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But “when the hymenopteron breaks its cocoon, where are its masters! Its predecessors have long ago disappeared. How then can it receive education by example?”

You who “shape the world to your whim,” you will reply: “Doubtless there are no longer masters to-day; but go back to the first ages of the globe, when the world in its newness, as Lucretius has so superbly said, as yet knew neither bitter cold nor excessive heat (9/8.); an eternal springtide bathed the earth, and the insects, not dying, as to-day, at the first touch of frost, two successive generations lived side by side, and the younger generation could profit at leisure by the lessons of example.” (9/9.)

Let us return to Fabre’s laboratory, to the covers of wire-gauze, and note what becomes, at the approach of winter, of the survivors of the vespine city.

In the mild and comfortable retreat where the wasps are kept under observation they die no less, despite their well-being and all the care expended on them, when once “the inexorable hour” has struck, and once the exact capital of life which seems to have been imparted to them ages ago is exhausted. With no apparent cause, we see death busy among them. “Suddenly the wasps begin to fall as though struck by lightning; for a few moments the abdomen quivers and the legs gesticulate, then finally remain inert, like a clockwork machine whose spring has run down to the last coil.” (9/10.) This law is general; “the insect is born orphaned both of mother and father, excepting the social insect, and again excepting the dung- beetle, which dies full of days.” (9/11.)

Moreover, Fabre is never weary of demonstrating that the insect, perfectly unconscious of the motive which makes it act, this thereby incapable of profiting by the lessons of experience and of innovation in its habits, beyond a very narrow circle. “No apprentices, no masters.” In this world each obeys “the inner voice” on its own account; each sets itself to accomplish its task, not only without troubling as to what its neighbour is doing, but without thinking any further as to what it is doing itself; instance the Epeïra, turning its back on its work, yet “the latter proceeds of itself, so well is the mechanism devised”; and if by ill chance the spider acted otherwise it would probably fail.

Darwin knew barely the tenth part of the colossal work of Fabre. He had read firstly in the “Annals of Natural Science” of the habits of the Cerceris and the fabulous history of the Meloidae. Finally he saw the first volume of the “Souvenirs” appear, and was interested in the highest degree by the beautiful study on the sense of location and direction in the Mason- bees.

This was already more than enough to excite his curiosity and to make him wonder whether all his philosophy would not stumble over this obstacle.

After having succeeded in explaining so luminously–and with what a lofty purview–the origin of species and the whole concatenation of animal forms, would it not be as though he halted midway in his task were the sanctuary of the origin of instinct to remain for ever inscrutable?

Fabre had not yet left Orange when Darwin engaged in a curious correspondence which lasted until the former had been nearly two years at Sérignan, and which showed how passionately interested the great theorist of evolution was in all the Frenchman’s surprising observations.

It seems that on his side Fabre took a singular interest in the discussion on account of the absolute sincerity, the obvious desire to arrive at the truth, and also the ardent interest in his own studies, of which Darwin’s letters were full. He conceived a veritable affection for Darwin, and commenced to learn English, the better to understand him and to reply more precisely; and a discussion on such a subject between these two great minds, who were, apparently, adversaries, but who had conceived an infinite respect for one another, promised to be prodigiously interesting.

Unhappily death was soon to put an end to it, and when the solitary of Down expired in 1882 the hermit of Sérignan saluted his great shade with real emotion. How many times have I heard him render homage to this illustrious memory!

But the furrow was traced; thenceforth Fabre never ceased to multiply his pin-pricks in “the vast and luminous balloon of transformism (evolution), in order to empty it and expose it in all its inanity.” (9/12.) By no means the least original feature of his work is this passionate and incisive argument, in which, with a remarkable power of dialectic, and at times in a tone of lively banter, he endeavoured to remove “this comfortable pillow from those who have not the courage to inquire into its fundamental nature.” He attacked these “adventurous syntheses, these superb and supposedly philosophic deductions,” all the more eagerly because he himself had an unshakable faith in the absolute certainty of his own discoveries, and because he asserted the reality of things only after he had observed and re-observed them to satiety.

This is why he cared so little to engage in argument relating to his own works; he did not care for discussion; he was indifferent to the daily press; he avoided criticism and controversy, and never replied to the attacks which were made upon him; he rather took pains to surround himself with silence until the day when he felt that his researches were ripe and ready for publicity.

He wrote to his dear friend Devillario, shortly after Darwin’s death:

“I have made a rule of never replying to the remarks, whether favourable or the reverse, which my writings may evoke. I go my own gait, indifferent whether the gallery applauds or hisses. To seek the truth is my only preoccupation. If some are dissatisfied with the result of my observations- -if their pet theories are damaged thereby–let them do the work themselves, to see whether the facts tell another story. My problem cannot be solved by polemics; patient study alone can throw a little light on the subject. (9/13.)

“I am profoundly indifferent to what the newspapers may say about me,” he wrote to his brother seventeen years later; “it is enough for me if I am pretty well satisfied with my own work.” (9/14.)

He read all the letters he received only in a superficial manner, neglecting to thank those who praised or congratulated him, and above all shrinking from all that idle correspondence in which life is wasted without aim or profit.

“I fume and swear when I have to cut into my morning in order to reply to so-and-so who sends me, in print or manuscript, his meed of praise; if I were not careful I should have no time left for far more important work.”

His beloved Frédéric, “the best of his friends,” was himself often treated no better, and to excuse his silence and the infrequency of his letters, Henri, even in the years spent at Carpentras and Ajaccio, could plead only the same reasons; his stupendous labours, his exhausting task, “which overwhelmed him, and was often too great, not for his courage, but for his time and his strength.” (9/15.)

Nevertheless, while evading the question of origins, his far-sighted intellect was bound to “read from the facts” concerning the genesis of new species in process of evolution; and his observations throw a singular light on the quite recent theory of sudden mutations.

The nymph of the Onthophagus presents “a strange paraphernalia of horns and spurs which the organism has produced in a moment of ardour–a luxurious panoply which vanishes in the adult.”

The nymph of the Oniticella also decks itself in “a temporary horn, which departs when it emerges.”

And “as the dung-beetle is recent in the general chronology of creatures, as it takes rank among the last comers, as the geological strata are mute concerning it, it is possible that these horn-like processes, which always degenerate before they reach completion, may be not a reminiscence but a promise, a gradual elaboration of new organs, timid attempts which the centuries will harden to a complete armour, AND IF THIS WERE SO THE PRESENT WOULD TEACH US WHAT THE FUTURE IS TO BE.” (9/16.)

Here is a specific transformation, a veritable creation; fortuitous, blind, and silent; one of those innumerable attempts which nature is always making, for the moment a mere matter of hazard, until some propitious circumstance fixes it in future incarnations.

Thus millions of indeterminate creatures are incessantly roughed out in the substance of that microcosm which is the initial cell; and it is here that Fabre sees the real secret of the law of evolution.

He refutes the great principle of Leibnitz, which was so brilliantly adopted by Darwin, that changes occur by degrees, by “fine shades,” by slow variations, as the result of successive adaptations, and that there is no jumping-off place in nature. On the contrary, life often passes suddenly from one form to another, by abrupt and capricious leaps, by irregular and disorderly steps, and it is in the egg that Fabre sees the first lineaments of these mysterious and spontaneous variations.

Species are therefore born as a whole, each at the same time, AT THE SAME MOMENT, “bringing into being its new organism, with its individual properties and peculiarities, its indelible and innate faculties and tendencies, like “so many medals, each struck with a different die, which the gnawing tooth of time attacks only sooner or later to annihilate it.”

However, Fabre affirms the continuity of progress; he believes in a better and more merciful future, a more complete humanity, ruled by more harmonious or less brutal laws.

With what profound intelligence and what generous enthusiasm he seeks to conjecture what this future might be, in his beautiful observations on the young of the Lycosa (9/17.), which can live for weeks and months in absolute abstinence, although we can perceive no reserve of nutriment!

We know no other sources of animal activity save the energy derived from food. Vegetables draw the materials of their nourishment from the soil and the air, and the sunlight is only an intermediary which enables the plant to fix its carbon. The animal species in turn borrow the elements indispensable to their existence from the vegetable world, or restore their flesh and blood with the flesh and blood of other animals.

Now the young Lycosae “are not inert on their mother’s back; if they fall from the maternal chine they quickly pick themselves up and climb up one of her legs, and once back in place they have to preserve the equilibrium of the mass. In reality they know no such thing as complete repose. What then is the energetic aliment which enables the little Lycosae to struggle? Whence is the heat expended in action derived?”

Fabre sees no other source than “the sun.”

“Every day, if the sky is clear, the Lycosa, loaded with her little ones, crawls to the edge of her well, and for long hours lies in the sun. There, on the maternal back, the young ones stretch themselves out, saturate themselves in the sunshine, charging themselves with motor reserves, steeping themselves in energy, directly converting into movement the calorific radiations coming from the sun, the centre of all life.”

The Scorpion also is able to live for months without nourishment, restoring directly, in the form of movement, “the effluvia emanating from the sun or from other ambient energies–heat, electricity, light–which are the soul of the world.”

Perhaps, among the innumerable worlds of space, there is somewhere, gravitating round a fixed star, a planet invisible to us where “the sunlight sates the hunger of the blind.”

The gentle philosophy of the ingenious dreamer soothes itself with the vision, entertained by great and noble minds, of a humanity “whose teeth will no longer attack sensible life, nor even the pulp of fruits”; “when creatures will devour one another no longer, will no longer feed upon the dead; when they will be nourished by the sunlight, without conflict, without war, without labour; freed from all care, and assured against all needs!”

Thus, in the humblest creatures, he sees the most marvellous perspectives; the body of the lowest insect becomes suddenly a transcendent secret, lighting up the abyss of the human soul, or giving it a glimpse of the stars.

And although his work is in contradiction to the theories of the evolutionists, it ends with the same moral conclusion, namely, that all creation moves slowly and without intermission on its gradual ascent towards progress.

CHAPTER 10. THE ANIMAL MIND.

The cunning anatomist has now successively laid bare all the springs of the animal intellect; he has shown how the various movements are mutually combined and engaged. But so far we have seen only one of the faces of the little mind of the animal; let us now consider the other aspect, the moral side, the region of feeling, the problem of which is confounded with the problem of instinct, and is doubtless fundamentally only another aspect of the same elemental power.

After the conflict the insect manifests its delight; it seems sometimes to exult in its triumph; “beside the caterpillar which it has just stabbed with its sting, and which lies writhing on the ground,” the Ammophila “stamps, gesticulates, beats her wings,” capers about, sounding victory in an intoxication of delight.

The sense of property exists in a high degree among the Mason-bees; with them right comes before might, and “the intruder is always finally dislodged.” (10/1.)

But can we find in the insect anything analogous to what we term devotion, attachment, affectionate feeling? There are facts which lead us to believe we may.

Let us go once more into Fabre’s garden and admire the Thomisus: absorbed in her maternal function, the little spider lying flat on her nest can strive no longer and is wasting away, but persists in living, mere ruin that she is, in order to open the door to her family with one last bite. Feeling under the silken roof her offspring stamping with impatience, but knowing that they have not strength to liberate themselves, she perforates the capsule, making a sort of practicable skylight. This duty accomplished, she quietly surrenders to death, still grappled to her nest.

