THE PROFESSOR: AVIGNON (CONTINUED)
When Pasteur called upon Fabre, at the beginning of his investigation
of the silk-growing industry, he was also greatly interested in the
improvement of wines by the application of heat. [74] Thus it was that,
having obtained the needed information respecting the silk-worm from
the Avignon naturalist, he suddenly asked him to show him his cellar.
Fabre found the request extremely embarrassing:
To show him my cellar! My private cellar! And I, poor wretch, but a
while ago, with my preposterous professor’s salary, could not even
permit myself the expense of a drop of wine, so that I used to make
myself a sort of rough cider, by placing a jar, to ferment, a
handful of brown sugar and some grated apples! My cellar! Show him
my cellar! Why not my tuns of wine, my dusty bottles, labelled
according to age and vintage! My cellar!
Completely confused, I tried to evade his request, to change the
subject. But he was tenacious.
“Show me your cellar, I beg you.”
There was no possibility of resisting such insistence.
With my finger I pointed to a corner of the kitchen where there was
a chair without a seat, and on the chair a demijohn holding a
couple of gallons.
“There’s my cellar, monsieur!”
“Your cellar? That?”
“I have no other.”
“That’s all?”
“Alas, yes. That’s all!”
“Ah!”
“Not a word more from the scientist. Pasteur, it was easy to see,
knew nothing of those highly-flavoured dishes which the common
people call la vache enragée. If my cellar, that is the old chair
and the hollow-sounding demijohn, had nothing to tell concerning
the ferments to be fought by means of heat, it spoke very
eloquently of another subject, which my illustrious visitor did not
appear to understand. One microbe evaded him, and it was one of the
most terrible; the microbe of misfortune strangling good will.”
[75]
It is told of one of our most famous dramatists who, like Fabre, is a
self-made man, having raised himself by persistent effort from the
workshop to the Academy, that when he was struggling against the
difficulties of the first steps upward, he had also to contend against
the impassive coldness of eminent colleagues from whom he might have
expected some support. “Young man,” said one of these—and he was not
one of the least illustrious—“young man, la vache enragée is excellent;
to help you would be to spoil you.”
No doubt the vache enragée, like the method d’ignorance, may have its
virtues. The story of Fabre’s career, and of Brieux’, goes to prove as
much. But of this sort of discipline, like that which extols the
advantages of ignorance, we may remark that one may have too much of
it; that it succeeds only on condition of being applied with moderation
and discretion.
A robust child of the Rouergat peasantry, such as Fabre, is capable of
enduring an abnormal dose with unusual results. But under too great
strain steel of the toughest temper is in danger of being broken or
fatigued. In hours of difficulty and suffering, if they are unduly
prolonged, the most resolute and courageous feel the need of an
encouraging voice, and a hand outstretched to give the moral or even
the material help with which one cannot always dispense with impunity.
This friendly voice, this helping hand, which Fabre failed to find in
the great benefactor of humanity who witnessed his distress—so true is
it that the best of us have their defects and their seasons of
inattention—he was presently to find unexpectedly enough, in one of his
official chiefs, whose first appearance in his life was to him like a
warm “ray of sunlight” piercing the icy atmosphere of winter.
The incident is worth recording: it is all the more delightful in that
Fabre, instead of thrusting himself forward, sought rather to draw
back, seeming more anxious to avoid than to recommend himself for
administrative favours.
The chief inspectors visited our grammar-school. These personages
travel in pairs: one attends to literature, the other to science.
When the inspection was over and the books checked, the staff was
summoned to the principal’s drawing-room, to receive the parting
admonitions of the two luminaries. The man of science began. I
should be sadly put to it to remember what he said. It was cold
professional prose, made up of soulless words which the hearer
forgot once the speaker’s back was turned, words merely boring to
both. I had heard enough of these chilly sermons in my time; one
more of them could not hope to make an impression on me.
The inspector in literature spoke next. At the first words which he
uttered, I said to myself:
“Oho! This is a very different business!”
The speech was alive and vigorous and imageful; indifferent to
scholastic commonplaces, the ideas soared, hovering gently in the
serene heights of a kindly philosophy. This time, I listened with
pleasure; I even felt stirred. Here was no official homily: it was
full of impassioned zeal, of words that carried you with them,
uttered by an honest man accomplished in the art of speaking, an
orator in the true sense of the word. In all my school experience,
I had never had such a treat.
