What a misfortune for him, what regret he would feel, "if he had now to go to some trivial country of plains, where he would die of boredom!"
For him everything was unfamiliar: not only the flora, but the maritime wealth of this singular country. He would set out of a morning, visiting the coves and creeks, roving along the beaches of this magnificent gulf, a lump of bread in his pocket, quenching his thirst with sea-water in default of fresh!
They were mornings full of rosy illusions, whose smiling hopes were revealed in his admirable letters to his brother. Already he meditated a conchology of Corsica, a colossal history of all the molluscs which live upon its soil or in its waters. [(3/3.)] He collected all the shells he could procure. He analysed, described, classed, and co-ordinated not only the marine species, but the terrestrial and freshwater shells also, extant or fossil. He asked his brother to collect for him all the shells he could find in the marshes of Lapalud, in the brooks and ditches of the neighbourhood of Orange. In his enthusiasm he tried to convince him of the immense interest of these researches, which might perhaps seem ridiculous or futile to him; but let him only think of geology; the humblest shell picked up might throw a sudden light upon the formation of this or that stratum. None are to be disdained: for men have considered, with reason, that they were honouring the memory of their eminent fellows by giving their names to the rarest and most beautiful. Witness the magnificent Helix dedicated to Raspail, which is found only in the caverns where the strawberry-tree grows amid the high mountains of Corsica. [(3/4.)]
Moreover, he said, "the infinitesimal calculus of Leibnitz will show you that the architecture of the Louvre is less learned than that of a snail: the eternal geometer has unrolled his transcendent spirals on the shell of the mollusc that you, like the vulgar profane, know only seasoned with spinach and Dutch cheese." [(3/5.)]
For all that, he did not neglect his mathematics, in which, on the contrary, he found abundant and suggestive recreation. The properties of a figure or a curve which he had newly discovered prevented his sleep for several nights.
"All this morning I have been busy with star-shaped polygons, and have proceeded from surprise to surprise...perceiving in the distance, as I advanced, unforeseen and marvellous consequences."
Here, among others, is one question which suddenly presented itself to his mind "in the midst of the spikes" of his polygons: what would be the period of the rotation of the sun on its own centre if its atmosphere reached as far as the earth? And this question gave rise to another, "without which the sequence stops then and there; number, space, movement, and order form a single chain, the first link of which sets all the rest in motion." [(3/6.)] And the hours went by quickly, so quickly with "x," the plants and the shells, that "literally there was no time to eat."
For Fabre was born a poet, and mathematics borders upon poetry; he saw in algebra "the most magnificent flights," and the figures of analytical geometry unrolled themselves in his imagination "in superb strophes"; the Ellipse, "the trajectory of the planets, with its two related foci, sending from one to the other a constant sum of vector radii"; the Hyperbole, "with repulsive foci, the desperate curve which plunges into space in infinite tentacles, approaching closer and closer to a straight line, the asymptote, without ever finally attaining it"; the Parabola, "which seeks fruitlessly in the infinite for its second, lost centre: it is the trajectory of the bomb: it is the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun, then flee into the depths whence they never return." [(3/7.)]
And one fine morning we behold him mounting, thrilled by a lyric passion, to the lofty regions in which Number, "irresistible, omnipotent, keystone of the vault of the universe, rules at once Time and Space." He ascends, he rushes forward, farther than the chariot--
"Beyond the Husbandman who ploughs in space
And sows the suns in furrows of the skies."