CHAPTER XXII

[Contents]CHAPTER XXIITHE LAST HEIGHTS1(1910–1915)[Contents]IIn the year 1910 Fame flung the gate of theharmaswide open. Coming late, she seemed anxious to repair her long neglect.The process of reparation continued. It grew fuller, more marked, and burst into a splendid apotheosis during the following years.Scientists as a class had accused Fabre of mixing up Horace and Virgil with his entomological adventures. He was despised for quoting these authors; he was placed upon the Index for introducing grace and passion into studies which officially were dry and cold as statistics. But in joining theAcadémie Françaiseon the occasion of the jubilee of 1910, theAcadémie des Sciencesgloriously avenged this unjust and Pharisaical disdain.But there were yet some of “time’s revenges”[367]to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.We have spoken of his early struggles in the University, of his career, first hampered, then shattered, of the jealousies and persecutions evoked by this “irregular” self-taught pioneer; no doubt the work of a triumphant clique, which eventually drove him from the house and slammed the door. This was, as the reader may remember, on the occasion of his lecture to young girls at Saint-Martial.But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into theharmas.2And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt[368]homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?And serious personages4from the precincts of the Académie and theUniversité de Francelent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence:[369]for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!It needed the trumpet-blast of the jubilee (1910) to remind the authorities to complete thebeau gesteof Victor Duruy, and after forty years to replace the rosette of the Legion of the Cross. And it took the loud outcry of indignation uttered by Mistral and the strong feeling aroused by the report, which was echoed by the whole Press, of their involuntary debt to the ex-professor, to obtain for the nonagenarian a pension of two thousand francs (£80) a year, which was nearly fifty years in arrears!The reparation was far from adequate; but it could not be made by means of money.“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.[370]Fabre, who was then in his ninetieth year, and could no longer stand upright, awaited M. Poincaré sitting in a chair before the threshold of his house, surrounded by his family; on his right hand stood the Sister who was watching over his welfare.A week before the President’s visit, I went to Sérignan to see my distinguished relative and to bless the marriage of his son Paul Henri.In the familiar intimacy of this family celebration he told me, as a piece of good news: “It is possible that I shall soon receive a visit from Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon.” He said this with a marked satisfaction which was very unlike his usual detachment.I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—toemancipatethem from the tutelage of the[371]clergy,5to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of theMusée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur[372]Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a pleapro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to thelycéeat Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol,[373]his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in theRevue scientifiqueof Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé6or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?“Neither of Armagnac nor a Burgundian”; neither secular nor clerical. The truth is that if we consider the matter candidly, without bandaging our eyes and without exclusive prejudice, Fabre should serve as a bond of union rather than a bone of contention.The ex-Director of the Beaux-Arts, Henry Roujon, who was aferventapostle of national concord, used to say: “Statutes are only lastingly beautiful if the sons of the same mother can inaugurate them without railing at one another.”Fabre, according to this maxim, might well[374]have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7(We wished to honour you living,Gentle patriarch and great scientist,And proud lover of Nature,Both Le Rouergue where you were born,And Provence where you wonThe golden laurel that lasts for ever.)[375]The first subscription-list was opened by the Normal College of Avignon, and a special appeal was made to the schoolmasters of Vaucluse and the rest of France. Other appeals were addressed to all without distinction, and the subscriptions flowed in from all sides, from scientists and men of letters, priests and schoolmasters,bourgeoisand workers in town and country, to whom it was explained that the statue was in honour of one of themselves who had achieved greatness by his labours.He himself, in his modesty, wished all to regard him only as a diligent student.“Master,” ventured an intimate of theharmasone day, “they are talking of putting up a statue of you close by here.”“Well, well! I shall see myself, but shall I recognise myself? I’ve had so little time for looking at myself!”“What inscription would you prefer?”“One word:Laboremus.”What lesson was ever more necessary than this eloquent reminder of the great law of labour! But this grand old man, who by labour has achieved fame, teaches us yet another lesson of even rarer quality.Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it[376]seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!”8This reminds us of a remark whispered into a neighbour’s ear on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations, in the midst of all the fashionable folk by whom he was surrounded: “I must be very queer to look at!”Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe:Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης.9He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before[377]the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”Here we recognise the man whom Rostand represented as follows in the verses inscribed upon a bas-relief which makes his collection of sonnets, entitledFabre-des-Insectes, as it were the pendant of Charpentier’s monument:“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailesPoursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)[Contents]IIThe fine and unusual qualities of Fabre’s career consist in this; he has attained fame while seeking nothing but truth: and what a truth!—the truth concealed in the humblest of created things!Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study.In his hands and in his books, as though by[378]magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing:Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos.10(It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little.Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis[379]of the reflections scattered through the pages of theSouvenirs.This was his reply:Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat.Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.”Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life,vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.[380]When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:O Jesu corona celsiorEt veritas sublimior.[Contents]IIINeither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is[381]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s:Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of hisharmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.… A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind,[383]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of theharmasthere burst of a sudden[384]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?True, in his incomparableIliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step[385]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet ofLa Bonne Souffrance:11“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never[386]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.[Contents]IVMore than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?Like the oaks of his native parts, the patriarch of Sérignan continued to brave the assaults of time, and even when he began to feel that his life was declining, it seemed as though it was only withdrawing itself from its long and manifold ramifications in the external world to take refuge, as in an inexpugnable asylum, in the depths and roots of his being. He was one of those of whom people say with us that they “cannot die.”Fabre’s work is immortal—that is agreed. But the artisan?Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was theharmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the[387]Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.His life: it was his study, his museum of natural history, his laboratory, where, with closed doors, face to face with Nature, he repeated, in order to perfect them, to consign them to writing, his open-air researches, his observations of the to-day or yesterday. Now he no longer sets foot in it, and now one saw—with what respect and tenderness—only the marks left by his footsteps upon the tiled floor, as he came and went about the big observation-table, which occupies all the middle of the room, in pursuit of the solution of the problems propounded by his insects.And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of[388]the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series ofSouvenirs.Must they be left thus abandoned previous to their being dispersed or falling into other hands—all these precious fragments of an incomparable life, and these venerable premises, consecrated by such rare memories?The great naturalist’s disciples could not resign themselves to the thought, and by a touching inspiration of filial piety they have found the means to secure these treasures, as by a love stronger than death, against this harrowing dispersal.To keep the dead in their last dwelling, or attract them thither, the ancient Egyptians used to place there the image of their earthly dwelling, offering them at least a reduced facsimile of their life’s environment, of the objects and premises which had in some sort made part of their life and their soul.Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they[389]determined to acquire theHarmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking,12“so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of hisharmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.To see him in the twilight of the dining-room[390]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux13had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he[391]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”14This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist[392]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do notbelievein God, because IseeHim in all things and everywhere.’ ”Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.[393]After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at theHarmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.The old man appreciated her services so greatly that he was overcome with dejection by the very thought that she might be recalled by her superiors, according to the rule of her Order, after the lapse of a certain period of time. And he would gratefully press her hand when the good Sister sought to relieve his anxiety and inspire him with the hope that she would be allowed to remain in his service till the end of his days.He found her simplicity, her delicacy, her good nature, and her devotion so delightful that he could not refrain from telling her so plainly in the direct, forcible manner familiar to him: “You are invaluable, Sister; you are admirable. I love religion as you practise it.”“He has often told me,” she writes, “that when he could not sleep at night, he used to pray, to think of God, and address to Him a prayer which he would himself compose.”In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly,[394]so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.On receiving the news of this alarming condition, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon hastened to theHarmas. The invalid expressed his delight and gratitude for the visit. Their relations were so cordial that the prelate decided to continue them by a series of admirable letters which have fortunately been published.In these letters, with great delicacy, Monseigneur Latty avoided all that might run contrary to the naturalist’s opinions, and very gently endeavoured to induce him to die as a Christian.To draw him more surely to the light that shines from the Cross and the grace which raises the soul above itself, he asks him to recite every evening, in unison with him, the beautiful prayer of the dying Saviour, which he calls “the prayer of the heights,” the height of Golgotha, the height of life:In manus tuus Domine commendo spiritum meum. (Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.)However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed[395]nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.During the summer of 1915 his weakness grew more marked, so that there was no hope of many more days of life. The curé of Sérignan having been mobilised, the absence of the priest at this time was a cause of great anxiety to Sister Adrienne—always on the watch for the soul ready to escape her.Providence happily came to her assistance; and a Breton priest, who had come to the South to recover his health, and had for some time been acquainted with the master, was admitted to terms of intimacy. After some hesitation he decided to speak to the scientist of the Sacrament of Penitence. With that beautiful simplicity of his, and to the astonishment of the priest, Fabre, who seemed expecting the invitation, replied:“Whenever you will.”“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he[396]heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”It was the 11th October 1915, at six o’clock of the evening, that the great scientist so gently surrendered his soul to God.The obsequies, celebrated on the 16th October, “were simple and affecting, as he would have liked them to be. For a few moments before leaving the church, the old naturalist’s fine face was again exposed. It reflected an immense serenity. On his peaceful features one divined the satisfaction of the man who is departing with his work accomplished. In his parchment-like hands he clasped a wooden crucifix with ivory tips. Beside his head was a wreath of laurestinus. Beside one arm was his great black felt hat.”The service was celebrated by the Arch-priest of Orange, in the little church; and then the harsh, rocky soil received the body of him who had so often stooped over it.This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is[397]magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:“Quos periisse putamusPræmissi sunt.Minime finis, sed limenVitæ excelsioris.”Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.”15But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his[398]thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.THE END1This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.↑2This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of theUniversité des Annales politiques et littéraires.↑3The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.”Cousin= cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.↑4Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.↑5E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros,op. cit., p. 81.↑6M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.↑7François Fabié.↑8In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known assanti belli= beautiful saints.—B. M.↑9The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to theDiscours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom:Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)↑10Psalm 100, verse 3.↑11Françoise Coppée.↑12Dr. Legros,Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.↑13The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.↑14J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.↑15E. Laguet,Annales politiques etlittéraires, April 6, 1914.↑

