RETIREMENT: ORANGE
It is commonly enough thought that a professor on his vacations and a
pensioned official are very much the same—that both art created and put
into the world merely to kill time and savour the delights of far
niente. Such was never Fabre’s opinion. While he loved nothing so well
as his Thursdays and vacations, this was because he then had more
freedom to devote himself to his favourite studies. If he resigned
himself readily to a premature retirement, if he was even happy to
shake off the yoke of the lycée, this was because he had quite
definitely determined to work more quietly and continuously; because he
hoped to increase the ardour and fertility of his mind by a closer and
more lasting intercourse with the world of Nature.
At the same time he found himself compelled to look to his pen for that
assurance of material life which his retorts had refused him, and which
his meagre professor’s pension afforded but insufficiently. “What is to
be done now?” he cried, after the collapse of his industrial hopes and
professorial ambitions. “Let us try another lever and resume rolling
the Sisyphean stone. Let us seek to draw from the ink-pot what the
madder-vat and the Alma Mater refuses us. Laboremus!”
Laboremus! That indeed is the fitting motto for this period of his
life, no less than for the earlier part of it. For it was then that he
wrote the greater number of his numerous handbooks, now classic, and it
was then that he began to write and to publish his Souvenirs
entomologiques, without ceasing on that account his great life-work,
the passionate observation of the living world.
Still, it is not so much the man’s work as the man, and not so much the
student as the man himself, that we wish to evoke in this chapter.
To live happily, we must live hidden from sight, far from the troubles
of the world, exercising our minds and cultivating our talents at
leisure. Such evidently was Fabre’s idea from the time of his departure
from Avignon; and it plainly reveals to us one of the salient features
of his moral physiognomy.
But he could not have had the illusion that in thus taking refuge from
the tribulations of which the world is the source, he was placing
himself beyond the reach of any trials. Is it not written that the life
of man upon earth is a perpetual struggle against suffering? And if it
were not for the cruel wounds which it inflicts upon the poor human
heart, we ought rather perhaps to bless this law of our destiny; for it
is one of the qualities of human greatness, of the beauty of the soul
as of the power of the intellect, that it does not fully reveal itself
save under the discipline and empire of suffering.
Among the moral qualities of Fabre as we have been able to divine them
there is one which the vicissitudes of life revealed more especially
during this phase of his existence: I mean his kindliness.
Fabre had the simplicity of the kindly man as well as that of the
truthful man. He, who instinctively withdrew from the gaze and the
malice of men, cared nothing for their smiles or their disdain when
there was a question of adding to his store of scientific data or
kindly actions, however trivial the matter might be.
The following episode is illuminating. Our entomologist was interested,
as a scientist, in discovering whether the bite of the Black-bellied
Tarantula, deadly to insects, was dangerous to other animals, and to
man, or whether it was not, in the latter case, a negligible accident.
He therefore experimented upon a bird:
I make a Tarantula bite the leg of a young, well-fledged Sparrow,
ready to leave the nest. A drop of blood flows: the wounded spot is
surrounded by a reddish circle, changing to purple. The bird almost
immediately loses the use of its leg, which drags, with the toes
doubled in; it hops upon the other. Apart from this, the patient
does not seem to trouble much about his hurt; his appetite is good.
My daughters feed him on flies, bread-crumb, apricot-pulp. He is
sure to get well, he will recover his strength; the poor victim of
the curiosity of science will be restored to liberty. This is the
wish, the intention of us all. Twelve hours later, the hope of a
cure increases; the invalid takes nourishment readily; he clamours
for it, if we keep him waiting. But the leg still drags. I set this
down to a temporary paralysis which will soon disappear. Two days
after, he refuses his food. Wrapping himself in his stoicism and
his rumpled feathers, the Sparrow hunches into a ball, now
motionless, now twitching. My girls take him in the hollow of their
hands and warm him with their breath. The spasms become more
frequent. A gasp proclaims that all is over. The bird is dead.
There was a certain coolness among us at the evening meal. I read
mute reproaches, because of my experiment, in the eyes of my
home-circle; I read an unspoken accusation of cruelty all around
me. The death of the unfortunate Sparrow had saddened the whole
family. I myself was not without some remorse of conscience: the
poor result achieved seemed to me too dearly bought. I am not made
of the stuff of those who, without turning a hair, rip up live Dogs
to find out nothing in particular. [88]
Is there not something touching in the simplicity of the father who,
with such good will, becomes a child with his children; and in the
compassionate kindness of the man who cannot without grieving witness
the death of a Sparrow? Fabre indeed possessed in no common degree that
quality which, according to Saint Augustine, is the foremost
characteristic of spiritual beauty and, according to the poet of the
animals, constitutes the essential nobility of the French mind:
“La bonté, c’est le fond de tout âme française.”
(Kindness, the base of every Frenchman’s mind.)
