Thus their two lives, which were like parallel lines, never meeting, were in keeping with their work. And while Mistral, still young and triumphant despite the years, was at Maillane overwhelmed with honours and consideration, the poor great man of Sérignan lived an obscure and inglorious existence. He had the greatest trouble to live and rear his family, and almost his sole income consisted of an uncertain sum of 120 pounds sterling annually, which he had for some years received, in the guise of a pension, by the generosity of the Institute, as the Gegner prize. Finally his situation was so precarious that he decided to sell to a museum that magnificent collection of water-colour plates in which he had represented, life-size and with an astonishing truth of colour, all the fungi which grow in Provence. He wrote to Mistral on the subject, after the visit which the latter paid him in the spring of 1908: the only visit of the kind. Before meeting in Saint-Estelle, the Paradise of the Félibres, they had wished not to die before at least meeting on this earth. Fabre wrote to mistral the following letter, which I owe to the kindness of the great poet:-- "I have never thought of profiting by my humble fungoid water- colours...Fate will perhaps decide otherwise. "In this connection, permit me to make a confession, to which your nobility of character encourages me. Until latterly I had lived modestly on the product of my school-books. To-day the weathercock has turned to another quarter, and my books no longer sell. So here I am, more than ever in the grip of that terrible problem of daily bread. If you think, then, that with your help and that of your friends, my poor pictures might help me a little, I have decided to let them go, but not without bitterness. It is like tearing off a piece of my skin, and I still hold to this old skin, shabby as it may be; a little for my own sake, much more for my family's, and much more again for the sake of my entomological studies, studies which I feel obliged to pursue, persuaded that for a long time to come no one will care to resume them, so ungrateful is the calling." (16/18.)