[Contents]CHAPTER XXIITHE LAST HEIGHTS1(1910–1915)[Contents]IIn the year 1910 Fame flung the gate of theharmaswide open. Coming late, she seemed anxious to repair her long neglect.The process of reparation continued. It grew fuller, more marked, and burst into a splendid apotheosis during the following years.Scientists as a class had accused Fabre of mixing up Horace and Virgil with his entomological adventures. He was despised for quoting these authors; he was placed upon the Index for introducing grace and passion into studies which officially were dry and cold as statistics. But in joining theAcadémie Françaiseon the occasion of the jubilee of 1910, theAcadémie des Sciencesgloriously avenged this unjust and Pharisaical disdain.But there were yet some of “time’s revenges”[367]to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.We have spoken of his early struggles in the University, of his career, first hampered, then shattered, of the jealousies and persecutions evoked by this “irregular” self-taught pioneer; no doubt the work of a triumphant clique, which eventually drove him from the house and slammed the door. This was, as the reader may remember, on the occasion of his lecture to young girls at Saint-Martial.But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into theharmas.2And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt[368]homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?And serious personages4from the precincts of the Académie and theUniversité de Francelent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence:[369]for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!It needed the trumpet-blast of the jubilee (1910) to remind the authorities to complete thebeau gesteof Victor Duruy, and after forty years to replace the rosette of the Legion of the Cross. And it took the loud outcry of indignation uttered by Mistral and the strong feeling aroused by the report, which was echoed by the whole Press, of their involuntary debt to the ex-professor, to obtain for the nonagenarian a pension of two thousand francs (£80) a year, which was nearly fifty years in arrears!The reparation was far from adequate; but it could not be made by means of money.“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.[370]Fabre, who was then in his ninetieth year, and could no longer stand upright, awaited M. Poincaré sitting in a chair before the threshold of his house, surrounded by his family; on his right hand stood the Sister who was watching over his welfare.A week before the President’s visit, I went to Sérignan to see my distinguished relative and to bless the marriage of his son Paul Henri.In the familiar intimacy of this family celebration he told me, as a piece of good news: “It is possible that I shall soon receive a visit from Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon.” He said this with a marked satisfaction which was very unlike his usual detachment.I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—toemancipatethem from the tutelage of the[371]clergy,5to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of theMusée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur[372]Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a pleapro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to thelycéeat Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol,[373]his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in theRevue scientifiqueof Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé6or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?“Neither of Armagnac nor a Burgundian”; neither secular nor clerical. The truth is that if we consider the matter candidly, without bandaging our eyes and without exclusive prejudice, Fabre should serve as a bond of union rather than a bone of contention.The ex-Director of the Beaux-Arts, Henry Roujon, who was aferventapostle of national concord, used to say: “Statutes are only lastingly beautiful if the sons of the same mother can inaugurate them without railing at one another.”Fabre, according to this maxim, might well[374]have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7(We wished to honour you living,Gentle patriarch and great scientist,And proud lover of Nature,Both Le Rouergue where you were born,And Provence where you wonThe golden laurel that lasts for ever.)[375]The first subscription-list was opened by the Normal College of Avignon, and a special appeal was made to the schoolmasters of Vaucluse and the rest of France. Other appeals were addressed to all without distinction, and the subscriptions flowed in from all sides, from scientists and men of letters, priests and schoolmasters,bourgeoisand workers in town and country, to whom it was explained that the statue was in honour of one of themselves who had achieved greatness by his labours.He himself, in his modesty, wished all to regard him only as a diligent student.“Master,” ventured an intimate of theharmasone day, “they are talking of putting up a statue of you close by here.”“Well, well! I shall see myself, but shall I recognise myself? I’ve had so little time for looking at myself!”“What inscription would you prefer?”“One word:Laboremus.”What lesson was ever more necessary than this eloquent reminder of the great law of labour! But this grand old man, who by labour has achieved fame, teaches us yet another lesson of even rarer quality.Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it[376]seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!”8This reminds us of a remark whispered into a neighbour’s ear on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations, in the midst of all the fashionable folk by whom he was surrounded: “I must be very queer to look at!”Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe:Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης.9He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before[377]the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”Here we recognise the man whom Rostand represented as follows in the verses inscribed upon a bas-relief which makes his collection of sonnets, entitledFabre-des-Insectes, as it were the pendant of Charpentier’s monument:“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailesPoursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)[Contents]IIThe fine and unusual qualities of Fabre’s career consist in this; he has attained fame while seeking nothing but truth: and what a truth!—the truth concealed in the humblest of created things!Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study.In his hands and in his books, as though by[378]magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing:Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos.10(It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little.Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis[379]of the reflections scattered through the pages of theSouvenirs.This was his reply:Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat.Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.”Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life,vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.[380]When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:O Jesu corona celsiorEt veritas sublimior.[Contents]IIINeither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is[381]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s:Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of hisharmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.… A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind,[383]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of theharmasthere burst of a sudden[384]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?True, in his incomparableIliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step[385]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet ofLa Bonne Souffrance:11“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never[386]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.[Contents]IVMore than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?Like the oaks of his native parts, the patriarch of Sérignan continued to brave the assaults of time, and even when he began to feel that his life was declining, it seemed as though it was only withdrawing itself from its long and manifold ramifications in the external world to take refuge, as in an inexpugnable asylum, in the depths and roots of his being. He was one of those of whom people say with us that they “cannot die.”Fabre’s work is immortal—that is agreed. But the artisan?Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was theharmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the[387]Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.His life: it was his study, his museum of natural history, his laboratory, where, with closed doors, face to face with Nature, he repeated, in order to perfect them, to consign them to writing, his open-air researches, his observations of the to-day or yesterday. Now he no longer sets foot in it, and now one saw—with what respect and tenderness—only the marks left by his footsteps upon the tiled floor, as he came and went about the big observation-table, which occupies all the middle of the room, in pursuit of the solution of the problems propounded by his insects.And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of[388]the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series ofSouvenirs.Must they be left thus abandoned previous to their being dispersed or falling into other hands—all these precious fragments of an incomparable life, and these venerable premises, consecrated by such rare memories?The great naturalist’s disciples could not resign themselves to the thought, and by a touching inspiration of filial piety they have found the means to secure these treasures, as by a love stronger than death, against this harrowing dispersal.To keep the dead in their last dwelling, or attract them thither, the ancient Egyptians used to place there the image of their earthly dwelling, offering them at least a reduced facsimile of their life’s environment, of the objects and premises which had in some sort made part of their life and their soul.Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they[389]determined to acquire theHarmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking,12“so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of hisharmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.To see him in the twilight of the dining-room[390]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux13had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he[391]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”14This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist[392]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do notbelievein God, because IseeHim in all things and everywhere.’ ”Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.[393]After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at theHarmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.The old man appreciated her services so greatly that he was overcome with dejection by the very thought that she might be recalled by her superiors, according to the rule of her Order, after the lapse of a certain period of time. And he would gratefully press her hand when the good Sister sought to relieve his anxiety and inspire him with the hope that she would be allowed to remain in his service till the end of his days.He found her simplicity, her delicacy, her good nature, and her devotion so delightful that he could not refrain from telling her so plainly in the direct, forcible manner familiar to him: “You are invaluable, Sister; you are admirable. I love religion as you practise it.”“He has often told me,” she writes, “that when he could not sleep at night, he used to pray, to think of God, and address to Him a prayer which he would himself compose.”In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly,[394]so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.On receiving the news of this alarming condition, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon hastened to theHarmas. The invalid expressed his delight and gratitude for the visit. Their relations were so cordial that the prelate decided to continue them by a series of admirable letters which have fortunately been published.In these letters, with great delicacy, Monseigneur Latty avoided all that might run contrary to the naturalist’s opinions, and very gently endeavoured to induce him to die as a Christian.To draw him more surely to the light that shines from the Cross and the grace which raises the soul above itself, he asks him to recite every evening, in unison with him, the beautiful prayer of the dying Saviour, which he calls “the prayer of the heights,” the height of Golgotha, the height of life:In manus tuus Domine commendo spiritum meum. (Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.)However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed[395]nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.During the summer of 1915 his weakness grew more marked, so that there was no hope of many more days of life. The curé of Sérignan having been mobilised, the absence of the priest at this time was a cause of great anxiety to Sister Adrienne—always on the watch for the soul ready to escape her.Providence happily came to her assistance; and a Breton priest, who had come to the South to recover his health, and had for some time been acquainted with the master, was admitted to terms of intimacy. After some hesitation he decided to speak to the scientist of the Sacrament of Penitence. With that beautiful simplicity of his, and to the astonishment of the priest, Fabre, who seemed expecting the invitation, replied:“Whenever you will.”“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he[396]heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”It was the 11th October 1915, at six o’clock of the evening, that the great scientist so gently surrendered his soul to God.The obsequies, celebrated on the 16th October, “were simple and affecting, as he would have liked them to be. For a few moments before leaving the church, the old naturalist’s fine face was again exposed. It reflected an immense serenity. On his peaceful features one divined the satisfaction of the man who is departing with his work accomplished. In his parchment-like hands he clasped a wooden crucifix with ivory tips. Beside his head was a wreath of laurestinus. Beside one arm was his great black felt hat.”The service was celebrated by the Arch-priest of Orange, in the little church; and then the harsh, rocky soil received the body of him who had so often stooped over it.This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is[397]magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:“Quos periisse putamusPræmissi sunt.Minime finis, sed limenVitæ excelsioris.”Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.”15But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his[398]thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.THE END1This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.↑2This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of theUniversité des Annales politiques et littéraires.↑3The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.”Cousin= cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.↑4Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.↑5E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros,op. cit., p. 81.↑6M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.↑7François Fabié.↑8In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known assanti belli= beautiful saints.—B. M.↑9The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to theDiscours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom:Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)↑10Psalm 100, verse 3.↑11Françoise Coppée.↑12Dr. Legros,Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.↑13The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.↑14J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.↑15E. Laguet,Annales politiques etlittéraires, April 6, 1914.↑

