One winter evening, when the rest of the household was asleep, as I sat reading beside a stove whose ashes were still warm, my book made me forget for a while the cares of the morrow: these heavy cares of a poor professor of physics who, after piling up diplomas and for a quarter of a century performing services of uncontested merit, was receiving for himself and his family a stipend of sixteen hundred francs, or less than the wages of a groom in a decent establishment. Such was the disgraceful parsimony of the day where education was concerned; such was the edict of our government red-tape: I was an irregular, the offspring of my solitary studies. And so I was forgetting the poverty and anxieties of a professor’s life amid my books, when I chanced to turn over the pages of an entomological essay that had fallen into my hands I forget how. It was a monograph by the then father of entomology, the venerable scientist Léon Dufour, on the habits of a Wasp that hunted Buprestis beetles. Certainly, I had not waited till then to interest myself in insects; from my early childhood I had delighted in Beetles, Bees, and Butterflies; as far back as I can remember, I see myself in ecstasy before the splendour of a Ground-beetle’s wing-cases or the wings of Papilio machaon, the Swallowtail. The fire was laid; the spark to kindle it was absent. Léon Dufour’s essay provided that spark. [65] New lights burst forth: I received a sort of mental revelation. So there was more in science than the arranging of pretty Beetles in a cork box and giving them names and classifying them; there was something much finer: a close and loving study of insect life, the examination of the structure and especially the faculties of each species. I read of a magnificent instance of this, glowing with excitement as I did so. Some time after, aided by those lucky circumstances which he who seeks them eagerly is always able to find, I myself published an entomological article, a supplement to Léon Dufour’s. This first work of mine won honourable mention from the Institute of France, and was awarded a prize for experimental physiology. But soon I received a far more welcome recompense, in the shape of a most eulogistic and encouraging letter from the very man who had inspired me. From his home in the Landes the revered master sent me a warm expression of his enthusiasm and urged me to go on with my studies. Even now, at that sacred recollection, my old eyes fill with happy tears. O fair days of illusion, of faith in the future, where are you now? [66] Moquin-Tandon converted Fabre to the study of animals and plants. Dufour converted him to the study of insects, and taught him to publish the results of his entomological studies.