The Psyche, dominated by a kind of unconscious necessity, protects her nursery by means of her body, anchors herself upon the threshold, and perishes there, devoted to her family even in death.

However, Fabre will show us with infallible logic that all these instances of foresight and maternal tenderness have, as a rule, no other motive than pleasure and the blind impulse which urges the insect to follow only the fatal path of its instincts.

In many species the material fact of maternity is reduced to its simplest expression.

The Pieris limits herself to depositing her eggs on the leaves of the cabbage, “on which the young must themselves find food and shelter.”

“From the height of the topmost clusters of the centaury the Clythris negligently lets her eggs fall to the ground, one by one, here or there at hazard; without the least care as to their installation.

“The eggs of the Locustidae are implanted in the earth like seeds and germinate like grain.”

But stop before the Lycosa, that magnificent type of maternal love which Fabre has already depicted. “She broods over her eggs with anxious affection. With the hinder claws resting on the margin of the well she holds herself supported above the opening of the white sac, which is swollen with eggs. For several long weeks she exposes it to the sun during half the day. Gently she turns it about in order to present every side to the vivifying light. The bird, in order to hatch her eggs, covers them with the down of her breast, and presses them against that living calorifer, her heart. The Lycosa turns hers about beneath the fires of heaven; she gives them the sun for incubator.” (10.2.) Could abnegation be more perfect? What greater proof could there be of renunciation and self-oblivion?

But appearances are vain. Substitute for the beloved sac some other object, and the spider “will turn about, with the same love, as though it were her sac of eggs, a piece of cork, a pincushion, or a ball of paper,” just as the hen, another victim of this sublime deception, will give all her heart to hatching the china nest-eggs which have been placed beneath her, and for weeks will forget to feed.

The young brood hatches, and the spider goes a-hunting, carrying her little ones on her back; she protects them in case of danger, but is incapable of recognizing them or of distinguishing them from the young of others. The Copris and the Scorpion are no less blind, “and their maternal tenderness barely exceeds that of the plant, which, a stranger to any sense of affection or morality, none the less exercises the most exquisite care in respect of its seeds.”

Moreover, the impulse to work is only a kind of unconscious pleasure. When the Pelopaeus “has stored her lair with game,” when the Cerceris has sealed the crypt to which she has confided the future of her race, neither one nor the other can foresee “the future offspring which their faceted eyes will never behold, and the very object of their labours is to them occult.”

With them, as with all, life can only be a perpetual illusion.

Yet the marvellous edifice of the “Souvenirs entomologiques” is consummated by the astonishing history of the Minotaur, whose habits surpass in ideal beauty all that could be imagined.

At the bottom of a burrow, in a deeply sunken vault, two dung-beetles are at work, the Minotaurs, who, once united, recognize one another, and can find one another again if separated, but do not voluntarily separate, realizing “the moral beauty of the double life” and “the touching concept of the family, the sacred group par excellence.” The male buries himself with his companion, remains faithful to her, comes to her assistance, and “stores up treasure for the future. Never discouraged by the heavy labour of climbing, leaving to the mother only the more moderate labour, keeping the severest for himself, the heavy task of transport in a narrow tunnel, very deep and almost vertical, he goes foraging, forgetful of himself, heedless of the intoxicating delights of spring, though it would be so good to see something of the country, to feast with his brothers, and to pester the neighbours; but no! he collects the food which is to nourish his children, and then, when all is ready for the new-comers, when their living is assured, having spent himself without counting the cost, exhausted by his efforts, and feeling himself failing, he leaves his home and goes away to die, that he may not pollute the dwelling with a corpse.”

The mother, on her side, allows nothing to divert her from her household, and only returns to the surface when accompanied by her young, who disperse at will. Then, having nothing more to do, the devoted creature perishes in turn. (10/3.)

Compared with the Scarabaeus, which contents itself with idle wandering, or even with the meritorious Sisyphus, does it not seem that the Minotaur moves on an infinitely higher plane?

What nobler could be found among ourselves? What father ever better comprehended his duties and obligations toward his family? What morality could be more irreproachable; what fairer example could be meditated?

“Is not life everywhere the same, in the body of the dung-beetle as in that of man? If we examine it in the insect, do we not examine it in ourselves?”

Whence does the Minotaur derive these particular graces? How has it risen to so high a level on the wings of pure instinct? How could we explain the rarity of so sublime an example, did we not know, to satiety, that “nature everywhere is but an enigmatic poem, as who should say a veiled and misty picture, shining with an infinite variety of deceptive lights in order to evoke our conjectures”? (10/4.)

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the majority have no other rule of conduct than to follow the trend of their instincts, and to obey “their unbridled desires.” No one better than Fabre has expounded the blind operation of these little natural forces, the brutality of their manners, their cannibalism, and what we might call their amorality, were it possible to employ our human formulae outside our own human world.

With the gardener-beetles, if one is crippled, none of the same race halts or lingers; none attempts to come to his aid. Sometimes the passers-by hasten to the invalid to devour him.”

In the republic of the wasps “the grubs recognized as incurable are pitilessly torn from their place and dragged out of the nest. Woe to the sick! they are helpless and at once expelled.”

When the winter comes all the larvae are massacred, and the whole vespine city ends in a horrible tragedy.

But life is a whole, and all conduct is good whose actions realize an object and are adapted to an end. If there is a “spirit” of the hive, the insect also has its morality and the wasp’s nest its “law,” and the conduct of its inmates, horrible though it may seem to Fabre, is doubtless only a submission to certain exigencies of that universal law which makes nature a “savage foster-mother who knows nothing of pity.”

These cruelties particularly show us that one of the functions of the insect in nature is to preside over the disappearance and also the ultimate metamorphoses of the least “remnants of life.”

Each has its providential hygienic function.

The Necrophori, “the first of the tiny scavengers of the fields,” bury corpses in order to establish their progeny in them; in the space of a few hours an enormous body, a mole, a water-rat, or an adder, will completely disappear, buried under the earth.

The Onthophagi purify the soil, “dividing all filth into tiny crumbs, ridding the earth of its defilements.”

A very small beetle, the Trox, has the imprescriptible mission of purging the earth of the rabbits’ fur rejected by the fox. (10/5.)

Here structure explains the function.

The intestine of the grub of the rose-beetle “is a veritable triturating mill, which transforms vegetable matter into mould; in a month it will digest a volume of matter equal to several thousand times the initial volume of the grub.”

The intestine of the Scarabaei is prolonged to a prodigious length in order to “drain the excrement to the last atom in its manifold circuits. The sheep has finely divided the vegetable matter; the grub, that incomparable triturator, reduces it to the finest possible consistency; not a morsel is left in which the magnifying glass can reveal a fibre.”

To fulfil its hygienic mission the insect arrives in due season, and multiplies its legions; “there are twenty thousand eggs in the flanks of the house fly; immediately they are hatched these twenty thousand maggots set to work, so that Linnaeus has said that three flies would suffice to devour the body of a horse or a lion.”

Feeding only upon wheat, a single weevil, the Calendar beetle, produces ten thousand eggs, whence issue as many larvae, each of them devouring its grain.

In all species the number of births is at first exaggerated, for all, the obscure, the nameless, the most destructive, our pests as well as our most precious helpers, have their utility and their part to play in the general scheme of life, a raison d’être in the eternal renewal of things, which is without reference to the vexatious or beneficent quality of their behaviour to us.

Each has its rank assigned, each has its task, to one the flower, to another the roots, to a third the leaves; the vine has its caterpillars, its beetles, its butterflies; the clover, its moths and mites. (10/6.)

Man sees himself forced to submit to them, and spends himself in vain efforts to carry on an often useless campaign. Nothing seems to affect them, neither drought, nor rain, nor even the severest cold; and the eggs and larvae, organizations apparently delicate in the extreme, are often more tenacious of life than the adults. Fabre has proved this: let the temperature suddenly fall twenty degrees: the eggs of Geotrupes and the larvae of the cockchafer or the rose-beetle endure such vicissitudes of temperature with impunity; contracted and stiffened into little masses of ice, but not destroyed, they revive in spring no less than the eel fry, the rotifers, or the tardigrades. One can scarcely believe that life still persists in a state of suspense only in these little frozen creatures, whose organization is already so complicated.

Then, of a sudden, the ravagers disappear; more often than not none knows how or why; deliverance is at hand. What indeed would become of the world were nothing to moderate such fecundity?

Again, each species has its trials which appear in time to moderate its surplusage, and Fabre expounds for us, with a stern philosophy, the terrible devices by which this repression is effected.

Each has its appointed enemy, which lives upon it or its offspring, and which in turn becomes the prey of some smaller creature. The gentle itself, “the king of the dead,” has its parasites. While it swims in the deliquescence of putrefying flesh a minute Chalcidian perforates its skin with an imperceptible wound, and introduces its terrible eggs, whence in the future will issue larvae which to-morrow will devour the devourers of to-day.

None exists save to the detriment of others. Everywhere, even in the smallest, we find “an atrocious activity, a cunning brigandage,” a savage extermination, which dominates a vast unconscious world of which the final result is the restoration of equilibrium. (10/7.) It is only on these antagonisms, on the enemies of our enemies, that we can found any hope of seeing this or that pest disappear. A small Hymenopteron, almost invisible, the Microgaster glomeratus, is entrusted with the destruction of the cabbage caterpillar; the cochineal wages war to the death upon the green- fly; the Ammophila is the predestined murderer of the harvest Noctuela, whose misdeeds in a beetroot country often amount to a disaster. The Odynerus has for its instinctive mission to arrest the excessive multiplication of a lucerne weevil, no less than twenty-four of whose grubs are necessary to rear the offspring of the brigand, and nearly sixty gadflies are sacrificed to the growth of a single Bembex.

Everywhere craft is organized to triumph over force. Around each nest the parasites lie in wait, “atrocious assassins of the child in the cradle, watching at the doors for the favourable occasion to establish their family at the expense of others. The enemy penetrates the most inaccessible fortress; each has its tactics of war, devised with a terrible art. Of the nest and the cocoon of the victim the intruder makes its own nest, its own cocoon, and in the following year, instead of the master of the house, he will emerge from underground as the usurping bandit, the devourer of the inhabitant.”

While the cicada is absorbed in laying her eggs an insignificant fly labours to destroy them. How express the calm audacity of this pigmy, following closely after the colossus, step by step; several at once almost under the talons of the giant, which could crush them merely by treading on them? But the cicada respects them, or they would long ago have disappeared.” (10/8.)

Fabre thus agrees with Pasteur, who in the world of the infinitely little shows us the same antagonisms, the same vital competition, the same eternal movement of flux and reflux, the same whirlpool of life, which is extinguished only to reappear: tending always towards an equilibrium which is incessantly destroyed. And it is thanks to this balancing that the integral of life remains everywhere and always almost identical with itself.

CHAPTER 11. HARMONIES AND DISCORDS.

Such indeed is the economy of nature that secret relations and astonishing concordances exist throughout the whole vast weft of things. There are no loose ends; everything is consequent and ordered. Hidden harmonies meet and mingle.

