To-day is Shrove Tuesday, a reminiscence of the ancient Saturnalia. I am meditating, on this occasion, a fantastic dish which would have delighted the gourmets of Rome.…
There will be eight of us; first of all my family, and then two friends, probably the only persons in the village before whom I could permit myself such eccentricities of diet without jocular comment upon what would be regarded as a depraved mania.
One of these is the schoolmaster. Since he permits it and does not fear the comments of the foolish, if by chance the secret of our feast should be divulged, we will call him by his name, Jullian. A man of broad views and reared upon science, his mind is open to truth of every kind.
The second, Marius Guigne, is a blind man who, a carpenter by profession, handles his plane and saw in the blackest darkness with the same [[275]]sureness of hand as that of a skilful-sighted person in broad daylight. He lost his sight in his youth, after he had known the joys of light and the wonders of colour. As a compensation for perpetual darkness he has acquired a gentle philosophy, always smiling; an ardent desire to fill, as far as possible, the gaps in his meagre primary education; a sensitiveness of hearing able to seize the subtle delicacies of music; and a fineness of touch most extraordinary in fingers calloused by the labours of the workshop. During our conversations, if he wishes to be informed as to this or that geometrical property, he holds out his widely-opened hand. This is our blackboard. With the tip of my forefinger, I trace on it the figure to be constructed; accompanying my light touches with a brief explanation. This is enough; the idea is grasped, and the saw, plane, and lathe will translate it into reality.
On Sunday afternoons, in winter especially, when three logs flaming on the hearth form a delicious contrast to the brutalities of the Mistral, they meet in my house. The three of us form the village Athenæum, the Rural Institute, where we speak of everything except hateful politics.… At such a meeting, the delight of my solitude, to-day’s dinner was devised. The special dish consists of the cossus, a delicacy of great renown in ancient times.
When he had eaten a sufficient number of nations, the Roman, brutalised by excess of luxury, began to eat worms. Pliny tells us: “Romanis in hoc luxuria esse cœpit, prægrandesque roborum [[276]]vermes delicatiore sunt in cibo: Cossos vocant.” (The Romans have reached such a degree of luxury at the table that they esteem as delicious tit-bits the great worm from the oak-tree known as Cossus.)
I do not know with what sauce the Cossus was eaten in the days of the Cæsars, the Apicius of the period having left us no information on this point. Ortolans are roasted on a spit; it would be profaning them to add the relish of complicated preparation. Let us proceed in the same manner with the Cossus, these Ortolans of entomology. Spitted in rows, they are exposed on the grill to the heat of live embers. A pinch of salt, the necessary condiment of our dish, is the only addition made to it. The roast grows golden, softly sizzling, weeps a few oily tears which catch fire on contact with the coals and burn with a white flame. It is done! Let us serve it hot.
Encouraged by my example, my family bravely attack their roast. The schoolmaster hesitates, the dupe of his imagination, which sees the great grubs of a little while ago crawling across his plate. He has taken for himself the smaller specimens, as the recollection of these disturbs him less. Less subject to imaginary dislikes, the blind man ruminates and savours them with every sign of satisfaction.
The testimony is unanimous. The roast is juicy, tender, and extremely tasty. One recognises in it a certain flavour of burnt almonds which is enhanced by a vague aroma of vanilla. In short, [[277]]the vermicular dish is found to be highly acceptable, one might even say excellent. What would it be if the refined art of the gourmets of antiquity had cooked it!…
If I have made this investigation it was certainly not in the hope of enriching the bill of fare. The rarity of the great grubs and the repugnance which all kinds of vermin arouses in most of us will always stand in the way of my discovery becoming a common dish.…
As far as I am concerned, it was still less the desire for a dainty mouthful that actuated me. My sobriety is not easily tempted. A handful of cherries pleases me better than the preparations of our kitchens. My only desire was to elucidate a point of natural history.[1]
I certainly admire this zeal for science and this absence of prejudice even in the choice of food; yet I am tempted to remark that in the matter of intrepidity, whether in respect of food or of science, there is one of Fabre’s circle of acquaintances who surpassed the schoolmaster and perhaps equals Fabre himself. I am referring to Favier. Who, then, is Favier?
Favier is an old soldier. He has pitched his hut of clay and branches under the African carob-trees; [[278]]he has eaten sea-urchins at Constantinople; he has shot starlings in the Crimea, during a lull in the firing. He has seen much and remembered much. In winter, when work in the fields ends at four o’clock and the evenings are long, he puts away rake, fork, and barrow, and comes and sits on the hearth-stone of the kitchen fireplace, where the billets of ilex-wood blaze merrily. He fetches out his pipe, fills it methodically with a moistened thumb and smokes it solemnly. He has been thinking of it for many a long hour; but he has abstained, for tobacco is expensive. The privation has doubled the charm; and not one of the puffs recurring at regular intervals is wasted.
