Chapter XVIII: The Collaborators: (continued)

Not all the naturalist’s experiments are dedicated to practical folk; some are reserved rather for the intellectual. Let us proceed to the facts:

To-day is Shrove Tuesday, a reminiscence of the ancient Saturnalia.
I am meditating, on this occasion, a fantastic dish which would
have delighted the gourmets of Rome....

There will be eight of us; first of all my family, and then two
friends, probably the only persons in the village before whom I
could permit myself such eccentricities of diet without jocular
comment upon what would be regarded as a depraved mania.

One of these is the schoolmaster. Since he permits it and does not
fear the comments of the foolish, if by chance the secret of our
feast should be divulged, we will call him by his name, Jullian. A
man of broad views and reared upon science, his mind is open to
truth of every kind.

The second, Marius Guigne, is a blind man who, a carpenter by
profession, handles his plane and saw in the blackest darkness with
the same sureness of hand as that of a skilful-sighted person in
broad daylight. He lost his sight in his youth, after he had known
the joys of light and the wonders of colour. As a compensation for
perpetual darkness he has acquired a gentle philosophy, always
smiling; an ardent desire to fill, as far as possible, the gaps in
his meagre primary education; a sensitiveness of hearing able to
seize the subtle delicacies of music; and a fineness of touch most
extraordinary in fingers calloused by the labours of the workshop.
During our conversations, if he wishes to be informed as to this or
that geometrical property, he holds out his widely-opened hand.
This is our blackboard. With the tip of my forefinger, I trace on
it the figure to be constructed; accompanying my light touches with
a brief explanation. This is enough; the idea is grasped, and the
saw, plane, and lathe will translate it into reality.

On Sunday afternoons, in winter especially, when three logs flaming
on the hearth form a delicious contrast to the brutalities of the
Mistral, they meet in my house. The three of us form the village
Athenæum, the Rural Institute, where we speak of everything except
hateful politics.... At such a meeting, the delight of my solitude,
to-day’s dinner was devised. The special dish consists of the
cossus, a delicacy of great renown in ancient times.

When he had eaten a sufficient number of nations, the Roman,
brutalised by excess of luxury, began to eat worms. Pliny tells us:
“Romanis in hoc luxuria esse cœpit, prægrandesque roborum vermes
delicatiore sunt in cibo: Cossos vocant.” (The Romans have reached
such a degree of luxury at the table that they esteem as delicious
tit-bits the great worm from the oak-tree known as Cossus.)

I do not know with what sauce the Cossus was eaten in the days of
the Cæsars, the Apicius of the period having left us no information
on this point. Ortolans are roasted on a spit; it would be
profaning them to add the relish of complicated preparation. Let us
proceed in the same manner with the Cossus, these Ortolans of
entomology. Spitted in rows, they are exposed on the grill to the
heat of live embers. A pinch of salt, the necessary condiment of
our dish, is the only addition made to it. The roast grows golden,
softly sizzling, weeps a few oily tears which catch fire on contact
with the coals and burn with a white flame. It is done! Let us
serve it hot.

Encouraged by my example, my family bravely attack their roast. The
schoolmaster hesitates, the dupe of his imagination, which sees the
great grubs of a little while ago crawling across his plate. He has
taken for himself the smaller specimens, as the recollection of
these disturbs him less. Less subject to imaginary dislikes, the
blind man ruminates and savours them with every sign of
satisfaction.

The testimony is unanimous. The roast is juicy, tender, and
extremely tasty. One recognises in it a certain flavour of burnt
almonds which is enhanced by a vague aroma of vanilla. In short,
the vermicular dish is found to be highly acceptable, one might
even say excellent. What would it be if the refined art of the
gourmets of antiquity had cooked it!...

If I have made this investigation it was certainly not in the hope
of enriching the bill of fare. The rarity of the great grubs and
the repugnance which all kinds of vermin arouses in most of us will
always stand in the way of my discovery becoming a common dish....

As far as I am concerned, it was still less the desire for a dainty
mouthful that actuated me. My sobriety is not easily tempted. A
handful of cherries pleases me better than the preparations of our
kitchens. My only desire was to elucidate a point of natural
history. [134]

I certainly admire this zeal for science and this absence of prejudice even in the choice of food; yet I am tempted to remark that in the matter of intrepidity, whether in respect of food or of science, there is one of Fabre’s circle of acquaintances who surpassed the schoolmaster and perhaps equals Fabre himself. I am referring to Favier. Who, then, is Favier?