Among the terebinth lice, “when the population is mature, the gall is ripe also, so fully do the calendars of the shrub and the animal coincide”; and the mortal enemy of the Halictus, the sinister midge of the springtime, is hatched at the very moment when the bee begins to wander in search of a location for its burrows.

The fantastic history of the larvae of the Anthrax furnishes us with one of the most suggestive examples of these strange coincidences. (10/9.)

The Anthrax is a black fly, which sows its eggs on the surface of the nests of the Mason-bee, whose larvae are at the moment reposing in their silken cocoons.

“The grub of the Anthrax emerges and comes to life under the touch of the sunlight. Its cradle is the rugged surface of the cell; it is welcomed into the world by a literally stony harshness…Obstinately it probes the chinks and pores of the nest; glides over it, crawls forward, returns, and recommences. The radicle of the germinating seed is not more persevering, not more determined to descend into the cool damp earth. What inspiration impels it? What compass guides it? What does the root know of the fertility of the soil?…The nurseling, the seed of the Anthrax, is barely visible, almost escaping the gaze of the magnifying glass; a mere atom compared to the monstrous foster-mother which it will drain to the very skin. Its mouth is a sucker, with neither fangs nor jaws, incapable of producing the smallest wound; it sucks in place of eating, and its attack is a kiss.” It practises, in short, a most astonishing art, “another variation of the marvellous art of feeding on the victim without killing it until the end of the meal, in order always to have a store of fresh meat. During the fourteen days through which the nourishment of the Anthrax continues, the aspect of the larva remains that of living flesh; until all its substance has been literally transferred, by a kind of transpiration, to the body of the nurseling, and the victim, slowly exhausted, drained to the last drop, while retaining to the end just enough life to prove refractory to decomposition, is reduced to the mere skin, which, being insufflated, puffs itself out and resumes the precise form of the larva, there being nowhere a point of escape for the compressed air.”

Now the grub of the Anthrax “appears precisely at the exact moment when the larva of the Chalicodoma is attacked by that lethargy which precedes metamorphosis, and which renders it insensible, and during which the substance of the grub about to be transfigured into a bee commences to break down and resolve itself into a liquid pulp, for the processes of life always liquefy the grub before achieving the perfect insect.” (11/2.)

Here again the time-tables coincide.

But it is perhaps in the celebrated Odyssey of the grub of the Sitaris that Fabre most urgently claims our admiration for the marvellous and incomprehensible wisdom of the Unconscious!

Let us recapitulate the unheard-of series of events, the inextricable complication of circumstances, which are required to condition the lowly life of a Sitaris.

In the first place, this microscopic creature must be provided with talons, or how could it adhere to the fleece of the Anthophora, on which it must live as parasite for a certain length of time?

Then again, it must transfer itself from the male to the female bee in the course of its travels abroad, or its destiny would be cut short.

Again, it must not miss the opportunity of embarking itself upon the egg just at the propitious moment.

Then the volume of this egg must be so calculated as to represent an allowance of food exactly proportioned to the duration of the first phase of its metamorphosis. Moreover, the quantity of honey accumulated by the bee must suffice for the whole of the remaining cycle of its larval existence.

Let a single link of the chain be broken, and the entire species of the Sitaris is no longer possible.

If every species has its law; if the Geotrupes remain faithful to filth, although experience shows that they can accommodate themselves equally well to the putrefaction of decayed leaves; if the predatory species–the Cerceris, the Sphex, the Ammophila–resort only to one species of quarry to nourish their larvae, although these same larvae accept all indifferently, it is on account of those superior economic laws and secret alliances the profound reasons for which as a rule escape us or are beyond the scope of our theories.

For all things are produced and interlocked by the eternal necessity; link engages in link, and life is only a plexus of solitary forces allied among themselves by their very nature, the condition of which is harmony. And the whole system of living creatures appears to us, through the work of the great naturalist, as an immense organism, a sort of vast physiological apparatus, of which all the parts are mutually interdependent, and as narrowly controlled as all the cells of the human body.

Fabre goes on to present us with other facts, which at a first glance appear highly immoral; I am referring to certain phases of sexual love among the lower animals, and his ghoulish revelations concerning the horrible bridals of the Arachnoids, the Millepoda, and the Locustidae.

The Decticus surrenders only to a single exploit of love; a victim of its “strange genesics”; utterly exhausted by the first embrace, empty, drained, extenuated, motionless in all its members, utterly worn out, it quickly succumbs, a mere broken simulacrum, like the miserable lover of a monstrous succubus who “loves him enough to devour him.” (11/3.)

The female scorpion devours the male; “all is gone but the tail!”

The female Spider delights in the flesh of her lover.

The cricket also devours a small portion of her “debonair” admirer.

The Ephippigera “excavates the stomach of her companion and eats him.”

But the horror of these nuptial tragedies is surpassed by the insatiable lust, the monstrous conjunction, the bestial delights of the Mantis, that “ferocious spectre, never wearied of embraces, munching the brains of its spouse at the very moment of surrendering her flanks to him.” (11/4.)

Whence these strange discords, these frightful appetites?

Fabre refers us to the remotest ages, to the depths of the geological night, and does not hesitate to regard these cruelties as “remnants of atavism,” the lingering furies of an ancient strain, and he ventures a profound and plausible explanation.

The Locusts, the Crickets, and the Scolopendrae are the last representatives of a very ancient world, of an extinct fauna, of an early creation, whose perverse and unbridled instincts were given free vent, when creation was as yet but dimly outlined, “still making the earliest essays of its organizing forces”; when the primitive Orthoptera, “the obscure forebears of those of to-day, were “sowing the wild oats of a frantic rut, “in the colossal forests of the secondary period; by the borders of the vast lakes, full of crocodiles, and antediluvian marshes, which in Provence were shaded by palms, and strange ferns, and giant Lycopodia, never as yet enlivened by the song of a bird.

These monstrosities, in which life was making its essays, were subject to singular physical necessities. The female reigned alone; the male did not as yet exist, or was tolerated only for the sake of his indispensable assistance. But he served also another and less obvious end; his substance, or at least some portion of his substance, was an almost necessary ingredient in the act of generation, something in the nature of a necessary excitant of the ovaries, “a horrible titbit,” which completed and consummated the great task of fecundation. Such, in Fabre’s eyes, was the imperious physiological reason of these rude laws. This is why the love of the males is almost equivalent to their suicide; the Gardener-beetle, attacked by the female, attempts to flee, but does not defend himself; “it is as though an invincible repugnance prevents him from repulsing or from eating the eater.” In the same way the male scorpion “allows himself to be devoured by his companion without ever attempting to employ his sting,” and the lover of the Mantis “allows himself to be nibbled to pieces without any revolt on his part.”

A strange morality, but not more strange than the organic peculiarities which are its foundation; a strange world, but perhaps some distant sun may light others like it.

These terrible creatures are a source of dismay to Fabre. If all things proceed from an underlying Reason, if the divine harmony of things testifies everywhere to a sovereign Logic, how shall the proofs of its excellence and its sovereign wisdom be found in such things as these?

Far from attributing to the order of the universe a supposed perfection, far from considering nature as the most immediate expression of the Good and the Beautiful, in the words of Tolstoy (11/5.), he sees in it only a rough sketch which a hidden God, hidden, but close at hand, and living eternally present in the heart of His creatures, is seeking to test and to shape.

Living always with his eyes upon some secret of the marvels of God, whom he sees in every bush, in every tree, “although He is veiled from our imperfect senses” (11/6.), the vilest insect reveals to him, in the least of its actions, a fragment of this universal Intelligence.

What marvels indeed when seen from above! But consider the Reverse–what antinomies, what flagrant contradictions! What poor and sordid means! And Fabre is astonished, in spite of all his candid faith, that the fatality of the belly should have entered into the Divine plan, and the necessity of all those atrocious acts in which the Unconscious delights. Could not God ensure the preservation of life by less violent means? Why these subterranean dramas, these slow assassinations? Why has Evil, THE POISON OF THE GOOD (11/7.), crept in everywhere, even to the origin of life, like an eternal Parasite?

Within this fatal circle, in which the devourer and the devoured, the exploiter and the exploited, lead an eternal dance, can we not perceive a ray of light?

For what is it that we see?

The victims are not merely the predestined victims of their persecutors. They seek neither to struggle nor to escape nor to evade the inevitable; one might say that by a kind of renunciation they offer themselves up whole as a sacrifice!

What irresistible destiny impels the bee to meet half-way the Philanthus, its terrible enemy! The Tarantula, which could so easily withstand the Pompilus, when the latter rashly carries war into its lair, does not disturb itself, and never dreams of using its poisoned fangs. Not less absolute is the submission of the grasshopper before the Mantis, which itself has its tyrant, the Tachytes.

Similarly those which have reason to fear for their offspring, if not for themselves, do nothing to evade the enemy which watches for them; the Megachile, although it could easily destroy it, is indifferent to the presence of a miserable midge, “the bandit who is always there, meditating its crime”; the Bembex, confronted with the Tachinarius, cannot control its terror, but nevertheless resigns itself, while squeaking with fright.

If each creature is what it is only because it is a necessary part of the plan of the supreme Artisan who has constructed the universe, why have some the right of life and death and others the terrible duty of immolation?

Do not both obey, not the gloomy law of carnage, but a kind of sovereign and exquisite sacrifice, some sort of unconscious idea of submission to a superior and collective interest?

This hypothesis, which was one day suggested to Fabre by a friend of great intellectual culture (11/8.), charmed and interested him keenly. I noticed that he was more than usually attentive, and he seemed to me to be suddenly reassured and appeased. For him it was as though a faint ray of light had suddenly fallen among these impenetrable and distressing problems.

It seemed to him that by setting before our eyes the spectacle of so many woes, universally distributed, and doubtless necessary, woes which do not spare even the humblest of creatures, the Sovereign Intelligence intends to exhort us to examine ourselves truly and to dispose us to greater love and pity and resignation.

All his work is highly and essentially religious; and while he has given us a taste for nature, he has not also endeavoured to give us, according to the expression of Bossuet “the taste for God,” or at least a sense of the divine? In opposing the doctrine of evolution, which reduces the animal world to the mere virtualities of the cell; in revealing to us all these marvels which seem destined always to escape human comprehension; finally, by referring us more necessarily than ever to the unfathomable problem of our origins, Fabre has reopened the door of mystery, the door of the divine Unknown, in which the religion of men must always renew itself. We should belittle his thought, we should dwarf the man himself, were we to seek to confine to any particular thesis his spiritualistic conception of the universe.

Fabre recognizes and adores in nature only the great eternal Power, whose imprint is everywhere revealed by the phenomena of matter.

