THE BOY WHO LOVED INSECTS

Insect Adventures by Jean-Henri Fabre and Louise Hasbrouck Zimm, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE BOY WHO LOVED INSECTS

CHAPTER XVII. THE BOY WHO LOVED INSECTS

NOWADAYS, people lay everything to heredity; that is, they say that human beings and animals both receive their special talents from their ancestors, who have perhaps been developing them through many generations. I do not altogether agree with this theory. I am going to tell you my own story to show that I did not inherit my passion for insects from any of my ancestors.

Neither my grandfather nor my grandmother on my mother’s side cared in the least about insects. I did not know my grandfather, but I know that he had a hard time making a living, and I am sure the only attention he paid to an insect, if he met it, was to crush it under his foot. Grandmother, who could not even read, certainly cared nothing about science or insects. If, sometimes, when rinsing her salad at the tap, she found a Caterpillar on the lettuce leaves, with a start of fright she would fling the loathsome thing away.

My other grandparents, my father’s father and mother, I knew well. Indeed, I went to live with them when I was five or six years old, because my father and mother were too poor to take care of me. These grandparents lived on a poverty-stricken farm away out in the country. They did not know how to read; they had never opened a book in their lives. Grandfather knew a great deal about cows and sheep, but nothing about anything else. How dumfounded he would have been to learn that, in the distant future, one of his family would spend his time studying insignificant insects! If he had guessed that that lunatic was myself, seated at the table by his side, what a smack I should have caught in the neck!

“The idea of wasting one’s time with that nonsense!” he would have thundered.

Grandmother, dear soul, was too busy with washing the clothes, minding the children, seeing to the meals of the household, spinning, attending to the chickens, curds and whey, butter, and pickles, to think of anything else. Sometimes, in the evenings, she used to tell us stories, as we sat around the fire, about the Wolf who lived on the moors. I should have very much liked to see this Wolf, the hero of so many tales that made our flesh creep, but I never did. I owe a great deal to you, dear grandmother; it was in your lap that I found consolation for my first sorrows. You have handed down to me, perhaps, a little of your physical vigor, a little of your love for work; but certainly you did not give me my love for insects.

Nor did either of my own parents. My mother was quite illiterate; my father had been to school as a child, he knew how to read and write a little, but he was too busy making a living to have room for any other cares. A good cuff or two when he saw me pinning an insect to a cork was all the encouragement I received from him.

And yet I began to observe, to inquire into things, when I was still almost a baby. My first memories of this tendency will amuse you. One day when I was five or six years old I was standing on the moor in front of our farm, clad in a soiled frieze frock flapping against my bare heels: I remember the handkerchief hanging from my waist by a bit of string,—a handkerchief, I am sorry to say, often lost and replaced by the back of my sleeve.

My face was turned toward the sun. The dazzling splendor fascinated me. No Moth was ever more attracted by the light of the lamp. As I stood there, I was asking myself a question. With what was I enjoying the glorious radiance, with my mouth or my eyes? Reader, do not smile: this was true scientific curiosity. I opened my mouth wide and closed my eyes: the glory disappeared. I opened my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappeared. I repeated the performance, with the same result. The question was solved: I had learned by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. Oh, what a discovery! That evening, I told the whole house about it. Grandmother smiled lovingly at my simplicity: the others laughed at it.

Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighboring bushes, a sort of jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little Bird chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter and that quickly. True, there is a Wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there, behind that clump of gloom.

I stand on the lookout for long, but all in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle ceases. I try again next day and the day after. This time, my stubborn watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is not a Bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind-legs my playfellows have taught me to like; a poor reward for my long hiding. The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy flavor, but what I have just learned. I now know, from personal observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not tell of my discovery, for fear of the same laughter that had greeted my story about the sun.

Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to smile at me with their great violet eyes. Later on, I see, in their place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the summer, grandfather comes with a spade and turns my field topsy-turvy. From underground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat-stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeonholed for good and all in my memory.

With an ever-watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practiced by himself, all unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the Large White Butterfly goes to the cabbage and the Red Admiral to the thistle. He looked and inquired, drawn by a curiosity whereof heredity did not know the secret.

A little later on I am back in the village, in my father’s house. I am now seven years old; and it is high time that I went to school. Nothing could have turned out better; the master is my godfather. What shall I call the room in which I was to become acquainted with the alphabet? It would be difficult to find the exact word, because the room served for every purpose. It was at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining-room and, at times, a chicken-house and a piggery. Palatial schools were not dreamed of in those days; any wretched hovel was thought good enough.

