here’s a nest made of hair and fine straw! It’s the first I have ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring me. And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and these eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.Meanwhile the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—“Tack! Tack!”—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of[55]my hand. Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hill-top over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again. At the bottom I meet the parish priest’s curate reading his breviary as he takes his walk. He sees me coming solemnly along, like a relic-bearer; he catches sight of my hand hiding something behind my back:“What have you there, my boy?” he asks.All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.“Ah!” says his reverence. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”“Up there, father, under a stone.”Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. “By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is;—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill-feathers.”“You mustn’t do that, my little friend,” replies the priest. “You mustn’t rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God’s birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields, and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don’t touch the nest.”[56]I promise; and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that plundering birds’ nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.“Saxicola,” the priest had said, on seeing my find.“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?”Years passed; and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hill-sides is also called theMotteux, or Clodhopper,6because, in the ploughing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grub-worms. Lastly, I came upon the Provençal expression[57]Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird’s rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for to-day I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or Wheat-ear.On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden-patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low, bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot-bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee-deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool, and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless seas; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.A miller has bethought him of putting the brook,[58]which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economising the gradient, diverts part of the water, and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill-wheels with motor-power. This basin stands beside a frequented path, and is walled off at the end.One day, hoisting myself on a play-fellow’s shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless, stagnant waters covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. To-day I should call it a Salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the Serpent and the Dragon, of whom we were told such blood-curdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I’ve seen enough; let’s get down again, quick!The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.This is the haunt of the red-necktied Minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running[59]water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering Rooks, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one’s first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant Hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that I have turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.Soon I find others, differing in size, shape, and colour. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their underside with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder.[60]What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the Rooks, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or theBouturel, as we call it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how theBouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.As my visits to the beech-clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating flakes. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillæ on a cat’s tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve[61]so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the Puffball in English, but its French name is theVesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination:Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me thatLycoperdonmeansVesse-de-loupand nothing else.How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! “Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!” said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were once the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; to-day, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along as it rushes towards the abyss.7

On that day, wealthy and leisured, with an apple for my lunch and all my time to myself, I decided to visit the brown of the neighbouring hill, hitherto looked upon as the boundary of the world. Right at the top is a row of trees which, turning their backs to the wind, bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often, from the little window in my home, have I not seen them bowing their heads in stormy weather; how often have I not watched them writhing like madmen amid the snow-dust which the north-wind’s besom raises and smooths along the hill-side! What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? I am interested in their supple backs, to-day still and upright against the blue of the sky, to-morrow shaken when the clouds pass overhead. I am gladdened by their calmness; I am distressed by their terrified gestures. They are my friends. I have them before my eyes at every hour of the day. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? I am going to climb up there; and perhaps I shall find out.

I mount the slope. It is a lean grass-sward[54]close-cropped by the sheep. It has no bushes, fertile in rents and tears, for which I should have to answer on returning home, nor any rocks, the scaling of which involves like dangers; nothing but large, flat stones, scattered here and there. I have only to go straight on, over smooth ground. But the sward is as steep as a sloping roof. It is long, ever so long; and my legs are very short. From time to time I look up. My friends, the trees on the hill-top, seem to be no nearer. Cheerly, sonnie! Scramble away!

What is this at my feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding-place under the eaves of a big stone. Bless us, here’s a nest made of hair and fine straw! It’s the first I have ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring me. And in this nest are six eggs, laid prettily side by side; and these eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in a dye of celestial azure. Overpowered with happiness, I lie down on the grass and stare.

Meanwhile the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—“Tack! Tack!”—flies anxiously from stone to stone, not far from the intruder. My age knows no pity, is still too barbarous to understand maternal anguish. A plan is running in my head, a plan worthy of a little beast of prey. I will come back in a fortnight and collect the nestlings before they can fly away. In the meantime, I will just take one of those pretty blue eggs, only one, as a trophy. Lest it should be crushed, I place the fragile thing on a little moss in the scoop of[55]my hand. Let him cast a stone at me that has not, in his childhood, known the rapture of finding his first nest.

My delicate burden, which would be ruined by a false step, makes me give up the remainder of the climb. Some other day I shall see the trees on the hill-top over which the sun rises. I go down the slope again. At the bottom I meet the parish priest’s curate reading his breviary as he takes his walk. He sees me coming solemnly along, like a relic-bearer; he catches sight of my hand hiding something behind my back:

“What have you there, my boy?” he asks.

All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.

“Ah!” says his reverence. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”

“Up there, father, under a stone.”

Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. “By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is;—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill-feathers.”

“You mustn’t do that, my little friend,” replies the priest. “You mustn’t rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God’s birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields, and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don’t touch the nest.”[56]

I promise; and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that plundering birds’ nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.

“Saxicola,” the priest had said, on seeing my find.

“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?”

Years passed; and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hill-sides is also called theMotteux, or Clodhopper,6because, in the ploughing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grub-worms. Lastly, I came upon the Provençal expression[57]Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird’s rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.

Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for to-day I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or Wheat-ear.

On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden-patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low, bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot-bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee-deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool, and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless seas; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.

A miller has bethought him of putting the brook,[58]which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economising the gradient, diverts part of the water, and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill-wheels with motor-power. This basin stands beside a frequented path, and is walled off at the end.

One day, hoisting myself on a play-fellow’s shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless, stagnant waters covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. To-day I should call it a Salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the Serpent and the Dragon, of whom we were told such blood-curdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I’ve seen enough; let’s get down again, quick!

The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.

This is the haunt of the red-necktied Minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running[59]water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.

On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering Rooks, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one’s first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant Hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that I have turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.