CHAPTER XXIITHE LAST HEIGHTS1(1910–1915)

[Contents]IIn the year 1910 Fame flung the gate of theharmaswide open. Coming late, she seemed anxious to repair her long neglect.The process of reparation continued. It grew fuller, more marked, and burst into a splendid apotheosis during the following years.Scientists as a class had accused Fabre of mixing up Horace and Virgil with his entomological adventures. He was despised for quoting these authors; he was placed upon the Index for introducing grace and passion into studies which officially were dry and cold as statistics. But in joining theAcadémie Françaiseon the occasion of the jubilee of 1910, theAcadémie des Sciencesgloriously avenged this unjust and Pharisaical disdain.But there were yet some of “time’s revenges”[367]to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.We have spoken of his early struggles in the University, of his career, first hampered, then shattered, of the jealousies and persecutions evoked by this “irregular” self-taught pioneer; no doubt the work of a triumphant clique, which eventually drove him from the house and slammed the door. This was, as the reader may remember, on the occasion of his lecture to young girls at Saint-Martial.But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into theharmas.2And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt[368]homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?And serious personages4from the precincts of the Académie and theUniversité de Francelent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence:[369]for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!It needed the trumpet-blast of the jubilee (1910) to remind the authorities to complete thebeau gesteof Victor Duruy, and after forty years to replace the rosette of the Legion of the Cross. And it took the loud outcry of indignation uttered by Mistral and the strong feeling aroused by the report, which was echoed by the whole Press, of their involuntary debt to the ex-professor, to obtain for the nonagenarian a pension of two thousand francs (£80) a year, which was nearly fifty years in arrears!The reparation was far from adequate; but it could not be made by means of money.“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.[370]Fabre, who was then in his ninetieth year, and could no longer stand upright, awaited M. Poincaré sitting in a chair before the threshold of his house, surrounded by his family; on his right hand stood the Sister who was watching over his welfare.A week before the President’s visit, I went to Sérignan to see my distinguished relative and to bless the marriage of his son Paul Henri.In the familiar intimacy of this family celebration he told me, as a piece of good news: “It is possible that I shall soon receive a visit from Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon.” He said this with a marked satisfaction which was very unlike his usual detachment.I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—toemancipatethem from the tutelage of the[371]clergy,5to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of theMusée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur[372]Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a pleapro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to thelycéeat Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol,[373]his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in theRevue scientifiqueof Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé6or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?“Neither of Armagnac nor a Burgundian”; neither secular nor clerical. The truth is that if we consider the matter candidly, without bandaging our eyes and without exclusive prejudice, Fabre should serve as a bond of union rather than a bone of contention.The ex-Director of the Beaux-Arts, Henry Roujon, who was aferventapostle of national concord, used to say: “Statutes are only lastingly beautiful if the sons of the same mother can inaugurate them without railing at one another.”Fabre, according to this maxim, might well[374]have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7(We wished to honour you living,Gentle patriarch and great scientist,And proud lover of Nature,Both Le Rouergue where you were born,And Provence where you wonThe golden laurel that lasts for ever.)[375]The first subscription-list was opened by the Normal College of Avignon, and a special appeal was made to the schoolmasters of Vaucluse and the rest of France. Other appeals were addressed to all without distinction, and the subscriptions flowed in from all sides, from scientists and men of letters, priests and schoolmasters,bourgeoisand workers in town and country, to whom it was explained that the statue was in honour of one of themselves who had achieved greatness by his labours.He himself, in his modesty, wished all to regard him only as a diligent student.“Master,” ventured an intimate of theharmasone day, “they are talking of putting up a statue of you close by here.”“Well, well! I shall see myself, but shall I recognise myself? I’ve had so little time for looking at myself!”“What inscription would you prefer?”“One word:Laboremus.”What lesson was ever more necessary than this eloquent reminder of the great law of labour! But this grand old man, who by labour has achieved fame, teaches us yet another lesson of even rarer quality.Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it[376]seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!”8This reminds us of a remark whispered into a neighbour’s ear on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations, in the midst of all the fashionable folk by whom he was surrounded: “I must be very queer to look at!”Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe:Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης.9He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before[377]the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”Here we recognise the man whom Rostand represented as follows in the verses inscribed upon a bas-relief which makes his collection of sonnets, entitledFabre-des-Insectes, as it were the pendant of Charpentier’s monument:“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailesPoursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)[Contents]IIThe fine and unusual qualities of Fabre’s career consist in this; he has attained fame while seeking nothing but truth: and what a truth!—the truth concealed in the humblest of created things!Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study.In his hands and in his books, as though by[378]magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing:Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos.10(It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little.Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis[379]of the reflections scattered through the pages of theSouvenirs.This was his reply:Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat.Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.”Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life,vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.[380]When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:O Jesu corona celsiorEt veritas sublimior.[Contents]IIINeither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is[381]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s:Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of hisharmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.… A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind,[383]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of theharmasthere burst of a sudden[384]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?True, in his incomparableIliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step[385]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet ofLa Bonne Souffrance:11“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never[386]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.[Contents]IVMore than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?Like the oaks of his native parts, the patriarch of Sérignan continued to brave the assaults of time, and even when he began to feel that his life was declining, it seemed as though it was only withdrawing itself from its long and manifold ramifications in the external world to take refuge, as in an inexpugnable asylum, in the depths and roots of his being. He was one of those of whom people say with us that they “cannot die.”Fabre’s work is immortal—that is agreed. But the artisan?Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was theharmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the[387]Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.His life: it was his study, his museum of natural history, his laboratory, where, with closed doors, face to face with Nature, he repeated, in order to perfect them, to consign them to writing, his open-air researches, his observations of the to-day or yesterday. Now he no longer sets foot in it, and now one saw—with what respect and tenderness—only the marks left by his footsteps upon the tiled floor, as he came and went about the big observation-table, which occupies all the middle of the room, in pursuit of the solution of the problems propounded by his insects.And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of[388]the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series ofSouvenirs.Must they be left thus abandoned previous to their being dispersed or falling into other hands—all these precious fragments of an incomparable life, and these venerable premises, consecrated by such rare memories?The great naturalist’s disciples could not resign themselves to the thought, and by a touching inspiration of filial piety they have found the means to secure these treasures, as by a love stronger than death, against this harrowing dispersal.To keep the dead in their last dwelling, or attract them thither, the ancient Egyptians used to place there the image of their earthly dwelling, offering them at least a reduced facsimile of their life’s environment, of the objects and premises which had in some sort made part of their life and their soul.Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they[389]determined to acquire theHarmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking,12“so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of hisharmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.To see him in the twilight of the dining-room[390]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux13had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he[391]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”14This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist[392]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do notbelievein God, because IseeHim in all things and everywhere.’ ”Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.[393]After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at theHarmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.The old man appreciated her services so greatly that he was overcome with dejection by the very thought that she might be recalled by her superiors, according to the rule of her Order, after the lapse of a certain period of time. And he would gratefully press her hand when the good Sister sought to relieve his anxiety and inspire him with the hope that she would be allowed to remain in his service till the end of his days.He found her simplicity, her delicacy, her good nature, and her devotion so delightful that he could not refrain from telling her so plainly in the direct, forcible manner familiar to him: “You are invaluable, Sister; you are admirable. I love religion as you practise it.”“He has often told me,” she writes, “that when he could not sleep at night, he used to pray, to think of God, and address to Him a prayer which he would himself compose.”In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly,[394]so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.On receiving the news of this alarming condition, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon hastened to theHarmas. The invalid expressed his delight and gratitude for the visit. Their relations were so cordial that the prelate decided to continue them by a series of admirable letters which have fortunately been published.In these letters, with great delicacy, Monseigneur Latty avoided all that might run contrary to the naturalist’s opinions, and very gently endeavoured to induce him to die as a Christian.To draw him more surely to the light that shines from the Cross and the grace which raises the soul above itself, he asks him to recite every evening, in unison with him, the beautiful prayer of the dying Saviour, which he calls “the prayer of the heights,” the height of Golgotha, the height of life:In manus tuus Domine commendo spiritum meum. (Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.)However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed[395]nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.During the summer of 1915 his weakness grew more marked, so that there was no hope of many more days of life. The curé of Sérignan having been mobilised, the absence of the priest at this time was a cause of great anxiety to Sister Adrienne—always on the watch for the soul ready to escape her.Providence happily came to her assistance; and a Breton priest, who had come to the South to recover his health, and had for some time been acquainted with the master, was admitted to terms of intimacy. After some hesitation he decided to speak to the scientist of the Sacrament of Penitence. With that beautiful simplicity of his, and to the astonishment of the priest, Fabre, who seemed expecting the invitation, replied:“Whenever you will.”“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he[396]heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”It was the 11th October 1915, at six o’clock of the evening, that the great scientist so gently surrendered his soul to God.The obsequies, celebrated on the 16th October, “were simple and affecting, as he would have liked them to be. For a few moments before leaving the church, the old naturalist’s fine face was again exposed. It reflected an immense serenity. On his peaceful features one divined the satisfaction of the man who is departing with his work accomplished. In his parchment-like hands he clasped a wooden crucifix with ivory tips. Beside his head was a wreath of laurestinus. Beside one arm was his great black felt hat.”The service was celebrated by the Arch-priest of Orange, in the little church; and then the harsh, rocky soil received the body of him who had so often stooped over it.This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is[397]magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:“Quos periisse putamusPræmissi sunt.Minime finis, sed limenVitæ excelsioris.”Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.”15But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his[398]thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.THE END

[Contents]IIn the year 1910 Fame flung the gate of theharmaswide open. Coming late, she seemed anxious to repair her long neglect.The process of reparation continued. It grew fuller, more marked, and burst into a splendid apotheosis during the following years.Scientists as a class had accused Fabre of mixing up Horace and Virgil with his entomological adventures. He was despised for quoting these authors; he was placed upon the Index for introducing grace and passion into studies which officially were dry and cold as statistics. But in joining theAcadémie Françaiseon the occasion of the jubilee of 1910, theAcadémie des Sciencesgloriously avenged this unjust and Pharisaical disdain.But there were yet some of “time’s revenges”[367]to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.We have spoken of his early struggles in the University, of his career, first hampered, then shattered, of the jealousies and persecutions evoked by this “irregular” self-taught pioneer; no doubt the work of a triumphant clique, which eventually drove him from the house and slammed the door. This was, as the reader may remember, on the occasion of his lecture to young girls at Saint-Martial.But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into theharmas.2And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt[368]homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?And serious personages4from the precincts of the Académie and theUniversité de Francelent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence:[369]for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!It needed the trumpet-blast of the jubilee (1910) to remind the authorities to complete thebeau gesteof Victor Duruy, and after forty years to replace the rosette of the Legion of the Cross. And it took the loud outcry of indignation uttered by Mistral and the strong feeling aroused by the report, which was echoed by the whole Press, of their involuntary debt to the ex-professor, to obtain for the nonagenarian a pension of two thousand francs (£80) a year, which was nearly fifty years in arrears!The reparation was far from adequate; but it could not be made by means of money.“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.[370]Fabre, who was then in his ninetieth year, and could no longer stand upright, awaited M. Poincaré sitting in a chair before the threshold of his house, surrounded by his family; on his right hand stood the Sister who was watching over his welfare.A week before the President’s visit, I went to Sérignan to see my distinguished relative and to bless the marriage of his son Paul Henri.In the familiar intimacy of this family celebration he told me, as a piece of good news: “It is possible that I shall soon receive a visit from Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon.” He said this with a marked satisfaction which was very unlike his usual detachment.I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—toemancipatethem from the tutelage of the[371]clergy,5to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of theMusée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur[372]Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a pleapro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to thelycéeat Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol,[373]his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in theRevue scientifiqueof Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé6or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?“Neither of Armagnac nor a Burgundian”; neither secular nor clerical. The truth is that if we consider the matter candidly, without bandaging our eyes and without exclusive prejudice, Fabre should serve as a bond of union rather than a bone of contention.The ex-Director of the Beaux-Arts, Henry Roujon, who was aferventapostle of national concord, used to say: “Statutes are only lastingly beautiful if the sons of the same mother can inaugurate them without railing at one another.”Fabre, according to this maxim, might well[374]have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7(We wished to honour you living,Gentle patriarch and great scientist,And proud lover of Nature,Both Le Rouergue where you were born,And Provence where you wonThe golden laurel that lasts for ever.)[375]The first subscription-list was opened by the Normal College of Avignon, and a special appeal was made to the schoolmasters of Vaucluse and the rest of France. Other appeals were addressed to all without distinction, and the subscriptions flowed in from all sides, from scientists and men of letters, priests and schoolmasters,bourgeoisand workers in town and country, to whom it was explained that the statue was in honour of one of themselves who had achieved greatness by his labours.He himself, in his modesty, wished all to regard him only as a diligent student.“Master,” ventured an intimate of theharmasone day, “they are talking of putting up a statue of you close by here.”“Well, well! I shall see myself, but shall I recognise myself? I’ve had so little time for looking at myself!”“What inscription would you prefer?”“One word:Laboremus.”What lesson was ever more necessary than this eloquent reminder of the great law of labour! But this grand old man, who by labour has achieved fame, teaches us yet another lesson of even rarer quality.Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it[376]seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!”8This reminds us of a remark whispered into a neighbour’s ear on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations, in the midst of all the fashionable folk by whom he was surrounded: “I must be very queer to look at!”Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe:Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης.9He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before[377]the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”Here we recognise the man whom Rostand represented as follows in the verses inscribed upon a bas-relief which makes his collection of sonnets, entitledFabre-des-Insectes, as it were the pendant of Charpentier’s monument:“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailesPoursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)

