Contents
		PAGE
Author’s Note		vii
Acknowledgments		viii
Introduction by Walter de la Mare		ix
CHAP
I	The Yew Tree Family who journeyed to find Fabre	1
II	How the Quest Began	3
III	St. Léons. Fabre’s Village	19
IV	School and a Pond	31
V	Misfortune comes to Fabre	51
VI	A Famous Lesson at Avignon	60
VII	The Sunken Lane	68
VIII	Scorpions	84
IX	The Sacred Beetle	97
X	Visitors	108
XI	Swallows	121
XII	Insects in Sèrignan	128
XIII	Fabre’s Garden	138
XIV	Friends to Dinner	153
XV	A Moth and a Butterfly	159
List of References		173

I have known boys and girls of any of the ages who have liked tales of real people better than any other tales. I have known others who would listen to tales of insects as long as the teller had tales to tell. I have thought therefore that the same people might like to read the story of Fabre and his insects at a younger age than that to which either the charming translations published by Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton, or the wonderful French original, appeal.

I should like to express my gratitude to the above firm for their permission to re-tell some of these tales. I also thank Fabre’s nephew and namesake and M. Jouve for the tales of the Naturalist which they told me at Avignon and Carpentras.

As to the form of the tale—a journey undertaken by children to the scenes of Fabre’s life—the journey actually happened, but the travellers were only two and older.

This book is scarcely mine. I can only say I hope I have not spoilt it—this little book with a welcome from Walter de la Mare, with tales from Fabre and with Robert Gibbings’ lovely woodcuts.

 

Warwick, 1936.

This is a book intended for young and lively-minded children—which implies, as I believe, that it might win a larger number of readers in proportion to the host available than if it were intended solely for intelligent adults. But there is no more precarious merchandise than books. What we most need and pine for in this we may, by ill chance, easily fail to come across. This is particularly likely to happen when we are young—and it is a disaster. The Insect Man is also a book of an unusual kind and quality—a statement which suggests that I am familiar with every kind of children’s book. But of course one can only speak from one’s own experience. Unlike, at any rate, numerous books aimed at children, this one clearly was not written either at or down to anybody, but straightforwardly. Its purpose is flawless—that of sharing an intense interest and delight in a man of extraordinary character and of an astonishing zeal which burned on in him undimmed throughout a lifetime ninety-two years long. After reading these pages—or hearing them read—a child of any imagination will have vividly shared his strange company, the villages, houses and very rooms in which he lived his simple and devoted life, and will have won to something at least of his inmost self and spirit.

A good school book clearly and concisely imparts knowledge and information—a process not necessarily so petrifying as it sounds. That information may be invaluable. “What matters in learning,” however, and this is Fabre’s sovereign wisdom, “is not to be taught, but to wake up.” The Insect Man also imparts invaluable information, but in the process it should unquestionably wake any reader up; since it reveals a love and joy in acquiring knowledge (and that as it happens of an outlandish and unbelievably romantic order), which even the youngest of children may have in a fountain-like abundance—as his incessant rain of questions proves—until, alas, perhaps, he goes to school.

Here the fact that Penelope, who is the informer, is called Penèl for love and brevity by Giles and Geraldine is one small proof that she is no mere preceptress. Nor are the children who share her pilgrimage to the tropical, arid, fascinating Fabre country in the least degree “childish”. They talk good English, and good sense, at times tinged with the imaginative. And their company is an unfailing delight.

As for the Insect Man and his ineffable “little beasts” and his childhood and his poverty and his obsession and his triumph and his devotions and hatreds, there is enough of all this here to reveal what riches are awaiting those who care to follow Miss Eleanor Doorly’s enticing lead—with the list on page 173 to help them.