Soon I find others, differing in size, shape, and colour. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their underside with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder.[60]

What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the Rooks, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or theBouturel, as we call it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how theBouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.

As my visits to the beech-clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating flakes. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillæ on a cat’s tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.

Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve[61]so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.

The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the Puffball in English, but its French name is theVesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination:Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me thatLycoperdonmeansVesse-de-loupand nothing else.

How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! “Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!” said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were once the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; to-day, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along as it rushes towards the abyss.7

Can one imagine a more picturesque and original fashion of sketching the outline of one’s earliest memories? We have collected these memories, which he has scattered so profusely over the pages of his books, with pious care, because they so delightfully reveal[62]a soul and a life that are akin to our own, more especially in their beginnings, and because they so wonderfully evoke an age and a country that were once ours and are still the possession of our grand-nephews.

At the age of ten the time came for the child to bid a fresh farewell to his native village. His father was the first of his race to be tempted by the town, and he removed his home to Rodez. Jean-Henri was never again to behold the humble village where he lived “his best years,” but he bore its image indelibly stamped upon his mind, upon that part of it in which are formed those profound impressions that grow more vivid with the years instead of fading. He left it at first with a light heart, but later on he was homesick for it; and as the years went by he felt more than ever its mysterious attraction, so that one of his last wishes was to see his grave dug in the shadow of his cradle. But we will not wrong feelings so delicate by seeking to interpret them; we will let him speak for himself.

Leaving our native village is no very serious matter when we are children. We even look on it as a sort of holiday. We are going to see something new, those magic pictures of our dreams. With age come regrets; and the close of life is[63]spent in stirring up old memories. Then, in our dreamy moods, the beloved village reappears, embellished, transfigured by the glow of those first impressions; and the mental image, superior to the reality, stands out in amazingly clear relief. The past, the far-off past, was only yesterday; we see it, we touch it.For my part, after three-quarters of a century, I could walk with my eyes closed straight to the flat stone where I first heard the soft chiming note of the Midwife Toad; yes, I should find it to a certainty, if time, which devastates all things, even the homes of Toads, has not moved it or perhaps left it in ruins.I see, on the margin of the brook, the exact position of the alder-trees whose tangled roots, deep under the water, were a refuge for the Crayfish. I should say:“It is just at the foot of this tree that I had the unutterable bliss of catching a beauty. She had horns so long … and enormous claws, full of meat, for I got her just at the right time.”I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. Oh, what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs.I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the[64]towns to which the vicissitudes of life have brought me. An exquisitely sweet link binds us to our native soil; we are like the plant that has to be torn away from the spot where it put out its first roots. Poor though it be, I should love to see my own village again; I should like to leave my bones there.8

Leaving our native village is no very serious matter when we are children. We even look on it as a sort of holiday. We are going to see something new, those magic pictures of our dreams. With age come regrets; and the close of life is[63]spent in stirring up old memories. Then, in our dreamy moods, the beloved village reappears, embellished, transfigured by the glow of those first impressions; and the mental image, superior to the reality, stands out in amazingly clear relief. The past, the far-off past, was only yesterday; we see it, we touch it.

For my part, after three-quarters of a century, I could walk with my eyes closed straight to the flat stone where I first heard the soft chiming note of the Midwife Toad; yes, I should find it to a certainty, if time, which devastates all things, even the homes of Toads, has not moved it or perhaps left it in ruins.

I see, on the margin of the brook, the exact position of the alder-trees whose tangled roots, deep under the water, were a refuge for the Crayfish. I should say:

“It is just at the foot of this tree that I had the unutterable bliss of catching a beauty. She had horns so long … and enormous claws, full of meat, for I got her just at the right time.”

I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. Oh, what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs.

I know my village thoroughly, though I quitted it so long ago; and I know hardly anything of the[64]towns to which the vicissitudes of life have brought me. An exquisitely sweet link binds us to our native soil; we are like the plant that has to be torn away from the spot where it put out its first roots. Poor though it be, I should love to see my own village again; I should like to leave my bones there.8

[65]

1The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author[40]was born in 1823. Cf.The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M.↑2The 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.↑3Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 126, 127;Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.”↑4The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M.↑5Souvenirs, pp. 260–270.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑6The 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 ProvençalCul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M.↑7Souvenirs, pp. 292–300.The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.”↑8Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 125–129.Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.”↑

1The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author[40]was born in 1823. Cf.The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M.↑2The 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.↑3Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 126, 127;Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.”↑4The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M.↑5Souvenirs, pp. 260–270.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑6The 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 ProvençalCul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M.↑7Souvenirs, pp. 292–300.The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.”↑8Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 125–129.Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.”↑

1The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author[40]was born in 1823. Cf.The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M.↑

1The Château de Saint-Léons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Léons, where the author[40]was born in 1823. Cf.The Life of the Fly, chaps. vi. and vii.—A. T. de M.↑

2The 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.↑

2The 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.↑

3Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 126, 127;Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.”↑

3Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 126, 127;Bramble-Bees, chap. xiii, “The Halicti.”↑

4The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M.↑

4The war of 1830 with Algiers.—A. T. de M.↑

5Souvenirs, pp. 260–270.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑

5Souvenirs, pp. 260–270.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑

6The 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 ProvençalCul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M.↑

6The 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 ProvençalCul-blanc. The Stonechat is a member of the same genus. B. M.↑

7Souvenirs, pp. 292–300.The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.”↑

7Souvenirs, pp. 292–300.The Life of the Fly, chap. xvii., “Recollections of Childhood.”↑

8Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 125–129.Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.”↑

8Souvenirs,VIII., pp. 125–129.Bramble-bees, chap. xiii., “The Halicti: The Portress.”↑

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