Little Henri loves those stories, but he loves something else better still, for which the others laugh at him. He finds a whole fairy world for himself by watching the queer insects that abound in that countryside. Little six-year-old monkey! He will stand in ecstasy before the splendor of the gardener beetle's wingcases, or the wings of a butterfly. All the dazzling beauty of their shimmering color is as magic unto him.
Once he heard a little singing, faint and soft among the bushes, at nightfall. What was it? A little bird? He must discover. True, he dares not venture too far away. There are wolves about, you know. Just there it is, the sound, behind that clump of broom. The boy puts out his hand. In vain! At the faintest little noise the brushwood jingle ceases. At last! Whoosh! A grab of the hand and he holds the singer fast. It is not a bird; it is a kind of grasshopper, and the boy knows now from his own observation that the grasshopper sings.
Ah, well-a-day! Now he is going back to the town of St. Leons in southern France where he was born. His father has sent for him to go to school. The schoolmaster of St. Leons is Henri's godfather, and what a man he is! He is not only schoolmaster; he is village barber as well and shaves all the notables, the mayor and parish priest. He is the bell-ringer who must interrupt his lessons to ring a merry peal for a wedding or a christening. He is choir-master and fills the church with his mighty voice at vespers. He is care-taker of the village clock and climbs every day to the top of the steeple, where he opens a huge cage of rafters and performs some miraculous windings amidst a maze of wheels and springs. He is manager of the property of an absentee landlord, directs the getting in of the hay, the walnuts, the apples and oats; he takes care of an old vacant castle with four great towers which are now but so many houses for pigeons. Such time as he has left from these duties he gives to his teaching! And the room where little Henri goes to school! It is at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining room, a chicken house and a piggery! There is a ladder leading up out of it to the loft above, whence the schoolmaster sometimes brings down hay for his ass, or a basket of potatoes for the housewife. That loft is the only other room in the house. The school room has a monumental fireplace, adorned with enormous bellows and a shovel so huge that it takes two hands to lift it. On either side of the hearth are recesses in the wall. These recesses are beds, and each has two sliding planks that serve as doors and shut in the sleeper at night, so he may lie cozy and snug while the North-wind howls without. Over in the sunny nook by the window stands the masters desk, and opposite, in a wall-niche, gleam a copper water-pail and rows of shining pewter dishes. Well nigh every spot on the wall that is touched by the light is adorned with a gay-colored half-penny picture. There is the lovely Genevieve of Brabant with her roe, and the fierce villain, Golo, hiding, sword in hand, darkly in the bushes. There is the Wandering Jew with hobnailed boots and a stout stick, his long, white beard falling, like an avalanche of snow, over his apron to his knees. What a source of constant delight to Henri are these pictures! How they hold his eye with their color—great patches of red, blue and green!
On three-legged stools before the hearth sit the little scholars, and there before them, in an enormous cauldron over the flames, hangs the pigs' food, simmering and giving off jets of steam with a puff-puff-puffing sound. Sometimes the boys take care to leave the school room door open. Then the little porkers, attracted by the smell of the food, come running in. They go trotting up to Henri, grunting and curling their little tails, questioning with their sharp little eyes, and poking their cold, pink snouts into his hand in search of a chestnut or scrap of bread. The master flicks his handkerchief—snick! Off go the little pigs! All to no use! A moment later, behold, in the doorway, old Madame Hen with her velvet-coated brood! The boys crumble pieces of bread and vie with each other to call the little chicks to them. Ah! their backs are so downy and soft to tickle with your fingers! It was not much little Henri could learn in such a school. No! He held a book up in front of his face but he never even learned his letters! One day his father brings him home a gaily-colored print, divided into squares, in each of which an animal teaches the alphabet by means of his name. A is for Ass, and so on! Little Henri is overjoyed. Those speaking pictures bring him among his friends. Animals forever! The beasts have taught him his letters!
