Before the bloody vision of the battlefields, how should he not feel shaken to the depths of his being by the tremors of a terrible anger and a vast pity, he who had never been able to see an insect suffering without a pang at the heart?
True, in his incomparable Iliad, the Homer of the Insects had often described creatures that hunt one another, kill one another, devour one another with indescribable ardour and ferocity, and he knew that he had only written a chapter of that “struggle for life” which is to be found on every step [[385]]of the biological ladder, with the same disregard of weakness and suffering.
But he would fain have seen man assert his superiority over the animals by repressing these instincts, which come from below, by the free flight of the aspirations vouchsafed from above, by the progressive subordination of the brute power of force to the spiritual power of justice and love.
While these distressing problems were filling his mind, and while, in protest against happenings so utterly contrary to his ideas, he would thump his fist upon his famous little table, a woman was moving gently to and fro, playing the parts, alternately, with the same calm countenance, of Martha and of Mary; and when he asked her her secret, she showed him her crucifix and read the Gospel to him, as though to wring from his heart the cry that was uttered by the poet of La Bonne Souffrance:[11]
“Vingt siècles de bonté sont sortis de ces mystères,
Je crois en toi, Jésus.…”
In moments of affliction, Fabre is even closer to the Truth than on the heights of knowledge and fame. For we are never [[386]]nearer the God of the Gospel than when we most feel the want of Him.
IV
More than ninety years of life and almost as many of labour, nearly five years of overwhelming fame, and almost as many of unspeakable suffering: must not a man be “built of heart of oak,” as they say in Aveyron, to survive so many trials?