The reception came to an end, bows were exchanged, and we were dismissed. A luncheon awaited us at the minister’s house. I sat on his right, not a little embarrassed by the privilege: on his left was a physiologist of great renown. Like the others, I spoke of all manner of things, including even Avignon Bridge. Duruy’s son, sitting opposite me, chaffed me pleasantly about the famous bridge on which everybody dances; [77] he smiled at my impatience to get back to the thyme-scented hills and the grey olive-yards rich in Grasshoppers. “What!” said his father. “Won’t you visit our museums, our collections? There are some very interesting things there.” “I know, Monsieur le Ministre, but I shall find better things, things more to my taste, in the incomparable museum of the fields.” “Then what do you propose to do?” “I propose to go back to-morrow.” I did go back, I had had enough of Paris: never had I felt such tortures of loneliness as in that immense whirl of humanity. To get away, to get away was my one idea. [78] In re-reading this curious and attractive episode of Fabre’s career, our mind was haunted by the no less attractive memory of another illustrious son of our Aveyron, which shares his glory with Provence. [79] Like the author of the Souvenirs entomologiques, the writer of the Poésie des Bêtes is the son of humble Aveyron peasants, who raised himself by his own efforts from the first to the second grade of school teachers, and whose genius, like that of Fabre, faithful to the environment in which he was born, confines itself, with jealous care, like that of the naturalist, to the “incomparable museum of the fields,” which he describes with the same clearness of vision and the same sincerity of feeling. Like Fabre, Fabié is a modest man, who does not readily emerge from the obscurity in which his native timidity delights. In his case again it needed the perspicacity and kindliness of Duruy, “the champion of the modest and the laborious,” to single him out and drag him out of his hole; just as, at the present time, a Parisian publicist, of whom his fine talents have made a conquest, has truly remarked, it needed the energetic intervention of his friends to give his poetic genius the supreme consecration reserved for the works of our most eminent writers: “Thank heaven, the author of the Poésie des Bêtes and Bonne Terre has friends who admire the poet as greatly as they esteem the man, and if M. François Fabié cannot make up his mind to emerge from the obscurity in which he has only too long, indeed always, enveloped himself, I venture to hope that they will not hesitate to take him by the shoulders and bring him out into the broad light of day, and that they will then propel him willy-nilly across the Pont des Arts at the end of which rises the dome of the illustrious Forty.” [80]