CHAPTER XIV

[Contents]CHAPTER XIVTHE HERMIT OF SÉRIGNAN (1879–1910)Starting from Orange and crossing the Aygues, a torrent whose muddy waters are lost in the Rhône, but whose bed is dried by the July and August suns, leaving only a desert of pebbles, where the Mason-bee builds her pretty turrets of rock-work, we come presently to the Sérignaise country; an arid, stony tract, planted with vines and olives, coloured a rusty red, or touched here and there with almost the hue of blood; and here and there a grove of cypress makes a sombre blot. To the north runs a long black line of hills, covered with box and ilex and the giant heather of the south. Far in the distance, to the east, the immense plain is closed in by the wall of Saint-Amant and the ridge of the Dentelle, behind which the lofty Ventoux rears its rocky, cloven bosom abruptly to the clouds. At the end of a few miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful breath of the mistral, we suddenly reach a little village. It is a curious little community, with its central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping fountains, and its almost Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with flat roofs; and sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling, we see the unexpected[210]curves of a loggia. At a distance the façade of the church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close at hand is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower surmounted by a narrow mitre wrought in hammered iron, in the midst of which are seen the black profiles of the bells.At the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in the centre of an enclosure of lofty walls, which are taller than the crests of the pines and cypresses, Fabre’s dwelling is hidden away. A pink house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at the end of an alley of lilacs, “which sway in the spring under the weight of their balmy thyrsi.” Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the deafeningcacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of this solitude.There, in this “hermit’s retreat,” as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring mountain, where he would often spend whole days alone with wild nature.It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the vain agitations and storms of[211]the world, that his life has been passed, in unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to accumulate.François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged, shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth. The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high, rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black eyes, those dilated pupils—the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as though made expressly to scrutinise Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above the orbits, two short, bristling eye-brows seem set there to guide the vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass,[212]has retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.1Is not the reader dazzled by the brilliant colours, the warm tones of this picture? The Provençal light shines upon his face, splendidly avenging us for the obscurity which had too long withheld him from the admiration of the world.We could not choose a better guide to introduce us to the home of the Hermit of Sérignan, and to give us access to his person.In front of the house, beyond a low wall, of a comfortable height to lean on, is the most unexpected and improbable of gardens, a kind ofcouderc—that is, a tract of poor, stony ground, of which the naturalist has made a sort of wild park, jealously protected from the access of the profane, and literally invaded by all sorts of plants and insects. Fabre speaks of this retreat as follows:This is what I wished for,hoc erat in votis: a bit of land, oh, not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favoured[213]by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without distant expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could contrive my plans of attack, lay my ambushes, and watch their effects at every hour of the day.Hoc erat in votis.Yes, this was my wish, my dream, always cherished, always vanishing into the mists of the future.And it is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one’s daily bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and with it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered by a few links of the convict’s chain.But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the solitude of a little village. It is aharmas, the name given, in this district,2to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plough; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.[214]Myharmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth, swamped by a huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation: I am told that vines once grew here. The three-pronged fork is the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a soil as this; and I am sorry, for the primitive vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil to plunder, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they were driven by the fork.What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources. We have, in the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating. Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim-looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star-thistle and the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading orange flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, whose spikes are strong as nails. Above it towers the Illyrian cottage-thistle, whose straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and ends in[215]large pink tufts. Its armour hardly yields before that of the oyster-plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with, first of all, the prickly or “cruel” thistle, which is so well armed that the plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear-thistle, with its ample foliage, each of its nervures ending in a spear-head; lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot. In among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket where the Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As long as the ground retains some traces of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does not lack a certain charm. But let thedroughtsof summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the flame of a match would set ablaze from one end to the other. Such is, or rather was, when I took possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live henceforth alone with the insects. Forty years of desperate struggle have won it for me.Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the expression is not out of place. This accursed ground, which no one would have had at a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip-seed, is an earthly paradise for the Bees and the Wasps. Its mighty growth of thistles and centauries draws them all to me from everywhere around. Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single spot; all the trades have[216]made it their rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in goldbeater’s skin, and many more.If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles, it would muster almost the whole of the honey-yielding tribe. A learned entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Pérez, to whom I submit the naming of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means of hunting, to send him so many rarities and even novelties. The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of thistles and centauries.3What has become of the days when the entomologist lived far from his beloved insects, when he had to seek them in all directions, and even to chase them through fields and vineyards, at the risk of alarming the passers-by or having a crow to pluck with thegarde-champêtre? To-day the insects are always there, within reach of his eyes and his hand. He has hardly to look for them nowadays. They come to him, into his garden and even into his house.All Fabre’s preferences are for the insect,[217]but he loves the other creatures also and gladly gives them the rights of citizenship in theharmas. He has a peculiar sympathy for those that are misunderstood and scorned by the vulgar.In front of the house is a large pond, fed by the aqueduct that supplies the village pumps with water. Here, from half a mile and more around, come the Frogs and Toads in the lovers’ season. In May, as soon as it is dark, the pond becomes a deafening orchestra: it is impossible to talk at table, impossible to sleep.We have had a glimpse of the natural wealth of theharmas, but we have no idea as yet of some of the artificial improvements which the inventive industry of the naturalist has introduced.I have [writes Fabre] wished for a few things in my life, none of them capable of interfering with the common weal. I have longed to possess a pond, screened from the indiscretion of the passers-by, close to my house, with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed. There, in my leisure hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have meditated upon aquatic life, a primitive life, easier than our own, simpler in its affections and its brutalities. I should have studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein foci of life are[218]condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulæ of the heavens. I should have admired the nascent creature that turns, slowly turns, in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the draft perhaps of the future shell. No planet circles round its centre of attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to the pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of water. I have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of glass. A poor makeshift!A louis has been overlooked in a corner of a drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardising the domestic balance. The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion—for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all trades if you would make both ends meet—sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet-iron and a tap to let the water out. Many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely[219]serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water?4The delight of my earliest childhood, the pond, is still a spectacle of which my old age can never tire.But even with all the visions which it evokes, how far inferior is the “pond” of Sérignan to the pond of Saint-Léons, “the pond with the little ducks on it, so rich in illusions! Such a pond is not met with twice in a lifetime. One needs to be equipped with one’s first pair of breeches and one’s earliest ideas in order to have such luck!”5In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the Crickets at their concerts, a second wish often came to me. Beside the road I light upon a dead Mole, a Snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly. The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoso approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave death’s artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most deserving work.[220]To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life’s treasure-house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the Mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophising over a stench. What would people say who passed and saw me!I am now in a position to realise my second wish. I have space, air, and quiet in the solitude of theharmas. None will come here to trouble me, to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So far, so good; but observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of passers-by, I have to fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who, finding my preparations, will not fail to spoil and scatter them. In anticipation of their misdeeds, I establish workshops in mid-air, whither none but genuine corruption-agents can come, flying on their wings. At different points in the enclosure, I plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their free ends, form a stable tripod. From each of these supports I hang, at a man’s height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at the bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain. I garnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The Snake, the Lizard, the Toad receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which enable me better to follow the first attack and the work of the invaders.[221]I ring the changes with furred and feathered beasts. A few children of the neighbourhood, allured by pennies, are my regular purveyors. Throughout the good season they come running triumphantly to my door, with a Snake at the end of a stick, or a Lizard in a cabbage-leaf. They bring me the Rat caught in a trap, the Chicken dead of the pip, the Mole slain by the gardener, the Kitten killed by accident, the Rabbit poisoned by some weed. The business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and buyer. No such trade had ever been known before in the village, nor ever will be again.6Yet despite all his inventions Fabre had no illusion as to their value. He well knew that art cannot replace nature who said, speaking of his glass-walled “pond,” the aquarium of which he seemed so proud: “A poor makeshift, after all!” You may think that he is reverting to his childhood and that he will tell us again of the pond with its ducklings. But he tells us something far better:“Not all our laboratory aquaria are worth the print left in the clay by the shoe of a mule, when a shower has filled the humble[222]basin and life has peopled it with her marvels.”7Who but he could have found such a pearl in this clay?[223]1Fabre, Poet of Science, G. V. Legros, pp. 108–115.↑2The country round Sérignan, in Provence.—A. T. de M.↑3Souvenirs,II., pp. 1–8.The Life of the Fly, chap. i., “The Harmas.”↑4Souvenirs,VII., pp. 270–273.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑5Ibid.,VII., 260–270.↑6Souvenirs,VIII., 278–280, 255–295.The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “The Greenbottles”;The Mason-wasps, chap. ix., “Insect Geometry”;The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Grey Flesh-Flies.”↑7Souvenirs,VIII., p. 228.The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Greenbottles.”↑

