To serve this noble ambition he needed the prestige of the degrees that would lead to the coveted chair. He won them as he had won those that gave him access to the second degree of instruction, without guide or master, by the sole effort of his mind and will. In 1858 he easily won his degree as licentiate in the natural sciences before the Faculty of Toulouse. It is an eloquent fact that instead of being, as it is for so many others, a goal and an end in itself, the licentiate was for Fabre but a brief parenthesis in his life of study, a stage no sooner reached than crossed on the infinite path of knowledge. The next step was that of the doctorate. It was achieved with no less ardour and success than the previous one. This is almost all we can say of it, for the hero of this history speaks of it only incidentally, because it is connected with the story of one of his insects. But for the Languedocian Scorpion the Souvenirs would leave us in ignorance of his degree of Doctor of Science. It was not long before Fabre saw that it was not enough to possess all the scientific degrees you will in order to realise the long-cherished project of teaching natural history in a Faculty. It was an inspector-general and a mathematician of the name of Rollier who undertook to inform him of this. Here is the incident as related by Fabre himself: My colleagues used to call him the Crocodile. Perhaps he had given them a rough time in the course of his inspections. For all his boorish ways he was an excellent man at heart. I owe him a piece of advice which greatly influenced my future studies. That day he suddenly appeared, alone, in the schoolroom, where I was taking a class in geometrical drawing. I must explain that, at this time, to eke out my ridiculous salary, and, at all costs, to provide a living for myself and my large family, I was a mighty pluralist, both inside the college and out. At the college in particular, after two hours of physics, chemistry or natural history, came, without respite, another two hours’ lesson, in which I taught the boys how to make a projection in descriptive geometry, how to draw a geodetic plane, a curve of any kind whose law of generation is known to us. This was called graphics. The sudden irruption of the dread personage causes me no great flurry. Twelve o’clock strikes, the pupils go out and we are left alone. I know him to be a geometrician. The transcendental curve, perfectly drawn, may work upon his gentler mood. I happen to have in my portfolio the very thing to please him. Fortune serves me well, in this special circumstance. Among my boys there is one who, though a regular dunce at everything else, is a first-rate hand with the square, the compass, and the drawing-pen: a deft-fingered numskull, in short.