One might say the same of Fabre. Some one should have taken him, too, by the shoulders and pushed him forcibly across the Pont des Arts, and should then have kept his eyes upon him until he reached his destination, lest he should turn aside and fly for the Pont d’Avignon, for we must not forget that Duruy and his gendarmes, although they were capable of making him come to Paris, were incapable of keeping him there. Fortunately Fabre’s work is not of the kind that needs, for its survival, the factitious glitter of honours. By its own merit it assures his name of an immortality greater than that of the Immortal Forty. There were three men, at this period of Fabre’s life, who contributed not a little to kindle or revive the fires of his scientific activity. Dufour’s essays furnished the spark that made the inward flame burst into a magnificent blaze of light. Experience and the example of Pasteur added fuel to the fire, by teaching him to keep as far as possible in close contact with nature. Duruy’s good will brought to this blaze the vivifying breath without which all ardour becomes chilled and all light extinguished. But genius does not merely develop under the impulse of the inner life, and the influence of the external life, which in some men is more potent and more active; it is determined also by the pressure of events, of which the most painful are not always the least effectual. Who does not know that famous line of Musset’s, which has almost become a proverb: “L’homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître.” (Man’s an apprentice, and his master, sorrow.) Like so many others, Fabre learned this by cruel yet fortunate experience. He had to suffer poverty, lack of success, and persecution, yet these were to him so many stepping-stones by which he rose to the serene and solitary height where his genius could at last unfurl its wings in freedom and soar at will. While Fabre had no ambition in respect of the Académie, he was ambitious where the University was concerned. Absolutely careless of titles and dignities, he was particularly eager to learn and to teach others as widely and as completely as possible. It was not enough for him to possess the knowledge requisite for a professor in a lycée, as it had not been enough to qualify for a primary schoolmaster. He wanted to attain that rare degree of knowledge which the higher education demands; he dreamed of occupying a chair of natural history in a faculty. Then he could free himself from the material tasks that constituted the danger as well as the merit of the secondary schoolmaster; he could devote himself at leisure to those wonderful natural sciences in which he glimpsed, not only a vitality and inspiration that appealed to his habit of mind, but a wealth of new subjects to be treated, of rich veins to be mined.