When the meeting broke up my heart beat faster than usual:
“What a pity,” I thought, “that my side, the science side, cannot
bring me into contact, some day, with that inspector! It seems to
me that we should become great friends.”
I inquired his name of my colleagues, who were always
better-informed than I. They told me it was Victor Duruy.
Well, one day, two years later, as I was looking after my
Saint-Martial laboratory in the midst of the steam from my vats,
with my hands the colour of boiled lobster-claws from constant
dipping in the indelible red of my dyes, there walked in,
unexpectedly, a person whose features straightway seemed familiar.
I was right; it was the very man, the chief-inspector whose speech
had once stirred me. M. Duruy was now Minister of Public
Instruction. He was styled “Your Excellency”; and this style,
usually an empty formula, was well-deserved in the present case,
for our new minister excelled in his exalted functions. We all held
him in high esteem. He was the workers’ minister, the man for the
humble toiler.
“I want to spend my last half-hour at Avignon with you,” said my
visitor with a smile. “That will be a relief from the official
bowing and scraping.”
Overcome by the honour paid me, I apologised for my costume—I was
in my short-sleeves—and especially for my lobster-claws, which I
had tried, for a moment, to hide behind my back.
“You have nothing to apologise for. I came to see the worker. The
working-man never looks better than in his overall, with the marks
of his trade on him. Let us have a talk. What are you doing just
now?”
I explained, in a few words, the object of my researches; I showed
my product; I executed under the minister’s eyes a little attempt
at printing in madder-red. The success of the experiment and the
simplicity of my apparatus, in which an evaporating dish,
maintained at boiling-point under a glass funnel, took the place of
a steam-chamber, caused him some surprise.
“I will help you,” he said. “What do you want for your laboratory?”
“Why, nothing, Monsieur le Ministre, nothing! With a little
application, the plant I have is ample.”
“What, nothing! You are unique there! The others overwhelm me with
requests; their laboratories are never well enough supplied. And
you, poor as you are, refuse my offers!”
“No, there is one thing which I will accept.”
“What is that?”
“The signal honour of shaking you by the hand.”
“There you are, my friend, with all my heart. But that’s not
enough. What else do you want?”
“The Paris Jardin des Plantes is under your control. Should a
crocodile die, let them keep the hide for me. I will stuff it with
straw and hang it from the ceiling. Thus adorned, my workshop will
rival the wizard’s den.”
The minister cast his eyes round the nave and glanced up at the
Gothic vault:
“Yes, it would look very well.” And he gave a laugh at my sally. “I
now know you as a chemist,” he continued. “I knew you already as a
naturalist and a writer. I have heard about your little animals. I
am sorry that I shall have to leave without seeing them. They must
wait for another occasion. My train will be starting presently.
Walk with me to the station, will you? We shall be alone and we can
chat a bit more on the way.”
We strolled along, discussing entomology and madder. My shyness had
disappeared. The self-sufficiency of a fool would have left me
dumb; the fine frankness of a lofty mind put me at my ease. I told
him of my experiments in natural history, of my plans for a
professorship, of my fight with harsh fate, my hopes and fears. He
encouraged me, spoke to me of a better future. We reached the
station and walked up and down outside, talking away delightfully.
A poor old woman passed, all in rags, her back bent by age and
years of work in the fields. She furtively put out her hand for
alms. Duruy felt in his waistcoat, found a two-franc piece, and
placed it in the outstretched hand; I wanted to add a couple of
sous as my contribution, but my pockets were empty, as usual. I
went to the beggar-woman and whispered in her ear:
“Do you know who gave you that? It’s the Emperor’s minister.”
The poor woman started; and her astounded eyes wandered from the
open-handed swell to the piece of silver and from the piece of
silver to the open-handed swell. What a surprise! What a windfall!
“Que lou bou Diéu ié done longo vido e santa, pécaïre!” she said in
her cracked voice.
And, curtseying and nodding, she withdrew, still staring at the
coin in the palm of her hand.
“What did she say?” asked Duruy.
“She wished you long life and health.”
“And pécaïre?”
“Pécaïre is a poem in itself: it sums up all the gentler passions.”