CHAPTER XIVTHE HERMIT OF SÉRIGNAN (1879–1910)Starting from Orange and crossing the Aygues, a torrent whose muddy waters are lost in the Rhône, but whose bed is dried by the July and August suns, leaving only a desert of pebbles, where the Mason-bee builds her pretty turrets of rock-work, we come presently to the Sérignaise country; an arid, stony tract, planted with vines and olives, coloured a rusty red, or touched here and there with almost the hue of blood; and here and there a grove of cypress makes a sombre blot. To the north runs a long black line of hills, covered with box and ilex and the giant heather of the south. Far in the distance, to the east, the immense plain is closed in by the wall of Saint-Amant and the ridge of the Dentelle, behind which the lofty Ventoux rears its rocky, cloven bosom abruptly to the clouds. At the end of a few miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful breath of the mistral, we suddenly reach a little village. It is a curious little community, with its central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping fountains, and its almost Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with flat roofs; and sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling, we see the unexpected[210]curves of a loggia. At a distance the façade of the church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close at hand is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower surmounted by a narrow mitre wrought in hammered iron, in the midst of which are seen the black profiles of the bells.At the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in the centre of an enclosure of lofty walls, which are taller than the crests of the pines and cypresses, Fabre’s dwelling is hidden away. A pink house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at the end of an alley of lilacs, “which sway in the spring under the weight of their balmy thyrsi.” Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the deafeningcacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of this solitude.There, in this “hermit’s retreat,” as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring mountain, where he would often spend whole days alone with wild nature.It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the vain agitations and storms of[211]the world, that his life has been passed, in unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to accumulate.François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged, shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth. The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high, rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black eyes, those dilated pupils—the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as though made expressly to scrutinise Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above the orbits, two short, bristling eye-brows seem set there to guide the vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass,[212]has retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.1

Starting from Orange and crossing the Aygues, a torrent whose muddy waters are lost in the Rhône, but whose bed is dried by the July and August suns, leaving only a desert of pebbles, where the Mason-bee builds her pretty turrets of rock-work, we come presently to the Sérignaise country; an arid, stony tract, planted with vines and olives, coloured a rusty red, or touched here and there with almost the hue of blood; and here and there a grove of cypress makes a sombre blot. To the north runs a long black line of hills, covered with box and ilex and the giant heather of the south. Far in the distance, to the east, the immense plain is closed in by the wall of Saint-Amant and the ridge of the Dentelle, behind which the lofty Ventoux rears its rocky, cloven bosom abruptly to the clouds. At the end of a few miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful breath of the mistral, we suddenly reach a little village. It is a curious little community, with its central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping fountains, and its almost Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with flat roofs; and sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling, we see the unexpected[210]curves of a loggia. At a distance the façade of the church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close at hand is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower surmounted by a narrow mitre wrought in hammered iron, in the midst of which are seen the black profiles of the bells.At the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in the centre of an enclosure of lofty walls, which are taller than the crests of the pines and cypresses, Fabre’s dwelling is hidden away. A pink house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at the end of an alley of lilacs, “which sway in the spring under the weight of their balmy thyrsi.” Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the deafeningcacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of this solitude.There, in this “hermit’s retreat,” as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring mountain, where he would often spend whole days alone with wild nature.It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the vain agitations and storms of[211]the world, that his life has been passed, in unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to accumulate.François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged, shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth. The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high, rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black eyes, those dilated pupils—the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as though made expressly to scrutinise Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above the orbits, two short, bristling eye-brows seem set there to guide the vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass,[212]has retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.1

At the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in the centre of an enclosure of lofty walls, which are taller than the crests of the pines and cypresses, Fabre’s dwelling is hidden away. A pink house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at the end of an alley of lilacs, “which sway in the spring under the weight of their balmy thyrsi.” Before the house are the shady plane-trees, where during the burning hours of August the cicada of the flowering ash, the deafeningcacan, concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere with its eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of this solitude.

There, in this “hermit’s retreat,” as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring mountain, where he would often spend whole days alone with wild nature.

It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the vain agitations and storms of[211]the world, that his life has been passed, in unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to accumulate.