A broad fixed ladder led to the floor above. Under the ladder stood a big bed in a boarded recess. What was there upstairs? I never quite knew. I would see the master sometimes bring down an armful of hay for the Ass, sometimes a basket of potatoes which the housewife emptied into the pot in which the little porkers’ food was cooked. It must have been a sort of loft, a storehouse of provisions for man and beast. Those two rooms were all there were in the whole dwelling.

“The fire was not exactly lit for us.”

To return to the lower one, the schoolroom: a window faces south, the only window in the house, a low, narrow window whose frame you can touch at the same time with your head and both your shoulders. This sunny opening is the only lively spot in the dwelling; it overlooks the greater part of the village, which straggles along the slopes of a slanting valley. In the window-recess is the master’s little table.

The opposite wall contains a niche in which stands a gleaming copper pail full of water. Here the parched children can relieve their thirst when they please, with a cup left within their reach. At the top of the niche are a few shelves bright with pewter plates, dishes, and drinking-vessels, which are taken down from their sanctuary on great occasions only.

More or less everywhere, at any spot which the light touches, are crudely colored pictures pasted on the walls. Against the far wall stands the large fireplace. In the middle is the hearth, but, on the right and left, are two breast-high recesses, half wood and half stone. Each of them is a bed, with a mattress stuffed with chaff of winnowed corn. Two sliding planks serve as shutters and close the chest if the sleeper would be alone. These beds are used by the favored ones of the house, the two boarders. They must lie snug in there at night, with their shutters closed, when the north wind howls at the mouth of the dark valley and sends the snow awhirl. The rest is occupied by the hearth and its accessories: the three-legged stools; the salt-box, hanging against the wall to keep its contents dry; the heavy shovel which it takes two hands to wield; lastly, the bellows like those with which I used to blow out my cheeks in grandfather’s house. They are made of a mighty branch of pine, hollowed throughout its length with a red-hot iron. One blows through this channel. With a couple of stones for supports, the master’s bundle of sticks and our own logs blaze and flicker, each of us having to bring a log of wood in the morning, if he would share in the treat.

For that matter, the fire was not exactly lit for us, but, above all, to warm a row of three pots in which simmered the Pigs’ food, a mixture of potatoes and bran. That, in spite of our each giving a log, was the real object of the brushwood-fire. The two boarders, on their stools, in the best places, and we others sitting on our heels, formed a semicircle around those big kettles, full to the brim and giving off little jets of steam, with puff-puff-puffing sounds. The bolder among us, when the master was not looking, would dig a knife into a well-cooked potato and add it to their bit of bread; for I must say that, if we did little work in my school, at least we did a deal of eating. It was the regular custom to crack a few nuts and nibble at a crust while writing our page or setting out our rows of figures.

We, the smaller ones, in addition to the comfort of studying with our mouths full, had every now and then two other delights, which were quite as good as cracking nuts. The back-door gave upon the yard where the Hen, surrounded by her brood of Chicks, scratched, while the little Pigs, of whom there were a dozen, wallowed in their stone trough. This door would open sometimes to let one of us out, a privilege which we abused, for the sly ones among us were careful not to close it on returning. Forthwith, the porkers would come running in, one after the other, attracted by the smell of the boiled potatoes. My bench, the one where the youngsters sat, stood against the wall, under the copper pail, and was right in the way of the Pigs. Up they came trotting and grunting, curling their little tails; they rubbed against our legs; they poked their cold pink snouts into our hands in search of a scrap of crust; they questioned us with their sharp little eyes to learn if we happened to have a dry chestnut for them in our pockets. When they had gone the round, some this way and some that, they went back to the farmyard, driven away by a friendly flick of the master’s handkerchief.

Next came the visit of the Hen, bringing her velvet-coated Chicks to see us. All of us eagerly crumbled a little bread for our pretty visitors. We vied with one another in calling them to us and tickling with our fingers their soft and downy backs.

What could we learn in such a school as that! Each of the younger pupils had, or rather was supposed to have, in his hands a little penny book, the alphabet, printed on gray paper. It began, on the cover, with a Pigeon, or something like it. Next came a cross, with the letters in their order. But, if the little book was to be of any use, the master should have shown us something about it. For this, the worthy man, too much taken up with the big ones, had not the time. He gave us the book only to make us look like scholars. We were to study it on our bench, to decipher it with the help of our next neighbor, in case he might know one or two of the letters. Our studying came to nothing, being every moment disturbed by a visit to the potatoes in the stew-pots, a quarrel among playmates about a marble, the grunting invasion of the little Pigs or the arrival of the Chicks.