For this reason he has all his life remained free from all superstition and has been completely indifferent to dogmas and miracles, which to his mind imply not only a profound ignorance of science, but also a gross and complete miscomprehension of the divine Intelligence. He kneels upon the ground or among the grasses only the more closely to adore that force, the source of all order, the intuitive knowledge of which, innate in all creatures, even in the tiny immovable minds of animals, is merely a magnificent and gratuitous gift. The office in which he eagerly communicates is that glorious and formidable Mass in which the ragged sower, “noble in his tatters, a pontiff in shabby small-clothes, solemn as a God, blesses the soil, more majestic than the bishop in his glory at Easter-tide.” (11/9.) It is there that he finds his “Ideal,” in the incense of the perfumes “which are softly exhaled from the shapely flowers, from their censers of gold,” in the heart of all creatures, “chaffinch and siskin, skylark and goldfinch, tiny choristers” piping and trilling, “elaborating their motets” to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis. He fraternizes with all, with his dogs and his cats, his tame tortoise, and even the “slimy and swollen frog”; the “Philosopher” of the Harmas, whose murky eyes he loves to interrogate as he paces his garden “by the light of the stars”; persuaded that all are accomplishing a useful work, and that all creatures, from the humblest insect which has only nibbled a leaf, or displaced a few grains of sand, to man himself, are anointed with the same chrism of immortality.

And as he has always set the pleasures of study before all others, he can imagine no greater recompense after death than to obtain from heaven permission still to continue in their midst, during eternity, his life of labour and effort.

CHAPTER 12. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.

We have noted the essential features of his precise and unfailing vision and the value of the documents which record the work of Fabre, but the writer merits no less attention than the observer and the philosopher.

In the domain of things positive, it is not always sufficient to gather the facts, to record them, and to codify in bare formulae the results of inquiry. Doubtless every essential discovery is able to stand by itself; in what would an inventor profit, for example, by raising himself to the level of the artist? “For the theorem lucidity suffices; truth issues naked from the bottom of a well.”

But the manner of speaking, describing, and depicting is none the less an integral part of the truth when it is a matter of expounding and transmitting the latter. To express it feebly is often to compromise it, to diminish it; and even to betray it. There are terms which say better than others what has to be said. “Words have their physiognomy; if there are lifeless words, there are also picturesque and richly-coloured words, comparable to the brush strokes which scatter flecks of light on the grey background of the picture.” There are particular terms of expression, felicities which present things in a better light, and the writer must search in his memory, his imagination, and his heart, for the fitting accent; for the flexibility of language and the wealth of words which are needful if he would fully succeed in the portrayal of living creatures; if he would tender the living truth, reproduce in all its light and shade the spectacle of the world, arouse the imagination, and faithfully interpret the mysterious spirit which impregnates matter and is reflected in thought.

The artist then comes forward to co-ordinate all these scattered fragments, to assemble them, to breathe vitality into them, to restore these inert truths to life.

But what a strange manner of working was Fabre’s; what a curious method of composition! However full of ideas his mind might be, he was incapable of expressing them if he remained in one place and assumed the ordinary preliminary attitude of a man preparing to write. Seated and motionless, his limbs at rest, pen in hand, with a blank page before him, it seemed to him that all his faculties became of a sudden paralysed. He must first move about; activity helped him to pursue his ideas; it was in action that he recovered his ardour and uncovered the sources of inspiration. Just as he never observed without enthusiasm, so he found it impossible to write without exaltation, and it was precisely because he so ardently loved the truth that he felt himself compelled to show it in all its beauty.

Moving like a circus-horse about the great table of his laboratory, he would begin to tramp indefatigably round and round, so that his steps have worn in the tiles of the floor an ineffaceable record of the concentric track in which they moved incessantly for thirty years.

His mind would grow clear and active as he walked, smoking his pipe and “using his marrow-bones.” (12/1.) He was already at work; he was “hammering” his future chapters in his brain; for the idea would be all the more precise as the form was more finished and more irreproachable, more closely identified with the thought; he would wait until the word quivered, palpitated, and lived; until the transcription was no longer an illusion, a phantom, a vision devoid of reality, but a faithful echo, a sincere translation, a finished interpretation, reflecting entire the fundamental essence of the thing; in a word, a work of art, a parallel to nature.

Then only would he sit before the little walnut-wood table “spotted with ink and scarred with knife-cuts, just big enough to hold the inkstand, a halfpenny bottle, and his open notebook”: that same little table at which, in other days, by force of meditation, he achieved his first degrees.

Then he would begin to write, “his pen dipped not in ink only” but in his heart’s blood (12/2.); first of all in ordinary ruled notebooks bound in black cloth, in which he noted, day by day, hour by hour, the observations of every moment, the results of his experiments, together with his thoughts and reflections. Little by little those documents would come together which elucidated and completed one another, and at last the book was written. These notebooks, these copious records, are remarkable for the regularity of the writing and the often impeccable finish of the first draught. Although here and there the same data are transcribed several times in succession, and each time struck through with a vigorous stroke of the pen, there are whole pages, and many pages together, without a single erasure. The handwriting, excessively small–one might think it had been traced by the feet of a fly–becomes in later years so minute that one almost needs a magnifying glass to decipher it.

These notebooks are not the final manuscript. The entomologist would write a new and more perfect copy on loose sheets of paper, making one draught after another, patiently fashioning his style and polishing his work, although many passages were included without revision as they were written in the first instance.

The greatest magician of modern letters, versed in all the artifices of the French language, speaking one day of Fabre and his writings, made in my hearing the assertion that he was not, properly speaking, an artist. He might well be a great naturalist, a veteran of science, an observer of genius, but he was by no means and would never be a writer according to the canons of the craft.

But how many others, like him, in their time regarded as “pitiable in respect of their language,” charm us to-day, simply because they were gifted with imagination and the power of giving life to their work! (12/3.)

To tell the truth, Fabre is absolutely careless of all literary procedure, and solely preoccupied with bringing his style into harmony with his thoughts; he is not in the least a manufacturer of literary phrases. There is no trace of artistic writing in his books, and it is only his manner of feeling and of expressing himself that makes him so dear to us.

What touches us in him is the accent, the simplicity, the measure, the good sense, and the perfect equilibrium of each of these pages: simple, often commonplace, even incorrect or trivial, but so alive, so human, that the blood seems to flow in them. It is the lover in Fabre that draws us to him; nothing quite like his work has been seen since the days of Jean de La Fontaine.

He has liberated science; he laughs at the specialists who take refuge behind their “barbarian terminologies,” at the “jargon” of those “who see the world only through the wrong end of the glass”; at the exaggerated importance which they attribute to insignificant details, the narrowness of classifications, and the chaos of systems; all that incoherent, remote, and inaccessible science, which he, on the contrary, strives to render pleasant and attractive.

This is why the great scientist has endeavoured to speak like other people, preferring, to the harsh consonants of technical phrases which sound “like insults” or have the air of “a magical invocation, which make certain scientific works read like so much gibberish,” the “naive and picturesque appellation, the familiar, trivial name, the popular, living term which directly interprets the exact signification of the habits of an insect, or informs us fully of its dominant characteristic, or which, at least, leaves nothing to conjecture.”

He considers it useless and even inconvenient to abandon many charming expressions, appropriate and significant as they are, which may be borrowed from the good old French tongue; and in this he resembles the immortal de Jussieu, who in his botanical classifications was careful not to discard the old popular denominations which Theophrastus, Virgil, and Linnaeus had thought fit to bestow upon plant and tree.

It is for the same reasons that he loves the Provençal tongue; that beautiful idiom, that superb language, rich in music, in sonorous words, so suggestive and so full of colour, many of whose terms, saying precisely what they intend to say, have no equivalent in French. He has learned the language, and reads it: in particular Roumanille, whose easy, familiar style pleases him better than the grandiloquence of Mistral, although he delights also in Calendal, whose lyrical powers fill him with enthusiasm. >From this ancient tongue, which was early as familiar to him as the French, he borrowed certain mannerisms, certain tricks of style, certain neologisms, and also, to some extent, his simplicity of manner and the cadence of his prose.

It was not without difficulty that he attained this mastery. Measure the gulf between his first volumes and his last; in the first the style is slightly nerveless and indefinite: it was only as he gradually advanced in his career that he acquired what may be called his final manner, or achieved, in his narratives, a perfect literary style. The most substantially constructed, the most happily expressed of his pages were written principally in his extreme old age. Not only is there no sign of failing in these, but in his latest “Souvenirs” the perfection of form is perhaps even more remarkable than the wealth of matter.

How vitally his scrupulous records impress the mind’s eye; how firmly they establish themselves in the memory!

Even if one has never seen the Pelopaeus, one readily conceives an impression of “her wasp-like costume, and curving abdomen, suspended at the end of a long thread.” What exactitude in this snapshot, taken at the moment when the insect is occupied in scooping out of the mire the lump of mud intended for the construction of her nest: “like a skilled housekeeper, with her clothing carefully tucked up that it may not be soiled, the wings vibrating, the limbs rigidly straightened, the black abdomen well raised on the end of its yellow stalk, she rakes the mud with the points of her mandibles, skimming the shining surface.” (12/4.)

He draws, in passing, this charming sketch of the gadfly, the pest of horses, which nourishes itself with their blood:

“Gadflies of several species used to take refuge under the silken dome of my umbrella, and there they would quietly rest, one here, one there, on the tightly stretched fabric; I rarely lacked their company when the heat was overpowering. To while away the hours of waiting, I used to love to watch their great golden eyes, which would shine like carbuncles on the vaulted ceiling of my shelter; I used to love to watch them slowly change their stations, when the excessive heat of some point of the ceiling would force them to move a little.” (12/5.)

We follow all the manoeuvres of the Balaninus, the acorn-weevil, “burying her drill” which “operates by means of little bites.” The narrator calls our attention to the slightest episodes, even to those accidents which sometimes surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that “fatal stake.” (12/6.)

As for the poplar-weevil, we can almost see it moving “in the subtlest equilibrium, clinging with its hooked talons to the slippery surface of the leaf”; we watch all the details of its methods and the progress of its labours. We see the flexed leaf assume the vertical under the awl-stroke which the insect applies to the pedicle, “when, partially deprived of sap, the leaf becomes more flexible, more malleable; it is in a sense partly paralysed, only half alive.” Then we follow the rolling process; “the imperturbable deliberation of the worker as it rolls its cigar, which finally hangs perpendicularly at the end of the bent and wounded stem.” (12/7.)

Fabre, like a true artist, finds all sorts of expressions to describe the tiny, fragile eggs of his insects; little shining pearls, delicious coffers of nickel or amber, miniature pots of translucid alabaster, “which we might think were stolen from the cupboard of a fairy.”

He opens the enchanted alcoves wherein the puny grubs lie slumbering, “fat, rounded puppets”; the tender larvae which “gape and swing their heads to and fro” when the mother returns to the nest with her toothsome mouthful or her crop swollen with honey.

What compassion, what tenderness, what sensitiveness in the affecting picture of the mother Halictus, abandoned, deprived of her offspring, bewildered and lost, when the terrible spring fly has destroyed her house: bald, emaciated, shabby, careworn, already dogged by the small grey lizard! (12/8.)

The tragedy of the wasps’ nest at the approach of the first chills of winter is the final fragment of an epic. At first there is a sort of uneasiness, “a species of indifference and anxiety which broods over the city”; already it has a presentiment of coming misfortune, of an approaching catastrophe. Presently a wild excitement ensues; the foster- mothers, “frightened, fierce, and restless,” as though suddenly attacked by an incomprehensible insanity, conceive an aversion for the young; “the neuters extirpate the larvae and drag them out of the nest,” and the drama of destruction draws to a close with “the final catastrophe; the infirm and the dying are dismembered, eviscerated, dissected in a heap in the catacombs by maggots, woodlice, and centipedes.” Finally the moth comes upon the scene, its larvae “attacking the dwelling itself; gnawing and destroying the joists and rafters, until all is reduced to a few pinches of dust and shreds of grey paper.” (12/9.)