It was, at all events, the basis of his own. And we are conscious of a
fundamental emotion, an intimate reprobation, that ascends from the
depths of his being to oppose all ideas of violence and hatred.
It does not surprise us to see the serene kindliness of our compatriot
veiling itself in dejection and becoming almost pugnacious when
confronted by the melancholy exploits of force; for how could he remain
unaffected before the stupendous barbarism and iniquity of 1870?
At the time of his retirement to Orange, Fabre was already the father
of five children: Antonia, Aglaé, Claire, Emile, and Jules, who, in
course of time, were joined by three others, Paul, Anna, and
Marie-Pauline.
It was not with Fabre as with some intellectuals, whose thoughts and
life remain almost strangers to the home which they establish one day
as though in a moment of distraction, and who divide their lives into
two parts—one being devoted to their professional labours and the other
reserved for the exigencies of family life.
Like the pagès of his native country who live surrounded by their wives
and children, sharing their tasks and breaking bread with them, Fabre
loved to make his family share in his work as well as in his leisure.
He too was a worker in the fields, and was persuaded that, just as
there can never be too many hands at work to extract their wealth, so
there could never be too many eyes at work contemplating their wonders.
He made all his children, little as well as big, boys and girls, so
many collaborators in his researches, and he loved to scatter their
names about the pages of his books. And it is not the least charm of
the Souvenirs that we meet in them, at every step, the father hand in
hand with his children. Passing to and fro, like a refreshing breeze
that blows through the scientific aridities of the subject, we feel a
twofold current of sympathy flowing from the father to his children and
the naturalist to his insects.
Incapable of living without either of them, he found a way to devote
himself to both, and so closely that the bond between them was truly
one that held fast in life and death. Aglaé, Antonia, Claire, Emile,
and Jules were recruited in turn, and Fabre informs us that their help
was often of the greatest value in his entomological researches. And he
liked to attach his children’s names to those of his insects and his
discoveries. Jules above all was distinguished by these entomological
honours, which a father’s gratitude piously laid, with regretful tears,
upon his untimely grave.
Not content with dedicating to him the first volume of his Souvenirs,
Fabre again did homage to Jules in the second volume:
To my Son Jules.—Beloved child, my zealous collaborator in the
study of insects, my perspicacious assistant in the study of
plants, it was for your sake that I began this volume; I have
continued it for the sake of your memory, and I shall continue it
in the bitterness of my mourning. Ah! how hateful is death when it
reaps the flower in all the radiance of its blossoming! Your mother
and your sisters bring to your tomb wreaths gathered in the rustic
flower-bed that you delighted in. To these wreaths, faded by a
day’s sunshine, I add this book, which, I hope, will have a
to-morrow. It seems to me that it thus prolongs our common studies,
fortified as I am by my indomitable faith in a reawakening in the
Beyond. [89]
When the separation from loved ones wounds the heart so grievously and
wrings from the soul such accents of hope and faith, we need seek no
other standard to judge a man’s moral worth.
The spectacle of a man, thus moved by the death of his dear ones, who
yet welcomes his own death with serenity, is admirable. Such was the
case with Fabre, as proved by the following episode of the same
date—i.e. 1879.
I am living at Orange in the year 1879. My house stands alone among
the fields....
After a hard winter, when the snow had lain on the ground for a
fortnight, I wanted once more to look into the matter of my
Halicti. I was in bed with pneumonia and to all appearances at the
point of death. I had little or no pain, thank God, but extreme
difficulty in living. With the little lucidity left to me, being
able to do no other sort of observing, I observed myself dying; I
watched with a certain interest the gradual falling to pieces of my
poor machinery. Were it not for the terror of leaving my family,
who were still young, I would gladly have departed. The after-life
must have so many higher and fairer truths to teach us.
My hour had not yet come. When the little lamps of thought began to
emerge, all flickering, from the dusk of unconsciousness, I wished
to take leave of the Hymenoptera, my fondest joy, and first of all
of my neighbour, the Halictus. [90] My son Emile took the spade and
went and dug the frozen ground. Not a male was found, of course;
but there were plenty of females, numbed with the cold in their
cells.
A few were brought for me to see, and, roused from their torpor by
the warmth of the room, they began to wander about my bed, where I
followed them vaguely with my failing eyes. [91]
It is very true that, on leaving Orange, Fabre still had “much to
learn” from the company of Hymenoptera and other insects—the great
period of his entomological career had not yet begun—but the regret
with which he left Orange was soon dissipated by the wealth of
observations and the facilities for study which his new home offered
him.
Living in retirement at Orange, on the confines of the town, at the
gate of the fields, he was as yet only in sight of the promised land.
At Sérignan, in the quiet obscurity of quite a little village, in the
very midst of “the great museum of the fields,” he was truly in
possession of the country of his dreams; he had found his ideal
abiding-place, the spot which was in most perfect conformity with his
tastes and most favourable to his genius.