THE PROFESSOR: AJACCIO
Virgil has truly said:
... labor omnia vincit
Improbus.
Persistent labour, in the service of a keen intelligence, knows no
insuperable obstacles: it always achieves its ends. Success,
accordingly, could not fail to befall the intrepid virtuosity of the
youthful Carpentras schoolmaster. The degree of licentiate in the
mathematical sciences was won, like the rest, at the point of the
sword, and the valiant champion of the cosine and the laboratory was
appointed Professor of Physics and Chemistry in the lycée of Ajaccio.
Here, by a happy concatenation of circumstances, and under the inward
impulsion of the providential vocation, the destiny of the famous
entomologist was to be finally determined.
In this novel environment, in “this paradise of glorious Nature,”
everything stimulated the alert curiosity of the predestined biologist;
the sea, full of marvels, the beach, where the waves threw up such
beautiful shells, the maquis of myrtle, arbutus, and lentisk!... This
time the temptation was too great! He surrendered. His leisure was
divided into two parts. One was still devoted to mathematics, the basis
of his future in the university. The other was already spent in
botanising and in investigating the wonders of the sea.
What a country! What magnificent investigations to be made! If I
had not been obsessed by x and y I should have surrendered wholly
to my inclinations!
Meanwhile Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist,
Requien [44] by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his
arm, had long been botanising all over Corsica, pressing and drying
specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became
acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations,
and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell
the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an
enthusiastic collector. Very few would have felt capable of
competing with him when it came to giving the name or the
geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of
moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The
scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring
memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of
things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the
domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless
have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to
the woes of novices.
In the following year I met Moquin-Tandon, [45] with whom, thanks
to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The
illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora
which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all
the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the General
Council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and
lodging: a shake-down in a room overlooking the sea; fare
consisting of lampreys, turbot, and sea-urchins; common enough
dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction
for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal
tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments; and there we were for
a fortnight, chatting at table de omni re scibili, after the
botanical excursion was over.
With Moquin-Tandon new vistas opened before me. Here it was no
longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory; he was
a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared
above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a
poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of
the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast
like that:
“Leave your mathematics,” he said. “No one will take the least
interest in your formulæ. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as
I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to
listen to you.”
We made an expedition to the centre of the island, to Monte Renoso,
[46] with which I was extremely familiar. I made the scientist pick
the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a
wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon-grass
(Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans call erba muorone; the
downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum), which, clad in wadding,
shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the
botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more
attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm than by the
hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountain-top, my
mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.
On the day before his departure, he said to me:
“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not
enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how
it’s done.”
And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family workbasket,
and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine-shoot, which
served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a Snail
in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and
sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the
only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever
received in my life. [47]
Fabre was a wonderful and indefatigable self-teacher; a truly self-made
man. The impulse had been given, but he had everything, or almost
everything, to learn of the living world of Nature. The way was open,
but the whole length of it had to be travelled. He trod it henceforth
with a high courage, for he was marching beneath the star that the
Master of minds had hung in the dawn of his days above the hills of
Lavaysse; the star that now, in the noon-day of life, shone through the
passing mists of morning in the flawless Corsican sky, to guide his
steps along the humblest tracks of the world of animals to the highest
summits of human knowledge; ay, more, to those calm regions which are
the dwelling of that uncreated Light and Life of which all the lights
and all the lives of earth are but the pale reflections and feeble
vestiges.
Not only do these reflections, which spontaneously pass through our
mind, appear to us in harmony with the natural signification of the
facts and the circumstances; we have the pleasant assurance that they
are an epitome of the intimate feelings of our famous compatriot, as
they are expressed in plain words in a thousand passages of his writing
and as they were openly revealed in his conversation. We know, in
short, that God and the activities of God in the world were questions
which he was fond of considering, without regarding the world’s
opinion. His essays are full of the subject. But we will quote only one
passage, which has the advantage of bringing us an echo of the jubilee
celebrations which were celebrated at Sérignan while this volume was
being written: When the venerable nonogenarian was being fêted, one of
his visitors asked him the question:
“Do you believe in God?”
To which he replied emphatically:
“I can’t say I believe in God; I see Him. Without Him I understand
nothing; without Him all is darkness. Not only have I retained this
conviction; I have ... aggravated or ameliorated it, whichever you
please. Every period has its manias. I regard Atheism as a mania. It is
the malady of the age. You could take my skin from me more easily than
my faith in God.”
We may add, in order to throw some light upon the religion of the
Aliborons of our villages, that the eminent biologist shares this
belief with almost all our great scientists.
Corsica, which vouchsafed Fabre the revelation of his vocation as
naturalist, inspired him also with such love and enthusiasm as he had
never hitherto known.
There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron
received at birth could only be confirmed and increased. He felt that
this superb and luxuriant nature was made for him, and that he was born
for it; to understand and interpret it. He would lose himself in a
delicious intoxication, amid the deep woodlands, the mountains rich
with scented flowers, wandering through the maquis, the myrtle scrub,
through jungles of lentisk and arbutus; barely containing his emotion
when he passed beneath the great secular chestnut-trees of Bastelica,
with their enormous trunks and leafy boughs, whose sombre majesty
inspired in him a sort of melancholy at once poetic and religious.
Before the sea, with its infinite distances, he lingered in ecstasy,
listening to the song of the waves, and gathering the marvellous shells
which the snow-white breakers left upon the beach, and whose unfamiliar
forms filled him with delight.
Not that he had time to make a very rich harvest of facts and
observations in this wonderful country. The most visible result of his
sojourn in the “isle of beauty,” and the greatest benefit which he
derived from it, seems to have been the fact that it brought his heart
and mind—if I may be permitted the expression—into a state of
entomological grace; I mean into a state of living and acting truly and
beautifully in accordance with his vocation as a naturalist.
So it is that the name of this radiant daughter of the Mediterranean,
which is so often written by his pen, seems to find its way thither in
order to evoke one of the brightest and most joyful periods of his
life, rather than to localise observations or circumstantial
experiences.
There is, however, one of these reminiscences which, despite the
extreme sobriety of the characteristics recorded, denotes, in the
youthful entomologist, a mind peculiarly attentive to the slightest
indications and the least movements of his future clients of the animal
world. It deals with the Spider, [48] that ill-famed creature whom all
hasten to crush underfoot as an odious and maleficent insect, but which
the entomologist holds in high esteem for its talents as a spinner, its
hunting expedients, and other highly interesting characteristics. The
author has just explained, on behalf of the poor, supposedly poisonous
insect, that for us its bite has no serious results, producing less
effect than the bite of a gnat: “Nevertheless, a few are to be feared;
and foremost among these is the Malmignatte, the terror of the Corsican
peasantry.”
By good fortune the only Tarantula that bit him in Corsica was the
Tarantula of natural history.
But while he was not injured by the spiders, he was less fortunate in
defending himself against the mosquitoes, from whose bites he
contracted an attack of malaria, in the myrtle maquis which he
doubtless haunted more persistently than was wise.
This unfortunate incident persuaded him to apply for an appointment in
France.