But now where shall he keep his precious print? He has a little sanctum that he has appropriated to himself in their humble home. It is a window in a cozy recess like the schoolmaster s. From there he can overlook the whole village as it straggles along the hillside. Way down in the hollow is the church with its three steeples and its clock. A little higher up lies the village square where a fountain falls from basin to basin beneath a high-arched roof. Sprinkled over the slopes above lie little houses with garden patches rising in terraces banked up by tottering walls. Between, are steep lanes cut out of the solid rock, lanes so steep that even the sure-footed mules, with their loads of branches, hesitate to enter them. High above all, standing out against the sky, a few wind-battered oaks bristle on the ridges. Those trees are Henri's friends and he loves them dearly. In stormy weather they bow their heads and turn their backs to the wind. They bend and toss about as though to uproot themselves and take to flight. How often has Henri watched them writhing like madmen when the North-wind's besom raises the snow-dust; and then tomorrow they stand motionless, still and upright, against a fair blue sky. What are they doing up there, those desolate trees? He is gladdened by their calmness and distressed by their terrified gestures. They are his friends. In the morning the sun rises behind their transparent screen and ascends in its glory. Where does it come from? To the boy those trees seem the boundary of the world. In this cozy little sanctum, with such an outlook, Henri keeps all his treasures. It is not too many treasures that he is allowed to keep. Once he was sent up the hillside by the path that climbed behind the chateau to the pond. He was to lead their twenty-four downy ducklings to the water. What a delight that pond was to him! On the warm mud of its edge, the Frog's baby, the little Tadpole, basks and frisks in its black legions. At the bottom are beautiful shells and little worms carrying tufts and feathers. Above, the reeds and water are swarming with busy life. It is a whole immense world for Henri to observe. What are all those little creatures about? What are they doing? What are their names? While the ducklings rummage delightedly, head-downward and stern-upward in the water, Henri looks carefully about. There are some soot-colored knots like strands of old yarn in the mud. He lifts one up. It slips sticky and slack through his fingers, but look! a few of the knots have burst, and out comes a black globule the size of a pinhead, followed by a flat tail. He recognizes, on a small scale, the Frog's baby, the Tadpole, and has found out that these are her eggs. Enough! he disturbs the knots of yam no more.
When he goes home that night his pockets are bulging with treasures. He has found stones that glitter like diamonds, and something like gold-dust amidst the sand. On the alder trees he has found that beautiful beetle, the sacred scarab. It is of an unutterable blue, a living jewel that pales the azure of the sky. He puts the glorious one in an empty snail shell which he plugs up with a leaf. He will take it home to observe it at leisure. But when he reaches the cottage and mother and father see his pockets, like to be torn to pieces by their burden, his father cries:
"You rascal! I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself by picking up stones. Make haste, throw them away!"
Broken-hearted, he obeys. Diamonds, gold-dust, petrified ram's-horn, heavenly beetle, all are flung on the ash-heap!
The brook that runs through the village is also a source of constant delight to Henri,—dear little brook, so tranquil, cool and dear. Half-way up the hillside a miller has dammed it to make a reservoir for his mill-wheel. The reservoir is shut off from the road by a melancholy wall, all darkly bearded with ferns, but one day little Henri hoists himself up on a playfellow's shoulders and peers over. Bottomless, stagnant water he sees, covered with slimy, green scum, and in the gaps of that carpet, there lazily swims a black and yellow reptile! Ha! the very serpent or dragon of his grandmother's fireside tales it seems. Henri loses no time. He slips down again in a hurry. Years later he knows he had seen a salamander.
Below the reservoir, alders and ash bend forward on either side of the brook, a lofty arch of living green. At the foot of the trees the great twisted roots form watery caverns prolonged into gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers only a glint of sunshine that sifts down through the leaves overhead. This is the haunt of the red-necktied minnow. Come along very gently. Lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are with their scarlet throats. See them there clustering side by side and rinsing their mouths incessantly. No movement save the slightest quiver of their tails and the fin on their backs to keep them still in running water. On a sudden a leaf drops down from the tree. Whoosh! the whole troop disappears!
On the other side of the brook is a cluster of beeches with smooth straight trunks like pillars. In the shade of those majestic branches sit chattering crows. The ground below is padded with moss, and at Henri's first step on that downy carpet his eye is caught by what?—it must be an egg dropped there by some vagrant hen. No! It is that curious thing, a mushroom, not yet full spread. It is the first he has ever picked and he turns it about in his fingers inquiring into its structure. Soon he finds another differing in size and shape and color. Ah! what a great treat it is! This one is bell-shaped, that one is like a cup; others are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels or rounded like hemispheres. He comes upon one that is broken and weeping milky tears. He steps upon another and it all turns blue in an instant. Ah! but here is one shaped like a pear with a little hole at the top like a sort of chimney. He prods the under side with his fingers. A whiff of smoke shoots up from the chimney! Amusing! How amusing! Henri has found a puff ball.
Plants and insects and animals,—on every side, what things of interest in the world! Among the golden buttercups of the meadows, the blue campanulas of the hills, the pink heather of the mountains, the fragrant bracken of the woods, what treasures Henri finds! And the birds! Once he was climbing the hill with an apple for his lunch, to visit his friends, the trees, and explore the edge of the world. But what is this at his feet? A lovely bird has flown from its hiding place under the eaves of a stone. Bless us! here is a nest made of hair and fine straw, and in it six eggs laid so prettily side by side. Those eggs are a magnificent blue, as though steeped in the blue of the sky. Overpowered with happiness, Henri lies down on the grass and stares, while the mother, with a little clap of her gullet—tack! tack! flits anxiously near by. It is the first nest which Henri has ever found, the first of the joys which the birds are to bring him.
