[Contents]CHAPTER VAT THE COLLEGE OF RODEZWe have learned what we may of the schoolboy of Saint-Léons. Let us follow him to theLycéeof Rodez, which he entered as a day-boy at the age of ten:I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side, two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone theDomine, salvum fac regemat the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere there was talk[66]of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.1At Rodez, as at Saint-Léons, natural objects provided him with the chief material of his recreations:The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had[67]been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The[68]loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.2The incident of which we have just read was the starting-point of the investigations which Fabre was to undertake fifty years later concerning the artificial sleep of birds and insects.If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is,[69]he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.3[70]Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of theBucolicsand theGeorgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than theMetamorphosesof Ovid orReligionof Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodezlycéewith literary exercises.All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of[71]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast[72]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning:procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.4This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered[73]life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of theMedusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.5[74]1Souvenirs,VI., p. 60.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑2Souvenirs,VII., pp. 29, 33.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?”↑3Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑4Souvenirs,II., pp. 41–44, 46.Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.”↑5Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
[Contents]CHAPTER VAT THE COLLEGE OF RODEZWe have learned what we may of the schoolboy of Saint-Léons. Let us follow him to theLycéeof Rodez, which he entered as a day-boy at the age of ten:I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side, two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone theDomine, salvum fac regemat the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere there was talk[66]of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.1At Rodez, as at Saint-Léons, natural objects provided him with the chief material of his recreations:The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had[67]been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The[68]loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.2The incident of which we have just read was the starting-point of the investigations which Fabre was to undertake fifty years later concerning the artificial sleep of birds and insects.If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is,[69]he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.3[70]Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of theBucolicsand theGeorgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than theMetamorphosesof Ovid orReligionof Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodezlycéewith literary exercises.All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of[71]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast[72]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning:procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.4This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered[73]life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of theMedusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.5[74]1Souvenirs,VI., p. 60.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑2Souvenirs,VII., pp. 29, 33.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?”↑3Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑4Souvenirs,II., pp. 41–44, 46.Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.”↑5Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
CHAPTER VAT THE COLLEGE OF RODEZ
We have learned what we may of the schoolboy of Saint-Léons. Let us follow him to theLycéeof Rodez, which he entered as a day-boy at the age of ten:I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side, two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone theDomine, salvum fac regemat the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere there was talk[66]of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.1At Rodez, as at Saint-Léons, natural objects provided him with the chief material of his recreations:The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had[67]been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The[68]loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.2The incident of which we have just read was the starting-point of the investigations which Fabre was to undertake fifty years later concerning the artificial sleep of birds and insects.If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is,[69]he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.3[70]Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of theBucolicsand theGeorgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than theMetamorphosesof Ovid orReligionof Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodezlycéewith literary exercises.All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of[71]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast[72]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning:procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.4This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered[73]life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of theMedusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.5[74]
We have learned what we may of the schoolboy of Saint-Léons. Let us follow him to theLycéeof Rodez, which he entered as a day-boy at the age of ten:
I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side, two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone theDomine, salvum fac regemat the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere there was talk[66]of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.1
I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side, two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone theDomine, salvum fac regemat the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.
Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere there was talk[66]of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.
Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.1
At Rodez, as at Saint-Léons, natural objects provided him with the chief material of his recreations:
The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had[67]been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The[68]loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.2
The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had[67]been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.
This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!
We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.
Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.
And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The[68]loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!
How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.
Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.2
The incident of which we have just read was the starting-point of the investigations which Fabre was to undertake fifty years later concerning the artificial sleep of birds and insects.
If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is,[69]he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:
By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.3
By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.3
[70]
Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of theBucolicsand theGeorgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than theMetamorphosesof Ovid orReligionof Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodezlycéewith literary exercises.
All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.
In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:
The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of[71]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast[72]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning:procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.4
The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of[71]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.
Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.
With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast[72]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning:procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.
I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.
This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.4
This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered[73]life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.
Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of theMedusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.5
Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.
Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of theMedusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.5
[74]
1Souvenirs,VI., p. 60.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑2Souvenirs,VII., pp. 29, 33.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?”↑3Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑4Souvenirs,II., pp. 41–44, 46.Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.”↑5Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
1Souvenirs,VI., p. 60.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑2Souvenirs,VII., pp. 29, 33.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?”↑3Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑4Souvenirs,II., pp. 41–44, 46.Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.”↑5Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
1Souvenirs,VI., p. 60.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
1Souvenirs,VI., p. 60.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
2Souvenirs,VII., pp. 29, 33.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?”↑
2Souvenirs,VII., pp. 29, 33.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. xv., “Suicide or Hypnosis?”↑
3Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
3Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
4Souvenirs,II., pp. 41–44, 46.Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.”↑
4Souvenirs,II., pp. 41–44, 46.Hunting Wasps, chap. xx., “A Modern Theory of Instinct.”↑
5Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑
5Souvenirs,VI., p. 61.The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.”↑