Note 2 — Chapter XXII · THE LAST HEIGHTS1 (1910–1915)

But now, on the 23rd of April 1911, a fresh invasion of young girls, almost all pupils of the University, burst into the harmas.2 And what had they to say? That they came from Paris to visit the glories of Provence, and that next to Mistral they had wished to see Fabre, after the “emperor of poetry,” the “king of science,” and they made it clear that it was not only to the scientist, but still more to the pioneer, the initiator—or why not say, with them, to the most illustrious of “cronies”3—that the girl “cronies,” as they called one another in their group, had come to present their heart-felt homage. Who to-day would dare to contest their right to become his pupils, to seek with him “the freshest honey and the most poetical observations of the insects that people the boughs and the flowers,” to enter with him into the secret of all these little lives, “which are, like ourselves,” they said, “creatures of the good God”?