The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



youth, he suffered so greatly and laboured so 

 valiantly: 



Once more, here am I, somewhat late in life, 

 at Carpentras, whose rude Gallic name sets the 

 fool smiling and the scholar thinking. Dear lit- 

 tle town where I spent my twentieth year and left 

 the first bits of my fleece upon life's bushes, my visit 

 of to-day is a pilgrimage; I have come to lay my 

 eyes once more upon the place which saw the birth 

 of the liveliest impressions of my early days. I 

 bow, in passing, to the old College where I tried 

 my prentice hand as a teacher. Its appearance is 

 unchanged ; it still looks like a penitentiary. Those 

 were the views of our mediaeval educational sys- 

 tem. To the gaiety and activity of boyhood, which 

 were considered unwholesome, it applied the rem- 

 edy of narrowness, melancholy, and gloom. Its 

 houses of instruction were, above all, houses of 

 correction. The freshness of Virgil was interpreted 

 in the stifling atmosphere of a prison. I catch a 

 glimpse of a yard between four high walls, a sort 

 of bear-pit, where the scholars fought for room 

 for their games under the spreading branches of 

 a plane-tree. All around were cells that looked 

 like horse-boxes, without light or air; those were 

 the class-rooms. I speak in the past tense, for 

 doubtless the present day has seen the last of this 

 academic destitution. 



Here is the tobacco-shop where, on Wednesday 

 evening, coming out of the college, I would buy on 

 credit the wherewithal to fill my pipe and thus 

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