Though unknown during most of his lifetime to the world at large, Fabre through his writings gained the friendship of several celebrated men. Charles Darwin called him the “incomparable observer.” The Minister of Education in France invited him to Paris and had him made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and presented him to the Emperor, Napoleon III. He was offered the post of tutor to the Prince Imperial, but preferred his country life and original researches, even though they meant continued poverty.

At last, after forty years of drudgery, Fabre secured from his textbooks a small independent income, which released him from teaching and enabled him to buy at Serignan a house and garden of his own, and a small piece of waste ground, dedicated to thistles and insects—a “cursed ground,” he wrote, “which no one would have as a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip seed,” but “an earthly paradise for bees and wasps”—and, on that account, for him also.

“It is a little late, O my pretty insects,” he adds—he was at this time over sixty; “I greatly fear the peach is offered to me only when I am beginning to have no teeth wherewith to eat it.” He lived, however, to spend many years at his chosen studies.

During the last years of his life his fame spread, and in 1910, in his eighty-eighth year, some of his admirers arranged a jubilee celebration for him at Serignan. Many famous men attended, and letters and telegrams poured in from all parts of the world. He died five years later, at the age of ninety-two.

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