All abashed, I open my hand and show my blue egg on its bed of moss.

'Ah!' says his reverence. 'A Saxicola's egg! Where did you get it?'

'Up there, father, under a stone.'

Question follows question; and my peccadillo stands confessed. By chance I found a nest which I was not looking for. There were six eggs in it. I took one of them—here it is—and I am waiting for the rest to hatch. I shall go back for the others when the young birds have their quill feathers.

'You mustn't do that, my little friend,' replies the priest. 'You mustn't rob the mother of her brood; you must respect the innocent little ones; you must let God's birds grow up and fly from the nest. They are the joy of the fields and they clear the earth of its vermin. Be a good boy, now, and don't touch the nest.'

I promise and the curate continues his walk. I come home with two good seeds cast on the fallows of my childish brain. An authoritative word has taught me that spoiling birds' nests is a bad action. I did not quite understand how the bird comes to our aid by destroying vermin, the scourge of the crops; but I felt, at the bottom of my heart, that it is wrong to afflict the mothers.

'Saxicola,' the priest had said, on seeing my find.

'Hullo!' said I to myself. 'Animals have names, just like ourselves. Who named them? What are all my different acquaintances in the woods and meadows called? What does Saxicola mean?'

Years passed and Latin taught me that Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird, in fact, was flying from one rocky point to the other while I lay in ecstasy before its eggs; its house, its nest, had the rim of a large stone for a roof. Further knowledge gleaned from books taught me that the lover of stony hillsides is also called the Motteux, or clodhopper, because, in the plowing season, she flies from clod to clod, inspecting the furrows rich in unearthed grubworms. Lastly, I came upon the Provencal expression Cul-blanc, which is also a picturesque term, suggesting the patch on the bird's rump which spreads out like a white butterfly flitting over the fields.

Thus did the vocabulary come into being that would one day allow me to greet by their real names the thousand actors on the stage of the fields, the thousand little flowers that smile at us from the wayside. The word which the curate had spoken without attaching the least importance to it revealed a world to me, the world of plants and animals designated by their real names. To the future must belong the task of deciphering some pages of the immense lexicon; for today I will content myself with remembering the Saxicola, or stonechat.

On the west, my village crumbles into an avalanche of garden patches, in which plums and apples ripen. Low bulging walls, blackened with the stains of lichens and mosses, support the terraces. The brook runs at the foot of the slope. It can be cleared almost everywhere at a bound. In the wider parts, flat stones standing out of the water serve as a foot bridge. There is no such thing as a whirlpool, the terror of mothers when the children are away; it is nowhere more than knee deep. Dear little brook, so tranquil, cool and clear, I have seen majestic rivers since, I have seen the boundless sea; but nothing in my memories equals your modest falls. About you clings all the hallowed pleasure of my first impressions.

A miller has bethought him of putting the brook, which used to flow so gaily through the fields, to work. Halfway up the slope, a watercourse, economizing the gradient, diverts part of the water and conducts it into a large reservoir, which supplies the mill wheels with motor power. This basin stands beside a frequented path and is walled off at the end.

One day, hoisting myself on a playfellow's shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless stagnant waters, covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. Today, I should call it a salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the serpent and the dragon, of whom we were told such bloodcurdling tales when we sat up at night. Hoo! I've seen enough: let's get down again, quick!

The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above.

This is the haunt of the red-necktied minnows. Come along very gently, lie flat on the ground and look. What pretty little fish they are, with their scarlet throats! Clustering side by side, with their heads turned against the stream, they puff their cheeks out and in, rinsing their mouths incessantly. To keep their stationary position in the running water, they need naught but a slight quiver of their tail and of the fin on their back. A leaf falls from the tree. Whoosh! The whole troop has disappeared.

On the other side of the brook is a spinney of beeches, with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. In their majestic, shady branches sit chattering crows, drawing from their wings old feathers replaced by new. The ground is padded with moss. At one's first step on the downy carpet, the eye is caught by a mushroom, not yet full-spread and looking like an egg dropped there by some vagrant hen. It is the first that I have picked, the first that have I turned round and round in my fingers, inquiring into its structure with that vague curiosity which is the first awakening of observation.

Soon, I find others, differing in size, shape and color. It is a real treat for my prentice eyes. Some are fashioned like bells, like extinguishers, like cups; some are drawn out into spindles, hollowed into funnels, rounded into hemispheres. I come upon some that are broken and are weeping milky tears; I step on some that, instantly, become tinged with blue; I see some big ones that are crumbling into rot and swarming with worms. Others, shaped like pears, are dry and open at the top with a round hole, a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escapes when I prod their under side with my finger. These are the most curious. I fill my pockets with them to make them smoke at my leisure, until I exhaust the contents, which are at last reduced to a kind of tinder.

What fun I had in that delightful spinney! I returned to it many a time after my first find; and here, in the company of the crows, I received my first lessons in mushroom lore. My harvests, I need hardly say, were not admitted to the house. The mushroom, or the bouturel, as we called it, had a bad reputation for poisoning people. That was enough to make mother banish it from the family table. I could scarcely understand how the bouturel, so attractive in appearance, came to be so wicked; however, I accepted the experience of my elders; and no disaster ever ensued from my rash friendship with the poisoner.

As my visits to the beech clump were repeated, I managed to divide my finds into three categories. In the first, which was the most numerous, the mushroom was furnished underneath with little radiating leaves. In the second, the lower surface was lined with a thick pad pricked with hardly visible holes. In the third, it bristled with tiny spots similar to the papillae on a cat's tongue. The need of some order to assist the memory made me invent a classification for myself.

Very much later there fell into my hands certain small books from which I learnt that my three categories were well known; they even had Latin names, which fact was far from displeasing to me. Ennobled by Latin which provided me with my first exercises and translations, glorified by the ancient language which the rector used in saying his mass, the mushroom rose in my esteem. To deserve so learned an appellation, it must possess a genuine importance.

The same books told me the name of the one that had amused me so much with its smoking chimney. It is called the puffball in English, but its French name is the vesse-de-loup. I disliked the expression, which to my mind smacked of bad company. Next to it was a more decent denomination: Lycoperdon; but this was only so in appearance, for Greek roots sooner or later taught me that Lycoperdon means vesse-de-loup and nothing else. The history of plants abounds in terms which it is not always desirable to translate. Bequeathed to us by earlier ages less reticent than ours, botany has often retained the brutal frankness of words that set propriety at defiance.

