When he considers himself incapable of adding further volumes to his work he busies himself with preparing a definitive edition, and in a touching farewell to his beloved studies he declares that they are so full of charm and unexplored marvels that could he live several lives he would devote them all to them without ever succeeding in “exhausting their interest.”
There we have Fabre. After labouring all his life without troubling about fame, ploughing his straight furrow like his peasant forebears, like them, when the night has come, he simply binds his sheaves with a humble and profound realisation of the narrow limits of his work as compared with the immensity of the world and the infinite mystery of things.
It is a fine spectacle, that of the entomologist on the summits of science, as of fame, raising himself, by his humility, above both, and fully prepared, to return to Him toward whom aspire those souls that have attained the limit of human climbing:
O Jesu corona celsior
Et veritas sublimior.
III
Neither science nor fame could prevent him from suffering. To begin with, there is [[381]]suffering attaching to these, for all labour has its burden, all light its shadow.
This none knew better than he whose genius was a protracted patience and his life a hard-fought battle. And as though it was his destiny to suffer to the end, he did suffer still when the tardy hour of his fame had struck. Was it not an ordeal still to be assailed by visits and speeches when “nothing was left but rest and silence”? How can a man delight in the incense of his admirers when he is broken with fatigue?
To express this contrast, to show that all was not unmixed joy in these flattering visits to the patriarch of Sérignan, I will borrow the delicate brush of an artist friend of Fabre’s: