The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



It was not long before Fabre saw that it 

 was not enough to possess all the scientific 

 degrees you will in order to realise the long- 

 cherished project of teaching natural history 

 in a Faculty. 



It was an inspector-general and a mathe- 

 matician of the name of Rolller who under- 

 took to inform him of this. Here is the in- 

 cident as related by Fabre himself: 



My colleagues used to call him the Crocodile. 

 Perhaps he had given them a rough time in the 

 course of his inspections. For all his boorish ways 

 he was an excellent man at heart. I owe him a 

 piece of advice which greatly influenced my future 

 studies. 



That day he suddenly appeared, alone, in the 

 schoolroom, where I was taking a class in geometri- 

 cal drawing. I must explain that, at this time, to 

 eke out my ridiculous salary, and, at all costs, to 

 provide a living for myself and my large family, I 

 was a mighty pluralist, both inside the college and 

 out. At the college in particular, after two hours 

 of physics, chemistry or natural history, came, with- 

 out respite, another two hours' lesson, in which I 

 taught the boys how to make a projection in de- 

 scriptive geometry, how to draw a geodetic plane, 

 a curve of any kind whose law of generation is 

 known to us. This was called graphics. 



The sudden irruption of the dread personage 

 causes me no great flurry. Twelve o'clock strikes, 

 l86 