What picturesque expressions he employs to depict, by means of some significant feature, the striking peculiarities of the insect physiognomy!

“The gipsy who night and day for seven months goes to and fro with her brats upon her back” is the Lycosa, the Tarantula with the black stomach, the great spider of the wastes.

The larva of the great Capricornis, which gnaws the interior of old oak- trees, “leaving behind it, in the form of dry-rot, the refuse of its digestive processes,” is “a scrap of intestine which eats its way as it goes.”

In “that hideous lout” the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider.

The Tachinae, those “brazen diptera” which swarm on the sunny sand on the watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at its expense, “are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!”

The Languedocian Sphex, sprawling flat upon the vine leaves, grows dizzy with the heat and frisks for very pleasure; “with its feet it taps rapidly on its resting-place, and thus produces a drumming like that of a shower of rain falling thickly on the leaves.” Fabre takes a keen delight in the production of these pictures, at once so exact and lifelike; but we must not therefore suppose that his mind is incapable of the detailed descriptions necessitated by the laborious processes of minute anatomy.

Like all sciences, entomology has its uninteresting aspects when we seek to study it deeply. Yet with what interest and lucidity has Fabre succeeded in expounding the complex morphoses of the obscure and miserable larva of the Sitaris, the curious intestine of the Scarabaeus, the secret of the spawning of the weevil, and the ingenious mechanisms of the musical instruments of the Decticus and the Cicada. With what subtle art he explains the song of the cricket, how the five hundred prisms of the serrated bow set the four tympana in vibration; and how the song is sometimes muffled by a process of muting. (12/10.)

Some of the images suggested to him by the forms of animals are so beautiful that certain of his descriptions might well serve to inspire an artist, or suggest new motives of decoration in the arts of enamelling, gem-engraving, jewellery, etc.

Instead of eternally copying ancient things, or seeking inspiration in lifeless texts, why not turn our attention to the numerous and interesting motives which are scattered all around us, whose originality consists precisely in the fact that they have never yet been employed? Why torture the mind to produce more painful elaborations of awkward, frozen, poverty- stricken combinations, when Nature herself is at hand, offering the inexhaustible casket of her living marvels, full of the profoundest logic and as yet unexamined?

If the bee by means of the hexagonal prism has anticipated all the geometers in the problem of the economy of space and matter; if the Epeïra and the mollusc have invented the logarithmic spiral and its transcendent properties; if all creatures “inspired by an aesthetic which nothing escapes, achieve the beautiful” (12/11.), surely human art, which can but imitate and remember, has only to employ to its profit and transfigure into ideal images the natural beauties so profusely furnished by the Unconscious.

Modern art, influenced more especially by the subtle Japanese, is already treading this path.

What artist could ever engrave on rare metals or model in precious substances a more beautiful subject than the wonderful picture of the Tarantula offering, at the length of her extended limbs, her white sac of eggs to the sun; or the transparent nymph of the Onthophagus taurus, “as though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous horns like those of the Aurochs”? (12/12.) What an undiscovered subject he might find in the nymph of the Ergatus (12/13.), with its almost incorporeal grace, as though made of “translucent ivory, like a communicant in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny”; or in the still more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus sacer, first of all “a mummy of translucent amber, maintained by its linen cerements in a hieratic pose; but soon upon this background of topaz, the head, the legs, and the thorax change to a sombre red, while the rest of the body remains white, and the nymph is slowly transfigured, assuming that majestic costume which combines the red of the cardinal’s mantle with the whiteness of the sacerdotal alb.”

On the other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a “stupendous mitre”: the most grotesque, the most fantastic freaks that creation can ever have evolved? (12/14.)

CHAPTER 13. THE EPIC OF ANIMAL LIFE.

Although in his portraits and descriptions Fabre is simple and exact, and so full of natural geniality; although he can so handle his words as to render them “adequate” to reproduce the moving pictures of the tiny creatures he observes, his style touches a higher level, flashes with colour, and grows rich with imagery when he seeks to interpret the feelings which animate them: their loves, their battles, their cunning schemes, and the pursuit of their prey; all that vast drama which everywhere accompanies the travail of creation.

It is here in particular that Fabre shows us what horizons, as yet almost unexplored, what profound and inexhaustible resources science is able to offer poetry.

The breaking of egg or chrysalid is in itself a moving event; for to attain to the light is for all these creatures “a prodigious travail.”

The hour of spring has sounded. At the call of the field-cricket, the herald of the spring, the germs that slumber in nymph or chrysalis have broken through their spell.

What haste and ingenuity are required to emerge from the natal darkness, to unwrap the swaddling-bands, to break the subterranean shells, to demolish the waxen bulkheads, to perforate the soil or to escape from prisons of silk!

The woodland bug, whose egg is a masterpiece, invents I know not what magical centre-bit, what curious piece of locksmith’s work, in order to unlock its natal casket and achieve its liberty.

For days the grasshopper “butts its head against the roughness of the soil, and wars upon the pebbles; by dint of frantic wriggling it escapes from the womb of the earth, bursts its old coat, and is transfigured, opening its eyes to the light, and leaping for the first time.”

The Bombyx of the pine-tree “decks its brow with points of diamond, spreads its wings, and erects its plumes, and shakes out its fleece to fly only in the darkness, to wed the same night, and to die on the morrow.”

What marvellous inventions, what machinery, what incredible contrivances, “in order that a tiny fly can emerge from under ground”!

The Anthrax assumes a panoply of trepans, an assortment of gimlets and knives, harpoons and grapnels, in order to perforate its ceiling of cement; then the lugubrious black fly appears, all moist as yet with the humours of the laboratory of life, steadies itself upon its trembling legs, dries its wings, quits its suit of armour, and takes flight.”

The blue-fly, buried in the depth of the sand, “cracks its barrel-shaped coffin,” and splits its mask, in order to disinter itself; the head divides into two halves, between which we see emerging and disappearing by turns a monstrous tumour, which comes and goes, swells and shrivels, palpitates, labours, lunges, and retires, thus compressing and gradually undermining the sand, until at last the newborn fly emerges from the depth of the catacombs. (13/1.)

Certain young spiders, in order to emancipate themselves, to conquer space, and disperse themselves about the world, resort to an ingenious system of aviation. They gain the highest point of the thicket, and release a thread, which, seized by the wind, carries them away suspended. Each shines like a point of light against the foliage of the cypresses. There is a continuous stream of tiny passengers, leaping and descending in scattered sheaves under the caresses of the sun, like atomic projectiles, like the fountain of fire at a pyrotechnic display. What a glorious departure, what an entry into the world! Gripping its aeronautic thread, the insect ascends in apotheosis! (13/2.)

But if all are called all are not chosen. “How many can move only at the greatest peril under the rugged earth, proceeding from shock to shock, in the harsh womb of universal life, and, arrested by a grain of sand, succumb half-way”!

There are others whom slower metamorphoses condemn to vegetate still longer in the subterranean night, before they are permitted to assume their festival attire, and share in their turn in the gladness of creation.

Thus the Cicada is forced to labour for long gloomy years in the darkness before it can emerge from the soil. At the moment when it issues from the earth the larva, soiled with mire, “resembles a sewer-man; its eyes are whitish, nebulous, squinting, blind.” Then “it clings to some twig, it splits down the back, rejects its discarded skin, drier than horny parchment, and becomes the Cigale, which is at first of a pale grass-green hue.” Then,

“Half drunken with her joy, she feasts In a hail of fire”;

And all day long drinks of the sugared sap of tender bark, and is silent only at night, sated with light and heat. The song, which forms part of the majestic symphony of the harvest-tide, announces merely its delight in existence. Having passed years underground, the cigale has only a month to reign, to be happy in a world of light, under the caressing sun. Judge whether the wild little cymbals can ever be loud enough “to celebrate such felicity, so well earned and so ephemeral”! (13/3.)

All sing for happiness, each after its kind, through the calm of the summer days. Their minds are intoxicated; it is their fashion of praying, of adoring, of expressing “the joys of life: a full crop and the sun on the back.” Even the humble grasshopper rubs its flanks to express its joy, raises and lowers its shanks till its wing-cases squeak, and is enchanted with its own music, which it commences or terminates suddenly “according to the alternations of sun and shade.” Each insect has its rhythm, strident or barely perceptible; the music of the thickets and fallows caressed by the sun, rising and falling in waves of joyful life.

The insects make merry; they hold uproarious festival; and they mate insatiably; even before forming a mutual acquaintance; in a furious rush of living, for “love is the sole joy of the animal,” and “to love is to die.”

Hardly unwrapped, still dusty from the strenuous labour of deliverance, “the female of the Scolia is seized by the male, who does not even give her time to wash her eyes.” Having slept over a year underground, the Sitares, barely rid of their mummy-cases, taste, in the sunlight, a few minutes of love, on the very site of their re-birth; then they die. Life surges, burns, flares, sparkles, rushes “in a perpetual tide,” a brief radiance between two nights.

A world of a myriad fairies fills the rustling forest: day and night it unfolds a thousand marvellous pictures; about the root of a bramble, in the shadow of an old wall, on a slope of loose soil, or in the dense thickets.

“The insect is transfigured for the nuptial ceremony; and each hopes, in its ritual, to declare its passion.” Fabre had some thought of writing the Golden Book of their bridals and their wedding festivals (13/4.); the Kamasutra of their feasts and rules of love; and with what art, at once frank and reserved, has he here and there handled this wonderful theme! In the radiant garden of delight, where no detail of truth is omitted, but where nothing shocks us, Fabre reveals himself as he is in his conversation; evading the subject where it takes a licentious turn; fundamentally chaste and extremely reserved.

At the foot of the rocks the Psyche “appears in the balcony of her boudoir, in the rays of the caressing sun; lying on the cloudy softness of an incomparable eider-down.” She awaits the visit of the spouse, “the gentle Bombyx,” who, for the ceremony, “has donned his feathery plumes and his mantle of black velvet.” “If he is late in coming, the female grows impatient; then she herself makes the advances, and sets forth in search of her mate.”

Drawn by the same voluptuous and overwhelming force, the cricket ventures to leave his burrow. Adorned “in his fairest attire, black jacket, more beauteous than satin, with a stripe of carmine on the thigh,” he wanders through the wild herbage, “by the discreet glimmer of twilight,” until he reaches the distant lodging of the beloved. There at last he arrives “upon the sanded walk, the court of honour that precedes the entry.” But already the place is occupied by another aspirant. Then the two rivals fall upon one another, biting one another’s heads, “until it ends by the retreat of the weaker, whom the victor insults by a bravura cry.” The happy champion bridles, assuming a proud air, as of one who knows himself a handsome fellow, before the fair one, who feigns to hide herself behind her tuft of aphyllantus, all covered with azure flowers. “With a gesture of a fore-limb he passes one of his antennae through his mandibles as though to curl it; with his long-spurred, red-striped legs he shuffles with impatience; he kicks the empty air; but emotion renders him mute.” (13/5.)