How far off are those blessed times when my childish curiosity sought solitary exercise in making itself acquainted with the mushroom! 'Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni!' said Horace. Ah, yes, the years glide fleeting by, especially when they are nearing their end! They were the merry brook that dallies among the willows on imperceptible slopes; today, they are the torrent swirling a thousand straws along, as it rushes towards the abyss. Fleeting though they be, let us make the most of them. At nightfall, the woodcutter hastens to bind his last fagots. Even so, in my declining days, I, a humble woodcutter in the forest of science, make haste to put my bundle of sticks in order. 'What will remain of my researches on the subject of instinct? Not much, apparently; at most, one or two windows opened on a world that has not yet been explored with all the attention which it deserves.

A worse destiny awaits the mushrooms, which were my botanical joys from my earliest youth. I have never ceased to keep up my acquaintance with them. To this day, for the mere pleasure of renewing it, I go, with a halting step, to visit them on fine autumn afternoons. I still love to see the fat heads of the boletes, the tops of the agarics and the coral-red tufts of the clavaria emerge above the carpet pink with heather.

At Serignan, my last stage, they have lavished their seductions upon me, so plentiful are they on the neighboring hills, wooded with holm oak, arbutus and rosemary. During these latter years, their wealth inspired me with an insane plan: that of collecting in effigy what I was unable to keep in its natural state in an herbarium. I began to paint life size pictures of all the species in my neighborhood, from the largest to the smallest. I know nothing of the art of painting in watercolors. No matter: what I have never seen practiced I will invent, managing badly at first, then a little better, at last well. The paintbrush will make a change from the strain of my daily output of prose.

I end by possessing some hundreds of sheets representing the mushrooms of the neighborhood in their natural size and colors. My collection has a certain value. If it lacks artistic finish, at least it boasts the merit of accuracy. It brings me visitors on Sundays, country people, who stare at it in all simplicity, astounded that such fine pictures should be done by hand, without a copy and without compasses. They at once recognize the mushroom represented; they tell me its popular name, thus proving the fidelity of my brush.

Well, what will become of this great pile of drawings, the object of so much work? No doubt, my family will keep the relic for a time; but, sooner or later, taking up too much space, shifted from cupboard to cupboard, from attic to attic, gnawed by the rats, foxed, dirtied and stained, it will fall into the hands of some little grandnephews who will cut it into squares to make paper caps. It is the universal rule. What our illusions have most fondly cherished comes to a pitiful end under the claws of ruthless reality.



CHAPTER XVIII. INSECTS AND MUSHROOMS

It were out of place to recall my long relations with the bolete and the agaric if the insect did not here enter into a question of grave interest. Several mushrooms are edible, some even enjoy a great reputation; others are formidable poisons. Short of botanical studies that are not within everybody's reach, how are we to distinguish the harmless from the venomous? There is a widespread belief which says that any mushroom which insects, or, more frequently, their larvae, their grubs, accept can be accepted without fear; any mushroom which they refuse must be refused. What is wholesome food for them cannot fail to be the same for us; what is poisonous to them is bound to be equally baneful to ourselves. This is how people argue, with apparent logic, but without reflecting upon the very different capabilities of stomachs in the matter of diet. After all, may there not be some justification for the belief? That is what I purpose examining.

The insect, especially in the larval stage, is the principal devourer of the mushroom. We must distinguish between two groups of consumers. The first really eat, that is to say, they break their food into little bits, chew it and reduce it to a mouthful which is swallowed just as it is; the second drink, after first turning their food into a broth, like the bluebottles. The first are the less numerous. Confining myself to the results of my observations in the neighborhood, I count, all told, in the group of chewers, four beetles and a moth caterpillar. To these may be added the mollusk, as represented by a slug, or, more specifically, an arion, of medium size, brown and adorned with a red edge to his mantle. A modest corporation, when all is said, but active and enterprising, especially the moth.

At the head of the mushroom loving beetles, I will place a Staphylinid (Oxyporus rufus, LIN.), prettily garbed in red, blue and black. Together with his larva, which walks with the aid of a crutch at its back, he haunts the fungus of the poplar (Pholiota aegerita, FRIES). He specializes in an exclusive diet. I often come across him, both in spring and autumn, and never any elsewhere than on this mushroom. For that matter, he had made a wise choice, the epicure! This popular fungus is one of our best mushrooms, despite its color of a doubtful white, its skin which is often wrinkled and its gills soiled with rusty brown at the spores. We must not judge people by appearances, nor mushrooms either. This one, magnificent in shape and color, is poisonous; that other, so poor to look at, is excellent.

Here are two more specialist beetles, both of small size. One is the Triplax (Triplax russica, LIN.), who has an orange head and corselet and black wing-cases. His grub tackles the hispid polyporus (Polyporus hispidus, BULL.), a coarse and substantial dish, bristling at its top with stiff hairs and clinging by its side to the old trunks of mulberry trees, sometimes also of walnut and elm trees. The other is the cinnamon-colored Anisotoma (Anisotoma cinnamomea, PANZ.). His larva lives exclusively in truffles.

The most interesting of the mushroom-eating beetles is the Bolboceras (Bolboceras gallicus, MUL.). I have described elsewhere his manner of living, his little song that sounds like the chirping of a bird, his perpendicular wells sunk in search of an underground mushroom (Hydnocystis orenaria, TUL.), which constitutes his regular nourishment. He is also an ardent lover of truffles. I have taken from between his legs, at the bottom of his manor house, a real truffle the size of a hazelnut (Tuber Requienii, TUL.). I tried to rear him in order to make the acquaintance of his grub; I housed him in a large earthen pan filled with fresh sand and enclosed in a bell cover. Possessing neither hydnocistes nor truffles, I served him up sundry mushrooms of a rather firm consistency, like those of his choice. He refused them all, helvellae and clavariae, chanterelles and pezizae alike.

With a rhizopogon, a sort of little fungoid potato, which is frequent in pine woods at a moderate depth and sometimes even on the surface, I achieved complete success. I had strewn a handful of them on the sand of my breeding pan. At nightfall, I often surprised the Bolboceras issuing from his well, exploring the stretch of sand, choosing a piece not too big for his strength and gently rolling it towards his abode. He would go in again, leaving the rhizopogon, which was too large to take inside, on the threshold, where it served the purpose of a door. Next day, I found the piece gnawed, but only on the under side.

