THE URCHIN OF MALAVAL
Jean-Henri Fabre was born at Saint-Léons, the market-town and
administrative centre of the canton of Vezins. In witness of which
behold this extract from the register of baptisms, a certified copy
transcribed by the Abbé Lafon, curé of Saint-Léons:
In the year 1823, on the 22nd September, was baptised
Jean-Henri-Casimir Fabre, of the aforesaid Saint-Léons, the
legitimate son of Antoine Fabre and Victoire Salgues, inhabitants
of the same place:—His godfather was Pierre Ricard, primary
schoolmaster. In proof of which—Fabre, vicar. [10]
Jean-Henri Casimir’s mother, by birth Victoire Salgues, was the
daughter of the bailiff of Saint-Léons. His father, Antoine Fabre, was
born in a little mas in the parish of Lavaysse, Malaval, where his
parents were still cultivating the old family property which since then
has passed to the head of the Vaissière family.
It was thus at Malaval that the future entomologist “passed his
earliest childhood,” as he told me when writing to me ten years ago.
[11] There was no wallowing in abundance at Saint-Léons. In order to
relieve the poor household of one mouth, he was confided to the care of
his grandmother and sent to Malaval. “There, in solitude, amid the
geese, the calves, and the sheep, my mind first awoke to consciousness.
What went before is for me shrouded in impenetrable darkness.”
The spot which was the scene of this first awakening deserves
description. When one follows the road from Laissac to Vezins, a short
distance after passing Vaysse-Rodié, just as one has almost reached the
crest of the height which by reason of its rocky helmet is called the
puech del Roucas, on the line of the watershed dividing the limestone
basin of the Aveyron from the granitic basin of the Viaur, on turning
sharply to the right one sees before one the austere Malavallis,
dominated on the one hand by the height of Lavaysse with its ancient
church, and enlivened a little on the other side by the tiny hamlet of
Malaval, which consists, to-day, of two farm-houses; one whiter, more
cheerful-looking, and on lower ground; the other standing higher,
greyer in hue, and more difficult to discover in the shade of the
oak-trees and thickets of broom and blackthorn which form a dense
mantle of green about it. It was there, amid these trees, in this
house, three thousand feet above the sea, in sight of the sturdy belfry
of Lavaysse, that Jean-Henri Fabre was “born into the true life,” the
life of the mind. Here, on this hillside, which directly faces the
east, he made his earliest discoveries; here, one fine morning, as he
will presently tell us, he discovered the sun; here, he saw not only
the dawn of day, but also “that inward dawn, so far swept clear of the
clouds of unconsciousness as to leave him a lasting memory.”
Nothing could take the place of the picturesqueness and sincerity of
the narrative in which he has related these earliest impressions of his
childhood:
My grandparents [12] were people whose quarrel with the alphabet was so
great that they had never opened a book in their lives; and they kept a
lean farm on the cold granite ridge of the Rouergue table-land. The
house, standing alone amidst the heath and broom, with no neighbour for
many a mile around and visited at intervals by the wolves, was to them
the hub of the universe. But for a few surrounding villages, whither
the calves were driven upon fair-days, the rest was only very vaguely
known by hearsay. In this wild solitude, the mossy fens, with their
quagmires oozing with iridescent pools, supplied the cows, the
principal source of wealth, with plentiful pasture. In summer, on the
short sward of the slopes, the sheep were penned day and night,
protected from beasts of prey by a fence of hurdles propped up with
pitchforks. When the grass was cropped close at one spot, the fold was
shifted elsewhither. In the centre was the shepherd’s rolling hut, a
straw cabin. Two watch-dogs, equipped with spiked collars, were
answerable for tranquillity if the thieving wolf appeared in the night
from out the neighbouring woods.
Padded with a perpetual layer of cow-dung, in which I sank to my knees,
broken up shimmering puddles of dark-brown liquid manure, the farmyard
also boasted a numerous population. Here the lambs skipped, the geese
trumpeted, the fowls scratched the ground, and the sow grunted with her
swarm of little pigs hanging to her dugs.
The harshness of the climate did not give husbandry the same chances.
