If he had hearkened only to his passion for Nature, the schoolboy of Rodez would soon have become one of the most ardent disciples of the school of the woods; that is, he would have played truant. But he was, happily, from an early age, a worker; because industry was for him both a family inheritance and an imperious necessity. Had he not been sent to college on condition of winning prizes? Could he show himself an idle scholar when he saw his parents wearing themselves out in order to supply the needs of their family? Moreover, as he rose from class to class, the love of learning increased within him. Latin ceased to be repulsive, and became even wholly sympathetic, when he found, in the fifth class, thanks to the genius of Virgil, that it dignified the humble joys of rural life by the emphasis of skilfully chosen words and brilliant colours of the poet: By easy stages I came to Virgil, and was much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas, and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections. [26] Traces of Virgil are often visible—more often than those of the other classical writers—in the work of Fabre. He loves to embellish his narratives with quotations borrowed from the writer of the Bucolics and the Georgics, and he loves also to evoke the happy days of his boyhood at Rodez behind the lineaments of the Virgilian idylls, which were far more akin to the taste of his age and the instinct of his genius than the Metamorphoses of Ovid or Religion of Louis Racine, who shared, with the Mantuan, the privilege of providing the young humanist of 1835 at the Rodez lycée with literary exercises. All roads lead to Rome. It is enough that they do so. Without sacrificing any of the demands of the classics, by way of analogy or by way of antithesis, the child’s mind was constantly escaping from his books toward the things of Nature and Life. In its free, palpitating flight his thought kindled his imagination, and with indescribable emotion he began to touch upon more serious questions: The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that.