I

In the year 1910 Fame flung the gate of theharmaswide open. Coming late, she seemed anxious to repair her long neglect.The process of reparation continued. It grew fuller, more marked, and burst into a splendid apotheosis during the following years.Scientists as a class had accused Fabre of mixing up Horace and Virgil with his entomological adventures. He was despised for quoting these authors; he was placed upon the Index for introducing grace and passion into studies which officially were dry and cold as statistics. But in joining theAcadémie Françaiseon the occasion of the jubilee of 1910, theAcadémie des Sciencesgloriously avenged this unjust and Pharisaical disdain.But there were yet some of “time’s revenges”[367]to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.We have spoken of his early struggles in the University, of his career, first hampered, then shattered, of the jealousies and persecutions evoked by this “irregular” self-taught pioneer; no doubt the work of a triumphant clique, which eventually drove him from the house and slammed the door. This was, as the reader may remember, on the occasion of his lecture to young girls at Saint-Martial.But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into theharmas.2And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt[368]homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?And serious personages4from the precincts of the Académie and theUniversité de Francelent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence:[369]for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!It needed the trumpet-blast of the jubilee (1910) to remind the authorities to complete thebeau gesteof Victor Duruy, and after forty years to replace the rosette of the Legion of the Cross. And it took the loud outcry of indignation uttered by Mistral and the strong feeling aroused by the report, which was echoed by the whole Press, of their involuntary debt to the ex-professor, to obtain for the nonagenarian a pension of two thousand francs (£80) a year, which was nearly fifty years in arrears!The reparation was far from adequate; but it could not be made by means of money.“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.[370]Fabre, who was then in his ninetieth year, and could no longer stand upright, awaited M. Poincaré sitting in a chair before the threshold of his house, surrounded by his family; on his right hand stood the Sister who was watching over his welfare.A week before the President’s visit, I went to Sérignan to see my distinguished relative and to bless the marriage of his son Paul Henri.In the familiar intimacy of this family celebration he told me, as a piece of good news: “It is possible that I shall soon receive a visit from Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon.” He said this with a marked satisfaction which was very unlike his usual detachment.I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—toemancipatethem from the tutelage of the[371]clergy,5to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of theMusée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur[372]Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a pleapro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to thelycéeat Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol,[373]his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in theRevue scientifiqueof Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé6or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?“Neither of Armagnac nor a Burgundian”; neither secular nor clerical. The truth is that if we consider the matter candidly, without bandaging our eyes and without exclusive prejudice, Fabre should serve as a bond of union rather than a bone of contention.The ex-Director of the Beaux-Arts, Henry Roujon, who was aferventapostle of national concord, used to say: “Statutes are only lastingly beautiful if the sons of the same mother can inaugurate them without railing at one another.”Fabre, according to this maxim, might well[374]have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7(We wished to honour you living,Gentle patriarch and great scientist,And proud lover of Nature,Both Le Rouergue where you were born,And Provence where you wonThe golden laurel that lasts for ever.)[375]The first subscription-list was opened by the Normal College of Avignon, and a special appeal was made to the schoolmasters of Vaucluse and the rest of France. Other appeals were addressed to all without distinction, and the subscriptions flowed in from all sides, from scientists and men of letters, priests and schoolmasters,bourgeoisand workers in town and country, to whom it was explained that the statue was in honour of one of themselves who had achieved greatness by his labours.He himself, in his modesty, wished all to regard him only as a diligent student.“Master,” ventured an intimate of theharmasone day, “they are talking of putting up a statue of you close by here.”“Well, well! I shall see myself, but shall I recognise myself? I’ve had so little time for looking at myself!”“What inscription would you prefer?”“One word:Laboremus.”What lesson was ever more necessary than this eloquent reminder of the great law of labour! But this grand old man, who by labour has achieved fame, teaches us yet another lesson of even rarer quality.Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it[376]seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!”8This reminds us of a remark whispered into a neighbour’s ear on the occasion of the jubilee celebrations, in the midst of all the fashionable folk by whom he was surrounded: “I must be very queer to look at!”Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe:Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης.9He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before[377]the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”Here we recognise the man whom Rostand represented as follows in the verses inscribed upon a bas-relief which makes his collection of sonnets, entitledFabre-des-Insectes, as it were the pendant of Charpentier’s monument:“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailesPoursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)

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

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

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

But there were yet some of “time’s revenges”[367]to be taken for the injustice which Fabre had suffered.

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

But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into theharmas.2And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt[368]homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?

And serious personages4from the precincts of the Académie and theUniversité de Francelent voice and gesture to the ingenuous utterance of radiant youth, which delightfully made amends for the past.

There was another official authority, the highest of all, to which Fabre had not much reason to be grateful. Long and brilliant services in the cause of public instruction, scientific works of the highest order, need of leisure and resources for his investigations, family responsibilities, and the struggle for life—what claims did not these represent to distinction and to the generosity of the public authorities! But what part or lot had he in these in reality? One might almost say none. One day, as though by chance, the perspicacity of a Minister of the Empire had all but rescued him from poverty and oblivion. A mere accident without sequence:[369]for it was immediately followed by the total collapse of the Empire and the institution of the Republic. Fabre was not even among the number of the pensioned!

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

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

“Come at once, or I will have my gendarmes bring you.” In summoning him thus to the Court in order to see and decorate this fine but timid genius, the Emperor, in 1869, had performed a generous action. The President of the Republic did still better, when, in 1913, in the course of his tour through Provence, he sought to honour by his visit him who had so greatly honoured his mother-country and his native and adopted provinces.[370]

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

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

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

I understood at once that his mind was harking back to the evil days of 1870 and contrasting them with the present. What did not happen in that disastrous year? Victor Duruy had just instituted courses of lectures for adults in order to make up for the deficiencies of popular education. Young girls were especially invited to these lectures. On the pretext of opening the golden doors of science to them it was hoped—no mystery has been made of the matter since—toemancipatethem from the tutelage of the[371]clergy,5to remove them from, or to dispute, the influence of the Church. The scientist, enamoured of the beauty of natural history, saw in this venture merely an opportunity for diffusing the knowledge and appreciation of his science among the people. Accordingly he opened a course of evening lectures in the old Abbey of Saint-Martial. And in the crowd that flocked eagerly to hear him beneath the vaulted roof of the old disaffected church were squads of young girls, more numerous at every lecture, enchanted by the magic of his teaching, by its lucidity and vitality. Who could object to such a success? Yet there were those who objected. A perfect cross-fire of criticism and complaint arose from the Church and the University. Fabre replied fearlessly, not without a touch of offended pride. The quarrel became embittered. Some went so far as to denounce him publicly and to point out, from the vantage of the pulpit, the dangers of his teaching. Shortly afterwards the municipality dismissed him from his office as conservator of theMusée Requien, without regard to his family responsibilities, which were then considerable.