François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged, shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth. The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high, rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black eyes, those dilated pupils—the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as though made expressly to scrutinise Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above the orbits, two short, bristling eye-brows seem set there to guide the vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass,[212]has retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.1

Is not the reader dazzled by the brilliant colours, the warm tones of this picture? The Provençal light shines upon his face, splendidly avenging us for the obscurity which had too long withheld him from the admiration of the world.We could not choose a better guide to introduce us to the home of the Hermit of Sérignan, and to give us access to his person.In front of the house, beyond a low wall, of a comfortable height to lean on, is the most unexpected and improbable of gardens, a kind ofcouderc—that is, a tract of poor, stony ground, of which the naturalist has made a sort of wild park, jealously protected from the access of the profane, and literally invaded by all sorts of plants and insects. Fabre speaks of this retreat as follows:This is what I wished for,hoc erat in votis: a bit of land, oh, not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favoured[213]by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without distant expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could contrive my plans of attack, lay my ambushes, and watch their effects at every hour of the day.Hoc erat in votis.Yes, this was my wish, my dream, always cherished, always vanishing into the mists of the future.And it is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one’s daily bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and with it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered by a few links of the convict’s chain.But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the solitude of a little village. It is aharmas, the name given, in this district,2to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plough; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.[214]Myharmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth, swamped by a huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation: I am told that vines once grew here. The three-pronged fork is the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a soil as this; and I am sorry, for the primitive vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil to plunder, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they were driven by the fork.What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources. We have, in the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating. Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim-looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star-thistle and the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading orange flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, whose spikes are strong as nails. Above it towers the Illyrian cottage-thistle, whose straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and ends in[215]large pink tufts. Its armour hardly yields before that of the oyster-plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with, first of all, the prickly or “cruel” thistle, which is so well armed that the plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear-thistle, with its ample foliage, each of its nervures ending in a spear-head; lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot. In among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket where the Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As long as the ground retains some traces of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does not lack a certain charm. But let thedroughtsof summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the flame of a match would set ablaze from one end to the other. Such is, or rather was, when I took possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live henceforth alone with the insects. Forty years of desperate struggle have won it for me.Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the expression is not out of place. This accursed ground, which no one would have had at a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip-seed, is an earthly paradise for the Bees and the Wasps. Its mighty growth of thistles and centauries draws them all to me from everywhere around. Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single spot; all the trades have[216]made it their rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in goldbeater’s skin, and many more.If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles, it would muster almost the whole of the honey-yielding tribe. A learned entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Pérez, to whom I submit the naming of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means of hunting, to send him so many rarities and even novelties. The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of thistles and centauries.3What has become of the days when the entomologist lived far from his beloved insects, when he had to seek them in all directions, and even to chase them through fields and vineyards, at the risk of alarming the passers-by or having a crow to pluck with thegarde-champêtre? To-day the insects are always there, within reach of his eyes and his hand. He has hardly to look for them nowadays. They come to him, into his garden and even into his house.All Fabre’s preferences are for the insect,[217]but he loves the other creatures also and gladly gives them the rights of citizenship in theharmas. He has a peculiar sympathy for those that are misunderstood and scorned by the vulgar.In front of the house is a large pond, fed by the aqueduct that supplies the village pumps with water. Here, from half a mile and more around, come the Frogs and Toads in the lovers’ season. In May, as soon as it is dark, the pond becomes a deafening orchestra: it is impossible to talk at table, impossible to sleep.We have had a glimpse of the natural wealth of theharmas, but we have no idea as yet of some of the artificial improvements which the inventive industry of the naturalist has introduced.I have [writes Fabre] wished for a few things in my life, none of them capable of interfering with the common weal. I have longed to possess a pond, screened from the indiscretion of the passers-by, close to my house, with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed. There, in my leisure hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have meditated upon aquatic life, a primitive life, easier than our own, simpler in its affections and its brutalities. I should have studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein foci of life are[218]condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulæ of the heavens. I should have admired the nascent creature that turns, slowly turns, in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the draft perhaps of the future shell. No planet circles round its centre of attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to the pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of water. I have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of glass. A poor makeshift!A louis has been overlooked in a corner of a drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardising the domestic balance. The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion—for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all trades if you would make both ends meet—sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet-iron and a tap to let the water out. Many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely[219]serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water?4The delight of my earliest childhood, the pond, is still a spectacle of which my old age can never tire.But even with all the visions which it evokes, how far inferior is the “pond” of Sérignan to the pond of Saint-Léons, “the pond with the little ducks on it, so rich in illusions! Such a pond is not met with twice in a lifetime. One needs to be equipped with one’s first pair of breeches and one’s earliest ideas in order to have such luck!”5In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the Crickets at their concerts, a second wish often came to me. Beside the road I light upon a dead Mole, a Snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly. The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoso approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave death’s artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most deserving work.[220]To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life’s treasure-house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the Mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophising over a stench. What would people say who passed and saw me!I am now in a position to realise my second wish. I have space, air, and quiet in the solitude of theharmas. None will come here to trouble me, to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So far, so good; but observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of passers-by, I have to fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who, finding my preparations, will not fail to spoil and scatter them. In anticipation of their misdeeds, I establish workshops in mid-air, whither none but genuine corruption-agents can come, flying on their wings. At different points in the enclosure, I plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their free ends, form a stable tripod. From each of these supports I hang, at a man’s height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at the bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain. I garnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The Snake, the Lizard, the Toad receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which enable me better to follow the first attack and the work of the invaders.[221]I ring the changes with furred and feathered beasts. A few children of the neighbourhood, allured by pennies, are my regular purveyors. Throughout the good season they come running triumphantly to my door, with a Snake at the end of a stick, or a Lizard in a cabbage-leaf. They bring me the Rat caught in a trap, the Chicken dead of the pip, the Mole slain by the gardener, the Kitten killed by accident, the Rabbit poisoned by some weed. The business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and buyer. No such trade had ever been known before in the village, nor ever will be again.6Yet despite all his inventions Fabre had no illusion as to their value. He well knew that art cannot replace nature who said, speaking of his glass-walled “pond,” the aquarium of which he seemed so proud: “A poor makeshift, after all!” You may think that he is reverting to his childhood and that he will tell us again of the pond with its ducklings. But he tells us something far better:“Not all our laboratory aquaria are worth the print left in the clay by the shoe of a mule, when a shower has filled the humble[222]basin and life has peopled it with her marvels.”7Who but he could have found such a pearl in this clay?[223]

