Chapter XV · THE HERMIT OF SÉRIGNAN (CONTINUED)
Bernard Miall translation
While the domain of the landowner and manufacturer ended at the walls of his field of pebbles and botanical garden, that of the entomologist extended far beyond them, as far as his eyes could see and his steps lead him.
For this reason a panoramic view of the surrounding country is desirable.
With its peaceful plains, its gracious hills, overgrown with strawberry-tree and ilex, and the sublime mountain of Provence rising upon the horizon, with its varied outlines and its sun-illumined flanks, the Sérignan landscape gently forces itself upon the spectator’s attention. And if the spirit moved him, Fabre had only to raise his head from his apparatus to find all about him something to soothe the eye and refresh the mind.
But however keen his feeling for the beauties of Nature, it is not so much as artist or dilettante but as the insect historiographer that he appreciates the value of the landscape, and the wealth of the plains and hills outspread before him.
From this point of view the whole surroundings of his hermitage seem as though created to continue and complete the harmas, and the scientific pleasures which this affords him.
We have already made mention of the Aygues, and the time has come to pay it a formal visit, as one of the favourite haunts of the Sérignan hermit:
The geographers define the Aygues as a watercourse. As an eye-witness I should call it rather a stream of flat pebbles. Understand me: I do not mean that the dry pebbles flow of their own accord; the feeble incline would not permit of such an avalanche. But let it rain: then they will flow. Then, from my home, which is more than a mile distant, I hear the uproar of the clashing pebbles.
During the greater part of the year the Aygues is a vast sheet of flat white stones; of the torrent only the bed is left, a furrow of enormous width, comparable to that of its mighty neighbour, the Rhône. When persistent rains fall, when the snows melt on the slopes of the Alps, the dry furrow fills for a few days, complaining, overflowing to a great distance, and displacing, amid the uproar, its pebbly banks. Return a week later: the din of the flood is succeeded by silence. The terrible waters have disappeared, leaving on the banks, as a trace of their brief passage, some wretched muddy puddles quickly drunk up by the sun.
These sudden floods bring a thousand living gleanings, swept off the flanks of the mountains. The dry bed of the Aygues is a most curious botanical garden. You may find there numbers of vegetable species swept down from the higher regions, some temporary, dying without offspring in a season, others permanent, adapting themselves to the new climate. They come from far away from a great height, these exiles; to pluck certain of them in their actual home you would have to climb Ventoux, passing the girdle of beeches and reaching the height at which woody vegetation ceases.
An insect which is sometimes found by chance in the osier-beds of the Aygues, and is by itself worth the journey, is the Apoderus of the hazel-tree.
It tells us also many things, this little red Weevil “from the heights rich in hazel-bushes” and carried by the storm into the alder-thickets of the Aygues.
It reminds us, too, of that other emigrant, whose intimate acquaintance it has become.
Between the parents and the son, what a difference, what a change of life and of destiny! Quantum mutatus ab illis! This, no doubt, is the first thing to strike one; and here, too, we have one of the most salient features of the superiority of the human intelligence; this almost infinite possibility of transformation and progress, which forms such a striking contrast with the rigid immutability of instinct which is barely susceptible of the slightest variation.
Others may be surprised to find in the scholar and scientist the features and the manners of a peasant. Let us rather rejoice to see that our eminent fellow-countryman has never renounced the simplicity of his origins, and take pleasure in noting how closely the hermit of Sérignan resembles the urchin of Malaval.
We have attempted to show the hermit of Sérignan in his own setting, as he really is. It remains for us to see how he glorifies his solitude and ennobles his rustic life; how the poor, simple peasant whom he has always been has done more for science than the most elegantly dressed and profusely decorated savants.