Chapter XIV: The Hermit of Sérignan (1879–1910)

Starting from Orange and crossing the Aygues, a torrent whose muddy
waters are lost in the Rhône, but whose bed is dried by the July
and August suns, leaving only a desert of pebbles, where the
Mason-bee builds her pretty turrets of rock-work, we come presently
to the Sérignaise country; an arid, stony tract, planted with vines
and olives, coloured a rusty red, or touched here and there with
almost the hue of blood; and here and there a grove of cypress
makes a sombre blot. To the north runs a long black line of hills,
covered with box and ilex and the giant heather of the south. Far
in the distance, to the east, the immense plain is closed in by the
wall of Saint-Amant and the ridge of the Dentelle, behind which the
lofty Ventoux rears its rocky, cloven bosom abruptly to the clouds.
At the end of a few miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful
breath of the mistral, we suddenly reach a little village. It is a
curious little community, with its central street adorned by a
double row of plane-trees, its leaping fountains, and its almost
Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with flat roofs; and
sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling, we see
the unexpected curves of a loggia. At a distance the façade of the
church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close
at hand is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower
surmounted by a narrow mitre wrought in hammered iron, in the midst
of which are seen the black profiles of the bells.

At the entrance of the little market-town, in a solitary corner, in
the centre of an enclosure of lofty walls, which are taller than
the crests of the pines and cypresses, Fabre’s dwelling is hidden
away. A pink house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre
foliage, appears at the end of an alley of lilacs, “which sway in
the spring under the weight of their balmy thyrsi.” Before the
house are the shady plane-trees, where during the burning hours of
August the cicada of the flowering ash, the deafening cacan,
concealed beneath the leaves, fills the hot atmosphere with its
eager cries, the only sound that disturbs the profound silence of
this solitude.

There, in this “hermit’s retreat,” as he himself has defined it,
the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an
ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in
love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long
time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of
through it on his way to the neighbouring mountain, where he would
often spend whole days alone with wild nature.

It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities,
the vain agitations and storms of the world, that his life has been
passed, in unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to
pursue, with resolute labour and incredible patience, that
prodigious series of marvellous observations which for nearly fifty
years he has never ceased to accumulate.

François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has
succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this
rugged, shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face,
stamped with originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence;
touched with geniality and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of
energy. Sicard has fixed for ever this strange mask; the thin
cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the strained nose, the pendent
wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled lips, with an
indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth. The
hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a
high, rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what
chisel, what graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of
that gaze, eclipsed from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the
eyelids! What Holbein, what Chardin could render the almost
extraordinary brilliance of those black eyes, those dilated
pupils—the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide and deeply
set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as though
made expressly to scrutinise Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above
the orbits, two short, bristling eye-brows seem set there to guide
the vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the
magnifying-glass, has retained an indelible fold of continual
attention; the other, on the contrary, always updrawn, has the look
of defying the interlocutor, of foreseeing his objections, of
waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust. [92]

Is not the reader dazzled by the brilliant colours, the warm tones of this picture? The Provençal light shines upon his face, splendidly avenging us for the obscurity which had too long withheld him from the admiration of the world.

We could not choose a better guide to introduce us to the home of the Hermit of Sérignan, and to give us access to his person.

In front of the house, beyond a low wall, of a comfortable height to lean on, is the most unexpected and improbable of gardens, a kind of couderc—that is, a tract of poor, stony ground, of which the naturalist has made a sort of wild park, jealously protected from the access of the profane, and literally invaded by all sorts of plants and insects. Fabre speaks of this retreat as follows:

This is what I wished for, hoc erat in votis: a bit of land, oh,
not so very large, but fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a
public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land,
favoured by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without distant
expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that
strain my nerves, I could contrive my plans of attack, lay my
ambushes, and watch their effects at every hour of the day. Hoc
erat in votis. Yes, this was my wish, my dream, always cherished,
always vanishing into the mists of the future.

And it is no easy matter to acquire a laboratory in the open
fields, when harassed by a terrible anxiety about one’s daily
bread. For forty years have I fought, with steadfast courage,
against the paltry plagues of life; and the long-wished-for
laboratory has come at last. What it has cost me in perseverance
and relentless work I will not try to say. It has come; and with
it—a more serious condition—perhaps a little leisure. I say
perhaps, for my leg is still hampered by a few links of the
convict’s chain.

But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the
bit of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of
living entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in
the solitude of a little village. It is a harmas, the name given,
in this district, [93] to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to
the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of
the plough; but the sheep passes there in spring, when it has
chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.

My harmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth, swamped by
a huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at
cultivation: I am told that vines once grew here. The three-pronged
fork is the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such a
soil as this; and I am sorry, for the primitive vegetation has
disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more clumps of
kermes-oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we step
by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the
first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a
spoil to plunder, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground
whence they were driven by the fork.

What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that
is first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources.
We have, in the first rank, the couch-grass, that execrable weed
which three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in
exterminating. Next, in respect of number, come the centauries,
grim-looking one and all, bristling with prickles or starry
halberds. They are the yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain
centaury, the star-thistle and the rough centaury: the first
predominates. Here and there, amid their inextricable confusion,
stands, like a chandelier with spreading orange flowers for lights,
the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, whose spikes are strong as nails.
Above it towers the Illyrian cottage-thistle, whose straight and
solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and ends in
large pink tufts. Its armour hardly yields before that of the
oyster-plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with,
first of all, the prickly or “cruel” thistle, which is so well
armed that the plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next,
the spear-thistle, with its ample foliage, each of its nervures
ending in a spear-head; lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers
itself into a spiky knot. In among these, in long lines armed with
hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creep along the ground. To
visit the prickly thicket where the Wasp goes foraging, you must
wear boots that come to mid-leg or else resign yourself to a
smarting in the calves. As long as the ground retains some traces
of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does not lack a certain
charm. But let the droughts of summer come and we see but a
desolate waste, which the flame of a match would set ablaze from
one end to the other. Such is, or rather was, when I took
possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live henceforth
alone with the insects. Forty years of desperate struggle have won
it for me.

Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the
expression is not out of place. This accursed ground, which no one
would have had at a gift to sow with a pinch of turnip-seed, is an
earthly paradise for the Bees and the Wasps. Its mighty growth of
thistles and centauries draws them all to me from everywhere
around. Never, in my insect-hunting memories, have I seen so large
a population at a single spot; all the trades have made it their
rallying-point. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders
in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a
leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board,
plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging
underground galleries, workers in goldbeater’s skin, and many more.

If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles, it
would muster almost the whole of the honey-yielding tribe. A
learned entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Pérez, to whom I submit
the naming of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means
of hunting, to send him so many rarities and even novelties. The
whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of
thistles and centauries. [94]

What has become of the days when the entomologist lived far from his beloved insects, when he had to seek them in all directions, and even to chase them through fields and vineyards, at the risk of alarming the passers-by or having a crow to pluck with the garde-champêtre? To-day the insects are always there, within reach of his eyes and his hand. He has hardly to look for them nowadays. They come to him, into his garden and even into his house.

All Fabre’s preferences are for the insect, but he loves the other creatures also and gladly gives them the rights of citizenship in the harmas. He has a peculiar sympathy for those that are misunderstood and scorned by the vulgar.

In front of the house is a large pond, fed by the aqueduct that
supplies the village pumps with water. Here, from half a mile and
more around, come the Frogs and Toads in the lovers’ season. In
May, as soon as it is dark, the pond becomes a deafening orchestra:
it is impossible to talk at table, impossible to sleep.

We have had a glimpse of the natural wealth of the harmas, but we have no idea as yet of some of the artificial improvements which the inventive industry of the naturalist has introduced.

I have [writes Fabre] wished for a few things in my life, none of
them capable of interfering with the common weal. I have longed to
possess a pond, screened from the indiscretion of the passers-by,
close to my house, with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed.
There, in my leisure hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have
meditated upon aquatic life, a primitive life, easier than our own,
simpler in its affections and its brutalities. I should have
studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein foci of
life are condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulæ of the
heavens. I should have admired the nascent creature that turns,
slowly turns, in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the
draft perhaps of the future shell. No planet circles round its
centre of attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.

I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to
the pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of
water. I have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of
glass. A poor makeshift!

A louis has been overlooked in a corner of a drawer. I can spend it
without seriously jeopardising the domestic balance. The blacksmith
makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The
joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion—for, in my village, you
have to be a Jack-of-all trades if you would make both ends
meet—sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a
movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four
sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred
sheet-iron and a tap to let the water out. Many an inquisitive
caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass
trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is
meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the
receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block
of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy
mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely serve to let
me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water? [95]

The delight of my earliest childhood, the pond, is still a
spectacle of which my old age can never tire.

But even with all the visions which it evokes, how far inferior is the “pond” of Sérignan to the pond of Saint-Léons, “the pond with the little ducks on it, so rich in illusions! Such a pond is not met with twice in a lifetime. One needs to be equipped with one’s first pair of breeches and one’s earliest ideas in order to have such luck!” [96]

In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the Crickets at their
concerts, a second wish often came to me. Beside the road I light
upon a dead Mole, a Snake killed with a stone, victims both of
human folly. The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to
smell. Whoso approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his
head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with
his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly
consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave
death’s artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most
deserving work.

To know the habits of those creatures charged with the
disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of
disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation
that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life’s
treasure-house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I
regretfully left the Mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to
go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the
place for philosophising over a stench. What would people say who
passed and saw me!

I am now in a position to realise my second wish. I have space,
air, and quiet in the solitude of the harmas. None will come here
to trouble me, to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So
far, so good; but observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of
passers-by, I have to fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who,
finding my preparations, will not fail to spoil and scatter them.
In anticipation of their misdeeds, I establish workshops in
mid-air, whither none but genuine corruption-agents can come,
flying on their wings. At different points in the enclosure, I
plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their free ends, form a
stable tripod. From each of these supports I hang, at a man’s
height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at the
bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain.
I garnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The Snake, the Lizard, the
Toad receive the preference, because of their bare skins, which
enable me better to follow the first attack and the work of the
invaders. I ring the changes with furred and feathered beasts. A
few children of the neighbourhood, allured by pennies, are my
regular purveyors. Throughout the good season they come running
triumphantly to my door, with a Snake at the end of a stick, or a
Lizard in a cabbage-leaf. They bring me the Rat caught in a trap,
the Chicken dead of the pip, the Mole slain by the gardener, the
Kitten killed by accident, the Rabbit poisoned by some weed. The
business proceeds to the mutual satisfaction of sellers and buyer.
No such trade had ever been known before in the village, nor ever
will be again. [97]

Yet despite all his inventions Fabre had no illusion as to their value. He well knew that art cannot replace nature who said, speaking of his glass-walled “pond,” the aquarium of which he seemed so proud: “A poor makeshift, after all!” You may think that he is reverting to his childhood and that he will tell us again of the pond with its ducklings. But he tells us something far better:

“Not all our laboratory aquaria are worth the print left in the clay by the shoe of a mule, when a shower has filled the humble basin and life has peopled it with her marvels.” [98]

Who but he could have found such a pearl in this clay?