Note 1 — Chapter XVI · THE HERMIT OF SÉRIGNAN (CONTINUED)
Bernard Miall translation
“M. Fabre’s life-story is one of the finest that could be related,” said M. Laffite lately, in a leading article in La Nature. “It is simple. It is the humble and tragic story of a persistent struggle between two irreducible adversaries, on the one hand the most precarious conditions of the struggle for life, and on the other the power of a vocation, as though riveted to his being, which urged him despite everything to observation, study, and an understanding of the world of living creatures, and in particular of the insects.”1