In a propitious season they would set fire to a stretch of moorland
bristling with gorse and send the swing-plough across the ground
enriched by the cinders from the fire. This yielded a few acres of rye,
oats, and potatoes. The best corners were kept for hemp, which
furnished the distaffs and spindles of the house with the material for
cloth, and was looked upon as grandmother’s private crop.
Grandfather, therefore, was, before all, a herdsman versed in the love
of cows and sheep, but completely ignorant of aught else. How
dumbfounded he would have been to learn that, in the remote future, one
of his family would become enamoured of those insignificant animals to
which he had never vouchsafed a glance in his life! Had he guessed that
that lunatic was myself, the scapegrace seated at the table by his
side, what a smack of the head I should have caught, what a wrathful
look!
“The idea of wasting one’s time with that nonsense!” he would have
thundered.
For the patriarch was not given to joking. I can still see his serious
face, his unclipped head of hair, often brought back behind his ears
with a flick of the thumb and spreading its ancient Gallic mane over
his shoulders. I see his little three-cornered hat, his small-clothes
buckled at the knees, his wooden shoes, stuffed with straw, that echoed
as he walked. Ah, no! Once childhood’s games were past, it would never
have done to rear the Grasshopper and unearth the Dung-beetle from his
natural surroundings.
Grandmother, pious soul, used to wear the eccentric headdress of the
Rouergue Highlanders: a large disk of black felt, stiff as a plank,
adorned in the middle with a crown a finger’s-breadth high and hardly
wider across than a six-franc piece. A black ribbon fastened under the
chin maintained the equilibrium of this elegant, but unstable circle.
Pickles, hemp, chickens, curds and whey, butter; washing the clothes,
minding the children, seeing to the meals of the household: say that
and you have summed up the strenuous woman’s round of ideas. On her
left side, the distaff, with its load of tow; in her right hand, the
spindle turning under a quick twist of her thumb, moistened at
intervals with her tongue: so she went through life, unweariedly,
attending to the order and the welfare of the house. I see her in my
mind’s eye, particularly on winter evenings, which were more favourable
to family talk. When the hour came for meals, all of us, big and
little, would take our seats round a long table, on a couple of
benches, deal planks supported by four rickety legs. Each found his
wooden bowl and his tin spoon in front of him. At one end of the table
there always stood an enormous rye-loaf, the size of a cartwheel,
wrapped in a linen cloth with a pleasant smell of washing, and there it
remained until nothing was left of it. With a vigorous stroke,
grandfather would cut off enough for the needs of the moment; then he
would divide the piece among us with the one knife which he alone was
entitled to wield. It was now each one’s business to break up his bit
with his fingers and to fill his bowl as he pleased.
Next came grandmother’s turn. A capacious pot bubbled lustily and sang
upon the flames in the hearth, exhaling an appetising savour of bacon
and turnips. Armed with a long metal ladle, grandmother would take from
it, for each of us in turn, first the broth, wherein to soak the bread,
and next the ration of turnips and bacon, partly fat and partly lean,
filling the bowl to the top. At the other end of the table was the
pitcher, from which the thirsty were free to drink at will. What
appetites we had, and what festive meals those were, especially when a
cream-cheese, home-made, was there to complete the banquet!
Near us blazed the huge fire-place, in which whole tree-trunks were
consumed in the extreme cold weather. From a corner of that monumental,
soot-glazed chimney, projected, at a convenient height, a slate shelf,
which served to light the kitchen when we sat up late. On this we burnt
slips of pine-wood, selected among the most translucent, those
containing the most resin. They shed over the room a lurid red light,
which saved the walnut-oil in the lamp.
When the bowls were emptied and the last crumb of cheese scraped up,
grandam went back to her distaff, on a stool by the chimney-corner. We
children, boys and girls, squatting on our heels and putting out our
hands to the cheerful fire of furze, formed a circle round her and
listened to her with eager ears. She told us stories, not greatly
varied, it is true, but still wonderful, for the wolf often played a
part in them. I should have very much liked to see this wolf, the hero
of so many tales that made our flesh creep; but the shepherd always
refused to take me into his straw hut, in the middle of the fold, at
night. When we had done talking about the horrid wolf, the dragon, and
the serpent, and when the resinous splinters had given out their last
gleams, we went to sleep the sweet sleep that toil gives. As the
youngest of the household, I had a right to the mattress, a sack
stuffed with oat-chaff. The others had to be content with straw.
