Chapter I · THE SÉRIGNAN JUBILEE

Fabre, on the contrary, has eyes only for the insect. He observes it by and for itself, in the most trivial manifestations of its life: the living, active insect, with its labours and its habits, is the thing that interests him before all else, guiding his investigation of the infinite host of these tiny lives, which claim his attention on every hand; and in this world of insects wealth of artifice and capacities of the mental order seem to be in an inverse ratio to beauty of form and brilliance of colour. For this reason Fabre learns to disdain the magnificent Butterfly, applying himself by preference to the modest Fly: the two-winged Flies, which are relatives of our common House-fly, or the four-winged Flies, the numerous and infinitely various cousins of the Wasps and Bees; the Spiders, ugly indeed, but such skilful spinners, and even the Dung-beetles and Scarabæidæ of every species, those wonderful agents of terrestrial purification.

In this singular world, which affords him the society which he prefers, he has gathered an ample harvest of unexpected facts and highly perplexing actions on the part of these little so-called inferior animals. No one has excelled him in detecting their slightest movements, and in surprising all the secrets of their lives. Darwin declared, and many others have repeated his words, that Fabre was “an incomparable observer.” The verdict is all the more significant in that the French entomologist did not scruple to oppose his observations to the theories of the famous English naturalist.

The ten volumes of his Souvenirs Entomologiques will remain one of the most intensely interesting works which have ever been written concerning the habits of insects, and also one of the most remarkable records of the psychology of a great observer of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In them the author depicts to the life not only the habits and the instincts of the insects; he gives us a full-length portrait of himself. He makes us share his busy life, amid the subjects of observation which incessantly claim his attention. The world of insects hums and buzzes about him, obsesses him, calling his attention from all directions, exciting his curiosity; he does not know which way to turn. Overwhelmed by the innumerable winged army of the drinkers of nectar who, on the fine summer days, invade his field of observation, he calls to his aid his whole household: his daughters, Claire, Aglaé, and Anna, his son Paul, his workmen, and above all his man-servant Favier, an old countryman who has spent his life in the barracks of the French colonies, a man of a thousand expedients, who watches his master with an incredulous yet admiring eye, listening to him but refusing to be convinced, and shocking him by the assertion, which nothing will induce him to retract, that the bat is a rat which has grown wings, the slug an old snail which has lost its shell, the night-jar a toad with a passion for milk, which has sprouted feathers the better to suck the goats’ udders at night, and so forth. The cats and the dog join the company at times, and one almost regrets that one is not within reach of the sturdy old man, so that one might respond to his call.

That is well-expressed, and it gives us a fairly correct idea of the vital and poetic charm of the Souvenirs.

The same writer asks, speaking of the well-defined tasks performed by all these little creatures beloved of the worthy biologist of Sérignan: “Who has taught each one its trade, to the exclusion of any other, and allotted the parts which they fill, as a rule with a completeness unequalled, save by ‘their absolute unconsciousness of the goal at which they are aiming?’ This is a very important problem: it is the problem of the origin of things. Henri Fabre has no desire to grapple with it. Living in perpetual amazement, amid the miracles revealed by his genius, he observes, but he does not explain.”

Now this venerable nonagenarian whom naturalists, poets, and philosophers are so justly about to honour in Sérignan, because his brow is radiant with the purest rays of science, poetry, and philosophy: this entomologist of real genius, he whom Edmond Perrier ranks among “the princes of natural history,” he whom Victor Hugo called “the insects’ Homer,” he whom Darwin proclaimed “an incomparable observer”: who is there in Aveyron, knowing that he was born beneath our skies and that he has dwelt upon our soil, but will rejoice to feel that he belongs to us by his birth and the whole of his youth?