Night falls upon Sérignan, serene, limpid, violet and amethyst. The sounds of day fade one by one. Still a few distant hoots from the horns of motor-cars flying along the dusty roads, or the sound of a dog baying the new moon, which shows its slender sickle on the horizon; sometimes, too, as though to eclipse the first stars, a rocket roars, a prelude to the fireworks which are about to conclude the apotheosis.… J. H. Fabre, the hero of the fête, the lover of the Sphex, the Mantis, the Dung-beetle, is very tired. Think of it—ninety years of age, and almost ninety years of labour!… and [[382]]a world-wide reputation to sustain … and visits to receive. To-day it was the visit of a Minister and all the flies on the ministerial wheel. And he had to return thanks, feeling upon him the eyes of the reporters and the photographer’s lens. What an ordeal! Fabre can hold out no longer!…
Do you not feel that the harvest of fame at ninety years of age and after almost ninety years of labour is perhaps even more painful than the harvest of science in the ardour of youth?
Meditating upon his history, with its full days and hours, Fabié, in a delightful flight of imagination, shows us the harassed entomologist escaping from the past to find himself alone with his thoughts and his beloved insects. “He slips silently to the gate of his harmas. There he lies down on a bank thickly carpeted with lavender and withered couch-grass”.… A few moments pass. His children intervene: “he is relaxing himself, stretching himself, soothed, happy as a little child.—‘But, father, you aren’t thinking! When the dew is falling!’ ‘Ah, my children, why did you wake me? I was having such a beautiful dream!’ For in his sleep he had entered into conversation with the crickets of his native country-side.”
Fatigue of the body, weariness of the mind, [[383]]and a breaking heart! Suffering pressed closely upon him at the close of his days.
“It is better to be loved than to be celebrated,” said Aubanel, the delicate poet of Avignon. As long as Fabre had beside him his beloved brother, his adored wife, and his darling children, he was at least conscious of a kindly atmosphere of memories, and of tenderness that made up for what he lacked and helped him to endure his afflictions with serene resignation.
But now, little by little, there came a void about him. Death has its surprises and life its demands.
With the death of his wife, in July 1912, half his own soul died. With that of his brother, in 1913, his life was almost wholly shattered, crushed, buried in the tomb.
With the marriage of the last of his sons and his two youngest daughters almost all the life of the house, all the caressing grace of light, considerate footfalls, of clear tender voices, of smiles and kisses, had forsaken the old man, to return only in passing and at distant intervals. His isolation became more and more complete.
Was all over? No, this was hardly the beginning of his afflictions. In the great silence of the harmas there burst of a sudden [[384]]the terrible thunderclap of war which roused to a protest of intolerable grief the uttermost fibres of his being.
The whole man suffered. The Frenchman, to see his beloved country the victim of the brutal and underhand aggression of a predatory nation: the father to see his dear children, a son and two sons-in-law, cast into the furnace; the idealist and the great-hearted man who had held war to be a relic of barbarism, doomed to disappear from the annals of the human race, to see war declared, and spreading with the violence of a conflagration, surpassing in horror all that history tells us of the armed conflicts of the past.