CHAPTER IX

[Contents]CHAPTER IXTHE PROFESSOR: AJACCIOVirgil has truly said:…labor omnia vincitImprobus.Persistent labour, in the service of a keen intelligence, knows no insuperable obstacles: it always achieves its ends. Success, accordingly, could not fail to befall the intrepid virtuosity of the youthful Carpentras schoolmaster. The degree of licentiate in the mathematical sciences was won, like the rest, at the point of the sword, and the valiant champion of the cosine and the laboratory was appointed Professor of Physics and Chemistry in thelycéeof Ajaccio.Here, by a happy concatenation of circumstances, and under the inward impulsion of the providential vocation, the destiny of the famous entomologist was to be finally determined.In this novel environment, in “this paradise[119]of glorious Nature,” everything stimulated the alert curiosity of the predestined biologist; the sea, full of marvels, the beach, where the waves threw up such beautiful shells, themaquisof myrtle, arbutus, and lentisk!… This time the temptation was too great! He surrendered. His leisure was divided into two parts. One was still devoted to mathematics, the basis of his future in the university. The other was already spent in botanising and in investigating the wonders of the sea.What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I had not been obsessed byxandyI should have surrendered wholly to my inclinations!Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien1by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations, and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector.[120]Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the woes of novices.In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon,2with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments;[121]and there we were for a fortnight, chatting at tablede omni re scibili, after the botanical excursion was over.With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that:“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.”We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,3with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans callerba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm[122]than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.On the day before his departure, he said to me:“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.4Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open, but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of Lavaysse; the[123]star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble vestiges.Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was[124]being fêted, one of his visitors asked him the question:“Do you believe in God?”To which he replied emphatically:“I can’t say I believe in God; IseeHim. Without Him I understand nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this conviction; I have …aggravatedoramelioratedit, whichever you please. Every period has its manias.I regard Atheism as a mania.It is the malady of the age.You could take my skin from me more easily than my faith in God.”We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this belief with almost all our great scientists.Corsica, which vouchsafed Fabre the revelation of his vocation as naturalist, inspired him also with such love and enthusiasm as he had never hitherto known.There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be confirmed and increased. He felt that this superb and luxuriant nature was made for him, and that he was born for it; to understand and interpret it. He would lose himself in a delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands, the mountains rich with[125]scented flowers, wandering through themaquis, the myrtle scrub, through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his emotion when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of Bastelica, with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre majesty inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious. Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy, listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar forms filled him with delight.Not that he had time to make a very rich harvest of facts and observations in this wonderful country. The most visible result of his sojourn in the “isle of beauty,” and the greatest benefit which he derived from it, seems to have been the fact that it brought his heart and mind—if I may be permitted the expression—into a state of entomological grace; I mean into a state of living and acting truly and beautifully in accordance with his vocation as a naturalist.So it is that the name of this radiant daughter of the Mediterranean, which is so often written by his pen, seems to find its way thither in order to evoke one of the brightest[126]and most joyful periods of his life, rather than to localise observations or circumstantial experiences.There is, however, one of these reminiscences which, despite the extreme sobriety of the characteristics recorded, denotes, in the youthful entomologist, a mind peculiarly attentive to the slightest indications and the least movements of his future clients of the animal world. It deals with the Spider,5that ill-famed creature whom all hasten to crush underfoot as an odious and maleficent insect, but which the entomologist holds in high esteem for its talents as a spinner, its hunting expedients, and other highly interesting characteristics. The author has just explained, on behalf of the poor, supposedly poisonous insect, that for us its bite has no serious results, producing less effect than the bite of a gnat: “Nevertheless, a few are to be feared; and foremost among these is the Malmignatte, the terror of the Corsican peasantry.”By good fortune the only Tarantula that bit him in Corsica was the Tarantula of natural history.But while he was not injured by the spiders,[127]he was less fortunate in defending himself against the mosquitoes, from whose bites he contracted an attack of malaria, in the myrtlemaquiswhich he doubtless haunted more persistently than was wise.This unfortunate incident persuaded him to apply for an appointment in France.[128]1Esprit Requien (1788–1851), a French naturalist and collector, director of the museum and botanical gardens at Avignon and author of several works on botany and conchology.—A. T. de M.↑2Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon (1804–63), a distinguished naturalist, for twenty years director of the botanical gardens at Toulouse. He was commissioned by the French Government in 1850 to compile a flora of Corsica, and is the author of several important works on botany and zoology.—A. T. de M.↑3A mountain 7730 feet high, about twenty-five miles from Ajaccio.—A. T. de M.↑4Souvenirs,VI., pp. 63–66.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑5Souvenirs,I., pp. 178–180.The Life of the Spider, chap. ii., “The Black-bellied Tarantula.”↑