The Bolboceras does not like eating in public, in the open air; he needs the discreet retirement of his crypt. When he fails to find his food by burrowing under ground, he comes up to look for it on the surface. Meeting with a morsel to his taste, he takes it home when its size permits; if not, he leaves it on the threshold of his burrow and gnaws at it from below, without reappearing outside. Up to the present, hydnocistes, truffles and rhizopoga are the only food that I have known him to eat. These three instances tell us at any rate that the Bolboceras is not a specialist like the Oxyporus and the Triplax; he is able to vary his diet; perhaps he feeds on all the underground mushrooms indiscriminately.

The moth enlarges her domain yet further. Her caterpillar is a grub five or six millimeters long, white, with a black shiny head. Colonies of it abound in most mushrooms. It attacks by preference the top of the stem, for epicurean reasons that escape me; thence it spreads throughout the cap. It is the habitual boarder of the boletes, agarics, lactarii and russulie. Apart from certain species and certain groups, everything suits it. This puny grub, which will spin itself an infinitesimal cocoon of white silk under the piece attacked and will later become an insignificant moth, is the primordial ravager.

Let us next mention the arion, that voracious mollusk who also tackles most mushrooms of some size. He digs himself spacious niches inside them and there sits blissfully eating. Few in numbers, compared with the other devourers, he usually sets up house alone. He has, by way of a set of jaws, a powerful plane which creates great breaches in the object of his depredations. It is he whose havoc is most apparent.

Now all these gnawers can be recognized by their leavings, such as crumbs and worm holes. They dig clean passages, they slash and crumble without a slimy trail, they are the pinkers. The others, the liquefiers, are the chemists; they dissolve their food by means of reagents. All are the grubs of flies and belong to the commonalty of the Muscidae. Many are their species. To distinguish them from one another by rearing them in order to obtain the perfect stage would involve a great expenditure of time to little profit. We will describe them by the general name of maggots.

To see them at work, I select, as the field of exploitation, the satanic bolete (Boletus Satanas, LENZ.), one of the largest mushrooms that I can gather in my neighborhood. It has a dirty-white cap; the mouths of the tubes are a bright orange-red; the stem swells into a bulb with a delicate network of carmine veins. I divide a perfectly sound specimen into equal parts and place these in two deep plates, put side by side. One of the halves is left as it is: it will act as a control, a term of comparison. The other half receives on the pores of its undersurface a couple of dozen maggots taken from a second bolete in full process of decomposition.

The dissolving action of the grub asserts itself on the very day whereon these preparations are made. The undersurface, originally a bright red, turns brown and runs in every direction into a mass of dark stalactites. Soon, the flesh of the cap is attacked and, in a few days, becomes a gruel similar to liquid asphalt. It is almost as fluid as water. In this broth the maggots wallow, wriggling their bodies and, from time to time, sticking the breathing holes in their sterns above the water. It is an exact repetition of what the liquefiers of meat, the grubs of the grey flesh fly and the bluebottle, have lately shown us. As for the second half of the bolete, the half which I did not colonize with vermin, it remains compact, the same as it was at the start, except that its appearance is a little withered by evaporation. The fluidity, therefore, is really and truly the work of the grubs and of them alone.

Does this liquefaction imply an easy change? One would think so at first, on seeing how quickly it is performed by the action of the grubs. Moreover, certain mushrooms, the coprini, liquefy spontaneously and turn into a black fluid. One of them bears the expressive name of the inky mushroom (Coprinus atramentarius, BULL.) and dissolves into ink of its own accord. The conversion, in certain cases, is singularly rapid. One day, I was drawing one of our prettiest coprini (Coprinus sterquilinus, FRIES), which comes out of a little purse or volva. My work was barely done, a couple of hours after gathering the fresh mushroom, when the model had disappeared, leaving nothing but a pool of ink upon the table. Had I procrastinated ever so little, I should not have had time to finish and I should have lost a rare and interesting find.

This does not mean that the other mushrooms, especially the boletes, are of ephemeral duration and lacking in consistency. I made the attempt with the edible bolete (Boletus edulis, BULL.), the famous cepe of our kitchens, so highly esteemed for its flavor. I was wondering whether it would not be possible to obtain from it a sort of Liebig's extract of fungus, which would be useful in cooking. With this purpose, I had some of these mushrooms cut into small pieces and boiled, on the one hand, in plain water and, on the other, in water with bicarbonate of soda added. The treatment lasted two whole days. The flesh of the bolete was indomitable. To attack it, I should have had to employ violent drugs, which were inadmissible in view of the result to be attained.

What prolonged boiling and the aid of bicarbonate of soda leave almost intact the fly's grubs quickly turn into fluid, even as the flesh worms fluidify hard-boiled white of egg. This is done in each instance without violence, probably by means of a special pepsin, which is not the same in both cases. The liquefier of meat has its own brand; the liquefier of the bolete has another sort. The plate, then, is filled with a dark, running gruel, not unlike tar in appearance. If we allow evaporation free course, the broth sets, into a hard, easily crumbled slab, something like toffee. Caught in this matrix, grubs and pupa perish, incapable of freeing themselves. Analytical chemistry has proved fatal to them. The conditions are quite different when the attack is delivered on the surface of the ground. Gradually absorbed by the soil, the excess of liquid disappears, leaving the colonists free. In my dishes, it collects indefinitely, killing the inhabitants when it dries up into a solid layer.

The purple bolete (Boletus purpureus, FRIES), when subjected to the action of the maggots, gives the same result as the Satanic bolete, namely, a black gruel. Note that both mushrooms turn blue if broken and especially if crushed. With the edible bolete, whose flesh invariably remains white when cut, the product of its liquefaction by the vermin is a very pale brown. With the oronge, or imperial mushroom, the result is a broth which the eye would take for a thin apricot jam. Tests made with sundry other mushrooms confirm the rule: all, when attacked by the maggot, turn into a more or less fluid mess, which varies in color.

Why do the two boletes with the red tubes, the purple bolete and the satanic bolete, change into a dark gruel? I have an inkling of the reason. Both of them turn blue, with an admixture of green. A third species, the bluish bolete (Boletus cyanescens, BULL., var. lacteus, LEVEILLE), possess remarkable color sensitiveness. Bruise it ever so lightly, no matter where, on the cap, the stem, the tubes of the undersurface: forthwith, the wounded part, originally a pure white, is tinted a beautiful blue. Place this bolete in an atmosphere of carbonic acid gas. We can now knock it, crush it, reduce it to pulp; and the blue no longer shows. But extract a fragment from the crushed mass: immediately, at the first contact with the air, the matter turns a most glorious blue. It reminds us of a process employed in dyeing. The indigo of commerce, steeped in water containing lime and sulfate of iron, or copperas, is deprived of a part of its oxygen; it loses its color and becomes soluble in water, as it was in the original indigo plant, before the treatment which the plant underwent. A colorless liquid results. Expose a drop of this liquid to the air. Straightway, oxidization works upon the product: the indigo is reformed, insoluble and blue.

