But here is something to repay the valiant naturalist for his early sacrifice: the delights of “prayer in the chapel of the lilacs.”
My hermitage contains an alley of lilacs, long and wide. When May is here, when the two [[236]]rows of bushes, yielding beneath the burden of the heads of blossom, bow themselves, forming pointed arches, this walk becomes a chapel, in which the most beautiful festival of the year is celebrated in the enchanting morning sunlight; a quiet festival, without flags flapping at the windows, without the burning of gunpowder, without quarrels after drinking; the festival of the simple, disturbed neither by the raucous brass band of the dancers, nor by the shouts of the crowd.… Vulgar delights of maroons and libations, how far removed are you from this solemnity!
I am one of the faithful in the chapel of the lilacs. My prayer is not such as can be translated by words; it is an intimate emotion that stirs in me gently. Devoutly I make my stations from one pillar of verdure to the next; step by step I tell my observer’s rosary.[2]
His “prayer is an Oh! of admiration,” addressed to that creative Power who, in His works, is always the geometer, according to Plato’s sublime saying: which is, that He everywhere sheds order, light, and harmony. Ἀεὶ ὀ Θεος γεωμετρεῖ.[3]
The contemplation of the living world that is stirring all about him gives him yet further cause to marvel at the wisdom of Him “who has made the plans on which life is [[237]]working.”[4] It is easy to understand that, for Fabre, the harmas assumed the colours and the charms of Eden, and that his solitary life therein was like a perpetual ecstasy.
For the rest, the scene changes as well as the protagonists. After the harmas with its breeding-cages and its customary inhabitants, the Sérignan country-side with its fortuitous encounters. When the weather is propitious the whole household sets out in a party. But the heat is torrid and the time of day unsuitable for walking. The naturalist sets out none the less. Bull alone dares to brave with his master the blazing heat of the sun. But even he will not hold out to the end! The goal is reached; but the most difficult thing is not to walk the distance to the post of observation; it is to settle down and remain there, under the scorching sun, waiting for an opportunity that is often slow to occur.
Ah, how long the hours seem, spent motionless, under a burning sun, at the foot of a declivity which sends the heat of an oven beating down upon you! Bull, my inseparable companion, has retired some distance into the shade, under a clump of evergreen oaks. He has found a layer of sand whose depths still retain some traces of the last shower. He digs himself a bed; and in the cool [[238]]furrow the sybarite stretches himself flat upon his belly. Lolling his tongue and thrashing the boughs with his tail, he keeps his soft, deep gaze fixed upon me:
“What are you doing over there, you booby, baking in the heat? Come here, under the foliage; see how comfortable I am!
“That is what I seem to read in my companion’s eyes.
“Oh, my Dog, my friend,” I should answer, if you could only understand, “man is tormented by a desire for knowledge, whereas your torments are confined to a desire for bones and, from time to time, a desire for your sweetheart! This, notwithstanding our devoted friendship, creates a certain difference between us, even though people nowadays say that we are more or less related, almost cousins. I feel the need to know things and am content to bake in the heat; you feel no such need and retire into the cool shade.”
Yes, the hours drag when you lie waiting for an insect that does not come.[5]
Yet from his expeditions into the countryside, he almost always brings back some new pensioner who serves to enrich his collection of intimates admitted to the familiarities of cohabitation. For not only the harmas but [[239]]his work-room becomes, by such chance means, an entomological museum, in which Flies, Scorpions, Caterpillars, Spiders, and I know not what else live side by side and in succession.
And when their turn is over, when the first comers have to make room for new arrivals, the master parts from his children with regret, dismissing them with the most kindly speeches, embellished by the most salutary advice. Here, for example, is the little speech which he makes to the Sphex:
You pretty Sphex-wasps hatched before my eyes, brought up by my hand, ration by ration, on a bed of sand in an old quill-box; you whose transformations I have followed step by step, starting up from my sleep in alarm lest I should have missed the moment when the nymph is bursting its swaddling-bands or the wing leaving its case; you who have taught me so much and learned nothing yourselves: O my pretty Sphex-wasps, fly away without fear of my tubes, my boxes, my bottles, or any of my receptacles, through this warm sunlight beloved of the Cicadæ; go, but beware of the Praying Mantis, who is plotting your ruin on the flowering heads of the thistles, and mind the Lizard, who is lying in wait for you on the sunny slopes; go in peace, dig your burrows, stab your Crickets scientifically and continue your kind, to procure [[240]]one day for others what you have given me: the few moments of happiness in my life![6]
One of the great joys of the Sérignan hermit is, after supper, to isolate himself in the restful quietude of the harmas, and there to lend an attentive ear to the least vibrations of sound from that little living world which he can no longer see but can still hear. Nothing will succeed in distracting him from this entomological concert, which is one of his delights. It makes him forget even the rejoicings of the national festival which is being celebrated close at hand, and the splendours of the starry sky that glitters above his head.