Fabre was of course not by any means the first observer of the insect universe. As far back, indeed, as 1835, when he himself was twelve years old, Emily Shore, for but one example, as a girl of fifteen was not only in her own bedroom keeping steadfast watch for hours at a stretch on a no less intensely industrious mason-wasp (Odynerus mucarius), but recording its wayfarings in her Journal. And recently the appalling economy of the dark-devoted termites has been exposed. Most such books, those for instance on the honey bee, are placid and pleasing. And, in general, all “scientific facts” should be welcomed with a vigilant and quiet interest. “Appalling” therefore is a word wholly out of keeping. Nevertheless Fabre introduces us not only into the insect world itself, a universe almost as aloof from Man’s as that of an inhabitant of Aldebaran and one (as Mr. H. G. Wells has demonstrated in The Food of the Gods) which only mere human size has precluded apparently from effecting his final eclipse, but also, as it seems to me, into a unique region of human fantasy. One’s astounded intelligence can scarcely credit, much less attempt to explain—or to justify!—the habits of some of these creatures of Fabre’s fanatical interest. Nothing, for example, created by man’s imagination has exceeded in blind effortless ingenuity the fly’s grub that is destined to prey on the bee’s grub, or in horror the activities of the tarantula or of the scorpion or (and this even in mere looks alone) of the praying mantis. These utterly “impossible she’s”! What, on the other hand, of the sheer marvel of the secret invocation to her suitors (as it is recorded on page 167) from that few-hours-old enchantress, a female Great Peacock moth: “I cloister her at once, damp with the moistures of her birth under a wire-net bell”? Or of the banded minim butterfly, bought by Fabre for two sous from his potato boy. Indeed, the infatuation of these exquisite creatures, which have not even an apparatus for digesting food, just perish for and “in” love, and yet appear to be unaware of Helen herself in her man-made glass fortress—well, that sets us thinking about ourselves and our own little way of heart and mind with extreme dubiety if not positive confusion. In view of these and similar phenomena, “poor stupid Spider” is perhaps a perfectly rational and merited comment. And yet, no less clearly, reason here won’t fit the case, and even intuition fails us. As might, say, a tarantula’s in his attempt face to face to fathom the less attractive habits of mankind. For even an angel infancy may reveal at times the contrariest hints of a little beast.

Walter de la Mare.

The Yew Tree Family who journeyed to
find Fabre

The children lived almost entirely under the Yew Tree. That was why everyone, who knew them, called them the Yew Tree Children. They had a house, but when they were in that there seemed always so many things to be done. There were so many rules to be observed, as, for instance, they could not speak outside their father’s doors; so many clocks to watch in order to have their hands washed before they struck one, or four, or seven; so many useful occupations that were good for them, like dusting the schoolroom or learning to make soup. But the Yew Tree, though it was in sight of the house, was far enough away to be beyond call or convenient-fetching distance, and the children were left gloriously alone.

Also they liked the Yew Tree for itself. It was very old—nine hundred years old, tradition said—and its trunk was wide, with hiding-places in it, while its branches were low and easy to climb. Moreover, the children found it amusing to watch all the strange tourists who made their way there to visit the tiny church where Jane Austen, the writer, was christened. Once someone had hidden the church key in one of the tree’s caverns, and from that time it had been the custom to keep it there. The children told the visitors that they were the sole and appointed guardians of the key, and didn’t explain that they had made the appointment themselves. But the key itself was uncommon and exciting, for it was a foot-and-a-half long, and yet difficult to find, so deep was its hiding-place.

The children were Geraldine, her brother Giles, and Margaret, who was only a friend. Their mother had been dead since Geraldine could remember, and their grown-up step-sister, Penelope, brought them up—very badly in the opinion of everybody but themselves.

Their village was different from other people’s villages, because everyone in it, including their father, was writing a life of Jane Austen. That made the children, who liked true stories of real people, want to make a collection of lives of the people who were different from Jane, in order to tease their father, who thought that there was “nobody like Jane.” Penelope did most of the collecting. The others generally listened to her and made improvements in the stories as she told them under the Yew Tree. When, by chance, she wrote them down, they granted her the special privilege of leaving out all her inverted commas for her own speeches, and that explains the absence of some of them in this story.

How the Quest Began

On the day when they first thought of the life of the Insect Man it was hot summer under the Yew Tree, in spite of the primroses by the old church wall and the first white violets in the grass. Geraldine was alone with her French governess and feeling very hot, because she was angry and naughty and it was summer. But Mademoiselle, happening to glance down at the flowers, and feeling that they were supporting her opinion that it was merely a sunny March day in a cold English spring, drew her fur coat closer round her and grew angrier with the bare-armed, bareheaded, cotton-frocked person on the other side of the table.

She had lost one battle that morning about lessons over the fire in the comfortable schoolroom and now she was in a fair way to lose another. “Never let a child win a skirmish,” she registered mentally for the hundred and first time, while her fur bristled irritably against the cotton opposite. There was something definitely wrong with cotton; there was so little of it—just a little blue, like the sky—tipped by that wisp of a face, two blue eyes, which recalled the cotton and a golden wave above, like a sunny cloud; and the whole so naughty, so stiff, so unbendable!