CHAPTER IXTHE PROFESSOR: AJACCIO

Virgil has truly said:…labor omnia vincitImprobus.Persistent labour, in the service of a keen intelligence, knows no insuperable obstacles: it always achieves its ends. Success, accordingly, could not fail to befall the intrepid virtuosity of the youthful Carpentras schoolmaster. The degree of licentiate in the mathematical sciences was won, like the rest, at the point of the sword, and the valiant champion of the cosine and the laboratory was appointed Professor of Physics and Chemistry in thelycéeof Ajaccio.Here, by a happy concatenation of circumstances, and under the inward impulsion of the providential vocation, the destiny of the famous entomologist was to be finally determined.In this novel environment, in “this paradise[119]of glorious Nature,” everything stimulated the alert curiosity of the predestined biologist; the sea, full of marvels, the beach, where the waves threw up such beautiful shells, themaquisof myrtle, arbutus, and lentisk!… This time the temptation was too great! He surrendered. His leisure was divided into two parts. One was still devoted to mathematics, the basis of his future in the university. The other was already spent in botanising and in investigating the wonders of the sea.What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I had not been obsessed byxandyI should have surrendered wholly to my inclinations!Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien1by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations, and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector.[120]Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the woes of novices.In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon,2with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments;[121]and there we were for a fortnight, chatting at tablede omni re scibili, after the botanical excursion was over.With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that:“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.”We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,3with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans callerba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm[122]than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.On the day before his departure, he said to me:“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.4Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open, but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of Lavaysse; the[123]star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble vestiges.Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was[124]being fêted, one of his visitors asked him the question:“Do you believe in God?”To which he replied emphatically:“I can’t say I believe in God; IseeHim. Without Him I understand nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this conviction; I have …aggravatedoramelioratedit, whichever you please. Every period has its manias.I regard Atheism as a mania.It is the malady of the age.You could take my skin from me more easily than my faith in God.”We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this belief with almost all our great scientists.Corsica, which vouchsafed Fabre the revelation of his vocation as naturalist, inspired him also with such love and enthusiasm as he had never hitherto known.There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be confirmed and increased. He felt that this superb and luxuriant nature was made for him, and that he was born for it; to understand and interpret it. He would lose himself in a delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands, the mountains rich with[125]scented flowers, wandering through themaquis, the myrtle scrub, through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his emotion when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of Bastelica, with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre majesty inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious. Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy, listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar forms filled him with delight.Not that he had time to make a very rich harvest of facts and observations in this wonderful country. The most visible result of his sojourn in the “isle of beauty,” and the greatest benefit which he derived from it, seems to have been the fact that it brought his heart and mind—if I may be permitted the expression—into a state of entomological grace; I mean into a state of living and acting truly and beautifully in accordance with his vocation as a naturalist.So it is that the name of this radiant daughter of the Mediterranean, which is so often written by his pen, seems to find its way thither in order to evoke one of the brightest[126]and most joyful periods of his life, rather than to localise observations or circumstantial experiences.There is, however, one of these reminiscences which, despite the extreme sobriety of the characteristics recorded, denotes, in the youthful entomologist, a mind peculiarly attentive to the slightest indications and the least movements of his future clients of the animal world. It deals with the Spider,5that ill-famed creature whom all hasten to crush underfoot as an odious and maleficent insect, but which the entomologist holds in high esteem for its talents as a spinner, its hunting expedients, and other highly interesting characteristics. The author has just explained, on behalf of the poor, supposedly poisonous insect, that for us its bite has no serious results, producing less effect than the bite of a gnat: “Nevertheless, a few are to be feared; and foremost among these is the Malmignatte, the terror of the Corsican peasantry.”By good fortune the only Tarantula that bit him in Corsica was the Tarantula of natural history.But while he was not injured by the spiders,[127]he was less fortunate in defending himself against the mosquitoes, from whose bites he contracted an attack of malaria, in the myrtlemaquiswhich he doubtless haunted more persistently than was wise.This unfortunate incident persuaded him to apply for an appointment in France.[128]

Virgil has truly said:

…labor omnia vincitImprobus.

…labor omnia vincit

Improbus.

Persistent labour, in the service of a keen intelligence, knows no insuperable obstacles: it always achieves its ends. Success, accordingly, could not fail to befall the intrepid virtuosity of the youthful Carpentras schoolmaster. The degree of licentiate in the mathematical sciences was won, like the rest, at the point of the sword, and the valiant champion of the cosine and the laboratory was appointed Professor of Physics and Chemistry in thelycéeof Ajaccio.

Here, by a happy concatenation of circumstances, and under the inward impulsion of the providential vocation, the destiny of the famous entomologist was to be finally determined.

In this novel environment, in “this paradise[119]of glorious Nature,” everything stimulated the alert curiosity of the predestined biologist; the sea, full of marvels, the beach, where the waves threw up such beautiful shells, themaquisof myrtle, arbutus, and lentisk!… This time the temptation was too great! He surrendered. His leisure was divided into two parts. One was still devoted to mathematics, the basis of his future in the university. The other was already spent in botanising and in investigating the wonders of the sea.