The big ones used to write. They had the benefit of the small amount of light in the room, by the narrow window, and of the large and only table with its circle of seats. The school supplied nothing, not even a drop of ink; every one had to come with a full set of utensils. The inkhorn of those days was a long cardboard box divided into two parts. The upper compartment held the pens, made of goose- or turkey-quill trimmed with a penknife; the lower contained, in a tiny well, ink made of soot mixed with vinegar.

The master’s great business was to mend the pens—and then to trace at the head of the white page a line of strokes, single letters, or words, according to the scholar’s capabilities. When that is over keep an eye on the work of art which is coming to adorn the copy! With what undulating movements of the wrist does the master’s hand, resting on the little finger, prepare and plan its flight! All at once the hand starts off, flies, whirls; and lo and behold, under the line of writing is unfurled a garland of circles, spirals, and flourishes, framing a bird with outspread wings, the whole, if you please, in red ink, the only kind worthy of such a pen. Large and small, we stood awestruck in the presence of these marvels.

What was read at my school? At most, in French, a few selections from sacred history. Latin came oftener, to teach us to sing vespers properly.

And history, geography? No one ever heard of them. What difference did it make to us whether the earth was round or square! In either case, it was just as hard to make it bring forth anything.

And grammar? The master troubled his head very little about that; and we still less. And arithmetic? Yes, we did a little of this, but not under that learned name. We called it sums. On Saturday evening, to finish up the week, there was a general orgy of sums. The top boys stood up and, in a loud voice, recited the multiplication table up to twelve times. When this recital was over, the whole class, the little ones included, took it up in chorus, creating such an uproar that Chicks and porkers took to flight if they happened to be there.

When all is said, our master was an excellent man who could have kept school very well but for his lack of one thing; and that was time. He managed the property of an absentee landlord. He had under his care an old castle with four towers, which had become so many pigeon-houses; he directed the getting-in of the hay, the walnuts, the apples and the oats. We used to help him during the summer. Lessons at that time were less dull. They were often given on the hay or on the straw; oftener still, lesson-time was spent in cleaning out the dove-cot or stamping on the Snails that had sallied in rainy weather from their fortresses, the tall box borders of the garden belonging to the castle.

Our master was a barber. With his light hand, which was so clever at beautifying our copies with curlicue birds, he shaved the notabilities of the place: the mayor, the parish-priest, the notary. Our master was a bell-ringer. A wedding or a christening interrupted the lessons; he had to ring a peal. A gathering storm gave us a holiday; the great bell must be tolled to ward off the lightning and the hail. Our master was a choir-singer. Our master wound up and regulated the village-clock. This was his proudest duty. Giving a glance at the sun, to tell the time more or less nearly, he would climb to the top of the steeple, open a huge cage of rafters and find himself in a maze of wheels and springs whereof the secret was known to him alone.

With such a school and such a master and such examples, what will become of my natural tastes, as yet so undeveloped? In those surroundings, they seem bound to perish, stifled forever. Yet no, the germ has life; it works in my veins, never to leave them again. It finds food everywhere, down to the cover of my penny alphabet, beautified with a crude picture of a Pigeon which I study much more eagerly than the A B C. Its round eye, with its circlet of dots, seems to smile upon me. Its wing, of which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs, dropped by some wandering hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my Pigeon-friend; he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench and wait more or less till school is over.

School out-of-doors has other charms. When the master takes us to kill the Snails in the box borders, I do not always do so. My heel sometimes hesitates before coming down upon the handful which I have gathered. They are so pretty! Just think, there are yellow ones and pink, white ones and brown, all with dark spiral streaks. I fill my pockets with the handsomest, so as to feast my eyes on them at my leisure.

On hay-making days in the master’s field, I strike up an acquaintance with the Frog. Flayed and stuck at the end of a split stick, he serves as bait to tempt the Crayfish to come out of his retreat by the brook-side. On the alder-trees I catch the Hoplia, the splendid Beetle who pales the azure of the heavens. I pick the narcissus and learn to gather, with the tip of my tongue, the tiny drop of honey that lies right at the bottom of the cleft corolla. I also learn that too-long indulgence in this feast brings a headache; but this discomfort in no way impairs my admiration for the glorious white flower, which wears a narrow red collar at the throat of its funnel.

When we go to beat the walnut-trees, the barren grass-plots provide me with Locusts spreading their wings, some into a blue fan, others into a red. And thus the country school, even in the heart of winter, furnished continuous food for my interest in things. My passion for animals and plants made progress of itself.