When he visited Fabre in 1914 Monseigneur[372]Latty was fully aware of these proceedings, and of the exodus which followed them, and also of the painful impression which it had produced upon Fabre, and the bitter-sweet reflections to which it still at times gave rise. Did the eminent prelate approach the illustrious old scientist bearing an olive branch as well as the golden laurel? I do not know; but the fact is that this first interview was quickly followed by a second, which was still more friendly, and from that moment Fabre never again spoke of and did not seem even to remember the privations of the past.

One reflection naturally occurs to us here, and it is rather an attempt to be just than a pleapro domo. Because once in his life the great naturalist was confronted by the hostility of certain persons belonging to the world of religion, need we erase from his carefully secularised history all that connects him with the Church, from the motherly caresses of the “holy woman” who assuaged his first griefs to the tender care of the worthy Sister who consoled his last sufferings? Must we forget that he was admitted as pupil-teacher to thelycéeat Rodez, as pupil to the seminary of Toulouse and the Normal College of Avignon on the recommendation of M. l’Abbé d’Aiguillon-Pujol,[373]his old Rodez headmaster? Are we to say nothing of his articles in theRevue scientifiqueof Brussels, one of the principal organs of Catholic science, or of his very important contributions to the classic series published under the editorship of M. l’Abbé Combes? If we are, rightly, deeply interested in the smallest details of his life and all that concerns him, are we to say nothing of his friendly relations with his curé6or of the religious practices of his family and household, or of his generous participation in all the works of charity in his parish, not excepting the free school?

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

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

Fabre, according to this maxim, might well[374]have statues erected to him. And speaking of statues, we must not, having mentioned the orators, forget the artists. All the illustrated periodicals had already popularised the original, eloquent physiognomy of our hero. This was too ephemeral a homage for his admirers. His features must be chiselled in marble and exposed under the blue sky to the delighted and affectionate eyes of his compatriots. Provence was the first to propose the idea. Le Rouergue followed. Avignon, Orange, and Sérignan each wanted their monument. Saint-Léons profited by its right of seniority to take precedence of Rodez and Maillane.

“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7(We wished to honour you living,Gentle patriarch and great scientist,And proud lover of Nature,Both Le Rouergue where you were born,And Provence where you wonThe golden laurel that lasts for ever.)

“Nous voulions te fêter vivantDoux patriarche et grand savant,Et fier amant de la nature,Et le Rouergue où tu nacquisEt la Provence où tu conquisLe laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7

“Nous voulions te fêter vivant

Doux patriarche et grand savant,

Et fier amant de la nature,

Et le Rouergue où tu nacquis

Et la Provence où tu conquis

Le laurier d’or qui toujours dure.”7

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

(We wished to honour you living,

Gentle patriarch and great scientist,

And proud lover of Nature,

Both Le Rouergue where you were born,

And Provence where you won

The golden laurel that lasts for ever.)

[375]

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

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

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

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

“What inscription would you prefer?”

“One word:Laboremus.”

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

Let us hear him confiding his impressions to a friend: “The Mayor of Sérignan, it[376]seems, proposes to erect a bust of me. At this very moment I have, staying in the house, the sculptor Charpentier, who is making my statue for a monument they are going to set up in the Normal College of Avignon. In my opinion there’s a good deal of the beautiful saints about it!”8

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

Here is a more sober if not more weighty remark. One day some one was reminding him, in my presence, of all the marks of honour lavished upon him during his last two days. I heard him reply quickly with the famous apostrophe:Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, καὶ πάντα ματαιότης.9

He had another manner, perhaps still more expressive, of rendering the same idea: he would puff into the air a cloud of smoke from his pipe, which never left him, and, before[377]the blue vanishing spiral: “That,” he would say, “is human glory!”

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

“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailesPoursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)

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

“C’est un homme incliné, modeste et magistral,

Pensif—car dans ses doigts il a tenu des ailes

Poursuivant les honneurs moins que les sauterelles.”

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

(A man who stoops, modest and magisterial,

Thoughtful—for in his fingers he has held wings,

Pursuing honours less than the grasshoppers.)

[Contents]IIThe fine and unusual qualities of Fabre’s career consist in this; he has attained fame while seeking nothing but truth: and what a truth!—the truth concealed in the humblest of created things!Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study.In his hands and in his books, as though by[378]magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing:Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos.10(It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little.Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis[379]of the reflections scattered through the pages of theSouvenirs.This was his reply:Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat.Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.”Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life,vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.[380]When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:O Jesu corona celsiorEt veritas sublimior.

II

The fine and unusual qualities of Fabre’s career consist in this; he has attained fame while seeking nothing but truth: and what a truth!—the truth concealed in the humblest of created things!Before Fabre’s time entomology was a poor little science, with no savour of life or freshness about it, without a ray of sunshine, without a soul; like those poor little insects under glass or stuck on pins, which it was its mission to study.In his hands and in his books, as though by[378]magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing:Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos.10(It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)Some one has said, and it is a saying worth repeating, so just and admirable is it, and so characteristic of the man and his work: With Fabre we have every moment, so to speak, the feeling, the surprise, of rising toward the infinitely great while stooping over the infinitely little.Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis[379]of the reflections scattered through the pages of theSouvenirs.This was his reply:Because I have shifted a few grains of sand upon the shore, am I in a position to understand the abysmal depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the world’s archives before we know the last word concerning a gnat.Thus the Homer, the Plato of the insects. He is utterly unassuming. He will not allow his admirers to impose upon him. He does not allow himself to be snared by the lure of vivid, brilliant language, nor by the intoxicating problems of inner truths whose surface he grazes. According to him the sum of all his work has been but to “shift a few grains of sand upon the shore” of knowledge, and it is useless for him to endeavour to sound the mysteries of life; he has not even learned—he does not even think it possible to human knowledge to learn—“the last word concerning a gnat.”Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life,vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.[380]When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:O Jesu corona celsiorEt veritas sublimior.

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

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

In his hands and in his books, as though by[378]magic, entomology became truly a living science, provided with wings—the wings of imagination and poetry, of thought and philosophy.

It is a far cry from the dense materialism of the “dust-to-dust” scientists who content themselves with dissecting poor little murdered bodies to the winged spiritualism of this open-air entomologist, interrogating with his bright, loving glance these little insect souls, at once so wonderful and so unconscious. And they all tell him the same thing:Ipse fecit nos et non ipsi nos.10(It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.)

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

Of this scientist, this philosopher, whose mind soars so readily from the “little things” to the great, to the “very great,” from the little curiosities of observation to the great problems that are to be encountered in the higher domains of thought, his friends conceived the idea of demanding a synthesis[379]of the reflections scattered through the pages of theSouvenirs.

This was his reply:

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

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

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

Does this imply that he has relapsed into scepticism; that finally, in despair, he renounces the ambition of his whole life,vitam impendere vero? By no means. He has striven to attain it even beyond his strength.[380]

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

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

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

O Jesu corona celsiorEt veritas sublimior.

O Jesu corona celsior

Et veritas sublimior.

[Contents]IIINeither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is[381]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s:Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of hisharmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.… A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind,[383]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of theharmasthere burst of a sudden[384]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?True, in his incomparableIliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step[385]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet ofLa Bonne Souffrance:11“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never[386]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.

III

Neither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is[381]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s:Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of hisharmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.… A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind,[383]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of theharmasthere burst of a sudden[384]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?True, in his incomparableIliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step[385]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet ofLa Bonne Souffrance:11“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never[386]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.

Neither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is[381]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.

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

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

Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…

Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and[382]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…

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

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

Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind,[383]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.

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

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

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

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

Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of theharmasthere burst of a sudden[384]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.

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

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

True, in his incomparableIliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step[385]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.

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

While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet ofLa Bonne Souffrance:11

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

“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,

Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”

In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never[386]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.