We could not choose a better guide to introduce us to the home of the Hermit of Sérignan, and to give us access to his person.

In front of the house, beyond a low wall, of a comfortable height to lean on, is the most unexpected and improbable of gardens, a kind ofcouderc—that is, a tract of poor, stony ground, of which the naturalist has made a sort of wild park, jealously protected from the access of the profane, and literally invaded by all sorts of plants and insects. Fabre speaks of this retreat as follows:

This is what I wished for,hoc erat in votis: a bit of land, oh, not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favoured[213]by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without distant expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could contrive my plans of attack, lay my ambushes, and watch their effects at every hour of the day.Hoc erat in votis.Yes, this was my wish, my dream, always cherished, always vanishing into the mists of the future.And it is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one’s daily bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and with it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered by a few links of the convict’s chain.But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the solitude of a little village. It is aharmas, the name given, in this district,2to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plough; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.[214]Myharmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth, swamped by a huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation: I am told that vines once grew here. The three-pronged fork is the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a soil as this; and I am sorry, for the primitive vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil to plunder, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they were driven by the fork.What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources. We have, in the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating. Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim-looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star-thistle and the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading orange flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, whose spikes are strong as nails. Above it towers the Illyrian cottage-thistle, whose straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and ends in[215]large pink tufts. Its armour hardly yields before that of the oyster-plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with, first of all, the prickly or “cruel” thistle, which is so well armed that the plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear-thistle, with its ample foliage, each of its nervures ending in a spear-head; lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot. In among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket where the Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As long as the ground retains some traces of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does not lack a certain charm. But let thedroughtsof summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the flame of a match would set ablaze from one end to the other. Such is, or rather was, when I took possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live henceforth alone with the insects. Forty years of desperate struggle have won it for me.Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the expression is not out of place. This accursed ground, which no one would have had at a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip-seed, is an earthly paradise for the Bees and the Wasps. Its mighty growth of thistles and centauries draws them all to me from everywhere around. Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single spot; all the trades have[216]made it their rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in goldbeater’s skin, and many more.If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles, it would muster almost the whole of the honey-yielding tribe. A learned entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Pérez, to whom I submit the naming of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means of hunting, to send him so many rarities and even novelties. The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of thistles and centauries.3

And it is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one’s daily bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage, against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and with it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say perhaps, for my leg is still hampered by a few links of the convict’s chain.

