Chapter XI · THE PROFESSOR: AVIGNON (CONTINUED)

In sketching for the reader’s benefit, the characteristic features of the Avignon naturalist, always busy with his researches, and always on the alert for fresh discoveries, we venture to flatter ourselves that we have placed before him one of the most accomplished and attractive types of that harmonious synthesis of industry and genius, which alone is capable of engendering great achievements, and which was so ably defined by the Latin poet in the words:

“… Ego nec studium sine divite venâ,

Nec rude quid possit video ingenium. Alterius sic

It will be no less interesting to see by what varied and concurrent circumstances, by what personal interventions, a virtuosity and an activity so well co-ordinated were stimulated, directed and controlled, sustained and protected against all causes of deviation or discouragement.

But the unsatisfied eagerness that draws the exile from our cool green hills to repeat, again and again, the ascent of the rocky Provençal height, is based on something more than sensitiveness to impressions and a pre-established harmony; he is also strongly attracted by the peculiar and unique variety of the flora growing upon its slopes:

It is four o’clock in the morning. At the head of the caravan walks Triboulet, with his Mule and his Ass: Triboulet, the Nestor of the Ventoux guides. My botanical colleagues inspect the vegetation on either side of the road by the cold light of the dawn; the others talk. I follow the party with a barometer slung from my shoulder and a note-book and pencil in my hand.

My barometer, intended for taking the altitude of the principal botanical halts, soon becomes a pretext for attacks on the gourd with the rum. No sooner is a noteworthy plant observed than somebody cries:

“Quick, let’s look at the barometer!”

And we all crowd around the gourd, the scientific instrument coming later. The coolness of the morning and our walk make us appreciate these references to the barometer so thoroughly that the level of the stimulant falls even more swiftly than that of the mercury. In the interests of the immediate future I must consult Torricelli’s tube a little less often.

As the temperature grows too cold for them, first the oak and the ilex disappear by degrees; then the vine and the almond-tree; and next the mulberry, the walnut-tree, and the white oak. Box becomes plentiful. We enter upon a monotonous region extending from the end of the cultivated fields to the lower boundary of the beech-woods, where the predominant plant is Satureia montana, the winter savory, known here by its popular name of pébré d’asé, Ass’s pepper, because of the acrid flavour of its tiny leaves, impregnated with essential oil. Certain small cheeses forming part of our stores are powdered with this strong spice. Already more than one of us is biting into them in imagination and casting hungry glances at the provision bags carried by the Mule. Our hard morning exercise has brought appetite, and more than appetite, a devouring hunger, what Horace calls latrans stomachus. I teach my colleagues how to stay this rumbling stomach until they reach the next halt; I show them a little sorrel-plant, with arrow-head leaves, the Rumex scutatus, or French sorrel; and, practising what I preach, I pick a mouthful. At first they laugh at my suggestion. I let them laugh and soon see them all occupied, each more eagerly than his fellow, in plucking the precious sorrel.

While chewing the acid leaves we come to the beeches. These are first big, solitary bushes, trailing on the ground; soon after, dwarf trees, clustering close together; and, finally, mighty trunks, forming a dense and gloomy forest, whose soil is a mass of rough limestone blocks. Bowed down in winter by the weight of the snow, battered all the year round by the fierce gusts of the Mistral, many of the trees have lost their branches and are twisted into grotesque postures, or even lie flat on the ground. An hour or more is spent in crossing this wooded zone, which from a distance shows against the sides of the Ventoux like a black belt. Then once more the beeches become bushy and scattered. We have reached their upper boundary and, to the great relief of all of us, despite the sorrel-leaves, we have also reached the stopping-place selected for our lunch.