This is exactly what we see in the boletes that turn blue so readily. Could they, in fact, contain soluble, colorless indigo? One would say so, if certain properties did not give grounds for doubt. When subjected to prolonged exposure to the air, the boletes that are apt to turn blue, particularly the most remarkable, Boletus cyanescens, lose their color, instead of retaining the deep blue which would be a sign of real indigo. Be this as it may, these mushrooms contain a coloring principle which is very liable to change under the influence of the air. Why should we not regard it as the cause of the black tint when the maggots have liquefied the boletes which turn blue? The others, those with the white flesh, the edible bolete, for instance, do not assume this asphalty appearance once they are liquefied by the grubs.

All the boletes that change to blue when broken have a bad reputation; the books treat them as dangerous, or at least open to suspicion. The name of Satanic awarded to one of them is an ample proof of our fears. The caterpillar and the maggot are of another opinion: they greedily devour what we hold in dread. Now here is a strange thing: those passionate devotees of Boletus Satanas absolutely refuse certain mushrooms which we find delightful eating, including the most celebrated of all, the oronge, the imperial mushroom, which the Romans of the empire, past masters in gluttony, called the food of the gods, cibus deorum, the agaric of the Caesars, Agaricus caesareus. It is the most elegant of all our mushrooms. When it prepares to make its appearance by lifting the fissured earth, it is a handsome ovoid formed by the outer wrapper, the volva. Then this purse gently tears and the jagged opening partly reveals a globular object of a magnificent orange. Take a hen's egg, boil it, remove the shell: what remains will be the imperial mushroom in its purse. Remove a part of the white at the top, uncovering a little of the yolk. Then you have the nascent imperial. The likeness is perfect. And so the people of my part, struck by the resemblance, call this mushroom lou rousset d'iou, or, in other words, yolk of egg. Soon, the cap emerges entirely and spreads into a disk softer than satin to the touch and richer to the eye than all the fruit of the Hesperides. Appearing amid the pink heather, it is an entrancing object.

Well, this gorgeous agaric (Amanita caesarea, SCOP.), this food of the gods the maggot absolutely refuses. My frequent examinations have never shown me an imperial attacked by the grubs in the field. It needs imprisonment in a jar and the absence of other victuals to provoke the attempt; and even then the treacle hardly seems to suit them. After the liquefaction, the grubs try to make off, showing that the fare is not to their liking. The Mollusk also, the Arion, is anything but an ardent consumer. Passing close to an imperial mushroom and finding nothing better, he stops and takes a bite, without lingering. If, therefore, we required the evidence of the insect, or even of the Slug, to know which mushrooms are good to eat, we should refuse the best of them all. Though respected by the vermin, the glorious imperial is nevertheless ruined not by larvae, but by a parasitic fungus, the Mycogone rosea, which spreads in a purply stain and turns it into a putrid mass. This is the only despoiler that I know it to possess.

A second amanita, the sheathed amanita (Amanita vaginata, BULL.), prettily streaked on the edges of the cap, is of an exquisite flavor, almost equal to the imperial. It is called lou pichot gris, the grayling, in these parts, because of its coloring, which is usually an ashen gray. Neither the maggot nor the even more enterprising Moth ever touches it. They likewise refuse the mottled amanita (Amanita pantherina, D. C.), the vernal amanita (Amanita verna, FRIES) and the lemon-yellow amanita (Amanita citrina, SCHAEFF.), all three of which are poisonous. In short, whether it be to us a delicious dish or a deadly poison, no amanita is accepted by the grubs. The arion alone sometimes bites at it. The cause of the refusal escapes us. It were vain, speaking of the mottled amanita, for instance, to allege as a reason the presence of an alkaloid fatal to the grubs, for we should have to ask ourselves why the imperial, the amanita of the Caesars, which is wholly free from poison, is rejected no less uncompromisingly than the venomous species. Could it perhaps be lack of relish, a deficiency of seasoning for stimulating the appetite? In point of fact, when eaten raw, the amanitas have no particular flavor.

What shall we learn from the sharper-flavored mushrooms? Here, in the pinewoods, is the woolly milk mushroom (Lactarius torminosus, SCHAEFF.), turned in at the edges and wrapped in a curly fleece. Its taste is biting, worse than Cayenne pepper. Torminosus means colic producing. The name is very suitable. Unless he possessed a stomach built for the purpose, the man who touched such food as this would have a singularly bad time before him. Well, that stomach the vermin possess: they revel in the pungency of the woolly milk mushroom even as the spurge caterpillar browses with delight on the loathsome leaves of the euphorbiae. As for us, we might as well, in either case, eat live coals.

Is a condiment of this kind necessary to the grubs? Not at all. Here, in the same pinewoods, is the "delicious" milk mushroom (Lactarius deliciosus, LIN.), a glorious orange-red crater, adorned with concentric zones. If bruised, it assumes a verdigris hue, possibly a variant of the indigo tint peculiar to the blue-turning boletes. From its flesh laid bare by being broken or cut ooze blood-red drops, a well-defined characteristic peculiar to this milk mushroom. Here the violent spices of the woolly milk mushroom disappear; the flesh has a pleasant taste when eaten raw. No matter: the vermin devour the mild milk mushroom with the same zest with which they devour the horribly peppered one. To them the delicate and the strong, the insipid and the peppery are all alike.

The epithet 'delicious' applied to the mushroom whose wound weeps tears of blood is highly exaggerated. It is edible, no doubt, but it is coarse eating and difficult to digest. My household refuses it for cooking purposes. We prefer to put it to soak in vinegar and afterwards to use it as we might use pickled gherkins. The real value of this mushroom is largely overrated thanks to a too laudatory epithet.