And I myself mentally repeated the artless vow. The man who stops
so kindly when a beggar puts out her hand has something better in
his soul than the mere qualities that go to make a minister.
We entered the station, still alone, as promised, and I quite
without misgivings. Had I but foreseen what was going to happen,
how I should have hastened to take my leave! Little by little a
group formed in front of us. It was too late to fly: I had to screw
up my courage. Came the general of division and his officers, came
the prefect and his secretary, the mayor and his deputy, the
school-inspector and the pick of the staff. The minister faced the
ceremonial semicircle. I stood next to him. A crowd at one side, we
two on the other. Followed the regulation spinal contortions, the
empty obeisances which my dear Duruy had come to my laboratory to
forget. When bowing to St. Roch, [76] in his corner niche, the
worshipper at the same time salutes the saint’s humble companion. I
was something like St. Roch’s dog in the presence of those honours
which did not concern me. I stood and looked on, with my awful red
hands concealed behind my back, under the broad brim of my felt
hat.
After the official compliments had been exchanged, the conversation
began to languish; and the minister seized my right hand and gently
drew it from the mysterious recesses of my wideawake:
“Why don’t you show those gentlemen your hands?” he said. “Most
people would be proud of them.”
I vainly protested with a jerk of the elbow. I had to comply, and I
displayed my lobster-claws.
“Workman’s hands,” said the prefect’s secretary. “Regular workman’s
hands.”
The general, almost scandalised at seeing me in such distinguished
company, added:
“Hands of a dyer and cleaner.”
“Yes, workman’s hands,” retorted the minister, “and I wish you many
like them. Believe me, they will do much to help the chief industry
of your city. Skilled as they are in chemical work, they are
equally capable of wielding the pen, the pencil, the scalpel, and
the lens. As you here seem unaware of it, I am delighted to inform
you.”
This time I should have liked the ground to open and swallow me up.
Fortunately the bell rang for the train to start. I said good-bye
to the minister and, hurriedly taking to flight, left him laughing
at the trick which he had played me.
The incident was noised about, could not help being so, for the
peristyle of a railway station keeps no secrets. I then learnt to
what annoyances the shadow of the great exposes us. I was looked
upon as an influential person, having the favour of the gods at my
entire disposal. Place-hunters and canvassers tormented me. One
wanted a licence to sell tobacco and stamps, another a scholarship
for his son, another an increase of his pension. I had only to ask
and I should obtain, said they.
O simple people, what an illusion was yours! You could not have hit
upon a worse intermediary. I figuring as a postulant! I have many
faults, I admit, but that is certainly not one of them. I got rid
of the importunate people as best I could, though they were utterly
unable to fathom my reserve. What would they have said had they
known of the minister’s offers with regard to my laboratory and my
jesting reply, in which I asked for a crocodile-skin to hang from
my ceiling! They would have taken me for an idiot.
Six months elapsed; and I received a letter summoning me to call
upon the minister at his office. I suspected a proposal to promote
me to a more important grammar-school, and wrote begging that I
might be left where I was, among my vats and my insects. A second
letter arrived, more pressing than the first and signed by the
minister’s own hand. This letter said:
“Come at once, or I shall send my gendarmes to fetch you.”
There was no way out of it. Twenty-four hours later I was in M.
Duruy’s room. He welcomed me with exquisite cordiality, gave me his
hand and, taking up a number of the Moniteur:
“Read that,” he said. “You refused my chemical apparatus; but you
won’t refuse this.”
I looked at the line to which his finger pointed. I read my name in
the list of the Legion of Honour. Quite stupid with surprise, I
stammered the first words of thanks that entered my head.
“Come here,” said he, “and let me give you the accolade. I will be
your sponsor. You will like the ceremony all the better if it is
held in private, between you and me: I know you!”
He pinned the red ribbon to my coat, kissed me on both cheeks, made
me telegraph the great event to my family. What a morning, spent
with that good man!
I well know the vanity of decorative ribbonry and tinware,
especially when, as too often happens, intrigue degrades the honour
conferred; but, coming as it did, that bit of ribbon is precious to
me. It is a relic, not an object for show. I keep it religiously in
a drawer.
There was a parcel of big books on the table, a collection of the
reports on the progress of science drawn up for the International
Exhibition of 1867, which had just closed.
