But death also has its poetry. Its shadowy domains hold lessons no less magnificent, and the most putrid carrion is to Fabre a "tabernacle" in which a divine comedy is enacted.
The ant, that "ardent filibuster, comes first, and commences to dissect it piecemeal."
The Necrophori "exhaling the odour of musk, and bearing red pompons at the end of their antennae," are "transcendent alchemists."
The Sarcophagi, or grey flesh flies, "with red bloodshot eyes, and the stony gaze of a knacker"; the Saprinidae, "with bodies of polished ebony like pearls of jet"; the Silpha aplata, with large and sombre wing-cases in mourning; the shiny slow-trotting Horn-beetle; the Dermestes, "powdered with snow beneath the stomach"; the slender Staphylinus; the whole fauna of the corpse, the whole horde of artisans of death, "intoxicating themselves with purulence, probing, excavating, mangling, dissecting, transmuting, and stamping out infection."
Fabre gives a curious exposition of "that strange art" by which the grub of the grey bot-fly, the vulgar maggot, by means of a subtle pepsine, disintegrates and liquefies solid matter; and it is because this singular solvent has no effect upon the epidermis that the fly, in its wisdom, chooses by preference the mucous membranes, the corner of the eye, the entrance of the nostrils, the borders of the lips, the live flesh of wounds, there to deposit its eggs.
With what penetration this original mind has analysed "the operation of the crucible in which all things are fused that they may recommence" and has expounded the marvellous lesson which is revealed by decomposition and putridity!
[CHAPTER 14. PARALLEL LIVES.]
We have now seen what entomology becomes in the hands of the admirable Fabre. The vast poem of creation has never had a more familiar and luminous interpreter, and you will nowhere find other work like his.
How far he outstrips Buffon and his descriptions of animals--so general, so vague, so impersonal--his records unreliable and his entire erudition of a second-hand quality!
It is with Réaumur that we are first of all tempted to compare him; and some have chosen to see in him only one who has continued Réaumur's work. In reality he has eagerly read Réaumur, although at heart he does not really enjoy his writings; he has drunk from this fruitful source, but he owes him no part of his own rich harvest.