Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

At Carpentras too the Anthophorae lived in abundance; those wild bees with whom the vexed and enigmatic history of the Sitaris and the Meloë is bound up; those little beetles, cousins of the Cantharides, whose complex metamorphoses and astonishing and peculiar habits have been revealed by Fabre. This memoir marked the second stage of his scientific career, and followed, at an interval of two years, the magnificent observations on the Cerceris.

These two studies, true masterpieces of science, already constituted two excellent titles to fame, and would by themselves have sufficed to fill a naturalist's whole lifetime and to make his name illustrious.

From that time forward he had no peer. The Institute awarded him one of its Montyon prizes [(4/11.)], "an honour of which, needless to say, he had never dreamed." [(4/12.)] Darwin, in his celebrated work on the "Origin of Species," which appeared precisely at this moment, speaks of Fabre somewhere as "the inimitable observer." [(4/13.)]

Exploring the immediate surroundings of Avignon, he very soon discovered fresh localities frequented almost exclusively by other insects, whose habits in their turn absorbed his whole attention.

First of these was the sandy plateau of the Angles, where every spring, in the sunlit pastures so beloved of the sheep, the Scarabaeus sacer, with his incurved feet and clumsy legs, commences to roll his everlasting pellet, "to the ancients the image of the world." His history, since the time of the Pharaohs, had been nothing but a tissue of legends; but stripping it of the embroidery of fiction, and referring it to the facts of nature, Fabre demonstrated that the true story is even more marvellous than all the tales of ancient Egypt. He narrated its actual life, the object of its task, and its comical and exhilarating performances. But such is the subtlety of these delicate and difficult researches that nearly forty years were required to complete the study of its habits and to solve the mystery of its cradle. [(4/14.)]

On the right bank of the Rhône, facing the embouchure of the Durance, is a small wood of oak-trees, the wood of Des Issarts. This again, for many reasons, was one of his favourite spots. There, "lying flat on the ground, his head in the shadow of some rabbit's burrow," or sheltered from the sun by a great umbrella, "while the blue-winged locusts frisked for joy," he would follow the rapid and sibilant flight of the elegant Bembex, carrying their daily ration of diptera to her larvae, at the bottom of her burrow, deep in the fine sand." [(4/15.)]

He did not always go thither alone: sometimes, on Sundays, he would take his pupils with him, to spend a morning in the fields, "at the ineffable festival of the awakening of life in the spring." [(4/16.)]

Those most dear to him, those who in the subsequent years have remained the object of a special affection, were Devillario, Bordone, and Vayssières [(4/17.)], "young people with warm hearts and smiling imaginations, overflowing with that springtime sap of life which makes us so expansive and so eager to know.

Among them he was "the eldest, their master, but still more their companion and friend"; lighting in them his own sacred fire, and amazing them by the deftness of his fingers and the acuteness of his lynx-like eyes. Furnished with a notebook and all the tools of the naturalist--lens, net, and little boxes of sawdust steeped in anaesthetic for the capture of rare specimens--they would wander "along the paths bordered with hawthorn and hyaebla, simple and childlike folk," probing the bushes, scratching up the sand, raising stones, running the net along hedge and meadow, with explosions of delight when they made some splendid capture or discovered some unrecorded marvel of the entomological world.

It was not only on the banks of the Rhône or the sandy plateau of Avignon that they sought adventure thus, "discussing things and other things," but as far as the slopes of Mont Ventoux, for which Fabre had always felt an inexplicable and invincible attraction, and whose ascent he accomplished more than twenty times, so that at last he knew all its secrets, all the gamut of its vegetation, the wealth of the varied flora which climb its flanks from base to summit, and which range "from the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate to the violet of Mont Cenis and the Alpine forget-me-not" [(4/18.)], as well as the antediluvian fauna revealed amid its entrails, a vast ossuary rich in fossils.