“Those books are for you,” continued the minister. “Take them with
you. You can look through them at your leisure: they may interest
you. There is something about your insects in them. You’re to have
this too: it will pay for your journey. The trip which I made you
take must not be at your own expense. If there is anything over,
spend it on your laboratory.”
And he handed me a roll of twelve hundred francs. In vain I
refused, remarking that my journey was not so burdensome as all
that; besides, his embrace and his bit of ribbon were of
inestimable value compared with my disbursements. He insisted:
“Take it,” he said, “or I shall be very angry. There’s something
else: you must come to the Emperor with me to-morrow, to the
reception of the learned societies.”
Seeing me greatly perplexed, and as though demoralised by the
prospect of an imperial interview:
“Don’t try to escape me,” he said, “or look out for the gendarmes
of my letter! You saw the fellows in the bear-skin caps on your way
up. Mind you don’t fall into their hands. In any case, lest you
should be tempted to run away, we will go to the Tuileries together
in my carriage.”
Things happened as he wished. The next day, in the minister’s
company, I was ushered into a little drawing-room at the Tuileries
by chamberlains in knee-breeches and silver-buckled shoes. They
were queer people to look at. Their uniforms and their stiff gait
gave them the appearance, in my eyes, of Beetles who, by way of
wingcases, wore a great, gold-laced dress-coat, with a key in the
small of the back. There were already a score of persons from all
parts waiting in the room. These included geographical explorers,
botanists, geologists, antiquaries, archæologists, collectors of
prehistoric flints, in short, the usual representatives of
provincial scientific life.
The Emperor entered, very simply dressed, with no parade about him
beyond a wide, red, watered-silk ribbon across his chest. No sign
of majesty, an ordinary man, round and plump, with a large
moustache and a pair of half-closed drowsy eyes. He moved from one
to the other, talking to each of us for a moment as the minister
mentioned our names and the nature of our occupations. He showed a
fair amount of information as he changed his subject from the
ice-floes of Spitsbergen to the dunes of Gascony, from a
Carlovingian charter to the flora of the Sahara, from the progress
in beetroot-growing to Cæsar’s trenches before Alesia. When my turn
came, he questioned me upon the hypermetamorphosis of the Meloidæ,
my last essay in entomology. I answered as best I could,
floundering a little in the proper mode of address, mixing up the
everyday monsieur with sire, a word whose use was so utterly new to
me. I passed through the dread straits, and others succeeded me. My
five minutes’ conversation with an imperial majesty was, they say,
a most distinguished honour. I am quite ready to believe them, but
I never had a desire to repeat it.
The reception came to an end, bows were exchanged, and we were
dismissed. A luncheon awaited us at the minister’s house. I sat on
his right, not a little embarrassed by the privilege: on his left
was a physiologist of great renown. Like the others, I spoke of all
manner of things, including even Avignon Bridge. Duruy’s son,
sitting opposite me, chaffed me pleasantly about the famous bridge
on which everybody dances; [77] he smiled at my impatience to get
back to the thyme-scented hills and the grey olive-yards rich in
Grasshoppers.
“What!” said his father. “Won’t you visit our museums, our
collections? There are some very interesting things there.”
“I know, Monsieur le Ministre, but I shall find better things,
things more to my taste, in the incomparable museum of the fields.”
“Then what do you propose to do?”
“I propose to go back to-morrow.”
I did go back, I had had enough of Paris: never had I felt such
tortures of loneliness as in that immense whirl of humanity. To get
away, to get away was my one idea. [78]
In re-reading this curious and attractive episode of Fabre’s career,
our mind was haunted by the no less attractive memory of another
illustrious son of our Aveyron, which shares his glory with Provence.
[79]
Like the author of the Souvenirs entomologiques, the writer of the
Poésie des Bêtes is the son of humble Aveyron peasants, who raised
himself by his own efforts from the first to the second grade of school
teachers, and whose genius, like that of Fabre, faithful to the
environment in which he was born, confines itself, with jealous care,
like that of the naturalist, to the “incomparable museum of the
fields,” which he describes with the same clearness of vision and the
same sincerity of feeling.