Is a certain degree of consistency required, to suit the grubs: something midway between the softness of the amanitas and the firmness of the milk mushrooms? Let us begin by questioning the olive tree agaric or luminous mushroom (Pleurotus phosphoreus, BATT.), a magnificent mushroom colored jujube red. Its popular name is not particularly appropriate. True, it frequently grows at the base of old olive trees, but I also pick it at the foot of the box, the holm oak, the plum tree, the cypress, the almond tree, the Guelder rose and other trees and shrubs. It seems fairly indifferent to the nature of the support. A more remarkable feature distinguishes it from all the other European mushrooms: it is phosphorescent. On the lower surface and there only, it sheds a soft, white gleam, similar to that of the glowworm. It lights up to celebrate its nuptials and the emission of its spores. There is no question of chemist's phosphorus here. This is a slow combustion, a sort of more active respiration than usual. The luminous emission is extinguished in the unbreathable gases, nitrogen and carbonic acid; it continues in aerated water; it ceases in water deprived of its air by boiling. It is exceedingly faint, however, so much so that it is not perceptible except in the deepest darkness. At night and even by day, if the eyes have been prepared for it by a preliminary wait in the darkness of a cellar, this agaric is a wonderful sight, looking indeed like a piece of the full moon.

Now what do the vermin do? Are they drawn by this beacon? In no wise: maggots, caterpillars and slugs never touch the resplendent mushroom. Let us not be too quick to explain this refusal by the noxious properties of the olive tree agaric, which is said to be extremely poisonous. Here, in fact, on the pebbly ground of the wastelands, is the eryngo agaric (Pleurotus eryngii, D. C.), which has the same consistency as the other. It is the berigoulo of the Provencaux, one of the most highly esteemed mushrooms. Well, the vermin will have none of it: what is a treat to us is detestable to them.

It is superfluous to continue this method of investigation: the reply would be everywhere the same. The insect, which feeds on one sort of mushroom and refuses others, cannot tell us anything about the kinds that are good or bad for us. Its stomach is not ours. It pronounces excellent what we find poisonous; it pronounces poisonous what we think excellent. That being so, when we are lacking in the botanical knowledge which most of us have neither time nor inclination to acquire, what course are we to take? The course is extremely simple.

During the thirty years and more that I have lived at Serignan, I have never heard of one case of mushroom poisoning, even the mildest, in the village; and yet there are plenty of mushrooms eaten here, especially in autumn. Not a family but, when on a walk in the mountains, gathers a precious addition to its modest alimentary resources. What do these people gather? A little of everything. Often, when rambling in the neighboring woods, I inspect the baskets of the mushroom pickers, who are delighted for me to look. I see things fit to make mycological experts stand aghast. I often find the purple bolete, which is classed among the dangerous varieties. I made the remark one day. The man carrying the basket stared at me in astonishment: 'That a poison! The wolf's bread!' he said, patting the plump bolete with his hand. 'What an idea! It's beef marrow, sir, regular beef marrow!' [Author's note: People use them indiscriminately for cooking purposes, after removing the tubes on the under side, which are easily separated from the rest of the mushroom.]

He smiled at my apprehensions and went away with a poor opinion of my knowledge in the matter of mushrooms.

In the baskets aforesaid, I find the ringed agaric (Armillaria mellea, FRIES), which is stigmatized as valde venenatus by Persoon, an expert on the subject. It is even the mushroom most frequently made use of, because of its being so plentiful, especially at the foot of the mulberry trees. I find the Satanic bolete, that dangerous tempter; the belted milk mushroom (Lactarius zonarius, BULL.), whose burning flavor rivals the pepper of its woolly kinsman; the smooth-headed amanita (Amanita leiocophala, D. C.), a magnificent white dome rising out of an ample volva and fringed at the edges with floury relics resembling flakes of casein. Its poisonous smell and soapy aftertaste should lead to suspicion of this ivory dome; but nobody seems to mind them.

How, with such careless picking, are accidents avoided? In my village and for a long way around, the rule is to blanch the mushrooms, that is to say, to bring them to the boil in water with a little salt in it. A few rinsings in cold water conclude the treatment. They are then prepared in whatever manner one pleases. In this way, what might at first be dangerous becomes harmless, because the preliminary boiling and rinsing have removed the noxious elements.

My personal experience confirms the efficacy of this rustic method. At home, we very often make use of the ringed agaric, which is reputed extremely dangerous. When rendered wholesome by the ordeal of boiling water, it becomes a dish of which I have naught but good to say. Then again the smooth-headed amanita frequently appears upon my table, after being duly boiled: if it were not first treated in this fashion, it would be hardly safe. I have tried the blue-turning boletes, especially the purple bolete and the Satanic. They answered very well to the eulogistic term of beef marrow applied to them by the mushroom picker who scouted my prudent counsels. I have sometimes employed the mottled amanita, so ill famed in the books, without disastrous result. One of my friends, a doctor, to whom I communicated my ideas about the boiling water treatment, thought that he would make the experiment on his own account. He chose the lemon-yellow amanita, which has as bad a reputation as the mottled variety, and ate it at supper. Everything went off without the slightest inconvenience. Another, a blind friend, in whose company I was one day to taste the Cossus of the Roman epicures, treated himself to the olive tree agaric, said to be so formidable. The dish was, if not excellent, at least harmless.

It results from these facts that a good preliminary boiling is the best safeguard against accidents arising from mushrooms. If the insect, devouring one species and refusing another, cannot guide us in any way, at least rustic wisdom, the fruit of long experience, prescribes a rule of conduct which is both simple and efficacious. You are tempted by a basketful of mushrooms, but you do not feel very sure as to their good or evil properties. Then have them blanched, well and thoroughly blanched. When it leaves the purgatory of the stewpan, the doubtful mushroom can be eaten without fear.

But this, you will tell me, is a system of cookery fit for savages: the treatment with boiling water will reduce the mushrooms to a mash; it will take away all their flavor and all their succulence. That is a complete mistake. The mushroom stands the ordeal exceedingly well. I have described my failure to subdue the cepes when I was trying to obtain an extract from them. Prolonged boiling, with the aid of bicarbonate of soda, so far from reducing them to a mess, left them very nearly intact. The other mushrooms whose size entitles them to culinary consideration offer the same degree of resistance. In the second place, there is no loss of succulence and hardly any of flavor. Moreover, they become much more digestible, which is a most important condition in a dish generally so heavy for the stomach. For this reason, it is the custom, in my family, to treat them one and all with boiling water, including even the glorious imperial.

