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The book is a biographical tribute to the celebrated French entomologist Jean‑Henri Fabre, assembled from articles that originally appeared in the Journal d’Aveyron. Its opening explains that the author, Augustin Fabre, wrote the work in 1910 to accompany the jubilee celebrations in Sérignan, gathering together scattered reminiscences, local anecdotes, and references to Fabre’s ten‑volume Souvenirs Entomologiques. The preface frames the text as a regional homage, linking Fabre’s humble origins in the Rouergue tableland to his later fame, and it promises a coordinated portrait that blends factual detail with the author’s enthusiastic admiration. The contents list shows a chronological progression from Fabre’s childhood through his teaching career, his retirement, and his final years as the “hermit of Sérignan,” culminating in reflections on his writings and collaborators.
The narrative voice is that of a contemporary admirer, earnest and reverent, whose style mixes factual reportage with lyrical flourishes typical of early‑20th‑century French memoirs. The language is formal yet accessible, interweaving personal recollections, quotations from notable figures such as Victor Hugo and Darwin, and occasional theological musings. Readers who enjoy richly detailed biographies, especially those that illuminate the intersection of science, literature, and regional culture, will find this work rewarding. It will appeal to historians of science, entomology enthusiasts, and anyone drawn to the passionate portrait of a naturalist who saw poetry in the smallest of creatures.
The opening · free to read
“Put your back into it, my boy! Go ahead; follow the footsteps of your fellow-countryman and kinsman, Henri Fabre of Malaval, who has done what you want to do, and has become an eminent professor and a learned writer.”
It is hardly credible, but this was the first time I had heard any one mention this famous namesake of mine, whose family, nevertheless, used to live on the opposite slope of the puech against which my tiny native mas was built.
His remark was not unheeded, and the name then engraved upon my memory has never been erased from it.
A few years later, having secured my doctor’s degree, I was teaching philosophy, not in the University, but in the Grand Seminaire [1] of Lyons. The problem of instinct, which enters into the province of psychology, led me to consult the works of J. H. Fabre, which were recommended to me by the professor of Science. My worthy colleague regarded the author of the Souvenirs Entomologiques with a sort of worship, and it was with positive delight that he used to read aloud to me the finest passages of those masterly “Essays upon the Instincts and Habits of Insects.”
A little later I chanced, in the course of my reading, on the Revue Scientifique de Bruxelles, which contained abundant extracts from the sixth volume of the Souvenirs, in which the author becomes confidential, and tells us, in the most delightful fashion, of his earliest childhood in the home of his grandparents “who tilled a poor holding on the cold granite backbone of the Rouergue tableland.” Hullo! I said to myself: so the prince of entomologists is a child of the Rouergue! What a discovery!
For a long time I thought of publishing, in the local press, a short biography of Fabre with a few extracts from his writings. I was only waiting an opportunity and a little leisure.
This leisure I had not yet found, when the opportunity offered itself in a decisive and urgent fashion, in the scientific jubilee of the great naturalist, which was celebrated at Sérignan on April 3, 1910. When all Provence was agog to celebrate the great man, when from all parts of France and from beyond her frontiers evidences of sympathy and admiration were pouring in, was it not only fitting that a voice should be upraised from the heart of Aveyron, and, above all, from that corner of Aveyron in which he first saw the light of day; if only to echo so many other voices, and to restore to his native countryside this unrivalled son of the Rouergue who had perhaps too readily been naturalised a Provençal? Moreover, in these times of overweening atheism, when so many pseudo-scientists are striving to persuade the ignorant that science is learning to dispense with God, would it not be a most timely thing to reveal, to the eyes of all, a scientist of undoubted genius who finds in science fresh arguments for belief, and manifold occasions for affirming his faith in the God who has created and rules the world?
And that was the origin of this book, the genesis of which will explain its character. Written especially for local readers, and consisting entirely of articles which appeared in the Journal d’Aveyron, it is fitting that it should piously gather up the most trivial local reminiscences of J. H. Fabre, and that it should be full of allusions to the men and the things of Aveyron. Written solely to call attention to the life and labours of Fabre, the writer seeks to co-ordinate in a single book the biographical data scattered throughout the ten volumes and four thousand pages of the Souvenirs.
The reader must not take exception to the all but invariable praise of their author nor to that spirit of enthusiasm which he will perhaps detect behind the pages of this volume. This is not to say that everything in the life and work of our hero is equally perfect and worthy of admiration. Whether knowledge or virtue be in question human activity must always fall short somewhere, must always in some degree be defective. Omnis consummationis vidi finem, said the Psalmist. But apart from the fact that it is not yet time, perhaps, to form a final judgment, the reader, I trust, will remember that this book comes to him with an echo of the jubilee celebrations of Sérignan, and the homage, still touched with enthusiasm, of a son of Aveyron and the Vezins countryside to the most illustrious of his fellow-countrymen.
La Griffoulette, near Vezins, August 28, 1910.
In a few days’ time [2] naturalists, poets, and philosophers will repair in company to Sérignan, in the neighbourhood of Orange. What is calling them from every point of the intellectual horizon, from the most distant cities and capitals, to a little Provençal village? Moussu Fabré, they would tell you yonder, in a tone of respectful sympathy.
