So it was, in reality, advantageous, as regards his destiny, that Fabre suffered, at this juncture of his history, this accumulation of trials, so grievous to experience, yet so fortunate in their consequences that they remind us of the sublime passage of the Gospel, whose sayings regarding eternal life are often rich in lessons for this our present life: “He that loses his life shall save it.” (End of the first volume in the French edition.) CHAPTER XIII RETIREMENT: ORANGE It is commonly enough thought that a professor on his vacations and a pensioned official are very much the same—that both art created and put into the world merely to kill time and savour the delights of far niente. Such was never Fabre’s opinion. While he loved nothing so well as his Thursdays and vacations, this was because he then had more freedom to devote himself to his favourite studies. If he resigned himself readily to a premature retirement, if he was even happy to shake off the yoke of the lycée, this was because he had quite definitely determined to work more quietly and continuously; because he hoped to increase the ardour and fertility of his mind by a closer and more lasting intercourse with the world of Nature. At the same time he found himself compelled to look to his pen for that assurance of material life which his retorts had refused him, and which his meagre professor’s pension afforded but insufficiently. “What is to be done now?” he cried, after the collapse 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 madder-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 numerous handbooks, now classic, and it was then that he began to write and to publish his Souvenirs entomologiques, without ceasing 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 talents 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 physiognomy.