I am a Philistine, it is true, a barbarian caring little for the refinements of cookery. I am not thinking of the epicure, but of the frugal man, the husbandman especially. I should consider myself amply repaid for my persistent observations if I succeeded in popularizing, however little, the wise Provencal recipe for mushrooms, an excellent food that makes a pleasant change from the dish of beans or potatoes, when we can overcome the difficulty of distinguishing between the harmless and the dangerous.

[Recorder's note: Modern mycologists warn against Fabre's claim that boiling neutralizes all mushroom poisons.]



CHAPTER XIX. A MEMORABLE LESSON

I take leave of the mushrooms with regret: there would be so many other questions to solve concerning them! Why do the maggots eat the Satanic bolete and scorn the imperial mushroom? How is it that they find delicious what we find poisonous and why is it that what seems exquisite to our taste is loathsome to theirs? Can there be special compounds in mushrooms, alkaloids, apparently, which vary according to the botanical genus? Would it be possible to isolate them and study their properties fully? Who knows whether medical science could not employ them in relieving our ailments, even as it employs quinine, morphia and other alkaloids? One might inquire into the cause of the liquefaction of the coprini, which is spontaneous, and that of the boletes, which is brought about by the maggots. Do both cases come within the same category? Does the coprinus digest itself by virtue of a pepsin similar to the maggots'? One would like to discover the oxidizable substance that gives the luminous mushroom its soft, white light, which is like the beams of the full moon. It would be interesting to know whether certain boletes turn blue owing to the presence of an indigo which is more liable to change than dyers' indigo and whether the green of the so-called delicious milk mushroom when bruised is due to a like cause.

All these patient chemical investigations would tempt me, if the rudimentary equipment of my laboratory and especially the irrevocable flight of age-worn hopes permitted it. The day has passed for it now; there is no time left to me. No matter: let us talk chemistry once more, for a little while; and, for want of something better, let us revive old memories. If the historian, now and again, takes a small place in the story of his animals, the reader will kindly excuse him: old age is prone to these reminiscences, the bloom of later days.

I have received, in all, two lessons of a scientific character in the course of my life: one in anatomy and one in chemistry. I owe the first to the learned naturalist Moquin-Tandon, who, on our return from a botanizing expedition to Monte Renoso, in Corsica, showed me the structure of a Snail in a plate filled with water. It was short and fruitful. From that moment, I was initiated. Henceforth, I was to wield the scalpel and decently to explore an animal's interior without any other guidance from a master. The second lesson, that of chemistry, was less fortunate. I will tell you what happened.

In my normal school, the scientific teaching was on an exceedingly modest scale, consisting mainly of arithmetic and odds and ends of geometry. Physics was hardly touched. We were taught a little meteorology, in a summary fashion: a word or two about a red moon, a white frost, dew, snow and wind; and, with this smattering of rustic physics, we were considered to know enough of the subject to discuss the weather with the farmer and the plowman.

Of natural history, absolutely nothing. No one thought of telling us anything about flowers and trees, which give such zest to one's aimless rambles, nor about insects, with their curious habits, nor about stones, so instructive with their fossil records. That entrancing glance through the windows of the world was refused us. Grammar was allowed to strangle life.

Chemistry was never mentioned either: that goes without saying. I knew the word, however. My casual reading, only half-understood for want of practical demonstration, had taught me that chemistry is concerned with the shuffle of matter, uniting or separating the various elements. But what a strange idea I formed of this branch of study! To me it smacked of sorcery, of alchemy and its search for the philosopher's stone. To my mind, every chemist, when at work, should have had a magic wand in his hand and the wizard's pointed, star studded cap on his head.

An important personage who sometimes visited the school, in his capacity as an honorary lecturer, was not the man to rid me of those foolish notions. He taught physics and chemistry at the grammar school. Twice a week, from eight to nine o'clock in the evening, he held a free public class in an enormous building adjacent to our schoolhouse. This was the former Church of Saint-Martial, which has today become a Protestant meeting house.

It was a wizard's cave certainly, just as I had pictured it. At the top of the steeple, a rusty weathercock creaked mournfully; in the dusk, great Bats flew all around the edifice or dived down the throats of the gargoyles; at night, Owls hooted upon the copings of the leads. It was inside, under the immensities of the vault, that my chemist used to perform. What infernal mixtures did he compound? Should I ever know?

It is the day for his visit. He comes to see us with no pointed cap: in ordinary garb, in fact, with nothing very queer about him. He bursts into our schoolroom like a hurricane. His red face is half-buried in the enormous stiff collar that digs into his ears. A few wisps of red hair adorn his temples; the top of his head shines like an old ivory ball. In a dictatorial voice and with wooden gestures, he questions two or three of the boys; after a moment's bullying, he turns on his heel and goes off in a whirlwind as he came. No, this is not the man, a capital fellow at heart, to inspire me with a pleasant idea of the things which he teaches.

Two windows of his laboratory look out upon the garden of the school. One can just lean on them; and I often come and peep in, trying to make out, in my poor brain, what chemistry can really be. Unfortunately, the room into which my eyes penetrate is not the sanctuary but a mere outhouse where the learned implements and crockery are washed. Leaden pipes with taps run down the walls; wooden vats occupy the corners. Sometimes, those vats bubble, heated by a spray of steam. A reddish powder, which looks like brick dust, is boiling in them. I learn that the simmering stuff is a dyer's root, known as madder, which will be converted into a purer and more concentrated product. This is the master's pet study.

What I saw from the two windows was not enough for me. I wanted to see farther, into the very classroom. My wish was satisfied. It was the end of the scholastic year. A stage ahead in the regular work, I had just obtained my certificate. I was free. A few weeks remain before the holidays. Shall I go and spend them out of doors, in all the gaiety of my eighteen summers? No, I will spend them at the school which, for two years past, has provided me with an untroubled roof and my daily crust. I will wait until a post is found for me. Employ my willing service as you think fit, do with me what you will: as long as I can study, I am indifferent to the rest.

The principal of the school, the soul of kindness, has grasped my passion for knowledge. He encourages me in my determination; he proposes to make me renew my acquaintance with Horace and Virgil, so long since forgotten. He knows Latin, he does; he will rekindle the dead spark by making me translate a few passages. He does more: he lends me an Imitation with parallel texts in Latin and Greek. With the first text, which I am almost able to read, I will puzzle out the second and thus increase the small vocabulary which I acquired in the days when I was translating Aesop's Fables. It will be all the better for my future studies. What luck! Board and lodging, ancient poetry, the classical languages, all the good things at once!

