Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

"Gadflies of several species used to take refuge under the silken dome of my umbrella, and there they would quietly rest, one here, one there, on the tightly stretched fabric; I rarely lacked their company when the heat was overpowering. To while away the hours of waiting, I used to love to watch their great golden eyes, which would shine like carbuncles on the vaulted ceiling of my shelter; I used to love to watch them slowly change their stations, when the excessive heat of some point of the ceiling would force them to move a little." [(12/5.)]

We follow all the manoeuvres of the Balaninus, the acorn-weevil, "burying her drill" which "operates by means of little bites." The narrator calls our attention to the slightest episodes, even to those accidents which sometimes surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that "fatal stake." [(12/6.)]

As for the poplar-weevil, we can almost see it moving "in the subtlest equilibrium, clinging with its hooked talons to the slippery surface of the leaf"; we watch all the details of its methods and the progress of its labours. We see the flexed leaf assume the vertical under the awl-stroke which the insect applies to the pedicle, "when, partially deprived of sap, the leaf becomes more flexible, more malleable; it is in a sense partly paralysed, only half alive." Then we follow the rolling process; "the imperturbable deliberation of the worker as it rolls its cigar, which finally hangs perpendicularly at the end of the bent and wounded stem." [(12/7.)]

Fabre, like a true artist, finds all sorts of expressions to describe the tiny, fragile eggs of his insects; little shining pearls, delicious coffers of nickel or amber, miniature pots of translucid alabaster, "which we might think were stolen from the cupboard of a fairy."

He opens the enchanted alcoves wherein the puny grubs lie slumbering, "fat, rounded puppets"; the tender larvae which "gape and swing their heads to and fro" when the mother returns to the nest with her toothsome mouthful or her crop swollen with honey.

What compassion, what tenderness, what sensitiveness in the affecting picture of the mother Halictus, abandoned, deprived of her offspring, bewildered and lost, when the terrible spring fly has destroyed her house: bald, emaciated, shabby, careworn, already dogged by the small grey lizard! [(12/8.)]

The tragedy of the wasps' nest at the approach of the first chills of winter is the final fragment of an epic. At first there is a sort of uneasiness, "a species of indifference and anxiety which broods over the city"; already it has a presentiment of coming misfortune, of an approaching catastrophe. Presently a wild excitement ensues; the foster-mothers, "frightened, fierce, and restless," as though suddenly attacked by an incomprehensible insanity, conceive an aversion for the young; "the neuters extirpate the larvae and drag them out of the nest," and the drama of destruction draws to a close with "the final catastrophe; the infirm and the dying are dismembered, eviscerated, dissected in a heap in the catacombs by maggots, woodlice, and centipedes." Finally the moth comes upon the scene, its larvae "attacking the dwelling itself; gnawing and destroying the joists and rafters, until all is reduced to a few pinches of dust and shreds of grey paper." [(12/9.)]

What picturesque expressions he employs to depict, by means of some significant feature, the striking peculiarities of the insect physiognomy!

"The gipsy who night and day for seven months goes to and fro with her brats upon her back" is the Lycosa, the Tarantula with the black stomach, the great spider of the wastes.

The larva of the great Capricornis, which gnaws the interior of old oak-trees, "leaving behind it, in the form of dry-rot, the refuse of its digestive processes," is "a scrap of intestine which eats its way as it goes."