Favier is an old soldier. He has pitched his hut of clay and
branches under the African carob-trees; he has eaten sea-urchins at
Constantinople; he has shot starlings in the Crimea, during a lull
in the firing. He has seen much and remembered much. In winter,
when work in the fields ends at four o’clock and the evenings are
long, he puts away rake, fork, and barrow, and comes and sits on
the hearth-stone of the kitchen fireplace, where the billets of
ilex-wood blaze merrily. He fetches out his pipe, fills it
methodically with a moistened thumb and smokes it solemnly. He has
been thinking of it for many a long hour; but he has abstained, for
tobacco is expensive. The privation has doubled the charm; and not
one of the puffs recurring at regular intervals is wasted.

Meanwhile, we start talking. Favier is, in his fashion, one of
those bards of old who were given the best seat at the hearth, for
the sake of their tales; only my story-teller was formed in the
barrack-room. No matter: the whole household, large and small,
listen to him with interest; though his speech is full of vivid
images, it is always decent. It would be a great disappointment to
us if he did not come, when his work was done, to take his ease in
the chimney-corner.

What does he talk about to make him so popular? He tells us what he
saw of the coup d’Etat to which we owe the hated Empire; he talks
of the brandy served out and of the firing into the mob. He—so he
assures me—always aimed at the wall; and I accept his word for it,
so distressed does he appear to me and so ashamed of having taken a
hand, however innocent, in that felon’s game.

He tells us of his watches in the trenches before Sebastopol; he
speaks of his sudden terror when, at night, all alone on outpost
duty, squatting in the snow, he saw fall beside him what he calls a
flower-pot. It blazed and flared and shone and lit up everything
around. The infernal machine threatened to burst at every second;
and our man gave himself up for lost. But nothing happened: the
flower-pot went out quietly. It was a star-shell, an illuminating
contrivance fired to reconnoitre the assailant’s outworks in the
dark.

The tragedy of the battle-field is followed by the comedy of the
barracks. He lets us into the mysteries of the stew-pan, the
secrets of the mess, the humorous hardships of the cells. And, as
his stock of anecdotes, seasoned with racy expressions, is
inexhaustible, the supper hour arrives before any of us has had
time to remark how long the evening is.

Favier first attracted my notice by a master-stroke. One of my
friends had sent me from Marseilles a pair of enormous Crabs, the
Maia, the Sea-spider or Spider-crab of the fishermen. I was
unpacking the captives when the workmen returned from their dinner:
painters, stone-masons, plasterers engaged in repairing the house
which had been empty so long. At the sight of those strange
animals, studded with spikes all over the carapace and perched on
long legs that give them a certain resemblance to a monstrous
Spider, the onlookers gave a cry of surprise, almost of alarm.
Favier, for his part, remained unmoved; and, as he skilfully seized
the terrible Spider struggling to get away, he said:

“I know that thing; I’ve eaten it at Vasna. It’s first-rate.”

And he looked round at the bystanders with an air of humorous
mockery which was meant to convey:

“You’ve never been out of your hole, you people.”

Favier knows many things; and he knows them more particularly
through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back,
the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to
the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned
in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famed Rassade of the South; he has
thought out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the
impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan
career.

I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for
things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a
nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in
our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell
me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the
infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity.

But, above all, he excels in ridding me of the troublesome folk
whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as
fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured
with a spice of malice and in all his questions there is an
undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into
ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking
through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of
rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the
bantering catechism with a word. [135]

Favier has other qualities: he does not hesitate in the face of difficulties, and it is a point of honour with him to acquit himself manfully, however arduous the task.

Favier is not content with faithfully executing his master’s orders. Like all intelligent and devoted servants, he divines and anticipates his desires. He has happy ideas of initiative.

On the 14th of April 1880, Favier was clearing away a heap of mould
resulting from the waste weeds and leaves heaped up in a corner
against the enclosing wall.... In the midst of his work with spade
and wheelbarrow, he suddenly called me:

“A find, sir, a splendid find! Come and look!”