What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I had not been obsessed byxandyI should have surrendered wholly to my inclinations!Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien1by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations, and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector.[120]Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the woes of novices.In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon,2with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments;[121]and there we were for a fortnight, chatting at tablede omni re scibili, after the botanical excursion was over.With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that:“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.”We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,3with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans callerba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm[122]than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.On the day before his departure, he said to me:“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.4

What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I had not been obsessed byxandyI should have surrendered wholly to my inclinations!

Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien1by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations, and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector.[120]Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the woes of novices.

In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon,2with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments;[121]and there we were for a fortnight, chatting at tablede omni re scibili, after the botanical excursion was over.

With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that:

“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.”

We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,3with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans callerba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm[122]than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.

On the day before his departure, he said to me:

“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”

And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.4

Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open, but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of Lavaysse; the[123]star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble vestiges.

Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was[124]being fêted, one of his visitors asked him the question:

“Do you believe in God?”

To which he replied emphatically:

“I can’t say I believe in God; IseeHim. Without Him I understand nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this conviction; I have …aggravatedoramelioratedit, whichever you please. Every period has its manias.I regard Atheism as a mania.It is the malady of the age.You could take my skin from me more easily than my faith in God.”

We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this belief with almost all our great scientists.

Corsica, which vouchsafed Fabre the revelation of his vocation as naturalist, inspired him also with such love and enthusiasm as he had never hitherto known.

There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be confirmed and increased. He felt that this superb and luxuriant nature was made for him, and that he was born for it; to understand and interpret it. He would lose himself in a delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands, the mountains rich with[125]scented flowers, wandering through themaquis, the myrtle scrub, through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his emotion when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of Bastelica, with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre majesty inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious. Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy, listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar forms filled him with delight.

Not that he had time to make a very rich harvest of facts and observations in this wonderful country. The most visible result of his sojourn in the “isle of beauty,” and the greatest benefit which he derived from it, seems to have been the fact that it brought his heart and mind—if I may be permitted the expression—into a state of entomological grace; I mean into a state of living and acting truly and beautifully in accordance with his vocation as a naturalist.

So it is that the name of this radiant daughter of the Mediterranean, which is so often written by his pen, seems to find its way thither in order to evoke one of the brightest[126]and most joyful periods of his life, rather than to localise observations or circumstantial experiences.

There is, however, one of these reminiscences which, despite the extreme sobriety of the characteristics recorded, denotes, in the youthful entomologist, a mind peculiarly attentive to the slightest indications and the least movements of his future clients of the animal world. It deals with the Spider,5that ill-famed creature whom all hasten to crush underfoot as an odious and maleficent insect, but which the entomologist holds in high esteem for its talents as a spinner, its hunting expedients, and other highly interesting characteristics. The author has just explained, on behalf of the poor, supposedly poisonous insect, that for us its bite has no serious results, producing less effect than the bite of a gnat: “Nevertheless, a few are to be feared; and foremost among these is the Malmignatte, the terror of the Corsican peasantry.”

By good fortune the only Tarantula that bit him in Corsica was the Tarantula of natural history.

But while he was not injured by the spiders,[127]he was less fortunate in defending himself against the mosquitoes, from whose bites he contracted an attack of malaria, in the myrtlemaquiswhich he doubtless haunted more persistently than was wise.

This unfortunate incident persuaded him to apply for an appointment in France.[128]

1Esprit Requien (1788–1851), a French naturalist and collector, director of the museum and botanical gardens at Avignon and author of several works on botany and conchology.—A. T. de M.↑2Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon (1804–63), a distinguished naturalist, for twenty years director of the botanical gardens at Toulouse. He was commissioned by the French Government in 1850 to compile a flora of Corsica, and is the author of several important works on botany and zoology.—A. T. de M.↑3A mountain 7730 feet high, about twenty-five miles from Ajaccio.—A. T. de M.↑4Souvenirs,VI., pp. 63–66.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑5Souvenirs,I., pp. 178–180.The Life of the Spider, chap. ii., “The Black-bellied Tarantula.”↑

1Esprit Requien (1788–1851), a French naturalist and collector, director of the museum and botanical gardens at Avignon and author of several works on botany and conchology.—A. T. de M.↑

2Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon (1804–63), a distinguished naturalist, for twenty years director of the botanical gardens at Toulouse. He was commissioned by the French Government in 1850 to compile a flora of Corsica, and is the author of several important works on botany and zoology.—A. T. de M.↑

3A mountain 7730 feet high, about twenty-five miles from Ajaccio.—A. T. de M.↑

4Souvenirs,VI., pp. 63–66.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑

5Souvenirs,I., pp. 178–180.The Life of the Spider, chap. ii., “The Black-bellied Tarantula.”↑

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