I owe a great deal to you, dear grandmother: it was in your lap that I
found consolation for my first sorrows. You have handed down to me,
perhaps, a little of your physical vigour, a little of your love of
work; but certainly you were no more accountable than grandfather for
my passion for insects.
And yet in me, the observer, the inquirer into things, began to take
shape almost in infancy. Why should I not describe my first
discoveries? They are ingenuous in the extreme, but will serve
notwithstanding to tell us something of the way in which tendencies
first show themselves.
I was five or six years old. That the poor household might have one
mouth less to feed, I had been placed in grandmother’s care. Here, in
solitude, my first gleams of intelligence were awakened amidst the
geese, the calves, and the sheep. Everything before that is
impenetrable darkness. My real birth was at the moment when the dawn of
personality rises, dispersing the mists of unconsciousness and leaving
a lasting memory. I can see myself plainly, clad in a soiled frieze
frock flapping against my bare heels; I remember the handkerchief
hanging from my waist by a bit of string, a handkerchief often lost and
replaced by the back of my sleeve.
There I stand one day, a pensive urchin, with my hands behind my back
and my face turned to the sun. The dazzling splendour fascinates me. I
am the Moth attracted by the light of the lamp. With what am I enjoying
the glorious radiance: with my mouth or my eyes? That is the question
put by my budding scientific curiosity. Reader, do not smile! the
future observer is already practising and experimenting. I open my
mouth wide and close my eyes: the glory disappears. I open my eyes and
shut my mouth: the glory reappears. I repeat the performance, with the
same result. The question’s solved: I have learnt by deduction that I
see the sun with my eyes. What a discovery! That evening I told the
whole house all about it. Grandmother smiled fondly at my simplicity:
the others laughed at it. ’Tis the way of the world.
Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighbouring bushes, a sort of
jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through
the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little bird
chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter, and that quickly.
True, there is the wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so
they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there,
behind that clump of broom. I stand on the look-out for long, but all
in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle
ceases. I try again next day and the day after. This time my stubborn
watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is
not a bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind-legs my playfellows
have taught me to relish: a poor recompense for my prolonged ambush.
The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy
flavour, but what I have just learnt. I now know, from personal
observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not publish my discovery
for fear of the same laughter that greeted my story about the sun.
Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to
smile to me with their great violet eyes. Later on I see, in their
place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice,
and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the
summer, grandfather walks up with a spade and turns my field of
observation topsy-turvy. From under ground there comes, by the
basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it
abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the
peat-stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are
pigeon-holed in my memory for good and all.
With an ever-watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer,
the little six-year-old monkey, practised by himself, all unawares. He
went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the Large White
Butterfly goes to the cabbage, and the Red Admiral to the thistle.
It would be impossible to describe more delightfully the gradual
development of tastes and aptitudes in the dawn of life.
The same freshness of impression and the same affinity for natural
objects will be found in another recollection of the same period: the
recollection of “a certain harmonica,” whose music to the “ear of a
child of six” sounded as sweet and strange as that of the frog whom he
heard emitting his limpid note in the neighbourhood of the solitary
farm as the last light of evening faded from the heights. “A series of
glass slips, of unequal length, fixed upon two tightly-stretched tapes,
and a cork on the end of a wire, which served as a striker”: such was
the instrument which some one brought the child from the latest fair.
“Imagine an untutored hand striking at random upon this key-board, with
the most riotous unexpectedness of octaves, discords, and inverted
harmonies”: such was the chiming of the bell-ringer frogs on the sunken
lanes of Malaval. “As a song it had neither head nor tail; but the
purity of the sound was delightful.” How much more delightful, in the
first radiance of his spontaneous childhood, this little scrap of a
fellow who was beginning to play his part in the great concert of the
world, in which he was one day to fill so notable a place and to sing a
new song to the glory of the Master of Nature! [13]