Like Fabre, Fabié is a modest man, who does not readily emerge from the
obscurity in which his native timidity delights. In his case again it
needed the perspicacity and kindliness of Duruy, “the champion of the
modest and the laborious,” to single him out and drag him out of his
hole; just as, at the present time, a Parisian publicist, of whom his
fine talents have made a conquest, has truly remarked, it needed the
energetic intervention of his friends to give his poetic genius the
supreme consecration reserved for the works of our most eminent
writers: “Thank heaven, the author of the Poésie des Bêtes and Bonne
Terre has friends who admire the poet as greatly as they esteem the
man, and if M. François Fabié cannot make up his mind to emerge from
the obscurity in which he has only too long, indeed always, enveloped
himself, I venture to hope that they will not hesitate to take him by
the shoulders and bring him out into the broad light of day, and that
they will then propel him willy-nilly across the Pont des Arts at the
end of which rises the dome of the illustrious Forty.” [80]
One might say the same of Fabre. Some one should have taken him, too,
by the shoulders and pushed him forcibly across the Pont des Arts, and
should then have kept his eyes upon him until he reached his
destination, lest he should turn aside and fly for the Pont d’Avignon,
for we must not forget that Duruy and his gendarmes, although they were
capable of making him come to Paris, were incapable of keeping him
there.
Fortunately Fabre’s work is not of the kind that needs, for its
survival, the factitious glitter of honours. By its own merit it
assures his name of an immortality greater than that of the Immortal
Forty.
There were three men, at this period of Fabre’s life, who contributed
not a little to kindle or revive the fires of his scientific activity.
Dufour’s essays furnished the spark that made the inward flame burst
into a magnificent blaze of light. Experience and the example of
Pasteur added fuel to the fire, by teaching him to keep as far as
possible in close contact with nature. Duruy’s good will brought to
this blaze the vivifying breath without which all ardour becomes
chilled and all light extinguished.
But genius does not merely develop under the impulse of the inner life,
and the influence of the external life, which in some men is more
potent and more active; it is determined also by the pressure of
events, of which the most painful are not always the least effectual.
Who does not know that famous line of Musset’s, which has almost become
a proverb:
“L’homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître.”
(Man’s an apprentice, and his master, sorrow.)
Like so many others, Fabre learned this by cruel yet fortunate
experience. He had to suffer poverty, lack of success, and persecution,
yet these were to him so many stepping-stones by which he rose to the
serene and solitary height where his genius could at last unfurl its
wings in freedom and soar at will.
While Fabre had no ambition in respect of the Académie, he was
ambitious where the University was concerned. Absolutely careless of
titles and dignities, he was particularly eager to learn and to teach
others as widely and as completely as possible. It was not enough for
him to possess the knowledge requisite for a professor in a lycée, as
it had not been enough to qualify for a primary schoolmaster. He wanted
to attain that rare degree of knowledge which the higher education
demands; he dreamed of occupying a chair of natural history in a
faculty. Then he could free himself from the material tasks that
constituted the danger as well as the merit of the secondary
schoolmaster; he could devote himself at leisure to those wonderful
natural sciences in which he glimpsed, not only a vitality and
inspiration that appealed to his habit of mind, but a wealth of new
subjects to be treated, of rich veins to be mined.
To serve this noble ambition he needed the prestige of the degrees that
would lead to the coveted chair. He won them as he had won those that
gave him access to the second degree of instruction, without guide or
master, by the sole effort of his mind and will.
In 1858 he easily won his degree as licentiate in the natural sciences
before the Faculty of Toulouse.
It is an eloquent fact that instead of being, as it is for so many
others, a goal and an end in itself, the licentiate was for Fabre but a
brief parenthesis in his life of study, a stage no sooner reached than
crossed on the infinite path of knowledge.
The next step was that of the doctorate. It was achieved with no less
ardour and success than the previous one. This is almost all we can say
of it, for the hero of this history speaks of it only incidentally,
because it is connected with the story of one of his insects. But for
the Languedocian Scorpion the Souvenirs would leave us in ignorance of
his degree of Doctor of Science.
It was not long before Fabre saw that it was not enough to possess all
the scientific degrees you will in order to realise the long-cherished
project of teaching natural history in a Faculty.
It was an inspector-general and a mathematician of the name of Rollier
who undertook to inform him of this. Here is the incident as related by
Fabre himself:
My colleagues used to call him the Crocodile. Perhaps he had given
them a rough time in the course of his inspections. For all his
boorish ways he was an excellent man at heart. I owe him a piece of
advice which greatly influenced my future studies.
