Such was the principal motive of his inquiry into the properties of madder, the colouring principle of which he succeeded in extracting directly, by a perfectly simple method, which for a time very advantageously replaced the extremely primitive methods of the old dyers, who used a simple extract of madder; a crude preparation which necessitated long and expensive manipulations. [(4/23.)]
He had been working at this for eight years when Victor Duruy, Minister of Public Instruction and Grand Master of the University, came to surprise him in his laboratory at Saint-Martial, in the full fever of research. Whatever was Duruy's idea in entering into relations with him, it seems that from their first meeting the two men were really taken with one another: there were, between them, so many close affinities of taste and character. Duruy found in Fabre a man of his own temper; for his, like Fabre's, was a modest and simple nature. Both came of the people, and the principal motive of each was the same ideal of work, emancipation, and progress.
A little later Duruy summoned the modest sage of Avignon to Paris, with particular insistence; he was full of attentions and of forethought, and made him there and then a chevalier of the Legion of Honour; a distinction of which Fabre was far from being proud, and which he was careful never to obtrude; but he nevertheless always thought of it with a certain tenderness, as a beloved "relic" in memory of this illustrious friend.
On the following day the naturalist was conveyed to the Tuileries to be presented to the Emperor. You must not suppose that he was in the least disturbed at the idea of finding himself face to face with royalty. In the presence of all these bedizened folk, in his coat of a cut which was doubtless already superannuated, he cared little for the impression he might produce. As good an observer of men as of beasts, he gazed quietly about him; he exchanged a few words with the Emperor, who was "quite simple," almost suppressed, his eyes always half-closed; he watched the coming and going of "the chamberlains with short breeches and silver-buckled shoes, great scarabaei, clad with café au lait wing-cases, moving with a formal gait." Already he sighed regretfully; he was bored; he was on the rack, and for nothing in the world would he have repeated the experience. He did not even feel the least desire to visit the vaunted collections of the Museum. He longed to return; to find himself once more among his dear insects; to see his grey olive-trees, full of the frolicsome cicadae, his wastes and commons, which smelt so sweet of thyme and cypress; above all, to return to his furnace and retorts, in order to complete his discovery as quickly as possible.
But others profited by his happy conceptions. Like the cicada, the Cigale of his fable (See "Social Life in the Insect World," by Jean-Henri Fabre (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912).), which makes a "honeyed reek" flow from--
"the bark
Tender and juicy, of the bough,"
on which it is quickly supplanted by
"Fly, drone, wasp, beetle too with hornèd head" [(4/24.)],
who
"Now lick their honey'd lips, and feed at leisure,"