In the foliage of the ash-tree the lover of the female Cantharis thrashes his companion, who makes herself as small as she can, hiding her head in her bosom; he bangs her with his fists, buffets her with his abdomen, “subjects her to an erotic storm, a rain of blows”; then, with his arms crossed, he remains a moment motionless and trembling; finally, seizing both antennae of the desired one, he forces her to raise her head “like a cavalier proudly seated on horse and holding the reins in his hands.”

The Osmiae “reply by a click of the jaws to the advances of their lovers, who recoil, and then, doubtless to make themselves more valiant, they also execute a ferocious mandibular grimace. With this byplay of the jaws and their menacing gestures of the head in the empty air the lovers have the air of intending to eat one another.” Thus they preface their bridals by displays of gallantry, recalling the ancient betrothal customs of which Rabelais speaks; the pretenders were cuffed and derided and threatened with a hearty pummelling. (13/6.)

On the arid hillsides, where the doubtful rays of the moon pierce the storm-clouds and illumine the sultry atmosphere, the pale scorpions, with short-sighted eyes, hideous monsters with misshapen heads, “display their strange faces, and two by two, hand in hand, stalk in measured paces amid the tufts of lavender. How tell their joys, their ecstasies, that no human language can express…!” (13/7.)

However, the glow-worm, to guide the lover, lights its beacon “like a spark fallen from the full moon”; but “presently the light grows feebler, and fades to a discreet nightlight, while all around the host of nocturnal creatures, delayed in their affairs, murmur the general epithalamium.” (13/8.)

But their happy time is soon over; tragedy is about to follow idyll.

One must live, and “the intestine rules the world.”

All creatures that fill the world are incessantly conflicting, and one lives only at the cost of another.

On the other hand, in order that the coming generations may see the light, the present generations must think of the preservation of the young. “Perish all the rest provided the brood flourish!” And in the depth of burrows the future larvae who live only for their stomachs, “little ogres, greedy of living flesh,” must have their prey.

To hunger and maternity let us also add love, which “rules the world by conflict.”

Such are the components of the “struggle for existence,” such as Fabre has described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more moving combats in its thickets.”

“Each has its ruses of war, its methods of attack, its methods of killing.”

What tactics–“studied, scientific, worthy of the athletes of the ancient palaestra”–are those which the Sphex employs to paralyse the Cricket and the Cerceris to capture the Cleona, to secure them in a suitable place, so as to operate on them more surely and at leisure!

Beside these master paralysers, so expert in the art of dealing slow death, there are those which, with a precision no less scholarly, kill and wither their victims at a single stroke, and without leaving a trace: “true practitioners in crime.”

On the rock-rose bushes, with their great pink flowers, “the pretty Thomisus, the little crab-spider, clad in satin,” watches for the domestic bee, and suddenly kills it, seizing the back of the head, while the Philanthus, also seizing it by the head, plunges its sting under the chin, neither too high nor too low, but “exactly in the narrow joint of the neck,” for both insects know that in this limited spot, in which is concentrated a small nervous mass, something like a brain, is “the weak point, most vulnerable of all,” the fault in the cuirass, the vital centre. Others, like the Araneidae, intoxicate their prey, and their subtle bite, “which resembles a kiss,” in whatever part of the body it is applied, “produces almost immediately a gradual swoon.”

Thus the great hairy Bourdon, in the course of its peregrinations across the wastes of thyme, sometimes foolishly strays into the lair of the Tarantula, whose eyes glimmer like jewels at the back of his den. Hardly has the insect disappeared underground than a sort of shrill rattling is heard, a “true death-song,” immediately followed by the completest silence. “Only a moment, and the unfortunate creature is absolutely dead, proboscis outstretched and limbs relaxed. The bite of the rattlesnake would not produce a more sudden paralysis.”

The terrible spider “crouching on the battlements of his castle, his heavy belly in the sun, attentive to the slightest rustling, leaps upon whatever passes, fly or Libellula, and with a single stroke strangles his victim, and drains its body, drinking the warm blood.”

“To dislodge him from his keep needs all the cunning strategy of the Pompilus; a terrible duel, a hand-to-hand combat, stupendous, truly epic, in which the subtle address and the ingenious audacity of the winged insect eventually triumph over the dreadful spider and his poisoned fangs.” (13/9.)

On the pink heather “the timid spider of the thickets suspends by ethereal cables the branching whorl of his snare, which the tears of the night have turned into chaplets of jewels…The magical jewellery sparkles in the sun, attracting mosquitoes and butterflies; but whosoever approaches too closely perishes, a victim of curiosity.” Above the funnel is the trap, “a chaos of springs, a forest of cordage; like the rigging of a ship dismembered by the tempest. The desperate creature struggles in the shrouds of the rigging, then falls into the gloomy slaughter-house where the spider lurks ready to bleed his prey.”

Death is everywhere.

Each crevice of bark, each shadow of a leaf, conceals a hunter armed with a deadly weapon, all his senses on the alert. Everywhere are teeth, fangs, talons, stings, pincers, and scythes.

Leaping in the long grasses, the Decticus with the ivory face “crunches the heads of grasshoppers in his mandibles.”

A ferocious creature, the grub of the Hemerobius, disembowels plant-lice, making of their skins a battle-dress, covering its back with the eviscerated victims, “as the Red Indian ties about his loins the tresses of his scalped enemies.”

Caterpillars are surrounded by the implacable voracity of the Carabidae:

“The furry skins are gaping with wounds; their contents escape in knots of entrails, bright green with their aliment, the needles of the pine-tree; the caterpillars writhe, struggling with loop-like movements, gripping the sand with their feet, dribbling and gnashing their mandibles. Those as yet unwounded are digging desperately in the attempt to escape underground. Not one succeeds. They are scarcely half buried before some beetle runs to them and destroys them by an eviscerating wound.”

At the centre of its net, which seems “woven of moonbeams,” in the midst of its snare, a glutinous trap of infernal ingenuity, or hidden at a distance in its cabin of green leaves, the Epeïra fasciata waits and watches for its prey. Let the terrible hornet, or the Libellula auripennis, flying from stem to stem, fall into the limed snare; the insect struggles, endeavours to unwind itself; the net trembles violently as though it would be torn from its cables. Immediately the spider darts forward, running boldly to the intruder. With rapid gestures the two hinder limbs weave a winding- sheet of silk as they rotate the victim in order to enshroud it…The ancient Retiarius, condemned to meet a powerful beast of prey, appeared in the arena with a net of cordage lying upon his left shoulder; the animal sprang upon him; the man, with a sudden throw, caught it in the meshes; a stroke of the trident despatched it. Similarly the Epeïra throws its web, and when there is no longer any movement under the white shroud the spider draws closer; its venomous fangs perform the office of the trident. (13/10.)

The Praying Mantis, that demoniac creature which alone among the insects turns its head to gaze, “whose pious airs conceal the most atrocious habits,” remains on the watch, motionless, for hours at a time. Let a great grasshopper chance to come by: the Mantis follows it with its glance, glides between the leaves, and suddenly rises up before it; “and then assumes its spectral pose, which terrifies and fascinates the prey; the wing-covers open, the wings spring to their full width, forming a vast pyramid which dominates the back; a sort of swishing sound is heard, like the hiss of a startled adder; the murderous fore-limbs open to their full extent, forming a cross with the body, and exhibiting the axillae ornamented with eyes vaguely resembling those of the peacock’s tail, part of the panoply of war, concealed upon ordinary occasions. These are only exhibited when the creature makes itself terrible and superb for battle. Then the two grappling-hooks are thrown; the fangs strike, the double scythes close together and hold the victim as in a vice.” (13/11.)

There is no peace; night falls and the horrible conflict continues in the darkness. Atrocious struggles, merciless duels, fill the summer nights. On the stems of the long grasses, beside the furrows, the glow-worm “anaethetizes the snail,” instilling into it its venom, which stupefies and produces sleep, in order to immobilize its prey before devouring it.

Having chorused their joy all the day long in the sunshine, in the evening the Cicadae fall asleep among the olives and the lofty plane-trees. But suddenly there is a sound as of a cry of anguish, short and strident; it is the despairing lamentation of the cicada, surprised in repose by the green grasshopper, that ardent hunter of the night, which leaps upon the cicada, seizes it by the flank, and devours the contents of the stomach. After the orgy of music comes night and assassination.

Such is the gloomy epic which goes forward among the flowers, amidst the foliage, under the shadowy boughs, and on the dusty fallows. Such are the sights that nature offers amid the profound peace of the fields, behind the flowering of the sudden spring-tide and the splendours of the summer. These murders, these assassinations are committed in a mute and silent world, but “the ear of the mind” seems to hear

“A tiger’s rage and cries as of a lion Roaring remotely through this pigmy world.”

Was it to these thrilling revelations that Victor Hugo intended to apply these so wonderfully appropriate lines? Was it he who bestowed upon Fabre, according to a poetic tradition, the name of “the Homer of the insects,” which fits him so marvellously well?

It is possible, although Fabre himself can cite no evidence to support these suggestions; but let us respect the legend, simply because it is charming, and because it adds an exact and picturesque touch to the portrait of Fabre.

In this drama of a myriad scenes, in which the little actors in their rustic stage play each in his turn their parts at the mercy of occasion and the hazard of encounter, the humblest creatures are personages of importance.

Like the human comedy, this also has its characters privileged by birth, clothed in purple, dazzling with embroidery, “adorned with lofty plumes,” who strut pretentiously; “its idle rich,” covered with robes of gold of rustling splendour, who display their diamonds, their topazes and their sapphires; who gleam with fire and shine like mirrors, magnificent of mien; but their brains are “dense, heavy, inept, without imagination, without ingenuity, deprived of all common sense, knowing no other anxiety than to drink in the sunlight at the heart of a rose or to sleep off their draughts in the shadow of a leaf.

Those who labour, on the contrary, do not attract the eye, and the most obscure are often the most interesting. Necessitous poverty has educated and formed them, has excited in them “feats of invention,” unsuspected talents, original industries; a thousand curious and unexpected callings, and no subject of poetry equals in interest the detailed history of one of these tiny creatures, by which we pass without observing them, amid the stones, the brambles, and the dead leaves. It is these above all that add an original and epic note to the vast symphony of the world.

But death also has its poetry. Its shadowy domains hold lessons no less magnificent, and the most putrid carrion is to Fabre a “tabernacle” in which a divine comedy is enacted.

The ant, that “ardent filibuster, comes first, and commences to dissect it piecemeal.”

The Necrophori “exhaling the odour of musk, and bearing red pompons at the end of their antennae,” are “transcendent alchemists.”

The Sarcophagi, or grey flesh flies, “with red bloodshot eyes, and the stony gaze of a knacker”; the Saprinidae, “with bodies of polished ebony like pearls of jet”; the Silpha aplata, with large and sombre wing-cases in mourning; the shiny slow-trotting Horn-beetle; the Dermestes, “powdered with snow beneath the stomach”; the slender Staphylinus; the whole fauna of the corpse, the whole horde of artisans of death, “intoxicating themselves with purulence, probing, excavating, mangling, dissecting, transmuting, and stamping out infection.”