But we will pass over the remarks made at breakfast and the incidents of the last stage of the climb; we will make direct for the summit of Mont Ventoux, where the leader of the expedition will give us a glimpse of the delights that await the naturalist at the end of his climb when he has taken the precaution to make it at the right moment:

But the silent language of the tiny creatures destined to be his most intimate companions through life was seconded, at an opportune moment, by the more expressive language of human speech. Here we have one of those events that were landmarks in Fabre’s life, marking the starting-point of a fresh phase in the evolution of his ideas and his labours. He alone can describe for us the actual nature and exact significance of this incident:

One winter evening, when the rest of the household was asleep, as I sat reading beside a stove whose ashes were still warm, my book made me forget for a while the cares of the morrow: these heavy cares of a poor professor of physics who, after piling up diplomas and for a quarter of a century performing services of uncontested merit, was receiving for himself and his family a stipend of sixteen hundred francs, or less than the wages of a groom in a decent establishment. Such was the disgraceful parsimony of the day where education was concerned; such was the edict of our government red-tape: I was an irregular, the offspring of my solitary studies. And so I was forgetting the poverty and anxieties of a professor’s life amid my books, when I chanced to turn over the pages of an entomological essay that had fallen into my hands I forget how.

Moquin-Tandon converted Fabre to the study of animals and plants. Dufour converted him to the study of insects, and taught him to publish the results of his entomological studies.

Dufour’s little work was a revelation; a flash of light revealing his vocation. It was like the electric impulse that bursts the seed about to open, that sends the genius ready to unfold its wings soaring into the heavens.

Does it not seem that there must be a special Providence for the elect of science?

In Dufour’s memoir, which gave Fabre so decisive an impulsion toward entomology, a singular fact is mentioned: the naturalist of the Landes found in the nest of a species of Wasp known as the Cerceris some small beetles of the Buprestis family, which, although apparently dead, remained as fresh as though alive during the period occupied by the rearing of the larvæ for whose nourishment they are destined to serve.

Dufour supposed that these Buprestes were simply dead, and, “in order to explain this marvellous preservation of their flesh, which makes an insect that for several weeks has been motionless as a corpse a kind of game that does not become high but remain as fresh as at the moment of capture during the greatest heat of summer, he presumed the use of a liquid antiseptic, acting in the same manner as the preparations used to preserve anatomical specimens. This liquid could only be the venom of the Hymenopteron inoculated into the victim’s body. The tiny drop of poisonous humour that accompanies the sting, the lancet employed in the inoculation, is supposed to perform the office of a kind of pickle or preservative liquid for preserving the flesh set aside for the nourishment of the larvæ.”

Fascinated and intrigued by Dufour’s discovery, Fabre wished to see the process for himself, and as a result he made the first and the finest of his own entomological discoveries, which he was later on to enrich by more precise and more remarkable details.

But at the same time he was forced to realise how incomplete and superficial were the observations of the man whom he nevertheless revered as the first among his masters.

How often was he to find occasion for revising the statements of his predecessors! They were not merely incomplete; they were often erroneous, even when they had the greatest names to recommend them.

Must we then ignore all that has been said and written and wholly repudiate the inheritance of the centuries and the scientists of the past? Heaven preserve us from such stupidity! But while it would not be reasonable or even possible to make a clean sweep of all that has been acquired by our predecessors, it is none the less prudent not to accept, in blind confidence, the whole heritage of the past, but to subject to the control of facts the statements even of the masters when these appear at all extravagant. Otherwise we run the risk, if not of perpetrating error by repeating it on our own responsibility, at all events of following a false trail on which we may lose much time and which may finally lead us to envy the lot of those who are able to attack their subject, from the very first, with minds empty of all information and any preconceived ideas. This was brought well home to Fabre by the repeated experience of errors which had escaped the most learned authors and erroneous methods suggested by the best books. And the persuasive effect of the highly symptomatic example afforded by an absolutely unrivalled master was even more eloquent.

Unexpectedly, one fine day [writes Fabre], Pasteur rang my door-bell: the Pasteur who was presently to acquire so great a celebrity. His name was known to me. I had read his beautiful essay on the dissymmetry of tartaric acid; I had followed with the keenest interest his researches concerning the generation of the Infusoria.

