Chapter V: At the College of Rodez

We have learned what we may of the schoolboy of Saint-Léons. Let us follow him to the Lycée of Rodez, which he entered as a day-boy at the age of ten:

I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College.
My functions as a serving-boy in the chapel entitled me to free
instruction as a day-boarder. There were four of us in white
surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of
the party, and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit;
and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the
bell or when to move the missal from one side of the altar to the
other. I was all of a tremble when we gathered, two on this side,
two on that, with genuflexions, in the middle of the sanctuary, to
intone the Domine, salvum fac regem at the end of mass. Let me make
a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the
others.

Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a
good figure in composition and translation. In that classical
atmosphere there was talk of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two
sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynægirus, the strong-jawed
man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a
Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who
sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans, and gathered his
harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another
as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the
slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the
big back grinder.

Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have
been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was
far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and
demigods. While honouring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynægirus, I
hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the
cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the
meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the
Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars. Thus
was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before. [24]

At Rodez, as at Saint-Léons, natural objects provided him with the chief material of his recreations:

The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was
done, our dozen Greek roots had been learnt by heart; and we
trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of
madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited,
artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river,
the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than
our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the
sand amid the water-weeds. We fully expected to transfix him with
our trident, a fork.

This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it
succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us; the Loach, the rascal,
saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!

We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring
pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin’s delight,
above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him.
Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.

Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare,
roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around
the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of
us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in
this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying
on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys
was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the
aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.

And now look out for the farmer’s wife! The loud gobbling of the
harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up
armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a
good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!

How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the
Turkey’s slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no
one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into
children’s games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from
one initiate to another.

Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where
there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry
to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is
nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is
not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis. [25]

The incident of which we have just read was the starting-point of the investigations which Fabre was to undertake fifty years later concerning the artificial sleep of birds and insects.

If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is, he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet:

By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with
Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The
scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and
within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite
details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow,
the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were
these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin
poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections. [26]

Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of the Bucolics and the Georgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than the Metamorphoses of Ovid or Religion of Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodez lycée with literary exercises.

All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life.

In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions:

The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the
problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a
fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of
youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought
to mind by this incident or that.

Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the
butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when
I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I
would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly
cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those
shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any
rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox.

With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the
animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The
man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid
the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the
ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is
not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he
tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly
fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and
hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While
an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher
takes a knife with a pointed blade; not at all a formidable knife,
hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my
breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back
of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen
spot. The great beast gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by
lightning: procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days.

I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how
it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I
used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my
chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill
him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from
the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab, and the
thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.

This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an
awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I
learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the
course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of
anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves
the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the
vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner
of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres. [27]

This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob.

Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and
Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger
threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run
about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is
about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this
phase.

Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have
gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of the
Medusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the
first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white
spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the
gloomy wretchedness of the day. [28]