Fabre, Poet of Science | Page 6

huissier, Victoire Salgues, and
in order to prepare himself, as working apprentice, in the tricks and
quibbles of the law. (1/2.)
In the roads of Malaval, bordered with brambles, in the glades of
bracken, and amid the meadows of broom, he received his first
impressions of nature. At Malaval too lived his grandmother, the good
old woman who could lull him to sleep at night with beautiful stories
and simple legends, while she wound her distaff or spun her bobbin.
But what were all these imaginary marvels, what were the ogres who
smelt fresh meat, or "the fairies who turned pumpkins into coaches and
lizards into footmen" beside all the marvels of reality, which already he
was beginning to perceive?
For above all things he was born a poet: a poet by instinct and by
vocation. From his earliest childhood, "the brain hardly released from
the swaddling-bands of unconsciousness," the things of the outer world
left a profound and living impression. As far back as he can remember,
while still quite a child, "a little monkey of six, still dressed in a little
baize frock," or just "wearing his first braces," he sees himself "in
ecstasy before the splendours of the wing-cases of a gardener-beetle, or
the wings of a butterfly." At nightfall, among the bushes, he learned to
recognize the chirp of the grasshopper. To put it in his own words, "he
made for the flowers and insects as the Pieris makes for the cabbage
and the Vanessa makes for the nettle." The riches of the rocks; the life
which swarms in the depth of the waters; the world of plants and
animals, that "prodigious poem; all nature filled him with curiosity and
wonder." "A voice charmed him; untranslatable; sweeter than language
and vague as a dream." (1/3.)
These peculiarities are all the more astonishing in that they seem to be
absolutely spontaneous and in nowise hereditary. What his parents
were he himself has told us: small farmers, cultivating a little
unprofitable land; poor "husbandmen, sowers of rye, cowherds"; and in
the wretched surroundings of his childhood, when the only light, of an

evening, came from a splinter of pine, steeped in resin, which was held
by a strip of slate stuck into the wall; when his folk shut themselves in
the byre, in times of severe cold, to save a little firewood and while
away the evenings; when close at hand, through the bitter wind, they
heard the howling of the wolves: here, it would seem, was nothing
propitious to the birth of such tastes, if he had not borne them naturally
within him.
But is it not the very essence of genius, as it is the peculiarity of instinct,
to spring from the depths of the invisible?
Yet who shall say what stores of thought unspoken, what unknown
treasures of observation never to be communicated, what patient
reflections unuttered, may be housed in those toil-worn brains, in which,
perhaps, slowly and obscurely, accumulate the germs of faculties and
talents by which some more favoured descendant may one day benefit?
How many poets have died unpublished or unperceived, in whom only
the power of expression was lacking!
When he was seven years old his parents recalled him to Saint-Léons,
in order to send him to the school kept by his godfather, Pierre Ricard,
the village schoolmaster, "at once barber, bellringer, and singer in the
choir." Rembrandt, Teniers, nor Van Ostade never painted anything
more picturesque than the room which served at the same time as
kitchen, refectory, and bedroom, with "halfpenny prints papering the
walls" and "a huge chimney, for which each had to bring his log of a
morning in order to enjoy the right to a place at the fireside."
He was never to forget these beloved places, blessed scenes of his
childhood, amid which he grew up like a little savage, and through all
his material sufferings, all his hours of bitterness, and even in the
resignation of age, their idyllic memory sufficed to make his life
fragrant. He would always see the humble paternal garden, the brook
where he used to surprise the crayfish, the ash-tree in which he found
his first goldfinch's nest, and "the flat stone on which he heard, for the
first time, the mellow ringing of the bellringer frog." (1/4.) Later, when
writing to his brother, he was to recall the good days of still careless
life, when "he would sprawl, the sun on his belly, on the mosses of the

wood of Vezins, eating his black bread and cream" or "ring the bells of
Saint-Léons" and "pull the tails of the bulls of Lavaysse." (1/5.)
For Henri had a brother, Frédéric, barely two years younger than he;
equally meditative by nature, and of a serious, upright mind; but his
tastes inclined