I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. I was well thought of in the school, for I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere, there was talk of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynœgirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder-tooth.
Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals. While admiring Cadmus and Cynœgirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars.
By easy stages I came to Virgil and was very much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas and the rest of them. Within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A real delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.
Then, suddenly, good-by to my studies, good-by to Tityrus and Menalcas. Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.
During this sad time, my love for the insects ought to have gone under. Not at all. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground, were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.
To cut a long story short: good fortune, which never abandons the brave, brought me to the primary normal school at Vaucluse, where I was certain of food: dried chestnuts and chick-peas. The principal, a man of broad views, soon came to trust his new assistant. He left me practically a free hand so long as I satisfied the school curriculum, which was very modest in those days. I was a little ahead of my fellow-pupils. I took advantage of this to get some order into my vague knowledge of plants and animals. While a dictation lesson was being corrected around me, I would examine, in the recesses of my desk, the oleander’s fruit, the snap-dragon’s seed-vessel, the Wasp’s sting and the Ground-beetle’s wing-case.
With this foretaste of natural science, picked up haphazard and secretly, I left school more deeply in love than ever with insects and flowers. And yet I had to give it all up. Natural history could not bring me anywhere. The schoolmasters of the time despised it; Latin, Greek, and mathematics were the subjects to study.
So I flung myself with might and main into higher mathematics: a hard battle, if ever there was one, without teachers, face to face for days on end with abstruse problems. Next I studied the physical sciences in the same manner, with an impossible laboratory, the work of my own hands. I went against my feelings: I buried my natural-history books at the bottom of my trunk.
And so, in the end, I am sent to teach physics and chemistry at Ajaccio College. This time, the temptation is too much for me. The sea, with its wonders, the beach, covered with beautiful shells, the myrtles, arbutus, and other trees; all this paradise of gorgeous nature is more attractive than geometry and trigonometry. I give up. I divide my spare time into two parts. The larger part is devoted to mathematics, by which I expect to make my way in the world; the other is spent, with much misgiving, in botanizing and looking for the treasures of the sea.