The Pupil Teacher: Avignon 



slon for learning? See him, for example, 

 on the day when, between Beaucaire and 

 Nimes, he contrived to make his dinner off 

 a few bunches of grapes " plucked furtively 

 at the edge of a field, after exchanging the 

 poor remnant of his last halfpence for a little 

 volume of Reboul's poems; soothing his 

 hunger by intoxicating himself with the 

 verses of the workman poet," ^ whose in- 

 spiration was of so noble and Christian a 

 character. 



The whole Fabre is in this trait of the 

 needy, enraptured youth, who thinks nothing 

 of hardships or of money provided he can 

 find the wherewithal to assuage his thirst for 

 knowledge and the ideal. 



Nevertheless, it is true that he passed 

 through many dark and painful hours at that 

 period. But in the end " the good fortune 

 that never deserts the valiant " opened the 

 doors of the Normal College of Avignon for 

 him. Having ventured to face the examina- 

 tion for a bursary, he won the latter with 

 the greatest ease. There he found a first 

 refuge from the uncertainties of the morrow, 

 although he had not yet achieved his Ideal, 

 nor even that place In the sun which he was 



1 Fabre, Poet of Science, by G. V. Legros, translated by 

 Bernard Miall (T. Fisher Unwin), p. 24. 



75 



