Fabre, Poet of Science | Page 8

Fabre only,
notwithstanding, it was his fixed idea, his constant preoccupation, and
"while the dictation class was busy around him, he would examine, in
the secrecy of his desk, the sting of a wasp or the fruit of the oleander,"
and intoxicate himself with poetry. (1/9.) His pedagogic studies
suffered thereby, and the first part of his stay at the normal school was
by no means extremely brilliant. In the middle of his second year he
was declared idle, and even marked as an insufficient pupil and of
mediocre intelligence. Stung to the quick, he begged as a favour that he
should be given the opportunity of following the third year's course in
the six months that remained, and he made such an effort that at the end
of the year he victoriously won his superior certificate. (1/10.)
A year in advance of the regulation studies, his curiosity might now
exercise itself freely in every direction, and little by little it became
universal. A chance chemistry lesson finally awakened in him the
appetite for knowledge, the passion for all the sciences, of which he
thirsted to know at least the elements. Between whiles he returned to
his Latin, translating Horace and re-reading Virgil. One day his director
put an "Imitation" into his hands, with double columns in Greek and
Latin. The latter, which he knew fairly well, assisted him to decipher
the Greek. He hastened to commit to memory the vocables, and idioms
and phrases of all kinds (1/11.), and in this curious fashion he learned
the language. This was his only method of learning languages. It is the
process which he recommended to his brother, who was commencing
Latin:
"Take Virgil, a dictionary, and a grammar, and translate from Latin into
French for ever and for ever; to make a good version you need only
common sense and very little grammatical knowledge or other pedantic
accessories.

"Imagine an old inscription half-effaced: correctness of judgment partly
supplies the missing words, and the sense appears as if the whole were
legible. Latin, for you, is the old inscription; the root of the word alone
is legible: the veil of an unknown language hides the value of the
termination: you have only the half of the words; but you have common
sense too, and you will make use of it." (1/12.)
CHAPTER 2.
THE PRIMARY TEACHER.
Furnished with his superior diploma, he left the normal school at the
age of nineteen, and commenced as a primary teacher in the College of
Carpentras.
The salary of the school teacher, in the year 1842, did not exceed 28
pounds sterling a year, and this ungrateful calling barely fed him, save
on "chickpeas and a little wine." But we must beware lest, in view of
the increasing and excessive dearness of living in France, the beggarly
salaries of the poor schoolmasters of a former day, so little worthy of
their labours and their social utility, appear even more
disproportionately small than they actually were. What is more to the
point, the teachers had no pension to hope for. They could only count
on a perpetuity of labour, and when sickness or infirmity arrived, when
old age surprised them, after fifty or sixty years of a narrow and
precarious existence, it was not merely poverty that awaited them; for
many there was nothing but the blackest destitution. A little later, when
they began to entertain a vague hope of deliverance, the retiring
pension which was held up to their gaze, in the distant future, was at
first no more than forty francs, and they had to await the advent of
Duruy, the great minister and liberator, before primary instruction was
in some degree raised from this ignominious level of abasement.
It was a melancholy place, this college, "where life had something
cloistral about it: each master occupied two cells, for, in consideration
of a modest payment, the majority were lodged in the establishment,
and ate in common at the principal's table."

It was a laborious life, full of distasteful and repugnant duties. We can
readily imagine, with the aid of the striking picture which Fabre has
drawn for us, what life was in these surroundings, and what the
teaching was: "Between four high walls I see the court, a sort of
bear-pit where the scholars quarrelled for the space beneath the boughs
of a plane-tree; all around opened the class-rooms, oozing with damp
and melancholy, like so many wild beasts' cages, deficient in light and
air...for seats, a plank fixed to the wall...in the middle a chair, the
rushes of the seat departed, a blackboard, and a stick of chalk." (2/1.)
Let the teachers of our spacious and well-lighted schools of to-day
ponder on these not so distant years, and measure the progress
accomplished. Evoking the memory of