I was eighteen years old; I was dreaming of diplomas, of a doctor’s degree, of a brilliant university career. To encourage me and incite me to emulation, one of my uncles, rather more well-informed than those about him, addressed me much as follows:

“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 Seminaire1 of Lyons. The problem of instinct, which enters into the province of psychology, led me to consult the works of J. H. Fabre, [x]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 [xi]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 [xii]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. [xiii]