Meanwhile, we start talking. Favier is, in his fashion, one of those bards of old who were given the best seat at the hearth, for the sake of their tales; only my story-teller was formed in the barrack-room. No matter: the whole household, large and small, listen to him with interest; though his speech is full of vivid images, it is always decent. It would be a great disappointment to us if he did not come, when his work was done, to take his ease in the chimney-corner.
What does he talk about to make him so popular? He tells us what he saw of the coup d’Etat to which we owe the hated Empire; he talks of the brandy served out and of the firing into the mob. He—so he assures me—always aimed at the wall; and I accept his word for it, so distressed does he appear to me and so ashamed of having taken a hand, however innocent, in that felon’s game. [[279]]
He tells us of his watches in the trenches before Sebastopol; he speaks of his sudden terror when, at night, all alone on outpost duty, squatting in the snow, he saw fall beside him what he calls a flower-pot. It blazed and flared and shone and lit up everything around. The infernal machine threatened to burst at every second; and our man gave himself up for lost. But nothing happened: the flower-pot went out quietly. It was a star-shell, an illuminating contrivance fired to reconnoitre the assailant’s outworks in the dark.
The tragedy of the battle-field is followed by the comedy of the barracks. He lets us into the mysteries of the stew-pan, the secrets of the mess, the humorous hardships of the cells. And, as his stock of anecdotes, seasoned with racy expressions, is inexhaustible, the supper hour arrives before any of us has had time to remark how long the evening is.
Favier first attracted my notice by a master-stroke. One of my friends had sent me from Marseilles a pair of enormous Crabs, the Maia, the Sea-spider or Spider-crab of the fishermen. I was unpacking the captives when the workmen returned from their dinner: painters, stone-masons, plasterers engaged in repairing the house which had been empty so long. At the sight of those strange animals, studded with spikes all over the carapace and perched on long legs that give them a certain resemblance to a monstrous Spider, the onlookers gave a cry of surprise, almost of alarm. Favier, for his part, remained unmoved; and, as he skilfully [[280]]seized the terrible Spider struggling to get away, he said:
“I know that thing; I’ve eaten it at Vasna. It’s first-rate.”
And he looked round at the bystanders with an air of humorous mockery which was meant to convey:
“You’ve never been out of your hole, you people.”
Favier knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famed Rassade of the South; he has thought out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career.
I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity.
But, above all, he excels in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there [[281]]is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word.[2]
Favier has other qualities: he does not hesitate in the face of difficulties, and it is a point of honour with him to acquit himself manfully, however arduous the task.
Favier is not content with faithfully executing his master’s orders. Like all intelligent and devoted servants, he divines and anticipates his desires. He has happy ideas of initiative.
On the 14th of April 1880, Favier was clearing away a heap of mould resulting from the waste weeds and leaves heaped up in a corner against the enclosing wall.… In the midst of his work with spade and wheelbarrow, he suddenly called me:
“A find, sir, a splendid find! Come and look!”
I hurried up. There, indeed, was a splendid discovery, and of a kind to fill me with delight, reawakening all my old memories of the Bois des Issarts.[3]
[[282]]
There swarmed a whole population of Scarabæi, in the form of larvæ, nymphs, and adult insects. There, too, were crowds of Rose-beetles (Cetoniæ), all stages being represented. There, too, were great numbers of Scoliæ, the Two-striped Scoliæ having recently emerged from their cocoons, which still had beside them the skins of the game served to the larvæ; and there, before the naturalist’s eyes, was the solution of the problem of the Scolia’s food, which “his painful researches in the Bois des Issarts had not enabled him to solve.”[4] Less than this had been needed for Favier to merit mention in the order of the day!
At the beginning of this chapter should we not have placed the insects themselves at the head of Fabre’s collaborators in his researches? When the insect takes a hand, Favier himself is out of the running.
In the meantime we have no intention of belittling Favier, or of retracting the praise which has been lavished upon him. Despite his inevitable deficiencies, and sometimes even because of them, Fabre owes him much. He owes him important manual services; he owes him curious data and inestimable discoveries; lastly, he owes him hitherto unknown opinions [[283]]relating to evolution, for Favier is an evolutionist, and a highly original one.