We have already mentioned Fabre’s relations with Moquin-Tandon, Dufour, Pasteur, and Duruy. Other names might be added to complete the list of his friends, or the correspondents whom he succeeded in interesting in entomology and admitting more or less to participation in his researches. [143] We will confine ourselves here to mentioning a worthy Brother of the Christian Colleges who afforded him one of the great pleasures of his life by enabling him to satisfy, at a small expense, without emptying his purse or too greatly curtailing his patient observations, one of the wilder longings of his youth, from which he was not always exempted by age: To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at the time when Robinson Crusoe was my delight. These rosy illusions, rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, beloved by the condor, were reduced, as a field for exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within four walls. Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry plant that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of journeys around his room. This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply. The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.