I hurried up. There, indeed, was a splendid discovery, and of a
kind to fill me with delight, reawakening all my old memories of
the Bois des Issarts. [136]

There swarmed a whole population of Scarabæi, in the form of larvæ, nymphs, and adult insects. There, too, were crowds of Rose-beetles (Cetoniæ), all stages being represented. There, too, were great numbers of Scoliæ, the Two-striped Scoliæ having recently emerged from their cocoons, which still had beside them the skins of the game served to the larvæ; and there, before the naturalist’s eyes, was the solution of the problem of the Scolia’s food, which “his painful researches in the Bois des Issarts had not enabled him to solve.” [137] Less than this had been needed for Favier to merit mention in the order of the day!

At the beginning of this chapter should we not have placed the insects themselves at the head of Fabre’s collaborators in his researches? When the insect takes a hand, Favier himself is out of the running.

In the meantime we have no intention of belittling Favier, or of retracting the praise which has been lavished upon him. Despite his inevitable deficiencies, and sometimes even because of them, Fabre owes him much. He owes him important manual services; he owes him curious data and inestimable discoveries; lastly, he owes him hitherto unknown opinions relating to evolution, for Favier is an evolutionist, and a highly original one.

For him the bat is a rat that has grown wings; the cuckoo is a
sparrow-hawk that has retired from business; the slug, a snail
which, through advancing age, has lost its shell; the night-jar,
the etraoucho-grepaou, as he calls it, is an old toad which, having
developed a passion for milk, has grown feathers in order to enter
the folds and milk the goats. It would be impossible to get these
fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier is, as will be seen, an
evolutionist after his fashion, and a daring evolutionist. Nothing
gives him pause in tracing the descent of animals. He has a reply
for everything: this comes from that. If you ask why, he replies:
“See how like they are!”

Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists
acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray
as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the
metamorphoses of the chavucho-grapaou when there are men who will
seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is
absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched
monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more
admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great
musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections
concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé:
l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et lou déforo d’uno mounino” (Man has
the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the
painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar,
when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent
is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un
por.”

And, therefore, the naturalist proceeds to make some wise reflections which we owe in the first place to Favier:

Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently
numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking
the child is the great generaliser.

For him the feathered race means just the bird, and the reptile
family the snake, without other differences than those of
magnitude. Ignorant of everything, he generalises to the utmost,
simplifying in his inability to see the complex. Later on he will
learn that the Sparrow is not the Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not
the Greenfinch; he will particularise, and he will do so more and
more daily as his faculty of observation is more widely exercised.
At first he saw nothing but resemblances, now he sees differences,
but not yet so clearly as to avoid incongruous comparisons and
zoological solecisms like those which my gardener utters. [138]

This chapter was to have taken the form of a letter addressed to
Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist who now lies buried
beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. It was my task to report to him
the result of some experiments which he had suggested to me in the
course of our correspondence: a very pleasant task, for, though
facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have
none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and
his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news
reached me: Darwin was dead: [139] after searching the mighty
question of origins, he was now grappling with the last and darkest
problem of the hereafter. [140]

This is what we need at the head of the seventh chapter of the second volume of the Souvenirs. Especially coming after what has gone before them, these few lines shed a more brilliant light upon Fabre’s secret attitude toward those very thinkers whose ideas he opposes most keenly than could any number of lectures. We have here the practical exemplification of that beautiful profession of faith inspired by Saint Augustine, which he has recorded elsewhere: “I wage war boldly upon those ideas that I believe untrue: but God preserve me from ever doing so upon those who maintain them.” [141]

In his constant skirmishes against the theory of evolution, even in the set battles which he occasionally fights, whenever he writes Charles Darwin’s name he mentions it with evident accents of respect and sympathy, gladly referring to him as “the master,” “the illustrious master,” “the venerated master.”

On his part the English scientist does full justice to the French scientist’s incomparable mastery in the study of insects. We have often mentioned the title of “inimitable observer” which he gives him in his work on the Origin of Species. In a letter dated the 16th of April 1881, he wrote to Mr. Romanes, who was preparing a book on Animal Intelligence: “I do not know whether you would care to discuss in your book some of the more complicated and marvellous instincts. It is an ungrateful task.... But if you discuss some of these instincts, it seems to me that you could not take a more interesting point than that of the animals that paralyse their prey, as Fabre has described in his astonishing memoir in the Annales des sciences naturelles, a memoir which he has since amplified in his admirable Souvenirs.”