Mademoiselle had tried everything, everything short of yielding, of allowing Geraldine to alter the words of the fable which she had been told to learn. Mademoiselle suspected her of knowing the thing quite well, of being therefore merely naughty in changing the title of La Fontaine’s famous fable, “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” She had repeated it in English docilely enough with her own pleasant little rhythmic swing, in an English that sounded unfamiliar and almost as if she had put it into verse herself:

But when it came to the French: “La sauterelle ayant chanté” began Geraldine over and over again, and Mademoiselle, with that low correcting voice of hers: “No! Geraldine. La cigale ayant chanté.”

A pause, and then Geraldine again: “La sauterelle ayant. . . .”

“La cigale is not la sauterelle,” stamped Mademoiselle at the end of her patience.

“No,” said Geraldine darkly, “I know.”

“Then why don’t you say what La Fontaine wrote?”

“Because he made a silly mistake.”

Mademoiselle’s face was a delightful study for the scrap in cotton, though she probably did not quite understand the French woman’s deep, awed conviction of the perfect rightness of the great fabulist. For a French woman there are no mistakes in La Fontaine’s fables.

Conversation between the two ceased to be possible and no one knows what would have happened, or if this tale ever would have been written, if Penelope had not appeared suddenly with her basket of daffodils from the rhododendron path.

“Ah! Miss Penelope,” cried Mademoiselle, “This Child! this morning! She is insupportable! She says La Fontaine made a mistake! I know not what is in her head, but La Fontaine! a mistake!”

Penelope took the third chair, resting her slender clasped fingers on her basket’s high handle, while a little slow smile crept first into her blue eyes and then caught her long, curving, kind lips. Behind Penelope’s smile there was such a long, long tale, a tale thousands of years old, that caused the smile, as she thought of how French La Fontaine was mixed up in it, and the old Greek Æsop and the tale-tellers of ancient India and the Insect Man; especially the Insect Man! And now her little step-sister was in it, who had taken up the cudgels last night on behalf of the cigale, which was only a grasshopper, and was fighting her governess this morning, because she would not have the cigale’s character blackened by any poet however great; and Mademoiselle was in it, whose reverence for La Fontaine was almost religious. Penelope knew all about it, because she had heard her father, who liked doing Geraldine’s prep. with her, telling her the story as a reward for making a rhymed translation of the fable. But between the necessity of upholding governesses and the equal necessity of taking sides with her sister who happened to be in the right, she was in a quandary.

Geraldine, she said, those two old ladies will never find that key unless you get it for them. When you come back, you can tell Mademoiselle what your Insect Man says about the cigale and the ant, and if you tell it very well, I will tell you the perfectly new, lovely idea I have just thought of for our holiday.

Geraldine was back in the twinkling of an eye and with her gaze fixed on Penelope to see if she was content with the telling, she began, while Penelope prayed silently that Mademoiselle would consent to listen:

The Tale of the Cigale^[1]

“A cigale is called a cicada in English and it is not a grasshopper.

“The Insect Man says that a long, long time ago, before there were any books, some wise man in India wanted to teach people to save their grain in harvest to be ready for the cold weather. So he told them a parable of a little singing beast, who starved in the winter because he had no savings, and could not borrow from the ant. And the little singing beast had no name in Europe, because he didn’t live here and people have an awkward way of not giving names to things they have never seen, which makes translation very difficult. So Æsop, a Greek, who wanted to repeat the fable of the singing beast, and was careless about the right name, called him or her, a cicada. But any ploughman, who dug up the cicada’s sleeping chrysalis in winter, could have told him what nonsense it was to think a cicada ever lived in the winter. La Fontaine just went on with Æsop’s mistake. And the man who did the picture in La Fontaine’s book, a man called Grandville, drew a grasshopper, a sauterelle, not a cicada at all. He drew the ant dressed up as a good housekeeper and the grasshopper bowing at her door beside great sacks of corn, with her guitar under her arm and her thin frock clinging round her, blown by the cold wind.

