Whatever his retirement has cost him, a man so passionately devoted to animals must bless the solitude of his village which enables him to pass all his time in observing and describing them. He congratulates himself, indeed, upon his premature retirement, which is dooming him to obscurity and impecuniosity for the rest of his days, at the same time allowing him wholly to give himself up to entomology. Ah, beloved village, so poor, so rustic, what a happy inspiration was mine when I came to you to demand of you a hermit’s retreat, where I could live in company with my dear insects and thus trace in a worthy manner a few chapters of their marvellous history! [118] CHAPTER XVII THE COLLABORATORS “M. Fabre’s life-story is one of the finest that could be related,” said M. Laffite lately, in a leading article in La Nature. “It is simple. It is the humble and tragic story of a persistent struggle between two irreducible adversaries, on the one hand the most precarious conditions of the struggle for life, and on the other the power of a vocation, as though riveted to his being, which urged him despite everything to observation, study, and an understanding of the world of living creatures, and in particular of the insects.” [119] Such, indeed, is one of the most striking aspects of the great naturalist’s life, and that under which it appears more especially in its early stages. But there is another aspect, perhaps even more remarkable, under which it was to reveal itself more particularly in later years. Considering the first of these aspects, we shudder at the violence of the battles fought for the triumph of his ideal and his vocation; considering the second, we are filled with delighted admiration by the fascinating and triumphant results achieved by this ideal; I mean the marvels and allurements of entomology. Under the clear gaze of this observer of genius, as at the bidding of a magic ring, a whole world of tiny creatures rises and moves before him, recalling the world of Lilliput, but still more marvellous, and more fertile in dramatic incident of every kind. “No romance of Jules Verne’s or Fenimore Cooper’s is more exciting.” [120] Fabre is the first of writers to be conquered by the spectacle that unfolds itself before his eyes; conquered in the whole of his activities, in his imagination and sensibility, and in his style, which quite naturally adorns itself with the colours of his insects; and no less naturally quivers and vibrates with their emotions. Others before him had studied the life of insects. “But no one had put so much persevering perspicacity into his study of them; no one above all had spoken with such enthusiasm, with such poetical feeling, of the wonders of which it is full; no one had identified himself, as did Fabre, with the creatures that he studied.