[Contents]IVMore than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?Like the oaks of his native parts, the patriarch of Sérignan continued to brave the assaults of time, and even when he began to feel that his life was declining, it seemed as though it was only withdrawing itself from its long and manifold ramifications in the external world to take refuge, as in an inexpugnable asylum, in the depths and roots of his being. He was one of those of whom people say with us that they “cannot die.”Fabre’s work is immortal—that is agreed. But the artisan?Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was theharmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the[387]Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.His life: it was his study, his museum of natural history, his laboratory, where, with closed doors, face to face with Nature, he repeated, in order to perfect them, to consign them to writing, his open-air researches, his observations of the to-day or yesterday. Now he no longer sets foot in it, and now one saw—with what respect and tenderness—only the marks left by his footsteps upon the tiled floor, as he came and went about the big observation-table, which occupies all the middle of the room, in pursuit of the solution of the problems propounded by his insects.And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of[388]the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series ofSouvenirs.Must they be left thus abandoned previous to their being dispersed or falling into other hands—all these precious fragments of an incomparable life, and these venerable premises, consecrated by such rare memories?The great naturalist’s disciples could not resign themselves to the thought, and by a touching inspiration of filial piety they have found the means to secure these treasures, as by a love stronger than death, against this harrowing dispersal.To keep the dead in their last dwelling, or attract them thither, the ancient Egyptians used to place there the image of their earthly dwelling, offering them at least a reduced facsimile of their life’s environment, of the objects and premises which had in some sort made part of their life and their soul.Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they[389]determined to acquire theHarmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking,12“so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of hisharmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.To see him in the twilight of the dining-room[390]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux13had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he[391]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”14This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist[392]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do notbelievein God, because IseeHim in all things and everywhere.’ ”Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.[393]After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at theHarmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.The old man appreciated her services so greatly that he was overcome with dejection by the very thought that she might be recalled by her superiors, according to the rule of her Order, after the lapse of a certain period of time. And he would gratefully press her hand when the good Sister sought to relieve his anxiety and inspire him with the hope that she would be allowed to remain in his service till the end of his days.He found her simplicity, her delicacy, her good nature, and her devotion so delightful that he could not refrain from telling her so plainly in the direct, forcible manner familiar to him: “You are invaluable, Sister; you are admirable. I love religion as you practise it.”“He has often told me,” she writes, “that when he could not sleep at night, he used to pray, to think of God, and address to Him a prayer which he would himself compose.”In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly,[394]so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.On receiving the news of this alarming condition, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon hastened to theHarmas. The invalid expressed his delight and gratitude for the visit. Their relations were so cordial that the prelate decided to continue them by a series of admirable letters which have fortunately been published.In these letters, with great delicacy, Monseigneur Latty avoided all that might run contrary to the naturalist’s opinions, and very gently endeavoured to induce him to die as a Christian.To draw him more surely to the light that shines from the Cross and the grace which raises the soul above itself, he asks him to recite every evening, in unison with him, the beautiful prayer of the dying Saviour, which he calls “the prayer of the heights,” the height of Golgotha, the height of life:In manus tuus Domine commendo spiritum meum. (Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.)However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed[395]nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.During the summer of 1915 his weakness grew more marked, so that there was no hope of many more days of life. The curé of Sérignan having been mobilised, the absence of the priest at this time was a cause of great anxiety to Sister Adrienne—always on the watch for the soul ready to escape her.Providence happily came to her assistance; and a Breton priest, who had come to the South to recover his health, and had for some time been acquainted with the master, was admitted to terms of intimacy. After some hesitation he decided to speak to the scientist of the Sacrament of Penitence. With that beautiful simplicity of his, and to the astonishment of the priest, Fabre, who seemed expecting the invitation, replied:“Whenever you will.”“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he[396]heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”It was the 11th October 1915, at six o’clock of the evening, that the great scientist so gently surrendered his soul to God.The obsequies, celebrated on the 16th October, “were simple and affecting, as he would have liked them to be. For a few moments before leaving the church, the old naturalist’s fine face was again exposed. It reflected an immense serenity. On his peaceful features one divined the satisfaction of the man who is departing with his work accomplished. In his parchment-like hands he clasped a wooden crucifix with ivory tips. Beside his head was a wreath of laurestinus. Beside one arm was his great black felt hat.”The service was celebrated by the Arch-priest of Orange, in the little church; and then the harsh, rocky soil received the body of him who had so often stooped over it.This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is[397]magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:“Quos periisse putamusPræmissi sunt.Minime finis, sed limenVitæ excelsioris.”Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.”15But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his[398]thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.THE END

IV

More than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?Like the oaks of his native parts, the patriarch of Sérignan continued to brave the assaults of time, and even when he began to feel that his life was declining, it seemed as though it was only withdrawing itself from its long and manifold ramifications in the external world to take refuge, as in an inexpugnable asylum, in the depths and roots of his being. He was one of those of whom people say with us that they “cannot die.”Fabre’s work is immortal—that is agreed. But the artisan?Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was theharmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the[387]Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.His life: it was his study, his museum of natural history, his laboratory, where, with closed doors, face to face with Nature, he repeated, in order to perfect them, to consign them to writing, his open-air researches, his observations of the to-day or yesterday. Now he no longer sets foot in it, and now one saw—with what respect and tenderness—only the marks left by his footsteps upon the tiled floor, as he came and went about the big observation-table, which occupies all the middle of the room, in pursuit of the solution of the problems propounded by his insects.And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of[388]the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series ofSouvenirs.Must they be left thus abandoned previous to their being dispersed or falling into other hands—all these precious fragments of an incomparable life, and these venerable premises, consecrated by such rare memories?The great naturalist’s disciples could not resign themselves to the thought, and by a touching inspiration of filial piety they have found the means to secure these treasures, as by a love stronger than death, against this harrowing dispersal.To keep the dead in their last dwelling, or attract them thither, the ancient Egyptians used to place there the image of their earthly dwelling, offering them at least a reduced facsimile of their life’s environment, of the objects and premises which had in some sort made part of their life and their soul.Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they[389]determined to acquire theHarmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking,12“so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of hisharmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.To see him in the twilight of the dining-room[390]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux13had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he[391]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”14This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist[392]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do notbelievein God, because IseeHim in all things and everywhere.’ ”Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.[393]After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at theHarmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.The old man appreciated her services so greatly that he was overcome with dejection by the very thought that she might be recalled by her superiors, according to the rule of her Order, after the lapse of a certain period of time. And he would gratefully press her hand when the good Sister sought to relieve his anxiety and inspire him with the hope that she would be allowed to remain in his service till the end of his days.He found her simplicity, her delicacy, her good nature, and her devotion so delightful that he could not refrain from telling her so plainly in the direct, forcible manner familiar to him: “You are invaluable, Sister; you are admirable. I love religion as you practise it.”“He has often told me,” she writes, “that when he could not sleep at night, he used to pray, to think of God, and address to Him a prayer which he would himself compose.”In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly,[394]so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.On receiving the news of this alarming condition, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Avignon hastened to theHarmas. The invalid expressed his delight and gratitude for the visit. Their relations were so cordial that the prelate decided to continue them by a series of admirable letters which have fortunately been published.In these letters, with great delicacy, Monseigneur Latty avoided all that might run contrary to the naturalist’s opinions, and very gently endeavoured to induce him to die as a Christian.To draw him more surely to the light that shines from the Cross and the grace which raises the soul above itself, he asks him to recite every evening, in unison with him, the beautiful prayer of the dying Saviour, which he calls “the prayer of the heights,” the height of Golgotha, the height of life:In manus tuus Domine commendo spiritum meum. (Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.)However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed[395]nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.During the summer of 1915 his weakness grew more marked, so that there was no hope of many more days of life. The curé of Sérignan having been mobilised, the absence of the priest at this time was a cause of great anxiety to Sister Adrienne—always on the watch for the soul ready to escape her.Providence happily came to her assistance; and a Breton priest, who had come to the South to recover his health, and had for some time been acquainted with the master, was admitted to terms of intimacy. After some hesitation he decided to speak to the scientist of the Sacrament of Penitence. With that beautiful simplicity of his, and to the astonishment of the priest, Fabre, who seemed expecting the invitation, replied:“Whenever you will.”“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he[396]heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”It was the 11th October 1915, at six o’clock of the evening, that the great scientist so gently surrendered his soul to God.The obsequies, celebrated on the 16th October, “were simple and affecting, as he would have liked them to be. For a few moments before leaving the church, the old naturalist’s fine face was again exposed. It reflected an immense serenity. On his peaceful features one divined the satisfaction of the man who is departing with his work accomplished. In his parchment-like hands he clasped a wooden crucifix with ivory tips. Beside his head was a wreath of laurestinus. Beside one arm was his great black felt hat.”The service was celebrated by the Arch-priest of Orange, in the little church; and then the harsh, rocky soil received the body of him who had so often stooped over it.This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is[397]magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:“Quos periisse putamusPræmissi sunt.Minime finis, sed limenVitæ excelsioris.”Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.”15But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his[398]thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.THE END

