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Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of the Bucolics and the Georgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than the Metamorphoses of Ovid or Religion of Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodez lycée with literary exercises.
All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.
In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:
The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of [[71]]youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.
Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.
With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast [[72]]gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning: procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.
I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.
This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres.[4]
This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered [[73]]life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.
Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.
Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of the Medusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.[5]
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[1] Souvenirs, VI., p. 60. The Life of the Fly, chap. vi., “My Schooling.” [↑]