But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the solitude of a little village. It is aharmas, the name given, in this district,2to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plough; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.[214]

Myharmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth, swamped by a huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation: I am told that vines once grew here. The three-pronged fork is the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a soil as this; and I am sorry, for the primitive vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil to plunder, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they were driven by the fork.

What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources. We have, in the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating. Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim-looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star-thistle and the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading orange flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, whose spikes are strong as nails. Above it towers the Illyrian cottage-thistle, whose straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and ends in[215]large pink tufts. Its armour hardly yields before that of the oyster-plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with, first of all, the prickly or “cruel” thistle, which is so well armed that the plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear-thistle, with its ample foliage, each of its nervures ending in a spear-head; lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot. In among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket where the Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As long as the ground retains some traces of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does not lack a certain charm. But let thedroughtsof summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the flame of a match would set ablaze from one end to the other. Such is, or rather was, when I took possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live henceforth alone with the insects. Forty years of desperate struggle have won it for me.

Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the expression is not out of place. This accursed ground, which no one would have had at a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip-seed, is an earthly paradise for the Bees and the Wasps. Its mighty growth of thistles and centauries draws them all to me from everywhere around. Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large a population at a single spot; all the trades have[216]made it their rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in goldbeater’s skin, and many more.

If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles, it would muster almost the whole of the honey-yielding tribe. A learned entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Pérez, to whom I submit the naming of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means of hunting, to send him so many rarities and even novelties. The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of thistles and centauries.3

What has become of the days when the entomologist lived far from his beloved insects, when he had to seek them in all directions, and even to chase them through fields and vineyards, at the risk of alarming the passers-by or having a crow to pluck with thegarde-champêtre? To-day the insects are always there, within reach of his eyes and his hand. He has hardly to look for them nowadays. They come to him, into his garden and even into his house.

All Fabre’s preferences are for the insect,[217]but he loves the other creatures also and gladly gives them the rights of citizenship in theharmas. He has a peculiar sympathy for those that are misunderstood and scorned by the vulgar.

In front of the house is a large pond, fed by the aqueduct that supplies the village pumps with water. Here, from half a mile and more around, come the Frogs and Toads in the lovers’ season. In May, as soon as it is dark, the pond becomes a deafening orchestra: it is impossible to talk at table, impossible to sleep.

We have had a glimpse of the natural wealth of theharmas, but we have no idea as yet of some of the artificial improvements which the inventive industry of the naturalist has introduced.

I have [writes Fabre] wished for a few things in my life, none of them capable of interfering with the common weal. I have longed to possess a pond, screened from the indiscretion of the passers-by, close to my house, with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed. There, in my leisure hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have meditated upon aquatic life, a primitive life, easier than our own, simpler in its affections and its brutalities. I should have studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein foci of life are[218]condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulæ of the heavens. I should have admired the nascent creature that turns, slowly turns, in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the draft perhaps of the future shell. No planet circles round its centre of attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to the pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of water. I have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of glass. A poor makeshift!A louis has been overlooked in a corner of a drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardising the domestic balance. The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion—for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all trades if you would make both ends meet—sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet-iron and a tap to let the water out. Many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely[219]serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water?4The delight of my earliest childhood, the pond, is still a spectacle of which my old age can never tire.

I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to the pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of water. I have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of glass. A poor makeshift!

A louis has been overlooked in a corner of a drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardising the domestic balance. The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion—for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all trades if you would make both ends meet—sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet-iron and a tap to let the water out. Many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely[219]serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water?4

The delight of my earliest childhood, the pond, is still a spectacle of which my old age can never tire.

