By seasoning the matter with indigestible terms, useful for dissimulating vagueness of thought, one might represent the Cione as a superb example of the change brought about by the centuries in the habits of an insect. It would be very scientific, but would it be very clear? I doubt it. When my eyes fall upon a page bristling with barbarous locutions, supposedly scientific, I say to myself: “Take care! The author does not properly understand what he is saying, or he would have found, in the vocabulary which so many clever minds have hammered out, some means of clearly stating his thought.” Boileau, who is denied the poetic afflatus, but who certainly possessed common sense, and plenty of it, informs us: “Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement.” (That which is clearly grasped is plainly said.) “Just so, Nicolas! Yes, clearness, always clearness. He calls a cat a cat. Let us do the same: let us call gibberish a most learned prose, to afford a pretext for repeating Voltaire’s witty remark: ‘When the listener does not understand and the speaker himself does not know what he is saying, that is metaphysics.’ Let us add: ‘And abstruse science.’” My conviction is that we can say excellent things without using a barbarous vocabulary. Lucidity is the sovereign politeness of the writer. I do my best to achieve it. [164] Thanks to his love of lucidity and simplicity, as much as to his frank and modest spirit, he had a horror of verbal snobbery and juggling with pretentious words. Official science itself, and, as he says bluntly, “official jargon,” [165] find no more favour in his eyes than the sins of incidental writers. As a boy [writes Fabre] I was always an ardent reader; but the refinements of a well-balanced style hardly interested me: I did not understand them. A good deal later, when close upon fifteen, I began vaguely to see that words have a physiognomy of their own. Some pleased me better than others by the distinctness of their meaning and the resonance of their rhythm; they produced a clearer image in my mind; after their fashion, they gave me a picture of the objects described. Coloured by its adjective and vivified by its verb, the name became a living reality: what it said I saw. And thus, gradually, was the magic of words revealed to me, when the chances of my undirected reading placed a few easy standard pages in my way. [166] The magic of words! He has done more than discover it in the pages of other writers. He has illustrated it on every page of his own writings, adapting it so exactly to the magic of things that it delights the scientist as Nature herself would, and enchants the poet and the man of letters as only the masterpieces of art and literature have power to do. CHAPTER XX FABRE’S WRITINGS (CONTINUED)