What did not make progress was my acquaintance with my letters, greatly neglected in favor of the Pigeon. I was still at the same stage, hopelessly behindhand with the alphabet, when my father, by a chance inspiration, brought me home from the town what was to give me a start along the road of reading. It was a large print, price three cents, colored and divided into compartments in which animals of all sorts taught the A B C by means of the first letters of their names. You began with the sacred beast, the Donkey, whose name, Âne, with a big initial, taught me the letter A. The Bœuf, the Ox, stood for B; the Canard, the Duck, told me about C; the Dindon, the Turkey, gave me the letter D. And so on with the rest. A few compartments, it is true, were lacking in clearness. I had no friendly feeling for the Hippopotamus, the Kamichi, or Horned Screamer, and the Zebu, who aimed at making me say H, K, and Z. No matter; father came to my aid in hard cases; and I made such rapid progress that, in a few days, I was able to turn in good earnest the pages of my little Pigeon-book, hitherto so undecipherable. I was initiated; I knew how to spell. My parents marveled. I can explain this unexpected progress to-day. Those speaking pictures, which brought me amongst my friends the beasts, were in harmony with my tastes. I have the animals to thank for teaching me to read. Animals forever!

Luck favored me a second time. As a reward for learning to read, I was given La Fontaine’s Fables, in a popular, cheap edition, crammed with pictures, small, I admit, and very inaccurate, but still delightful. Here were the Crow, the Fox, the Wolf, the Magpie, the Frog, the Rabbit, the Donkey, the Dog, the Cat; all persons of my acquaintance. The glorious book was immensely to my taste, with its skimpy illustrations in which the animals walked and talked. As to understanding what it said, that was another story! Never mind, my lad! Put together syllables that say nothing to you as yet; they will speak to you later and La Fontaine will always remain your friend.

I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. I was well thought of in the school, for 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 Cynœgirus, 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-tooth.

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. While admiring Cadmus and Cynœgirus, 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.

By easy stages I came to Virgil and was very much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas and the rest of them. 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 real delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.

Then, suddenly, good-by to my studies, good-by 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.

During this sad time, my love for the insects ought to have gone under. Not at all. 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.

To cut a long story short: good fortune, which never abandons the brave, brought me to the primary normal school at Vaucluse, where I was certain of food: dried chestnuts and chick-peas. The principal, a man of broad views, soon came to trust his new assistant. He left me practically a free hand so long as I satisfied the school curriculum, which was very modest in those days. I was a little ahead of my fellow-pupils. I took advantage of this to get some order into my vague knowledge of plants and animals. While a dictation lesson was being corrected around me, I would examine, in the recesses of my desk, the oleander’s fruit, the snap-dragon’s seed-vessel, the Wasp’s sting and the Ground-beetle’s wing-case.

With this foretaste of natural science, picked up haphazard and secretly, I left school more deeply in love than ever with insects and flowers. And yet I had to give it all up. Natural history could not bring me anywhere. The schoolmasters of the time despised it; Latin, Greek, and mathematics were the subjects to study.

So I flung myself with might and main into higher mathematics: a hard battle, if ever there was one, without teachers, face to face for days on end with abstruse problems. Next I studied the physical sciences in the same manner, with an impossible laboratory, the work of my own hands. I went against my feelings: I buried my natural-history books at the bottom of my trunk.

And so, in the end, I am sent to teach physics and chemistry at Ajaccio College. This time, the temptation is too much for me. The sea, with its wonders, the beach, covered with beautiful shells, the myrtles, arbutus, and other trees; all this paradise of gorgeous nature is more attractive than geometry and trigonometry. I give up. I divide my spare time into two parts. The larger part is devoted to mathematics, by which I expect to make my way in the world; the other is spent, with much misgiving, in botanizing and looking for the treasures of the sea.

We never know what will happen to us. Mathematics, on which I spent so much time in my youth, has been of hardly any good to me; and animals, which I avoided as much as ever I could, are the consolation of my old age.

I met two famous scientists in Ajaccio: Requien, a well-known botanist, and Moquin-Tandom, who gave me my first lesson in natural history. He stayed at my house, as the hotel was full. The day before he left he said to me:

“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”

He took a sharp pair of scissors from the family work-basket and a couple of needles, and showed me the anatomy of a snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, the never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.

It is time to finish this story about myself. It shows that from early childhood I have felt drawn towards the things of nature. I have the gift of observation. Why and how? I do not know.

We have all of us, men and animals, some special gift. One child takes to music, another is always modeling things out of clay; another is quick at figures. It is the same way with insects. One kind of Bee can cut leaves; another builds clay houses, Spiders know how to make webs. These gifts exist because they exist, and that is all any one can say. In human beings, we call the special gift genius. In an insect, we call it instinct. Instinct is the animal’s genius.

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