And yet in me, the observer, the inquirer into things, began to take shape almost in infancy. Why should I not describe my first discoveries? They are ingenuous in the extreme, but will serve notwithstanding to tell us something of the way in which tendencies first show themselves.
I was five or six years old. That the poor household might have one mouth less to feed, I had been placed in grandmother’s care. Here, in solitude, my first gleams of intelligence were awakened amidst the geese, the calves, and the sheep. Everything before that is impenetrable darkness. My real birth was at the moment when the dawn of personality rises, dispersing the mists of unconsciousness and leaving a lasting memory. I can see myself plainly, clad in a soiled frieze frock flapping against my bare heels; I remember the handkerchief hanging from my waist by a bit of [[20]]string, a handkerchief often lost and replaced by the back of my sleeve.
There I stand one day, a pensive urchin, with my hands behind my back and my face turned to the sun. The dazzling splendour fascinates me. I am the Moth attracted by the light of the lamp. With what am I enjoying the glorious radiance: with my mouth or my eyes? That is the question put by my budding scientific curiosity. Reader, do not smile! the future observer is already practising and experimenting. I open my mouth wide and close my eyes: the glory disappears. I open my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappears. I repeat the performance, with the same result. The question’s solved: I have learnt by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. What a discovery! That evening I told the whole house all about it. Grandmother smiled fondly at my simplicity: the others laughed at it. ’Tis the way of the world.
Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighbouring bushes, a sort of jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little bird chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter, and that quickly. True, there is the wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there, behind that clump of broom. I stand on the look-out for long, but all in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle ceases. I try [[21]]again next day and the day after. This time my stubborn watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is not a bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind-legs my playfellows have taught me to relish: a poor recompense for my prolonged ambush. The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy flavour, but what I have just learnt. I now know, from personal observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not publish my discovery for fear of the same laughter that greeted my story about the sun.
Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to smile to me with their great violet eyes. Later on I see, in their place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice, and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the summer, grandfather walks up with a spade and turns my field of observation topsy-turvy. From under ground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat-stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeon-holed in my memory for good and all.
With an ever-watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practised by himself, all unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the Large White Butterfly goes to the cabbage, and the Red Admiral to the thistle. [[22]]
It would be impossible to describe more delightfully the gradual development of tastes and aptitudes in the dawn of life.
The same freshness of impression and the same affinity for natural objects will be found in another recollection of the same period: the recollection of “a certain harmonica,” whose music to the “ear of a child of six” sounded as sweet and strange as that of the frog whom he heard emitting his limpid note in the neighbourhood of the solitary farm as the last light of evening faded from the heights. “A series of glass slips, of unequal length, fixed upon two tightly-stretched tapes, and a cork on the end of a wire, which served as a striker”: such was the instrument which some one brought the child from the latest fair. “Imagine an untutored hand striking at random upon this key-board, with the most riotous unexpectedness of octaves, discords, and inverted harmonies”: such was the chiming of the bell-ringer frogs on the sunken lanes of Malaval. “As a song it had neither head nor tail; but the purity of the sound was delightful.” How much more delightful, in the first radiance of his spontaneous childhood, this little scrap of a fellow who was beginning to play his part in the great concert of the world, [[23]]in which he was one day to fill so notable a place and to sing a new song to the glory of the Master of Nature![4] [[24]]
[1] Those journals which claim him as a native of Sérignan are therefore mistaken. “At Sérignan (Vaucluse), his native countryside, the peasants familiarly call him Moussu Fabré” (Univers, March 3, 1910). [↑]