That day he suddenly appeared, alone, in the schoolroom, where I
was taking a class in geometrical drawing. I must explain that, at
this time, to eke out my ridiculous salary, and, at all costs, to
provide a living for myself and my large family, I was a mighty
pluralist, both inside the college and out. At the college in
particular, after two hours of physics, chemistry or natural
history, came, without respite, another two hours’ lesson, in which
I taught the boys how to make a projection in descriptive geometry,
how to draw a geodetic plane, a curve of any kind whose law of
generation is known to us. This was called graphics.
The sudden irruption of the dread personage causes me no great
flurry. Twelve o’clock strikes, the pupils go out and we are left
alone. I know him to be a geometrician. The transcendental curve,
perfectly drawn, may work upon his gentler mood. I happen to have
in my portfolio the very thing to please him. Fortune serves me
well, in this special circumstance. Among my boys there is one who,
though a regular dunce at everything else, is a first-rate hand
with the square, the compass, and the drawing-pen: a deft-fingered
numskull, in short.
With the aid of a system of tangents of which I first showed him
the rule and the method of construction, my artist has obtained the
ordinary cycloid, followed by the interior and the exterior
epicycloid, and, lastly, the same curves both lengthened and
shortened. His drawings are admirable Spiders’ webs, encircling the
cunning curve in their net. The draughtsmanship is so accurate that
it is easy to deduce from it beautiful theorems which would be very
laborious to work out by the calculus.
I submit the geometrical masterpieces to my chief-inspector, who is
himself said to be smitten with geometry. I modestly describe the
method of construction, I call his attention to the fine deductions
which the drawing enables one to make. It is labour lost: he gives
but a heedless glance at my sheets and flings each on the table as
I hand it to him.
“Alas!” said I to myself. “There is a storm brewing; the cycloid
won’t save you; it’s your turn for a bite from the Crocodile!”
Not a bit of it. Behold the bugbear growing genial. He sits down on
a bench, with one leg here, another there, invites me to take a
seat by his side and, in a moment, we are discussing graphics.
Then, bluntly:
“Have you any money?” he asks.
Astounded at this strange question, I answer with a smile.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Confide in me. I’m asking you in your
own interest. Have you any capital?”
“I have no reason to be ashamed of my poverty, Monsieur
l’inspecteur général. I frankly admit, I possess nothing; my means
are limited to my modest salary.”
A frown greets my answer; and I hear, spoken in an undertone, as
though my confessor were talking to himself:
“That’s sad, that’s really very sad.”
Astonished to find my penury treated as sad, I ask for an
explanation: I was not accustomed to this solicitude on the part of
my superiors.
“Why, yes, it’s a great pity,” continues the man reputed so
terrible. “I have read your articles in the Annales des sciences
naturelles. You have an observant mind, a taste for research, a
lively style and a ready pen. You would have made a capital
university-professor.”
“But that’s just what I’m aiming at!”
“Give up the idea.”
“Haven’t I the necessary attainment?”
“Yes, you have; but you have no capital.”
The great obstacle stands revealed to me: woe to the poor in
pocket! University teaching demands a private income. Be as
ordinary, as commonplace as you please; but, above all, possess the
coin that lets you cut a dash. That is the main thing; the rest is
a secondary condition.
And the worthy man tells me what poverty in a frock-coat means.
Though less of a pauper than I, he has known the mortification of
it; he describes it to me, excitedly, in all its bitterness. I
listen to him with an aching heart; I see the refuge which was to
shelter my future crumbling before my eyes:
“You have done me a great service, sir,” I answer. “You put an end
to my hesitation. For the moment, I give up my plan. I will first
see if it is possible to earn the small fortune which I shall need
if I am to teach in a decent manner.”
Thereupon we exchanged a friendship grip of the hand and parted. I
never saw him again. His fatherly arguments had soon convinced me:
I was prepared to hear the blunt truth. A few months earlier I had
received my nomination as an assistant-lecturer in zoology at the
university of Poitiers. They offered me a ludicrous salary. After
paying the costs of moving, I should have had hardly three francs a
day left; and, on this income, I should have had to keep my family,
numbering seven in all. I hastened to decline the very great
honour.
