Persistent labour, in the service of a keen intelligence, knows no insuperable obstacles: it always achieves its ends. Success, accordingly, could not fail to befall the intrepid virtuosity of the youthful Carpentras schoolmaster. The degree of licentiate in the mathematical sciences was won, like the rest, at the point of the sword, and the valiant champion of the cosine and the laboratory was appointed Professor of Physics and Chemistry in the lycée of Ajaccio.
Here, by a happy concatenation of circumstances, and under the inward impulsion of the providential vocation, the destiny of the famous entomologist was to be finally determined.
In this novel environment, in “this paradise [[119]]of glorious Nature,” everything stimulated the alert curiosity of the predestined biologist; the sea, full of marvels, the beach, where the waves threw up such beautiful shells, the maquis of myrtle, arbutus, and lentisk!… This time the temptation was too great! He surrendered. His leisure was divided into two parts. One was still devoted to mathematics, the basis of his future in the university. The other was already spent in botanising and in investigating the wonders of the sea.
What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I had not been obsessed by x and y I should have surrendered wholly to my inclinations!
Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien[1] by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations, and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector. [[120]]Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the woes of novices.
In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon,[2] with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments; [[121]]and there we were for a fortnight, chatting at table de omni re scibili, after the botanical excursion was over.
With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that:
“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.”
We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,[3] with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans call erba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm [[122]]than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.
On the day before his departure, he said to me:
“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”
And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket, and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.[4]
Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open, but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of Lavaysse; the [[123]]star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble vestiges.
Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was [[124]]being fêted, one of his visitors asked him the question:
“Do you believe in God?”
To which he replied emphatically:
“I can’t say I believe in God; I see Him. Without Him I understand nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this conviction; I have … aggravated or ameliorated it, whichever you please. Every period has its manias. I regard Atheism as a mania. It is the malady of the age. You could take my skin from me more easily than my faith in God.”
We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this belief with almost all our great scientists.