Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

In the first few months at his new home he resumed his hymn to labour.

"You will learn in your turn," he writes to his son Émile, "you will learn, I hope, that we are never so happy as when work does not leave us a moment's repose. To act is to live." [(6/7.)]

The better to belong to himself, he eluded all invitations, even those from his nearest or most intimate friends; he hated to go away even for a few hours, preferring to enjoy in his own house their presence amidst his habitual and delightful surroundings. Everything in this still unexplored country was new to him. What would he do elsewhere, even in his beloved Carpentras, whither his faithful friend and pupil Devillario, who had formerly followed him in his walks around Avignon, would endeavour from time to time to draw him? Devillario was a magistrate, a collector and palaeontologist; his simple tastes, his wide culture, and his passion for natural history would surely have decided Fabre to accept his invitations, but that he forbade himself the pleasure. "I am afraid the hospitable cutlet that awaits me at your table will have time to grow cold; I am up to the neck in my work [(6/8.)]...But you, when you can, escape from your courts, and we will philosophize at random, as is our custom when we can manage to pass a few hours together. As for me, it is very doubtful whether the temptation will seize me to come to Carpentras. A hermit of the Thebaïd was no more diligent in his cell than I in my village home." [(6/9.)]

[CHAPTER 7. THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.]

Was there not indeed a sufficiency of captivating matters all about him, and beneath his very feet?

In his deep, sunny garden a thousand insects fly, creep, crawl, and hum, and each relates its history to him. A golden gardener-beetle trots along the path. Rose-beetles pass, in snoring flight, on every hand, the gold and emerald of their elytra gleaming; now and again one of them alights for a moment on the flowering head of a thistle; he seizes it carefully with the tips of his nervous, pointed fingers, seems to caress it, speaks to it, and then suddenly restores it to freedom.

Wasps are pillaging the centauries. On the blossoms of the camomile the larvae of the Meloë are waiting for the Anthophorae to carry them off to their cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies "spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis, rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly, on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one praying," and paralyses the great grey locust, nailed to its place by fear.

Nothing here is insignificant; what the world would smile at or deride will provide the sage with food for thought and reflection. "Nothing is trivial in the majestic problem of nature; our laboratory acquaria are of less value than the imprint which the shoe of a mule has left in the clay, when the rain has filled the primitive basin, and life has peopled it with marvels"; and the least fact offered us by chance on the most thoroughly beaten track may possibly open prospects as vast as all the starry sky.

Tell yourself that everything in nature is a symbol of something like a specimen of an abstruse cryptogram, all the characters of which conceal some meaning. But when we have succeeded in deciphering these living texts, and have grasped the allusion; when, beside the symbol, we have succeeded in finding the commentary, then the most desolate corner of the earth appears to the solitary seeker as a gallery full of the masterpieces of an unsuspected art. Fabre puts into our hands the golden key which opens the doors of this marvellous museum.

Let us consider the terebinth louse; it is just a little yellow mite; but is it nothing else? Its genealogical history teaches us "by what amazing essays of passion and variety the universal law which rules the transmission of life is evolved. Here is neither father nor eggs; all these mites are mothers; and the young are born living, just like their mothers." To this end "almost the whole of the maternal substance is disintegrated and renewed and conglobated to form the ovarium...the whole creature has become an egg, which has, for its shell, the dry skin of the tiny creature, and the microscope will show a whole world in formation...a nebulosity as of white of egg, in which fresh centres of life are forming, as the suns are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens." [(7/1.)]