No, science ought not to practise these jests. If we humble persons
are of use to her, she should at least enable us to live. If she
can’t do that, then let her leave us to break stones on the
highway. Oh, yes, I was prepared for the truth when that honest
fellow talked to me of frock-coated poverty! I am telling the story
of a not very distant past. Since then things have improved
considerably; but, when the pear was properly ripened, I was no
longer of an age to pick it.
However, notwithstanding Rollier’s confidences, Fabre had deferred
rather than definitely abandoned the execution of his project. Since
his impecuniosity was the only obstacle to the realisation of his
wishes, could he not seek to uplift himself, as others had done, by
daring and willing? In the meantime was it not better to make a great
effort in this direction than to remain for ever sunk in the material
anxieties and ungrateful tasks of the lycée?
The question as to how to free and simultaneously uplift himself
exercised the mind of Fabre at this time.
And what was I to do now [he writes] to overcome the difficulty
mentioned by my inspector and confirmed by my personal experience?
I would take up industrial chemistry. The municipal lectures at
Saint-Martial placed a spacious and fairly well-equipped laboratory
at my disposal. Why not make the most of it?
The chief manufacture of Avignon was madder. The farmer supplied
the raw material to the factories, where it was turned into purer
and more concentrated products. My predecessor had gone in for it
and done well by it, so people said. I would follow in his
footsteps and use the vats and furnaces, the expensive plant which
I had inherited. So to work.
What should I set myself to produce? I proposed to extract the
colouring-substance, alizarin, to separate it from the other
matters found with it in the root, to obtain it in the pure state
and in a form that allowed of the direct printing of the stuffs, a
much quicker and more artistic method than the old dyeing process.
Nothing could be simpler than this problem, once the solution was
known; but how tremendously obscure while it had still to be
solved! I dare not call to mind all the imagination and patience
spent upon endless endeavours which nothing, not even the madness
of them, discouraged. What mighty meditations in the sombre church!
What glowing dreams, soon to be followed by sore disappointment
when experiment spoke the last word and upset the scaffolding of my
plans! Stubborn as the slave of old amassing a peculium for his
enfranchisement, I used to reply to the check of yesterday by the
fresh attempt of to-morrow, often as faulty as the others,
sometimes the richer by an improvement; and I went on
indefatigably, for I, too, cherished the indomitable ambition to
set myself free.
Should I succeed? Perhaps so. I at last had a satisfactory answer.
I obtained, in a cheap and practical fashion, the pure
colouring-matter, concentrated in a small volume and excellent for
both printing and dyeing. One of my friends took up my process on a
large scale in his works; a few calico-factories adopted the
produce and expressed themselves delighted with it. The future
smiled at last; a pink rift opened in my grey sky. I should possess
the modest fortune without which I must deny myself the pleasure of
teaching in a university. Freed of the torturing anxiety about my
daily bread, I should be able to live at ease among my insects.
[81]
To these delights of industrial chemistry, the mistress of her problems
and rich in future promise, were added, by an additional stroke of good
fortune, the flattering congratulations and encouragement of the
Minister Duruy and the Emperor Napoleon. [82] It seemed as though,
after struggling long against the tide, his frail vessel had a fair
wind astern; it seemed about to come into port; surely at last his
utmost desires were about to be realised!
Once home amidst my family, I felt a mighty load off my mind and a
great joy in my heart, where rang a peal of bells proclaiming the
delights of my approaching emancipation. Little by little, the
factory that was to set me free rose skywards, full of promises.
Yes, I should possess the modest income which would crown my
ambition by allowing me to descant on animals and plants in a
university chair.
“Well, no,” said Fate, “you shall not acquire the freedman’s
peculium; you shall remain a slave, dragging your chain behind you;
your peal of bells rings false!”
Hardly was the factory in full swing, when a piece of news was
bruited, at first a vague rumour, an echo of probabilities rather
than certainties, and then a positive statement leaving no room for
doubt. Chemistry had obtained the madder-dye by artificial means;
thanks to a laboratory concoction, it was utterly overthrowing the
agriculture and industries of my district. This result, while
destroying my work and my hopes, did not surprise me unduly. I
myself had toyed with the problem of artificial alizarin; and I
knew enough about it to foresee that, in no very distant future,
the product of the chemist’s retort would take the place of the
product of the fields. [83]
It was only a step from the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock. He who but
now had discovered Peru was about to feel more keenly than ever the
sharp pangs of poverty; he whom science and fortune had lately
conspired to raise to one of the highest chairs in the University was
to be forced to descend from the modest desk of a lycée professor; he
whom the friendship and admiration of Duruy had dreamed, it is said, of
promoting to the high dignity of tutor to the Prince Imperial [84] was
now to be forbidden to teach the schoolgirls of his own Provence!