I did better still. Our science master—the real, not the honorary one—who came twice a week to discourse of the rule of three and the properties of the triangle, had the brilliant idea of letting us celebrate the end of the school year with a feast of learning. He promised to show us oxygen. As a colleague of the chemist in the grammar school, he obtained leave to take us to the famous laboratory and there to handle the object of his lesson under our very eyes. Oxygen, yes, oxygen, the all-consuming gas; that was what we were to see on the morrow. I could not sleep all night for thinking of it.

Thursday afternoon came at last. As soon as the chemistry lesson is over, we were to go for a walk to Les Angles, the pretty village over yonder, perched on a steep rock. We were therefore in our Sunday best, our out-of-doors clothes: black frock coats and tall hats. The whole school was there, some thirty of us, in the charge of an usher, who knew as little as we did of the things which we were about to see. We crossed the threshold of the laboratory, not without excitement. I entered a great nave with a Gothic roof, an old, bare church through which one's voice echoed, into which the light penetrated discreetly through stained glass windows set in ribs and rosettes of stone. At the back were huge raised benches, with room for an audience of many hundreds; at the other end, where the choir once was, stood an enormous chimney mantel; in the middle was a large, massive table, corroded by the chemicals. At one end of this table was a tarred tub, lined inside with lead and filled with water. This, I at once learned, was the pneumatic trough, the vessel in which the gases were collected.

The professor begins the experiment. He takes a sort of large, long glass bulb, bent abruptly in the region of the neck. This, he informs us, is a retort. He pours into it, from a screw of paper, some black stuff that looks like powdered charcoal. This is manganese dioxide, the master tells us. It contains in abundance, in a condensed state and retained by combination with the metal, the gas which we propose to obtain. An oily looking liquid, sulfuric acid, an excessively powerful agent, will set it at liberty. Thus filled, the retort is placed on a lighted stove. A glass tube brings it into communication with a bell jar full of water on the shelf of the pneumatic trough. Those are all the preparations. What will be the result? We must wait for the action of heat.

My fellow pupils gather eagerly round the apparatus, cannot come close enough to it. Some of them play the part of the fly on the wheel and glory in contributing to the success of the experiment. They straighten the retort, which is leaning to one side; they blow with their mouths on the coals in the stove. I do not care for these familiarities with the unknown. The good natured master raises no objection; but I have never been able to endure the thronging of a crowd of gapers, who are very busy with their elbows and force their way to the front row to see whatever is happening, even though it be merely a couple of mongrels fighting. Let us withdraw and leave these officious ones to themselves. There is so much to see here, while the oxygen is being prepared. Let us make the most of the occasion and take a look round the chemist's arsenal.

Under the spacious chimney mantel is a collection of queer stoves, bound round with bands of sheet iron. There are long and short ones, high and low ones, all pierced with little windows that are closed with a terracotta shutter. This one, a sort of little tower, is formed of several parts placed one above the other and each supplied with big round handles to hold them by when you take the monument to pieces. A dome, with an iron chimney, tops the whole edifice, which must be capable of producing a very hell fire to roast a stone of no significance. Another, a squat one, stretches out like a curved spine. It has a round hole at either end; and a thick porcelain tube sticks out from each. It is impossible to conceive the purpose which such instruments as these can serve. The seekers of the philosopher's stone must have had many like them. They are torturers' engines, tearing the metals' secrets from them.

The glass things are arranged on shelves. I see retorts of different sizes, all with necks bent at a sudden angle. In addition to their long beak, some of them have a narrow little tube coming out of their bulb. Look, youngster, and do not try to guess the object of these curious vessels. I see glasses with feet to them, funnel-shaped and deep; I stand amazed at strange looking bottles with two or three mouths to each, at phials swelling into a balloon with a long, narrow tube. What an odd array of implements! And here are glass cupboards with a host of bottles and jars, filled with all manner of chemicals. The labels apprise me of their contents: molybdenite of ammonia, chloride of antimony, permanganate of potash and ever so many other strange terms. Never, in all my reading, have I met with such repellent language.

Suddenly, bang! And there is running and stamping and shouting and cries of pain! What has happened? I rush up from the back of the room. The retort has burst, squirting its boiling vitriol in every direction. The wall opposite is all stained with it. Most of my fellow pupils have been more or less struck. One poor youth has had the splashes full in his face, right into his eyes. He is yelling like a madman. With the help of a friend who has come off better than the others, I drag him outside by main force, take him to the sink, which fortunately is close at hand, and hold his face under the tap. This swift ablution serves its purpose. The horrible pain begins to be allayed, so much so that the sufferer recovers his senses and is able to continue the washing process for himself.

My prompt aid certainly saved his sight. A week later, with the help of the doctor's lotions, all danger was over. How lucky it was that I took it into my head to keep some way off! My isolation, as I stood looking into the glass case of chemicals, left me all my presence of mind, all my readiness of resource. What are the others doing, those who got splashed through standing too near the chemical bomb? I return to the lecture hall. It is not a cheerful spectacle. The master has come off badly: his shirtfront, waistcoat and trousers are covered with smears, which are all smoldering and burning into holes. He hurriedly divests himself of a portion of his dangerous raiment. Those of us who possess the smartest clothes lend him something to put on so that he can go home decently.

One of the tall, funnel-shaped glasses which I was admiring just now is standing, full of ammonia, on the table. All, coughing and sniveling, dip their handkerchiefs into it and rub the moist rag over their hats and coats. In this way, the red stains left by the horrible compound are made to disappear. A drop of ink will presently restore the color completely.

And the oxygen? There was no more question, I need hardly say, of that. The feast of learning was over. Never mind: the disastrous lesson was a mighty event for me. I had been inside the chemist's laboratory; I had had a glimpse of those wonderful jars and tubes. In teaching, what matters most is not the thing taught, whether well or badly grasped: it is the stimulus given to the pupil's latent aptitudes; it is the fulminate awakening the slumbering explosives. One day, I shall obtain on my own account that oxygen which ill luck has denied me; one day, without a master, I shall yet learn chemistry.

Yes, I shall learn this chemistry, which started so disastrously. And how? By teaching it. I do not recommend that method to anybody. Happy the man who is guided by a master's word and example! He has a smooth and easy road before him, lying straight ahead. The other follows a rugged path, in which his feet often stumble; he goes groping into the unknown and loses his way. To recover the right road, if want of success have not discouraged him, he can rely only on perseverance, the sole compass of the poor. Such was my fate. I taught myself by teaching others, by passing on to them the modicum of seed that had ripened on the barren moor cleared, from day to day, by my patient plowshare.

