However, the soul of the “good sage” which they thus sought to capture and hold here on earth—in short, to imprison in his work and its environment—made its escape and took flight toward loftier regions and wider horizons.
To see him in the twilight of the dining-room [[390]]where he silently finished his life, majestically leaning back in his arm-chair, with his best shirt and old-fashioned necktie, his eyes still bright in his emaciated face, his lips fine and still mobile, but thin with age and at moments trembling with emotion, or moved by a sudden inspiration—to see him thus, would you not say that he was still observing? Yes, but his observations are now of an invisible world, a world even richer in mysteries and revelations than the world below, so patiently explored for more than fifty years.
One day, when two professors of the Grand-Séminaire de Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux[13] had come to see him, as the time drew near to bid them good-bye, the old man held out his hands and tucked them under their arms, and, not without difficulty, rose from his arm-chair, and arm-in-arm with them advanced, tile by tile, to the threshold of the house, whither he had determined to accompany them. Suddenly, pressing their arms more closely and alluding to their cassocks and their vocation, he said, energetically: “You have chosen the better part”; and, holding them back for a last word, he [[391]]added: “Life is a horrible phantasmagoria. But it leads us to a better future.”
This future the naturalist liked to conceive in accordance with the images familiar to his mind, as being a more complete understanding of the great book of which he had deciphered only a few words, as a more perfect communion with the offices of nature, in the incense of the perfumes “that are softly exhaled by the carven flowers from their golden censers,” amid the delightful symphonies in which are mingled the voices of crickets and Cicadæ, chaffinches and siskins, skylarks and goldfinches, “those tiny choristers,” all singing and fluttering, “trilling their motets to the glory of Him who gave them voice and wings on the fifth day of Genesis.”[14]
This last passage might be underlined, for now more than ever, in our thoughts of this scientist, of whom it has been said that “with a taste for Nature he has given us an appreciation of God,” the work cannot be divorced from the artisan without the grossest inconsistency.
One who had the good fortune to become intimate with Fabre during the last days of his life tells how eagerly the naturalist [[392]]used to accept the wild flowers which he brought in from his walks, how tenderly he would caress them with his frail fingers and brilliant eyes. Both looks and gestures expressed an infinite admiration for the pure and simple work of Nature as God has ordained it:
“And when one evening,” says his friend, “I remarked that these little miracles clearly proved the existence of a divine Artificer: ‘For me, I do not believe in God’ declared the scientist, repeating for the last time his famous and paradoxical profession of faith: ‘I do not believe in God, because I see Him in all things and everywhere.’ ”
Another day he expressed his firm and profound conviction to the same friend, in a slightly different form. “God is Light!” he said dreamily.—“And you always see Him shining?” “No,” he said suddenly, “God does not shine; He obtrudes Himself.”
The man who thus bows before God has truly attained, on the heights of human knowledge, what we may call with him the threshold of eternal life. To him God sends His angels to open the gates, that he may enter by the straight paths of the Gospel and the Church. [[393]]
After the death of Mme. Fabre in 1912, a nursing Sister of the Congregation of Saint-Roch de Viviers was installed at the Harmas; her name was Sister Adrienne.