“I don’t know anything about a sauterelle, except that he is a big green grasshopper who lives in the more northern part of France where La Fontaine lived. But the little, dear, delicate cicada lives in the South where the Insect Man lived, and he is my special Insect Man. He had two plane-trees opposite his house, under which he used to sit all day long, and watch, and watch, and watch the cicada and learn all about it, and this is what he saw: the cicada in the heat of the South, when everything is dried-up and all the insects dying of thirst, just settles on a branch of some shrub, pierces the bark and sucks the sap, singing the while. She doesn’t sing with her mouth, but has a whole arrangement of cymbals to make music in her tail. While the Insect Man watched, he saw all kinds of thirsty insects come up to drink the drops that oozed out and overflowed from the hole the cicada had made: wasps, flies, beetles . . . but especially ants. He saw the littlest ones slip under the stomach of the cicada to get closer to the sap; and she, nice beast, just lifted herself up on her feet to make more room for the ants to drink easily. Fancy scandalising her after that! The bigger creatures took a sip; then flew away to try for something better and finding nothing, came back to try to drive the cicada away from the drink spring it had made.

“The Insect Man, whose name was Fabre, saw the miserable ants biting the cicada’s feet to make her move. Some of them pulled her by the end of the wing, some climbed on her back and tickled her sensitive feelers; one even seized her sucker and tried to pull it out of the hole, till at last, bothered by the tiny beasts, the giant left the spring, and, flying to another plant, began the story all over again. The beggar, the robber, is the ant; the industrious worker who shares so sweetly with unfortunate people is the cicada.

“But there is a lot more than that wrong in the fable. The cicada never eats flies or worms or grain. She never eats at all, she only drinks. Then, too, she never lives into the winter at all. She dies every year when it is still warm; and the Insect Man has seen the ants eating her thin, slim, dried-up body. So she is the ants’ food in winter and their drink provider in summer. She can’t live into the winter. She is alive about five summer weeks, that is all, just time enough to sing and to lay her eggs. Her eggs and her chrysalis live, in all, four years underground; four years in the dark for the sake of five weeks in the sunshine. No wonder, says the Insect Man, she sings all the days of the five weeks and makes a deafening shout about her joy at being alive.”

“Now the holiday, Penél?”

As we are taking the car to France, don’t you think it would be great fun to go to all the places where the Insect Man lived and write our own life of him as we go along?

“Not really? Not truly? Shall we really see the two plane-trees themselves and the very cicadas or, anyway, their great great grand-children?”

Not too fast, Geraldine, remember that the cicada lives only five weeks in the summer and that this is not summer, but spring!

“There!” said Mademoiselle, with a despairing little grimace, “I told you so!” as the wisp of blue cotton danced away in the breeze singing: “We’re off to the home of the Insect Man!”

“Stop!” called Giles to his sister, for he and Margaret had come up from the orchard with still more daffodils: “Come back and let us discuss this holiday! Before we decide on it, I think Penelope ought to tell Margaret and me something about this Insect Man, so that we may know if he lived in places we should like to visit and whether he did anything really interesting to make his life worth writing.”

He saw things that no one else had ever seen, said Penelope. Then, he put down what he saw and how he had seen it, so charmingly, in a great book, that you can open it anywhere and get a fascinating tale about little beasts. In that way he won two titles to fame: the one as a seer, or observer; the other as a writer.

He was just a little village boy who became a great scientist. He lived all his life among splendours: mountains, brilliant suns, medieval buildings as mighty as the palace of the popes at Avignon, Roman architecture as exquisitely fine as the triumphal arch at Orange. He lived among the spotless snows of high places and the tangled glory of the flowers of the South. He loved them all; but he chose for study some of the smallest living things, the insects.

He, like us, was always interested in little beasts, as Geraldine calls them; but, up to his time, learned students of insects, for the most part, only made collections of them and classified them. They knew, of course, how many legs they had and what shaped wings, but they had never thought of studying their characters.

“Their characters!” snorted Giles.

Yes, you have no idea what strange and sometimes awful characters insects have! What would you think of wives who always eat their husbands? But they have their virtues too and their startling skill. Fabre tells us that he was from the beginning interested in these strange splinters of life; but that one day he read an uncommon essay by a great student and that the effect was as if a spark had fallen into his mind and set it all alight. For the first time he realised that to collect insects in glass-topped boxes and to classify them under hard names was not the whole of insect science. There was something more: you could watch insects till you knew them, till they revealed to you their habits and tricks, their methods of doing things, their surgical skill, their reasons for their actions, their characters.

“Just give us an example of a tale, Penél,” said Giles.

It is almost a shame to tell them to you, you should read them for yourselves in Fabre’s own lovely language.

“Nevertheless, a tale! a tale! How else can we know if we want to hear anything more about the man?”

The Tale of the Digger-Wasps^[2]

mouthing out