Every period has its scientific craze; to-day it is evolution; then it was spontaneous generation. By his glass bulbs, made sterile or fertile at will, by his experiments, magnificent in their rigorous simplicity, Pasteur exploded for ever the insanity which professed to see life arising from a chemical conflict in a mass of putrescence.

Aware of this dispute, so victoriously elucidated, I gave my illustrious visitor the best of welcomes. The scientist had come to me in the first place for certain information. I owed this notable honour to my quality of colleague as a teacher of physics and chemistry. Ah, but what a humble, obscure colleague!

Pasteur’s tour through the district of Avignon was in connection with sericulture. For some years the silk-worm nurseries had been at sixes and sevens, ravaged by unknown plagues. The silkworms, without appreciable cause, became masses of putrid deliquescence, or hardened into stony lumps. The peasant, in dismay, saw one of his chief sources of income disappearing; after much expense and trouble he had to throw his litters on the dung-heap.

A few words were exchanged concerning the prevailing evil; then, without further preamble:

“I wanted to see some cocoons,” said my visitor; “I have never seen any; I know them only by name. Could you get me some?”

“Nothing simpler. My landlord is himself a dealer in cocoons, and he lives across the road. If you’ll be good enough to wait a moment, I will bring you what you want.”

A few long strides and I had reached my neighbour’s house, where I stuffed my pockets with cocoons. On my return I offered them to the scientist. He took one, turned it over and over in his fingers; curiously he examined it, as we should some singular object which had come from the other end of the world. He shook it against his ear.

“It rattles!” he said, quite surprised. “There is something inside!”

“Why, yes!”

“But what?”

“The chrysalis.”

“What’s that, the chrysalis?”

“I mean the sort of mummy into which the caterpillar turns before it becomes a moth.”

“And in every cocoon there is one of those things?”

“Of course; it’s to protect the chrysalis that the caterpillar spins.”

“Ah!”

The fact is indeed so extraordinary that it may well appear incredible, but it receives authentic confirmation from the wholly concordant account of Duclaux, Pasteur’s pupil and historiographer, as well as from the honesty of the naturalist, who is assuredly incapable of having invented the story for our amusement.

I still remember the day [says Duclaux] when Pasteur, returning to the laboratory, said to me with a touch of excitement in his voice:

“Do you know what M. Dumas has just asked of me? To go to the Midi, to study the silk-worm disease.”

I don’t know what I replied; probably what he himself replied to his illustrious master: Then there is a silk-worm disease? There are provinces that are being ruined by it? All this was happening so far from Paris, and we were so far from Paris in the laboratory!…

Pasteur hesitated. He was not a physiologist. But Dumas’ insistence, the attraction of the unknown, and an inward voice urged him to accept. So he left for the Midi; it was early in June 1865. He was invested with an official mission which confronted him with a plague that had to be conquered and obliged him to render an account of the attempts made and the results obtained.

To be sent to fight a fire and not to know what fire is and to have no fire-engine or hose! It needed Pasteur to accept and to shoulder such a responsibility!… To his complaint that he had no knowledge of the matter, Dumas had replied:

“So much the better! You will have no ideas on the subject but those that will come to you as a result of your own observations!”

In this case the choice was not mistaken, and the lesson was as profitable to Pasteur as it was to Fabre, to whom he was about to hand it on, all unsuspecting.

Beginning with that arising out of Dufour’s memoir, repeated experiences taught Fabre not to be too greatly influenced, in his conceptions of natural objects, by faith in his reading or even in the assertions of his masters. To go still further, Pasteur’s example made him appreciate the advantage of coming fresh to the facts, of confronting them in a state of ignorance, of receiving impressions from them alone, and of having no ideas but those that truly emanate from the reality.

Let us add that while no one was ever more interested in authors and their writings, to purchase which he often sacrificed his last coppers, and even his daily bread, no one was more resolutely determined to give the first place to the language of facts, and direct intercourse with the tiny living creatures whom he had chosen for his own. So much so that, if we wish fully to describe his method, we must complete the maxim which we have just quoted by this other, which forms its exact counterpart: Amicus liber, magis amica natura.