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

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

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

Let us resume our comparison. Like the oak that loses its boughs, one after the other, he saw falling one by one the several factors of his life. His life was theharmas, that paradise of insects, that laboratory after his own heart, where he could make his observations under the blue sky, to the song of the[387]Cicadæ, amid the thyme, lavender, and rosemary. Now he was seen there no longer; hardly were the traces of his footsteps yet visible through the untrimmed boughs that crossed the paths and the grass that was invading them.

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

And we have a feeling that we are looking upon, and handling, relics, when on this table we still see the pocket-lenses, the microscopes and modest apparatus which has served for his experiments. And we have the same feeling before the collections in the glass-topped cases of polished pine which stand against the whitewashed walls, and before the hundred and twenty volumes of[388]the magnificent herbarium which stand in a row beneath them, and before the innumerable portfolios of mycological plates, in which vivid colour is blended so well with delicacy of drawing, and before the registers and stacks of notes in fine, clear handwriting, without erasures, which promised a fresh series ofSouvenirs.

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

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

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

Fabre’s friends sought to do still better. In order to preserve it in its integrity, they[389]determined to acquire theHarmas, with its plantations, its collections, and all its dependencies, and in order to make their homage as complete as possible they made, with this object, an appeal for international subscriptions, which were unhappily interrupted by the war.

“This is the museum which we wish to dedicate to him,” said the chief promoter of this pious undertaking,12“so that in after years, when the good sage who knew the language of the innumerable little creatures of the country-side shall rest beneath the cypresses of hisharmas, at the foot of the laurestinus bushes, amidst the thyme and the sage that the bees will still rifle, all those whom he has taught, all those whom he has charmed, may feel that something of his soul still wanders in his garden and animates his house.”

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

To see him in the twilight of the dining-room[390]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.

One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux13had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he[391]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”

This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”14

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

One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist[392]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:

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

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

The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church.[393]

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

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

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

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

In the spring of 1914 the aged naturalist, who was more than ninety years of age, felt that his strength was failing more perceptibly,[394]so that the doctors diagnosed a fatal outcome in the near future.

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

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

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

However, Fabre was not yet at the end of his Calvary. Contrary to the expectation of the doctors, a return of strength enabled him to live to see another Spring, and it needed[395]nothing less than the terrible shocks of the tempest unloosed upon Europe to overcome the powers of resistance that had braved so many storms.

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

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

“Whenever you will.”

“Purified by absolution, fortified by the Extreme Unction, received, in full consciousness, into the Church, Fabre displayed a wonderful serenity. Pressing the hand of the priest who was officiating, he listened to the recommendation of the soul. And when he[396]heard the sacred words that were familiar to him—In manus tuus, Domine—his lips moved as though to pronounce the Amen of supreme acceptance, while his gaze, which was beginning to grow dim, settled upon the Sister’s crucifix.”

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

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

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

This “life of J. H. Fabre told by himself” would not be complete if we did not give here the text of the epitaph which he himself had composed beforehand. It is[397]magnificent: it gives one the impression of an unfurling of wings:

“Quos periisse putamusPræmissi sunt.Minime finis, sed limenVitæ excelsioris.”

“Quos periisse putamus

Præmissi sunt.

Minime finis, sed limen

Vitæ excelsioris.”

Fabre was preceded to the tomb by several months by Mistral, who was seven years his junior. “Very different in an equal fame, these two men are inseparable. Mistral and Fabre both represented Provence; one was born there and never left it, and to some extent created it; the other adopted and was adopted by it, and, like his illustrious compatriot, covered it with glory.”15

But while Fabre represented Provence, which saw the unfolding of his rich and vital nature, and while it lavished upon him all the beauty of its sky, all the brilliance of its Latin soul, all the savour of its musical and picturesque language, and all the entomological wealth of its sunny hills, he none the less represents the Rouergue, whence he derived his innate qualities and his earliest habits, his love of nature and the insects, his[398]thirst for God and the Beyond, his indefatigable love of work, his tenacious enthusiasm for study, his irresistible craving for solitude, the strange, powerful, striking and picturesque grace of his language, his almost rustic simplicity, his blunt frankness, his proud timidity, his no less proud independence, and with all these the ingenuous and unusual sensitiveness and sincere modesty of his character.

THE END

1This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.↑2This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of theUniversité des Annales politiques et littéraires.↑3The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.”Cousin= cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.↑4Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.↑5E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros,op. cit., p. 81.↑6M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.↑7François Fabié.↑8In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known assanti belli= beautiful saints.—B. M.↑9The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to theDiscours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom:Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)↑10Psalm 100, verse 3.↑11Françoise Coppée.↑12Dr. Legros,Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.↑13The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.↑14J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.↑15E. Laguet,Annales politiques etlittéraires, April 6, 1914.↑

1This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.↑2This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of theUniversité des Annales politiques et littéraires.↑3The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.”Cousin= cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.↑4Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.↑5E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros,op. cit., p. 81.↑6M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.↑7François Fabié.↑8In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known assanti belli= beautiful saints.—B. M.↑9The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to theDiscours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom:Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)↑10Psalm 100, verse 3.↑11Françoise Coppée.↑12Dr. Legros,Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.↑13The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.↑14J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.↑15E. Laguet,Annales politiques etlittéraires, April 6, 1914.↑

1This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.↑

1This chapter was written by the Abbé Fabre especially for the English edition.—B. M.↑

2This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of theUniversité des Annales politiques et littéraires.↑

2This was the pilgrimage of the young girls of theUniversité des Annales politiques et littéraires.↑

3The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.”Cousin= cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.↑

3The French words are “Cousins,” “Cousines.”Cousin= cousin, good friend, crony.—B. M.↑

4Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.↑

4Jules Clarétie, Jean Richepin, Adolphe Brisson, etc.↑

5E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros,op. cit., p. 81.↑

5E. Lavisse, quoted by Dr. Legros,op. cit., p. 81.↑

6M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.↑

6M. l’Abbé Germain, ex-curé of Sérignan.↑

7François Fabié.↑

7François Fabié.↑

8In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known assanti belli= beautiful saints.—B. M.↑

8In Provence, as in Italy, the plaster statues sold by itinerant Italians are known assanti belli= beautiful saints.—B. M.↑

9The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to theDiscours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom:Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)↑

9The text is from Ecclesiastes, i. 2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” but Fabre cites it according to theDiscours contre Eutrope, in which he had learnt it at school, alluding to the appropriate reflection of Saint John Chrysostom:Ἀεὶ ρεν, ράλιστα Σενπνε ἠχαιρον εἰπεῖν; ματαιότης, etc. (Semper quidem, nunc vero maxime opportunum est dicere: Vanitas, etc.)↑

10Psalm 100, verse 3.↑

10Psalm 100, verse 3.↑

11Françoise Coppée.↑

11Françoise Coppée.↑

12Dr. Legros,Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.↑

12Dr. Legros,Les Annales politiques et littéraires, April 12, 1914.↑

13The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.↑

13The Abbé Joseph Betton and his friend, the Abbé Juiot.↑

14J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.↑

14J. H. Fabre, cited by Dr. Legros.↑

15E. Laguet,Annales politiques etlittéraires, April 6, 1914.↑

15E. Laguet,Annales politiques etlittéraires, April 6, 1914.↑

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