But who is the Moussu Fabré thus cherished by the simplest as well as by the most cultivated minds? He is a sturdy old man of all but ninety years, who has spent almost the whole of his life in the company of Wasps, Bees, Gnats, Beetles, Spiders, and Ants, and has described the doings of these tiny creatures in a most wonderful fashion in ten large volumes entitled Souvenirs Entomologiques or Etudes sur l’Instinct et les Mœurs des Insectes. [3]
One might say of this achievement what the author of Lettres Persanes said of his book: Proles sine matre. It is a child without a mother. It is, in short, unprecedented. [4] It has not its fellow, either in the Machal of Solomon, or the apologues of the old fabulists, or the treatises on natural history written by our modern scientists. The fabulists look to find man in the animal, which for them is little more than a pretext for comparisons and moral narratives, and the scientists commonly confine their curiosity to the dissection of the insect’s organs, the analysis of its functions, and the classification of species. We might even say that the insect is the least of their cares, for, like Solomon, they delight in holding forth upon all the creatures upon the earth or in the heavens above, and all the plants “from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall” (1 Kings iv: 32–33).
Fabre, on the contrary, has eyes only for the insect. He observes it by and for itself, in the most trivial manifestations of its life: the living, active insect, with its labours and its habits, is the thing that interests him before all else, guiding his investigation of the infinite host of these tiny lives, which claim his attention on every hand; and in this world of insects wealth of artifice and capacities of the mental order seem to be in an inverse ratio to beauty of form and brilliance of colour. For this reason Fabre learns to disdain the magnificent Butterfly, applying himself by preference to the modest Fly: the two-winged Flies, which are relatives of our common House-fly, or the four-winged Flies, the numerous and infinitely various cousins of the Wasps and Bees; the Spiders, ugly indeed, but such skilful spinners, and even the Dung-beetles and Scarabæidæ of every species, those wonderful agents of terrestrial purification.
In this singular world, which affords him the society which he prefers, he has gathered an ample harvest of unexpected facts and highly perplexing actions on the part of these little so-called inferior animals. No one has excelled him in detecting their slightest movements, and in surprising all the secrets of their lives. Darwin declared, and many others have repeated his words, that Fabre was “an incomparable observer.” The verdict is all the more significant in that the French entomologist did not scruple to oppose his observations to the theories of the famous English naturalist.
Not only in the certainty and the detailed nature of his facts, but also in the colour and reality of his descriptions is his mastery revealed. In him the naturalist is reduplicated by a man of letters and a poet, who “understands how to cast over the naked truth the magic mantle of his picturesque language,” [5] making each of his humble protagonists live again before our eyes, each with its characteristic achievements. So striking is this power of his that Victor Hugo described him as “the insects’ Homer,” while one of the most accomplished of our scientists, Mr. Edmond Perrier, Director of the Museum of Natural History, not content with saluting him as “one of the princes of natural history,” speaks of his literary work in the following terms:
The ten volumes of his Souvenirs Entomologiques will remain one of the most intensely interesting works which have ever been written concerning the habits of insects, and also one of the most remarkable records of the psychology of a great observer of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In them the author depicts to the life not only the habits and the instincts of the insects; he gives us a full-length portrait of himself. He makes us share his busy life, amid the subjects of observation which incessantly claim his attention. The world of insects hums and buzzes about him, obsesses him, calling his attention from all directions, exciting his curiosity; he does not know which way to turn. Overwhelmed by the innumerable winged army of the drinkers of nectar who, on the fine summer days, invade his field of observation, he calls to his aid his whole household: his daughters, Claire, Aglaé, and Anna, his son Paul, his workmen, and above all his man-servant Favier, an old countryman who has spent his life in the barracks of the French colonies, a man of a thousand expedients, who watches his master with an incredulous yet admiring eye, listening to him but refusing to be convinced, and shocking him by the assertion, which nothing will induce him to retract, that the bat is a rat which has grown wings, the slug an old snail which has lost its shell, the night-jar a toad with a passion for milk, which has sprouted feathers the better to suck the goats’ udders at night, and so forth. The cats and the dog join the company at times, and one almost regrets that one is not within reach of the sturdy old man, so that one might respond to his call.
See him lying on the sand where everything is grilling in the burning rays of the sun, watching some wasp that is digging its burrow, noting its least movement, trying to divine its intentions, to make it confess the secret of its actions, following the labours of the innumerable Scarabaei that clean the surface of the soil of all that might defile it—the droppings of large animals, the decomposing bodies of small birds, moles, or water-rats; putting unexpected difficulties in their way, slily giving these tiny life-companions of his problems of his own devising to solve. [6]
That is well-expressed, and it gives us a fairly correct idea of the vital and poetic charm of the Souvenirs.
The same writer asks, speaking of the well-defined tasks performed by all these little creatures beloved of the worthy biologist of Sérignan: “Who has taught each one its trade, to the exclusion of any other, and allotted the parts which they fill, as a rule with a completeness unequalled, save by ‘their absolute unconsciousness of the goal at which they are aiming?’ This is a very important problem: it is the problem of the origin of things. Henri Fabre has no desire to grapple with it. Living in perpetual amazement, amid the miracles revealed by his genius, he observes, but he does not explain.”
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