For it was about this time that “he attempted to found at Avignon a
sort of system of secondary education for young girls,” and delivered,
in the ancient abbey of Saint-Martial, those famous free lectures which
remained so celebrated in the memory of the generation of that period,
and at which an eager crowd thronged to hear him, among the most
assiduous members being Roumanille, the friend of Mistral, who knew the
exquisite secret of weaving into his melodies “the laughter of young
girls and the flowers of spring.”
For no one could explain a fact better than Fabre; no one could
elucidate it so fully and so clearly. No one could teach as he did, so
simply, so picturesquely, yet in so original a fashion.
And he had the power of communicating to his hearers his own
conviction, his profound faith, the sacred fire that inspired him, the
passion which he felt for all natural things.
But there were sufficient reasons to set the sectarians all agog and
excite the rancour of the envious, some regarding this great novelty of
placing the natural sciences within reach of young girls as a heresy
and even a scandal, others finding it unsatisfactory that this
“irregular person, the child of his own solitary studies, should fill,
by his work, his successes, and the magic of his teaching, a place so
apart and so disproportionate. Their cavilling, their underhand cabals,
their secret manœuvring won an easy triumph.” In what hateful and
tragic fashion we must let him tell us in his own words:
The first of these removals took place in 1870. A little earlier, a
minister who has left a lasting memory in the university, that fine
man Victor Duruy, [85] had instituted classes for the secondary
education of girls. This was the beginning, as far as was then
possible, of the burning question of to-day. I very gladly lent my
humble aid to this labour of light. I was put to teach physical and
natural science. I had faith, and was not sparing of work, with the
result that I rarely faced a more attentive or interested audience.
The days on which the lessons fell were red-letter days, especially
when the lesson was botany and the table disappeared from view
under the treasures of the neighbouring conservatories.
That was going too far. In fact, you can see how heinous my crime
was: I taught those young persons what air and water are; whence
the lightning comes and the thunder; by what device our thoughts
are transmitted across the seas and continents by means of a metal
wire; why fire burns and why we breathe; how a seed puts forth
shoots and how a flower blossoms: all eminently hateful things in
the eyes of some people, whose feeble eyes are dazzled by the light
of day.
The little lamp must be put out as quickly as possible and measures
taken to get rid of the officious person who strove to keep it
alight. The scheme was darkly plotted with the old maids who owned
my house and who saw the abomination of desolation in these new
educational methods. I had no written agreement to protect me. The
bailiff appeared with a notice on stamped paper. It baldly informed
me that I must move out within four weeks from date, failing which
the law would turn my goods and chattels into the street. I had
hurriedly to provide myself with a dwelling. The first house which
we found happened to be at Orange. Thus was my exodus from Avignon
effected. [86]
After this we understand why it was that Fabre cried:
“It is all over; the downfall of my hopes is complete!”
But no, beloved master! All was not over. The immortal work with which
your name is connected was as yet to be begun. This ruin, this
mortification, this grievous overthrow of all your hopes in connection
with the University were even needed to lead you back to the fields, to
enable you to raise, in all its amplitude and its exquisite
originality, the scientific edifice of which you may say, with the
ancient poet: Exegi monumentum aere perennis. [87]
M. Edmond Perrier very judiciously remarked, in his speech at Sérignan:
“In Paris, in a great city, you would have had great difficulty in
finding your beloved insects, and entomology would have lost a great
part of those magnificent observations which are the glory of French
science.”
So it was, in reality, advantageous, as regards his destiny, that Fabre
suffered, at this juncture of his history, this accumulation of trials,
so grievous to experience, yet so fortunate in their consequences that
they remind us of the sublime passage of the Gospel, whose sayings
regarding eternal life are often rich in lessons for this our present
life: “He that loses his life shall save it.”
(End of the first volume in the French edition.)