When he wrote this Darwin was acquainted only with the first volume of the Souvenirs. [142] What would he have said if he could have enjoyed the whole of the learned entomologist’s masterly work?

In reading this first volume, the attention of the English naturalist had been especially struck by the operations of the Hunting Wasps, which were peculiarly upsetting to his theories.

Darwin was visibly preoccupied by the problem of instinct as propounded by the irrefutable observations of the French entomologist, but he did not despair of finding a solution in conformity with his system. Fabre, on his side, believed that his position was inexpugnable, and was not without hope of converting Darwin by what appeared to him to be the evidence of the facts.

Nowhere does the theory of evolution come full tilt against so
immovable an obstacle. Darwin, a true judge, did not fail to
realise this. He greatly dreaded the problem of the instincts. My
first results in particular had left him anxious. If he had known
the tactics of the Hairy Ammophila, the Mantis-hunting Tachytus,
the Philanthus apivorus, the Calicurgus, and other predatory
insects which have since been investigated, his anxiety, I believe,
would have become a frank avowal of his inability to get instinct
to enter the world of his formula. Alas! the philosopher of Down
left us when the discussion was only just beginning, with
experiment to fall back upon, a method superior to all arguments.
The little that I had published at that period left him still some
hope of explanation. In his eyes instinct is always an acquired
habit.

We have already mentioned Fabre’s relations with Moquin-Tandon, Dufour, Pasteur, and Duruy. Other names might be added to complete the list of his friends, or the correspondents whom he succeeded in interesting in entomology and admitting more or less to participation in his researches. [143] We will confine ourselves here to mentioning a worthy Brother of the Christian Colleges who afforded him one of the great pleasures of his life by enabling him to satisfy, at a small expense, without emptying his purse or too greatly curtailing his patient observations, one of the wilder longings of his youth, from which he was not always exempted by age:

To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to
cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of
its manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that
has eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years,
at the time when Robinson Crusoe was my delight. These rosy
illusions, rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull,
stay-at-home reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests of
Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, beloved by the condor,
were reduced, as a field for exploration, to a patch of pebbles
enclosed within four walls.

Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does
not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
herborised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his canary;
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry plant
that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre,
using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most
famous of journeys around his room.

This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting
the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the
bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a
hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there;
patiently I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some
scrap of a reply.

The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each
fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the
pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights;
each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton
bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the
Leaf-cutter.

If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not
suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of
the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into
relations with the Sacred Beetle, the Capricorn, the Geotrupes, the
Copris, the Decticus, the Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short
with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a
lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my
near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.

Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes
with that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in
the same guild of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with
climatic conditions.

Then my longing to travel returns, vainer to-day than ever, unless
one could find a seat on that carpet of which we read in the
Arabian Nights, the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be
carried whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far
preferable to Xavier de Maistre’s post-chaise! If I could only find
just a little corner on it, with a return-ticket!

I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Brother of
the Christian Schools, to Brother Judulien, of the La Salle College
at Buenos Aires. His modesty would be offended by the praises which
his debtor owes him. Let us simply say that, acting on my
instructions, his eyes take the place of mine. He seeks, finds,
observes, sends me his notes and his discoveries. I observe, seek
and find with him, by correspondence.

It is done; thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat
on the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine
Republic, eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the
Sérignan Dung-beetles and that of their rivals in the western
hemisphere. [144]

To close the history of the Sérignan hermit by opening such remote perspectives is not so inconsistent as it may seem, for, after having obstinately imprisoned himself within the narrow horizon of his village all his life, the Provençal recluse was beginning to be drawn out of it by the intelligent zeal of certain friends, who forced him to make a triumphant tour of France, and we might almost say of the world.

The magic carpet on which they made him sit for this magnificent journey was, however, by no means a borrowed article. It was he himself who had provided it. It was none other than the marvellous series, so rich and so varied, of his entomological works, which had only to be known in order to ensure for the author everywhere the welcome which he deserved, a truly enthusiastic welcome, and the place which was due to him: one of the foremost places among our scientists and our writers.