But what matter! The hermit of Sérignan was not discouraged; he was disturbed only by the failure of his strength, and the fear that he could not much longer exercise that divine faculty which had always consoled him for all his sorrows and his disappointments. He could scarcely drag his weary limbs across the pebbles of his Harmas; but he bore his eighty-seven years with a fine disdain for age and its failings, and although the fire of his glance and that whole, eager countenance still expressed his passion for the truth, his abrupt gestures, touched with irony, his simple bearing, and the extreme modesty of his whole person, spoke sufficiently of his profound indifference toward outside contingencies, for the baubles of fame and all the stupidities of life.
At a few miles' distance, in another village, that other great peasant, Mistral, the singer of Provence, the poet of love and joy, the minstrel of rustic labour and antique faiths, was pursuing, amid the homage of his apotheosis, the incredible cycle of his splendid existence.
This glory had come to him suddenly; this fame "whose first glances are sweeter than the fires of dawn," and which was never to desert him for fifty long years.
The wind of favour which had sweetened his youth continued to propel him in full sail. He had only to show himself to be at once surrounded, felicitated, worshipped; and his mere presence would sway a crowd as the black peaks of the high cypresses are swayed by the great wind that bears his name. Like Fabre, he had remained faithful to his native soil; that soil which the great naturalist had never been able to leave without at once longing impatiently to return to its dusty olives where the cigale sings, its ilex trees and its thickets; and so he lived far from the cities, in a quiet village, with the same horizon of plains and hills that were balmy with thyme, leading in his little home an equal life full of wisdom and simplicity.
The hermit of Sérignan was the Lucretius of this Provence, which had already found its Virgil. With a very different vision, each had the same rustic tastes, the same love of the free spaces of wild nature and the scenes of rural life. But Mistral, wherever he looked, saw human life as happy and simple, through the prism of his creative imagination and the optimism of his happy life. Fabre, on the contrary, behind the sombre realities which he studied, saw only the ferocious engagement of confused living forces, and a frightful tragedy.
Thus their two lives, which were like parallel lines, never meeting, were in keeping with their work. And while Mistral, still young and triumphant despite the years, was at Maillane overwhelmed with honours and consideration, the poor great man of Sérignan lived an obscure and inglorious existence.
He had the greatest trouble to live and rear his family, and almost his sole income consisted of an uncertain sum of 120 pounds sterling annually, which he had for some years received, in the guise of a pension, by the generosity of the Institute, as the Gegner prize.
Finally his situation was so precarious that he decided to sell to a museum that magnificent collection of water-colour plates in which he had represented, life-size and with an astonishing truth of colour, all the fungi which grow in Provence.
He wrote to Mistral on the subject, after the visit which the latter paid him in the spring of 1908: the only visit of the kind. Before meeting in Saint-Estelle, the Paradise of the Félibres, they had wished not to die before at least meeting on this earth.
Fabre wrote to mistral the following letter, which I owe to the kindness of the great poet:--