Note 7 — Chapter XII · THE PROFESSOR: AVIGNON (CONTINUED)

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.”7