Fabre gives a curious exposition of “that strange art” by which the grub of the grey bot-fly, the vulgar maggot, by means of a subtle pepsine, disintegrates and liquefies solid matter; and it is because this singular solvent has no effect upon the epidermis that the fly, in its wisdom, chooses by preference the mucous membranes, the corner of the eye, the entrance of the nostrils, the borders of the lips, the live flesh of wounds, there to deposit its eggs.

With what penetration this original mind has analysed “the operation of the crucible in which all things are fused that they may recommence” and has expounded the marvellous lesson which is revealed by decomposition and putridity!

CHAPTER 14. PARALLEL LIVES.

We have now seen what entomology becomes in the hands of the admirable Fabre. The vast poem of creation has never had a more familiar and luminous interpreter, and you will nowhere find other work like his.

How far he outstrips Buffon and his descriptions of animals–so general, so vague, so impersonal–his records unreliable and his entire erudition of a second-hand quality!

It is with Réaumur that we are first of all tempted to compare him; and some have chosen to see in him only one who has continued Réaumur’s work. In reality he has eagerly read Réaumur, although at heart he does not really enjoy his writings; he has drunk from this fruitful source, but he owes him no part of his own rich harvest.

But there are many affinities between them; they have many traits in common, despite the points of difference between them.

The illustrious son of Rochelle was born, like Fabre, with a love of all natural things, and before attacking the myriad problems of physics and natural history, wherein he was to shine by so many curious discoveries, he also had prepared himself by a profound study of mathematics.

Luckier than Fabre, however, Réaumur enjoyed not only the advantages of birth, but all the material conditions necessary to his ardent intellectual activity. Fortune overwhelmed her favourite with gifts, and played no small part in his glory by enabling him, from an early age, to profit by his leisure and to give a free rein to his ruling passions. He was no less modest than the sage of Sérignan; self-effacing before others, says one of his biographers, so that they were never made to feel his superiority. (14/1.)

In the midst of the beautiful and spacious gardens at the end of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where he finally made his home, he also contrived to create for himself a Harmas after his own heart.

It was there that in the as yet virgin domain of entomology he unravelled the riddle of the marvellous republic of the bees, and was able to expound and interpret a large number of those tiny lives which every one had hitherto despised, and which indeed they continued to despise until the days of Fabre, or at least regarded as absolutely unimportant. He was the first to venture to suspect their connection with much “that most nearly concerns us,” or to point out “all the singular conclusions” which may be drawn therefrom. (14/2.)

How many details he has enshrined in his interesting “Memoirs,” and how many facts we may glean from this great master! He, like Fabre, had the gift of charming a great number of his contemporaries. Tremblay, Bonnet, and de Geer owed their vocations to Réaumur, not to speak of Huber, whose genius he inspired.

A physicist before all, and accustomed to delicate and meticulous though comparatively simple tasks, he had admirably foreseen the extraordinary complication of these inquiries; so much so that, with the modesty of the true scientist that he was, he regarded his own studies, even the most substantial, as mere indications, intended to point the way to those that followed him.

As methodical, in short, as the author of the “Souvenirs,” the scrupulous Réaumur wrote nothing that he himself had not proved or verified with the greatest care; and we may be sure that all that he records of his personal and immediate observations he has really seen with his own eyes.

In the wilderness of error he had, like Fabre, an infallible compass in his extraordinary common sense; and, equally skilled in extracting from the false the little particle of truth which it often contains, he was no less fond of listening at the gate of legends, of tracing the source of traditions; rightly considering that before deriding them as old-wives’ tales we should first probe in all directions into their origin and foundation. (14/3.)

He was also tempted to experiment, and he well knew that in such problems as those he attacked observation alone is often powerless to reveal anything. It is enough to recall here one of the most promising and unexpected of the discoveries which resulted from his experiments. Réaumur was the first to conceive the ingenious idea of retarding the hatching of insects’ eggs by exposing them to cold, thus anticipating the application of cold to animal life and the discoveries of Charles Tellier, whose more illustrious forerunner he was; at the same time he discovered the secret of prolonging, in a similar fashion, the larval existence of chrysalids during a space of time infinitely superior to that of their normal cycle; and what is more, he succeeded in making them live a lethargic life for years and even for a long term of years, thus repeating at will the miracle of the Seven Sleepers. (14/4.)

Too much occupied, however, with the smaller aspect of things, he had not the art of forcing Nature to speak, and in the province of psychical aptitudes he was barely able to rise above the facts.

As he was powerless to enter into real communion with the tiny creatures which he observed, although his observations were conducted with religious admiration; as he saw always only the outside of things, like a physicist rather than a poet or psychologist, he contented himself with noting the functioning of their organs, their methods of work, their properties, and the changes which they undergo; he did not interpret their actions. The mystery of the life which quivers within and around them eludes him. This is why his books are such dry reading. He is like a bright garden full of rare plants; but it is a monotonous garden, without life or art, without distant vistas or wide perspectives. His works are somewhat diffuse and full of repetitions; entire monographs, almost whole volumes, are devoted to describing the emerging of a butterfly; but they form part of the library of the curious lover of nature; they are consulted with interest, and will always be referred to, but it cannot be said that they are read.

After Réaumur, according to the dictum of the great Latreille, entomology was confined to a wearisome and interminable nomenclature, and if we except the Hubers, two unparalleled observers, although limited and circumscribed, the only writer who filled the interregnum between Réaumur and Fabre was Léon Dufour.

In the quiet little town whither he went to succeed his father, this military surgeon, turned country doctor, lived a busy and useful life.

While occupied with his humble patients, whom he preferred to regard merely as an interesting clinic, and while keeping the daily record of his medical observations, he felt irresistibly drawn “to ferret in all the holes and corners of the soil, to turn over every stone, large or small; to shrink from no fatigue, no difficulty; to scale the highest peaks, the steepest cliffs, to brave a thousand dangers, in order to discover an insect or a plant. (14/5.)

A disciple of Latreille, he shone above all as an impassioned descriptive writer.

No one was more skilled in determining a species, in dissecting the head of a fly or the entrails of a grub, and no spectacle in the world was for him so fascinating as the triple life of the insect; those magical metamorphoses, which he justly considered as one of the most astonishing phenomena in creation. (14/6.)

He saw further than Réaumur, and burned with the same fire as Fabre, for he also had the makings of a great poet. His curiosity had assembled enormous collections, but he considered, as Fabre considered, that collecting is “only the barren contemplation of a vast ossuary which speaks only to the eyes, and not to the mind or imagination,” and that the true history of insects should be that of their habits, their industries, their battles, their loves, and their private and social life; that one must “search everywhere, on the ground, under the soil, in the waters, in the air, under the bark of trees, in the depth of the woods, in the sands of the desert, and even on and in the bodies of animals.”

Was not this in reality the ambitious programme which Fabre was later to propose to himself when he entered into his Harmas and founded his living laboratory of entomology; he also having set himself as his exclusive object the study of “the insects, the habits of life, the labours, the struggles and the propagation of this little world, which agriculture and philosophy should closely consider”? (14/7.)

Dufour also had admirably grasped the place of the insect in the general harmony of the universe, and he clearly perceived that parasitism, that imbrication of mutually usurping lives, is “a law of equilibration, whose object is to set a limit to the excessive multiplication of individuals of the same type,” that the parasites are predestined to an imprescriptible mission, and that this mysterious law “defies all explanation.”

On the other hand, he did not become very intimate with these tiny peoples; his attention was dispersed over too many points; perhaps he was fundamentally incapable of concentrating himself for a long period upon a circumscribed object; perhaps he lacked that first condition of genius, patience, so essential to such researches: although he enriched science by an infinite multitude of precious facts and has recorded a quantity of details concerning the habits of insects, he did not succeed in representing any one of these innumerable little minds. He had an intense feeling for nature, but he was not able to interpret it, and his immense volume of work, scattered through nearly three hundred monographs, remains ineffective.

Let us compare with his work the vast epic of the “Souvenirs.” We become familiar with the whole life of the least insect, and all its unending related circumstances; we obtain sudden glimpses of insight into our own organization, with its abysses and its lacunae, and also into those rich provinces or faculties which we are only beginning to suspect in the depths of our unconscious activity.

In the evening twilight, after the vast andante of the cicadae is hushed, at the hour when the shining glow-worms “light their blue fires,” and the “pale Italian cricket, delirious with its nocturnal madness, chirrups among the rosemary thickets,” while in the distance sounds the melodious tinkle of the bell-ringer frogs, replying from one hiding-place to another, the old master shows us that profound and mysterious magic with which matter is endowed by the faintest glimmer of life.

He shows us the intimate connection of things, the universal harmony which so intimately allies all creatures; and he shows us also that everywhere and all around us, in the smallest object, poetry exists like a hidden flame, if only we know how to seek it.

And in revealing so many marvellous energies in even the lowest creatures, he helps us to divine the infinity of phenomena still unguessed-at, which the subtlety of the unknowable force which thrills through the whole universe hides from us under the most trivial appearances.

For he has not told everything; this incommensurable region, which had hitherto remained unworked, is far from being exhausted.

How many unknown and hidden things are still left to be gleaned! There will be a harvest for all. Remember that “even the humblest species either has no history, or the little that has been written concerning it calls for serious revision” (14/8.); that a single bush, such as the bramble, suffices to rear more than fifty species of insects, and that each species, according to the just observation of Réaumur, “has its habits, its tricks of cunning, its customs, its industries, its art, its architecture, its different instincts, and its individual genius.”

What a stupendous alphabet to decipher, of which we have as yet only commenced to read the first few letters! When we are able to read it almost entirely, when observers are more numerous and have concerted their efforts, mutually illuminating, completing and correcting one another, then, and then only, we shall succeed, if not in resolving some of those high problems which have never ceased to interest mankind, at least in seizing some reflected knowledge of ourselves, and in seeing a little farther into the kingdom of the mind.

CHAPTER 15. THE EVENINGS AT SÉRIGNAN.

But it will doubtless be long before a new Fabre will resume, with the same heroic ardour, the life of solitary labour, varied only by a few austere recreations.

Rising at six o’clock, he would first of all pace the tiles of his kitchen, breakfast in hand; so imperious in him was the need of action, if his mind was to work successfully, that even at this moment of morning meditation his body must already be in movement. Then, after many turns among the bushes of the enclosure, all irised with drops of dew which were already evaporating, he went straight to his cell: that is, to the silence of his laboratory.

There, in unsociable silence, invisible to all, he worked hard and steadily until noon; pursuing an observation or carrying out some experiment, or recording what he saw or what he had seen the day before, or re-drafting his records in their final form.

How many who have come hither to knock upon the door in these morning hours, or to ring at the little gate, silent as the tomb, which gives upon the private path frequented only by foot-passengers on their way to the fields, have undertaken a fruitless journey! But without such discipline would it have been possible to accomplish such a task as his?

At last he would leave his workroom; jaded, exhausted by the excessive intensity of his work, “face pale and features drawn.” (15/1.)

