This gloomy picture of a sudden, terrifying, violent death may be compared with another which, in some respects, is even more tragic: that of the ruined home and the shattered life of the little Rodez schoolboy, who was to leave the town somewhat as he left the slaughter-house, bewildered by the catastrophe of which he had just been the witness and was soon to be the victim. At this point of his narrative his eyes are dim with tears and his voice is choked by a half-suppressed sob. Then, suddenly, good-bye to my studies, good-bye to Tityrus and Menalcas! Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase. Amid that lamentable chaos my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of the Medusa. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day. [28] CHAPTER VI THE PUPIL TEACHER: AVIGNON (1841–43) The stroke of misfortune which suddenly interrupted Jean-Henri’s studies at the Rodez lycée made him an exile from his father’s house and banished him from his native countryside. For the second time he was, as it were, dropped upon the road like Perrault’s Tom Thumb. And the fairy-tale comes to life again in the Odyssey of the poor boy who wandered at random, picking up his food at hazard, facing misfortune with a stout heart, and smiling whenever he could at the poem of Nature, who always had some fresh surprise in store for him. Who can fail to be moved by pity and admiration, beholding him set forth upon the broad, white highroads, a wandering child, all but lost, seeking his way, seeking his livelihood even, without other relief, in his extremity of distress, and almost without other food than his love of Nature and his passion for learning? See him, for example, on the day when, between Beaucaire and Nîmes, he contrived to make his dinner off a few bunches of grapes “plucked furtively at the edge of a field, after exchanging the poor remnant of his last halfpence for a little volume of Réboul’s poems; soothing his hunger by intoxicating himself with the verses of the workman poet,” [29] whose inspiration was of so noble and Christian a character. The whole Fabre is in this trait of the needy, enraptured youth, who thinks nothing of hardships or of money provided he can find the wherewithal to assuage his thirst for knowledge and the ideal.