The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



Traces of Virgil are often visible — more 

 often than those of the other classical writers 

 — in the work of Fabre. He loves to em- 

 bellish his narratives with quotations bor- 

 rowed from the writer of the Bucolics and 

 the Georgics, and he loves also to evoke the 

 happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind 

 the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which 

 were far more akin to the taste of his age 

 and the instinct of his genius than the 

 Metamorphoses of Ovid or Religion of Louis 

 Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the 

 privilege of providing the young humanist 

 of 1835 at the Rodez lycee with literary ex- 

 ercises. 



All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that 

 they do so. Without sacrificing any of the 

 demands of the classics, by way of analogy 

 or by way of antithesis, the child's mind 

 was constantly escaping from his books to- 

 ward the things of Nature and Life. 



In its free, palpitating flight his thought 

 kindled his imagination, and with indescrib- 

 able emotion he began to touch upon more 

 serious questions: 



The problem of life and that other one, with 

 its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times 

 passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obses- 

 sion, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of 



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