But when Henri is twelve years old his father moves away from the country and goes to the town to keep a cafe. Now Henri may go to school where he can really learn. His father, however, is never truly successful. He is always poor. Bad days come again when Henri must leave his lessons and earn his bread as best he may, now selling lemons under the arcades of the market at the fair of Beaucaire, or before the barracks of the Pré, another day enlisting in a gang of day-laborers to work on the road. Gloomy days those were, lonely and despairing, but in spite of all, the boy's love of nature and his passion for learning upheld him. Often, too, some creature kept him company, some insect never seen before. Today he is hungry, but he finds for the first time the pine-chafer, that superb beetle whose black or chestnut coat is sprinkled with specks of white velvet, and which squeaks when you capture him, with a slight complaining sound. Enough! Henri's hunger is forgotten.
When he is nineteen Henri takes a competitive examination and enters the normal school of Carpentras. He finishes the very simple schooling there, and then, little as he knows, he begins to teach others. What a teacher he is, studying right along with his pupils and learning through teaching them, puzzling out for himself, with passionate devotion, every branch of science, and teaching as he goes. Now he holds his chemistry class with rudest, home-made instruments, in the dusky, vaulted nave of an old, abandoned, Gothic church, which has once seemed to him like some wizard's den, with its rusty, old weather-cock creaking atop its steeple, the great bats flitting among the gargoyles and the owls hooting on the roof. Now he takes his pupils out among the fields to study nature "at the ineffable festival of the awakening of life in the Spring."
His pupils love him dearly, but alas! education is still held in little esteem in France. The salary paid Professor Fabre is but a paltry pittance. He is married, too, and has a family to keep. How can he make both ends meet? Only by teaching, teaching, teaching, and that leaves him so little time to study his precious insects. He is peculiar, too, is Professor Fabre, and finds little favor with his fellow teachers. In the simplicity of his heart he cares nothing for worldly honors, for the forms and ceremonies of the world. He cares only to study and to learn. He does not like to wear the long, slick, black coat and high silk hat befitting a Professor. Fie! There goes Professor Fabre in a little slouch hat! It is unseemly! He must be reprimanded! He must wear a "topper" like his fellows! And so it goes. For thirty years of patient struggle, so it goes. But now, at last, he has acquired a modest income from his writings. He can leave off teaching and buy a little house at Sérignan. Glory be! he can doff his professor's coat and don the peasant's blouse again! He can plant a flower in his old silk hat, and when it has served its time as a flowerpot he can kick it into bits! He is free for his studies!
A pink house with green shutters, half hidden among trees, was the hermitage at Sérignan, and its garden a riot of verdure, the sweet air full of insects humming and heavy with perfume. Here those little creatures each told the student its secret and its history. How he loved them all, how tenderly he wrote of them, how accurately he observed them. Other scientists dissected insects and sought the secret of their life from death; Fabre observed his alive and sought the secret of their life from the marvelous instinct that directed all their ways. With reverence and awe he stood before the unerring Power that guides the wild bee and the wasp, though they may be carried miles away from home, back over vast and unknown spaces, surely to their nests. In instinct he saw the lofty evidence of God. How wonderfully those little creatures built their nests, how certain was the power that guided them, how surely each fulfilled his given task. True, the ugliness he saw in that little world troubled his tender spirit,—the cannibalism, the brutality of manners, the murders and assassinations. Here was something to wish done away. But far above all else, he marveled at the wonderful intelligence that directed there, and throughout nature he adored the great Eternal Power whose imprint is everywhere.
Studying in his sunny garden, Fabre not only loved insects himself, but he also taught others to love them. He was the first to cast away in his writing the long words and dry scientific phrases which other scientists used and which seemed to him like some barbarous Iroquois tongue. He wrote as the poet writes. For him the cricket was not some creature with a long Latin name, but "the brown violinist of the clods," and that voracious diving beetle that feeds on all the other insects of the water, was not the Dytiscus only, but the "pirate of the ponds." He tells us how at break of day "the bee pops her head out of her attic window to see what the weather is" and how "the timid spider of the thickets suspends by ethereal cables the branching whorls of his snare which the tears of the night have turned into chaplets of jewels." What fairy tale could equal to him the wonder of the butterfly bursting from the cocoon, or the marvelous unfolding of the locust's iridescent wings? He had his flesh-eating ogres too, his pirates and assassins, his modest and industrious little workers with their thousand curious callings, and his pigmy princes clad in gold and purple, dazzling with embroidery, adorned with lofty plumes, displaying their diamonds, their topazes and sapphires, gleaming with fire or shining like mirrors, magnificent of mien. To him, the best fairy book ever written could be read by simply upturning a stone. And so little Henri discovered the Fairyland of Science and revealed it to the world.