Now he is “at leisure: the half-day is over” (15/2.); and he can satisfy his immense need not of repose, but of relaxation and distraction in less severe occupations; for he is never at any time nor anywhere inactive; incessantly making notes, with little stumps of pencil which he carries about in his pockets, and on the first scrap of paper that comes to hand, of all that passes through his mind. Those eternal afternoons, which usually, in the depth of the French provinces, prove so dull and wearisome, seem short enough to him. Now he will halt before his plants, now stoop to the ground, the better to observe a passing insect; always in search of some fresh subject of study; or now bending over his microscope. (15/3.) Then he undertakes, for his later-born children at Sérignan, the duties which he formerly performed for the elder family at Orange: he teaches them himself; he has much to do with them, for their sake and for his own as well, for he is jealous of possessing them, and he regrets parting with them. They too have their tasks arranged in advance.

They are his assistants, his appointed collaborators, who keep and relieve guard, undertaking, in his absence, some observation already in hand, so that no detail may be lost, no incident of the story that unrolls itself sometimes with exasperating slowness beneath the bell-covers of the laboratory or on some bush in the garden. He inspires the whole household with the fire of his own genius, and all those about him are almost as interested as he.

At home, in the house, always wearing his eternal felt hat, and absorbed in meditation, he speaks little, holding that every word should have its object, and only employing a term when he has tested its weight and meaning. Silence at mealtimes again is a rule that no one of his household would infringe. But he unbends his brow when he receives a friend at his hospitable table, where but lately his smiling wife would sit, full of little attentions for him. (15/4.)

Frugal in all respects, he barely touches the dishes before him; avoiding all meats, and saving himself wholly for the fruits; for is not man naturally frugivorous, by his teeth, his stomach, and his bowels? Certain dishes repel him, for reasons of sentiment rather than through any real disgust; such as paté de foie gras, which reminds him too forcibly of the so cruelly tortured goose; such cruelty is too high a price to pay for a mere greasy mouthful. (15/5.) On the other hand, he drinks wine with pleasure, the harsh, rough “wine of the country” of the plains of Sérignan. He is also well able to appreciate good things and appetizing cookery; no one ever had a finer palate; but he is happiest in seeing others appreciate the pleasures of the table. Witness that breakfast worthy of Gargantua, which he himself organized in honour of his guests, whom he had invited to an excursion over the Ventoux Alp; where he seems expressly to have commanded “that all should come in shoals.” What a tinkling of bottles, what piles of bread! There are green olives “flowing with brine,” black olives “seasoned with oil,” sausages of Arles “with rosy flesh, marbled with cubes of fat and whole peppercorns,” legs of mutton stuffed with garlic “to dull the keen edge of hunger”; chickens “to amuse the molars”; melons of Cavaillon too, with white pulp, not forgetting those with orange pulp, and to crown the feast those little cheeses, so delightfully flavoured, peculiar to Mont Ventoux, “spiced with mountain herbs,” which melt in the mouth. (15/6.)

But his greatest pleasure is his pipe; a briar, which in absence of mind he is always allowing to go out, and always relighting.

Respectful of all traditions, he has kept up the observance of old customs; no Christmas Eve has ever been passed under the roof of his Harmas without the consecrated meats upon the table; the heart of celery, the nougat of almonds, the dish of snails, and the savoury-smelling turkey. Then, stuck into the Christmas bread (15/7.), the sprigs of holly, the verbouisset, the sacred bush whose little starry flowers and coral berries, growing amid evergreen leaves, affirm the eternal rebirth of indestructible nature.

At Sérignan Fabre is little known and little appreciated. To tell the truth, folk regard him as eccentric; they have often surprised him in the country lying on his stomach in the middle of a field, or kneeling on the ground, a magnifying glass in hand, observing a fly or some one of those insignificant creatures in which no sane person would deign to be interested.

How should they know him, since he never goes into the village? When he did once venture thither to visit his friend Charrasse, the schoolmaster, his appearance was an event of which every one had something to say, so greatly did it astonish the inhabitants. (15/8.)

Yet he never hesitates to place his knowledge at the service of all, and welcomes with courtesy the rare pilgrims in whom a genuine regard is visible, although he is always careful never to make them feel his own superiority; but he very quickly dismisses, sometimes a trifle hastily, those who are merely indiscreet or importunate; pedantic and ignorant persons he judges instantaneously with his piercing eyes; with such people he cannot emerge from his slightly gloomy reserve; he shuts himself up like the snail, which, annoyed by some displeasing object, retires into its shell, and remains silent in their presence.

Professors come to consult him: asking his advice as to their programmes of instruction, or begging him to resolve some difficult problem or decide some especially vexed question; and his explanations are so simple, so clear, so logical that they are astonished at their own lack of comprehension and their embarrassment. (15/9.)

But there are few who venture within the walls of that enclosure, which seems to shut out all the temptations of the outer world; the only intimate visitors to the Harmas are the village schoolmaster–first Laurent, then Louis Charrasse (15/10.), and later Jullian–and a blind man, Marius.

This latter lost his sight at the age of twenty. Then, to earn a living, he began to make and repair chairs, and in his misfortune, although blind and extremely poor, he kept a calm and contented mind.

Fabre had discovered the sage and the blind man on his arrival at Sérignan, and also Favier (15/11.), “that other native, whose jovial spirit was so prompt to respond, and who helped to dig up the Harmas; to set up the planks and tiles of the little kitchen-garden; a rude task, since this scrap of uncultivated ground was then but a terrible desert of pebbles.” To Favier fell the care of the flowers, for the new owner was a great lover of flowers. Potted plants, sometimes of rare species, were already, as to-day, crowded in rows upon the terrace before the house, where all the summer they formed a sort of vestibule in the open air, on either side of the entrance; and these Fabre never ceased to watch over with constant and meticulous care. Both spoke the same language, and the words they exchanged were born of a like philosophy; for Favier also loved nature in his own way, and at heart was an artist; and when, after the day’s work, sitting “on the high stone of the kitchen hearth, where round logs of green oak were blazing,” he would evoke, in his picturesque and figurative language, the memories of an old campaigner, he charmed all the household and the evening seemed to pass with strange rapidity.

When this precious servant and boon companion had disappeared, after two years of digging, sowing, weeding, and hoeing, all was ready; the frame was completed and the work could be commenced. It was then that Marius became the master’s appointed collaborator, and it is he who now constructs his apparatus, his experimental cages; stuffs his birds, helps to ransack the soil, and shades him with an umbrella while he watches under the burning sun. Marius cannot see, but so intimate is his communion with his master, so keen his enthusiasm for all that Fabre does, that he follows in his mind’s eye, and as though he could actually see them, all the doings at which he assists, and whose inward reflection lights up his wondering countenance.

Marius was not only rich in feeling and the gift of inner vision; he had also a marvellously correct ear. He was a member of the “Fanfare” of Sérignan, in which he played the big drum, and there was no one like him for keeping perfect time and for bringing out the clash of the cymbals.

Charrasse was no less fervent a disciple; he worshipped science and all beautiful things; and he could even conceive a noble passion for his exhausting trade of school-teaching.

Like Marius, he ate “a bitter bread”; and Fabre would get on with them all the better in that they, like himself, had lived a difficult life. “Man is like the medlar,” he liked to tell them; “he is worth nothing until he has ripened a long time in the attic, on the straw.”

“L’homme est comme la nèfle, il n’est rien qui vaille S’il n’a mûri longtemps, au grenier, sur la paille.”

These humble companions afforded him the simple conversation which he likes so well; so natural, and so full of sympathy and common sense. They customarily spent Thursday and Sunday afternoons at the Harmas; but these beloved disciples might call at any hour; the master always welcomed them, even in the morning, even when he was entirely absorbed in his work and could not bear any one about him. They were his circle, his academy; he would read them the last chapter written in the morning; he shared his latest discoveries with them; he did not fear to ask advice of their “fertile ignorance.” (15/12.)

Charrasse was a “Félibre,” versed in all the secrets of the Provençal idiom, of which he knew all the popular terms, the typical expressions and turns of speech; and Fabre loved to consult him, to read some charming verses which he had just discovered, or to recite some delightful rustic poem with which he had just been inspired; for in such occupations he found one of his favourite relaxations, giving free vent to his fancy, a loose rein to the poet that dwells within him. These poems the piety of his brother has preserved in the collection entitled “Oubreto.” It is at such a moment that one should see his black eyes, full of fire; his power of mimicry and expression, his impassioned features, lit up by inspiration, truly idealized, almost transfigured, are at such times a thing to be remembered.

Sometimes, again, in the shadow of the planes, on summer afternoons, when the cigales were falling silent; or in the winter, before the blazing fireplace, in that dining-room on the ground floor in which he welcomed his visitors; when out of doors the mistral was roaring and raging, or the rain clattering on the panes, the little circle was enlarged by certain new- comers, his nephews, nieces, a few intimates, of whom, a little later, I myself was often one. At such times his humour and imagination were given full play, and it was truly a rare pleasure to sit there, sipping a glass of mulled wine, during those delightful and earnest hours; to taste the charm of his smiling philosophy, his picturesque conversation, full of exact ideas, all the more profound in that they were founded on experience and pointed or adorned by proverbs, adages, and anecdotes. Thanks to the daily reading of the “Temps,” which one of his friends regularly sends him, Fabre is in touch with all the ideas of the day, and expresses his judgment of them; for example, he does not conceal his scepticism with regard to certain modern inventions, such as the aeroplane, whose novelty rather disturbs his mind, and whose practical bearing seems to him to be on the whole somewhat limited.

Thus even the most recent incidents find their way into the solitude of the Harmas and help to sustain the conversation.

“The first time we resume our Sérignan evenings,” he wrote to his nephew on the morrow of one of these intimate gatherings, “we will have a little chat about your Justinian, whom the recent drama of “Théodora” has just made the fashion. Do you know the history of that terrible hussy and her stupid husband? Perhaps not entirely; it is a treat I am keeping for you.” (15/13.)

The only subject which is hardly ever mentioned during these evenings at Sérignan is politics, although Fabre, strange as it may seem, was one year appointed to sit on the municipal council.

The son of peasants, who has emerged from the people yet has always remained a peasant, has too keen a sense of injustice not to be a democrat; and how many young men has he not taught to emancipate themselves by knowledge? But above all he is proud of being a Frenchman; his mind, so lucid, so logical, which has never gone abroad in search of its own inspirations, and has never been influenced by any but those old French masters, François Dufour and Réaumur, and the old French classics, has always felt an instinctive repugnance, which it has never been able to overcome, for all those ideas which some are surreptitiously seeking to put forward in our midst in favour of some foreign trade-mark.

Although his visit to the court of Napoleon III left him with a rather sympathetic idea of the Emperor, whose gentle, dreamy appearance he still likes to recall, he detested the Empire and the “brigand’s trick” which established it.

On the day of the proclamation of the Republic he was seen in the streets of Avignon in company with some of his pupils. He was agreeably surprised at the turn events had taken, and delighted by the unforeseen result of the war.

A spirit as proud and independent as his was naturally the enemy of any species of servitude. State socialism of the equalitarian and communistic kind was to him no less horrifying. Was not Nature at hand, always to remind him of her eternal lessons?

“Equality, a magnificent political label, but scarcely more! Where is it, this equality? In our societies shall we find even two persons exactly equal in vigour, health, intelligence, capacity for work, foresight, and so many other gifts which are the great factors of prosperity?…A single note