can. Life is about to become a hideous
inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase. Amid this 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 antennae, her
pretty pattern of white spots on a dark brown ground were as a ray of
sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.

To cut a long story short: good fortune, which never abandons the brave,
brought me to the primary normal school at Vaucluse where I was assured
food: dried chestnuts and chickpeas. The principal, a man of broad
views, soon came to trust his new assistant. He left me practically a
free hand, so long as I satisfied the school curriculum, which was very
modest in those days. Possessing a smattering of Latin and grammar, I
was a little ahead of my fellow pupils. I took advantage of this to
get some order into my vague knowledge of plants and animals. While a
dictation lesson was being corrected around me, with generous assistance
from the dictionary, I would examine, in the recesses of my desk, the
oleander's fruit, the snapdragon's seed vessel, the wasp's sting and the
ground beetle's wing-case.

With this foretaste of natural science, picked up haphazard and by
stealth, I left school more deeply in love than ever with insects and
flowers. And yet I had to give it all up. That wider education, which
would have to be my source of livelihood in the future, demanded this
imperiously. What was I to take in hand to raise me above the primary
school, whose staff could barely earn their bread in those days? Natural
history could not bring me anywhere. The educational system of the time
kept it at a distance, as unworthy of association with Latin and Greek.
Mathematics remained, with its very simple equipment: a blackboard, a
bit of chalk and a few books.

So I flung myself with might and main into conic sections and the
calculus: a hard battle, if ever there was one, without guides or
counselors, face to face for days on end with the abstruse problem which
my stubborn thinking at last stripped of its mysteries. Next came
the physical sciences, studied in the same manner, with an impossible
laboratory, the work of my own hands.

The reader can imagine the fate of my favorite branch of science in
this fierce struggle. At the faintest sign of revolt, I lectured myself
severely, lest I should let