But even with all the visions which it evokes, how far inferior is the “pond” of Sérignan to the pond of Saint-Léons, “the pond with the little ducks on it, so rich in illusions! Such a pond is not met with twice in a lifetime. One needs to be equipped with one’s first pair of breeches and one’s earliest ideas in order to have such luck!”5

In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the Crickets at their concerts, a second wish often came to me. Beside the road I light upon a dead Mole, a Snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly. The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoso approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave death’s artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most deserving work.[220]To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life’s treasure-house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the Mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophising over a stench. What would people say who passed and saw me!I am now in a position to realise my second wish. I have space, air, and quiet in the solitude of theharmas. None will come here to trouble me, to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So far, so good; but observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of passers-by, I have to fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who, finding my preparations, will not fail to spoil and scatter them. In anticipation of their misdeeds, I establish workshops in mid-air, whither none but genuine corruption-agents can come, flying on their wings. At different points in the enclosure, I plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their free ends, form a stable tripod. From each of these supports I hang, at a man’s height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at the bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain. I garnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The Snake, the Lizard, the Toad receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which enable me better to follow the first attack and the work of the invaders.[221]I ring the changes with furred and feathered beasts. A few children of the neighbourhood, allured by pennies, are my regular purveyors. Throughout the good season they come running triumphantly to my door, with a Snake at the end of a stick, or a Lizard in a cabbage-leaf. They bring me the Rat caught in a trap, the Chicken dead of the pip, the Mole slain by the gardener, the Kitten killed by accident, the Rabbit poisoned by some weed. The business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and buyer. No such trade had ever been known before in the village, nor ever will be again.6

To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life’s treasure-house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the Mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophising over a stench. What would people say who passed and saw me!

I am now in a position to realise my second wish. I have space, air, and quiet in the solitude of theharmas. None will come here to trouble me, to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So far, so good; but observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of passers-by, I have to fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who, finding my preparations, will not fail to spoil and scatter them. In anticipation of their misdeeds, I establish workshops in mid-air, whither none but genuine corruption-agents can come, flying on their wings. At different points in the enclosure, I plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their free ends, form a stable tripod. From each of these supports I hang, at a man’s height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at the bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain. I garnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The Snake, the Lizard, the Toad receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which enable me better to follow the first attack and the work of the invaders.[221]I ring the changes with furred and feathered beasts. A few children of the neighbourhood, allured by pennies, are my regular purveyors. Throughout the good season they come running triumphantly to my door, with a Snake at the end of a stick, or a Lizard in a cabbage-leaf. They bring me the Rat caught in a trap, the Chicken dead of the pip, the Mole slain by the gardener, the Kitten killed by accident, the Rabbit poisoned by some weed. The business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and buyer. No such trade had ever been known before in the village, nor ever will be again.6

Yet despite all his inventions Fabre had no illusion as to their value. He well knew that art cannot replace nature who said, speaking of his glass-walled “pond,” the aquarium of which he seemed so proud: “A poor makeshift, after all!” You may think that he is reverting to his childhood and that he will tell us again of the pond with its ducklings. But he tells us something far better:

“Not all our laboratory aquaria are worth the print left in the clay by the shoe of a mule, when a shower has filled the humble[222]basin and life has peopled it with her marvels.”7

Who but he could have found such a pearl in this clay?[223]

1Fabre, Poet of Science, G. V. Legros, pp. 108–115.↑2The country round Sérignan, in Provence.—A. T. de M.↑3Souvenirs,II., pp. 1–8.The Life of the Fly, chap. i., “The Harmas.”↑4Souvenirs,VII., pp. 270–273.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑5Ibid.,VII., 260–270.↑6Souvenirs,VIII., 278–280, 255–295.The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “The Greenbottles”;The Mason-wasps, chap. ix., “Insect Geometry”;The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Grey Flesh-Flies.”↑7Souvenirs,VIII., p. 228.The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Greenbottles.”↑

1Fabre, Poet of Science, G. V. Legros, pp. 108–115.↑

2The country round Sérignan, in Provence.—A. T. de M.↑

3Souvenirs,II., pp. 1–8.The Life of the Fly, chap. i., “The Harmas.”↑

4Souvenirs,VII., pp. 270–273.The Life of the Fly, chap. vii., “The Pond.”↑

5Ibid.,VII., 260–270.↑

6Souvenirs,VIII., 278–280, 255–295.The Life of the Fly, chap. v., “The Greenbottles”;The Mason-wasps, chap. ix., “Insect Geometry”;The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Grey Flesh-Flies.”↑

7Souvenirs,VIII., p. 228.The Life of the Fly, chap. ix., “The Greenbottles.”↑

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