The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



lapse of his industrial hopes and professorial 

 ambitions. " Let us try another lever and 

 resume rolling the Sisyphean stone. Let us 

 seek to draw from the ink-pot what the mad- 

 der-vat and the Alma Mater refuses us. 

 Laboremus! " 



Laboremus! That indeed is the fitting 

 motto for this period of his life, no less than 

 for the earlier part of it. For it was then 

 that he wrote the greater number of his nu- 

 merous handbooks, now classic, and it was 

 then that he began to write and to publish 

 his Souvenirs entomologiques, without ceas- 

 ing on that account his great life-work, the 

 passionate observation of the living world. 



Still, it is not so much the man's work as 

 the man, and not so much the student as the 

 man himself, that we wish to evoke in this 

 chapter. 



To live happily, we must live hidden from 

 sight, far from the troubles of the world, 

 exercising our minds and cultivating our tal- 

 ents at leisure. Such evidently was Fabre's 

 idea from the time of his departure from 

 Avignon; and it plainly reveals to us one of 

 the salient features of his moral physiog- 

 nomy. 



But he could not have had the illusion that 

 in thus taking refuge from the tribulations 



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