But the silent language of the tiny creatures destined to be his most intimate companions through life was seconded, at an opportune moment, by the more expressive language of human speech. Here we have one of those events that were landmarks in Fabre’s life, marking the starting-point of a fresh phase in the evolution of his ideas and his labours. He alone can describe for us the actual nature and exact significance of this incident:
One winter evening, when the rest of the household was asleep, as I sat reading beside a stove whose ashes were still warm, my book made me forget for a while the cares of the morrow: these heavy cares of a poor professor of physics who, after piling up diplomas and for a quarter of a century performing services of uncontested merit, was receiving for himself and his family a stipend of sixteen hundred francs, or less than the wages of a groom in a decent establishment. Such was the [[153]]disgraceful parsimony of the day where education was concerned; such was the edict of our government red-tape: I was an irregular, the offspring of my solitary studies. And so I was forgetting the poverty and anxieties of a professor’s life amid my books, when I chanced to turn over the pages of an entomological essay that had fallen into my hands I forget how.
It was a monograph by the then father of entomology, the venerable scientist Léon Dufour, on the habits of a Wasp that hunted Buprestis beetles. Certainly, I had not waited till then to interest myself in insects; from my early childhood I had delighted in Beetles, Bees, and Butterflies; as far back as I can remember, I see myself in ecstasy before the splendour of a Ground-beetle’s wing-cases or the wings of Papilio machaon, the Swallowtail. The fire was laid; the spark to kindle it was absent. Léon Dufour’s essay provided that spark.[10]
New lights burst forth: I received a sort of mental revelation. So there was more in science than the arranging of pretty Beetles in a cork box and giving them names and classifying them; there was something much finer: a close and loving study of insect life, the examination of the structure and especially the faculties of each species. I read of a magnificent instance of this, glowing with excitement as I did so. Some time after, aided by [[154]]those lucky circumstances which he who seeks them eagerly is always able to find, I myself published an entomological article, a supplement to Léon Dufour’s. This first work of mine won honourable mention from the Institute of France, and was awarded a prize for experimental physiology. But soon I received a far more welcome recompense, in the shape of a most eulogistic and encouraging letter from the very man who had inspired me. From his home in the Landes the revered master sent me a warm expression of his enthusiasm and urged me to go on with my studies. Even now, at that sacred recollection, my old eyes fill with happy tears. O fair days of illusion, of faith in the future, where are you now?[11]
Moquin-Tandon converted Fabre to the study of animals and plants. Dufour converted him to the study of insects, and taught him to publish the results of his entomological studies.
Dufour’s little work was a revelation; a flash of light revealing his vocation. It was like the electric impulse that bursts the seed about to open, that sends the genius ready to unfold its wings soaring into the heavens.
It was to the chance perusal of a certain passage that another prince of science owed [[155]]the awakening of his genius. We are speaking of Pasteur, whom we shall presently see in his dealings with Fabre. “It was through reading a note by the Russian chemist, Mitscherlich, on the comparison of the specific characters of certain crystals that Pasteur became interested in those investigations of the subject of molecular dissymmetry which were the starting-point of so many wonderful discoveries.”[12]
Does it not seem that there must be a special Providence for the elect of science?
In Dufour’s memoir, which gave Fabre so decisive an impulsion toward entomology, a singular fact is mentioned: the naturalist of the Landes found in the nest of a species of Wasp known as the Cerceris some small beetles of the Buprestis family, which, although apparently dead, remained as fresh as though alive during the period occupied by the rearing of the larvæ for whose nourishment they are destined to serve.
Dufour supposed that these Buprestes were simply dead, and, “in order to explain this marvellous preservation of their flesh, which makes an insect that for several weeks has been motionless as a corpse a kind of game that does not become high but remain [[156]]as fresh as at the moment of capture during the greatest heat of summer, he presumed the use of a liquid antiseptic, acting in the same manner as the preparations used to preserve anatomical specimens. This liquid could only be the venom of the Hymenopteron inoculated into the victim’s body. The tiny drop of poisonous humour that accompanies the sting, the lancet employed in the inoculation, is supposed to perform the office of a kind of pickle or preservative liquid for preserving the flesh set aside for the nourishment of the larvæ.”
But Fabre was burning with curiosity to observe for himself a phenomenon which an old practitioner like Dufour proclaims the most curious and extraordinary known to the history of the insect kingdom.[13] He did not hesitate to go to Carpentras, to search for the Buprestis-hunting wasp, which does not occur in the neighbourhood of Avignon. A minute inspection of the Cerceris’ victims enabled him to prove that, not only was the flesh intact, but the joints were flexible, the viscera were moist, defalcation persisted, and vestiges of irritability even were present, all of which facts were scarcely compatible [[157]]“with the supposition of an animal absolutely dead, the hypothesis of a true corpse rendered incorruptible by the effect of a liquid preservative.” He was thus led to conclude that the insect was not dead, but only benumbed and reduced to a state of immobility.
Fascinated and intrigued by Dufour’s discovery, Fabre wished to see the process for himself, and as a result he made the first and the finest of his own entomological discoveries, which he was later on to enrich by more precise and more remarkable details.