Fabre, Poet of Science

by Georges Victor Legros

Ask of the bee, which inaction leaves passive and melancholy so that she presently dies of weariness; of the Chalicodoma, so eager a worker that she will "let herself be crushed under the feet of the passer-by rather than abandon her task."

Ask it of all nature, which knows neither halt nor repose, and who, according to the profound saying of Goethe "has pronounced her malediction upon all that retards or suspends her progress."

Let us then labour, men and beasts, "so that we may sleep in peace; grubs and caterpillars in that torpor which prepares them for the transformation into moths and butterflies, and ourselves in the supreme slumber which dissolves life in order to renew it."

Let us work, in order to nourish within ourselves that divine intuition thanks to which we leave our original impress upon nature; let us work, in order to bring our humble contribution to the general harmony of things, by our painful and meritorious labour; in order that we may associate ourselves with God, share in His creation, and embellish and adorn the earth and fill it with wonders. [(16/4.)]

Forward then! always erect, even amid the tombs, to forget our griefs. Fabre finds no better consolation to offer his brother, who has lost almost in succession his wife and his eldest daughter:

"Do not take it ill if I have not condoled with you on the subject of your recent losses. Tried so often by the bitterness of domestic grief, I know too well the inanity of such consolations to offer the like to my friends. Time alone does a little cicatrize such wounds; and, let us add, work. Let us keep on our feet and at work as long as we are able. I know no better tonic." [(16/5.)]

And this exhortation to work, which recurs so often in the first letters of his youth, was to be the last word of the last volume which so splendidly terminates the incomparable series of his "Souvenirs": "Laboremus."

...

Age has killed neither his courage nor his energies, and he continues to work with the same zeal at nearly ninety years of age, and with as much eagerness as though he were destined to live for ever.

Although his physical forces are failing him, although his limbs falter, his brain remains intact, and is giving us its last fruit in his studies on the Cabbage caterpillar and the Glow-worm, which mark a sudden rejuvenescence of thought on his part, and the commencement of a new cycle of studies, which promise to be of the greatest originality.