A few months after the incident of the vitriol bomb, I was sent to Carpentras to take charge of junior classes at the college there. The first year was a difficult one, swamped as I was by the excessive number of pupils, a set of duffers kept out of the more advanced classes and all at different stages in spelling and grammar. Next year, my school is divided into two; I have an assistant. A weeding-out takes place in my crowd of scatterbrains. I keep the older, the more intelligent ones; the others are to have a term in the preparatory division. From that day forward, things are different. Curriculum there is none. In those happy times, the master's personality counted for something; there was no such thing as the scholastic piston working with the regularity of a machine. It was left for me to act as I thought fit. Well, what should I do to make the school earn its title of 'upper primary'?

Why, of course! Among other things, I shall do some chemistry! My reading has taught me that it does no harm to know a little chemistry, if you would make your furrows yield a good return. Many of my pupils come from the country; they will go back to it to improve their land. Let us show them what the soil is made of and what the plant feeds on. Others will follow industrial careers; they will become tanners, metal founders, distillers; they will sell cakes of soap and kegs of anchovies. Let us show them pickling, soap making, stills, tannin and metals. Of course, I know nothing about these things, but I shall learn, all the more so as I shall have to teach them to the boys; and your schoolboy is a little demon for jeering at the master's hesitation.

As it happens, the college boasts a small laboratory, containing just what is strictly indispensable: a receiver, a dozen glass balloons, a few tubes and a niggardly assortment of chemicals. That will do, if I can have the run of it. But the laboratory is a sanctum reserved for the use of the sixth form. No one sets foot in it except the professor and his pupils preparing for their degree. For me, the outsider, to enter that tabernacle with my band of young imps would be most unseemly; the rightful occupant would never think of allowing it. I feel it myself: elementary teaching dare not aspire to such familiarity with the higher culture. Very well, we will not go there, so long as they will lend me the things.

I confide my plan to the principal, the supreme dispenser of those riches. He is a classics man, knows hardly anything of science, at that time held in no great esteem, and he does not quite understand the object of my request. I humbly insist and exert my powers of persuasion. I discreetly emphasize the real point of the matter. My group of pupils is a numerous one. It takes more meals at the schoolhouse—the real concern of a principal—than any other section of the college. This group must be encouraged, lured on, increased if possible. The prospect of disposing of a few more platefuls of soup wins the battle for me; my request is granted. Poor science! All that diplomacy to gain your entrance among the despised ones, who have not been nourished on Cicero and Demosthenes!

I am authorized to move, once a week, the material required for my ambitious plans. From the first floor, the sacred dwelling of the scientific things, I shall take them down to a sort of cellar where I give my lessons. The troublesome part is the pneumatic trough. It has to be emptied before it is carried downstairs and to be filled again afterwards. A day scholar, a zealous acolyte, hurries over his dinner and comes to lend me a hand an hour or two before the class begins. We effect the move between us.

What I am after is oxygen, the gas which I once saw fail so lamentably. I thought it all out at my leisure, with the help of a book. I will do this, I will do that, I will go to work in this or the other fashion. Above all, we will run no risks, perhaps of blinding ourselves; for it is once more a question of heating manganese dioxide with sulfuric acid. I am filled with misgivings at the recollection of my old school fellow yelling like mad. Who cares? Let us try for all that: fortune favors the brave! Besides, we will make one prudent condition, from which I shall never depart: no one but myself shall come near the table. If an accident happen, I shall be the only one to suffer; and, in my opinion, it is worth a burn or two to make acquaintance with oxygen.

Two o'clock strikes; and my pupils enter the classroom. I purposely exaggerate the likelihood of danger. They are all to stay on their benches and not stir. This is agreed. I have plenty of elbow room. There is no one by me, except my acolyte, standing by my side, ready to help me when the time comes. The others look on in profound silence, reverent towards the unknown.

Soon the gaseous bubbles come "gloo-glooing" through the water in the bell jar. Can it be my gas? My heart beats with excitement. Can I have succeeded without any trouble at the first attempt? We will see. A candle blown out that moment and still retaining a red tip to its wick is lowered by a wire into a small test jar filled with my product. Capital! The candle lights with a little explosion and burns with extraordinary brilliancy. It is oxygen right enough.

The moment is a solemn one. My audience is astounded and so am I, but more at my own success than at the relighted candle. A puff of vainglory rises to my brow; I feel the fire of enthusiasm run through my veins. But I say nothing of these inner sensations. Before the boys' eyes, the master must appear an old hand at the things he teaches. What would the young rascals think of me if I allowed them to suspect my surprise, if they knew that I myself am beholding the marvelous subject of my demonstration for the first time in my life? I should lose their confidence, I should sink to the level of a mere pupil.

Sursum corda! Let us go on as if chemistry were a familiar thing to me. It is the turn of the steel ribbon, an old watch spring rolled corkscrew fashion and furnished with a bit of tinder. With this simple lighted bait, the steel should take fire in a jar filled with my gas. And it does burn; it becomes a splendid firework, with cracklings and a blaze of sparks and a cloud of rust that tarnishes the jar. From the end of the fiery coil a red drop breaks off at intervals, shoots quivering through the layer of water left at the bottom of the vessel and embeds itself in the glass which has suddenly grown soft. This metallic tear, with its indomitable heat, makes every one of us shudder. All stamp and cheer and applaud. The timid ones place their hands before their faces and dare not look except through their fingers. My audience exults; and I myself triumph. Ha, my friends, isn't it grand, this chemistry!

All of us have red letter days in our lives. Some, the practical men, have been successful in business; they have made money and hold their heads high in consequence. Others, the thinkers, have gained ideas; they have opened a new account in the ledger of nature and they silently taste the hallowed joys of truth. One of my great days was that of my first acquaintance with oxygen. On that day, when my class was over and all the materials put back in their place, I felt myself grow several inches taller. An untrained workman, I had shown, with complete success, that which was unknown to me a couple of hours before. No accident whatever, not even the least stain of acid.

It is, therefore, not so difficult nor so dangerous as the pitiful finish of the Saint Martial lesson might have led me to believe. With a vigilant eye and a little prudence, I shall be able to continue. The prospect is enchanting.

And so, in due season, comes hydrogen, carefully contemplated in my reading, seen and reseen with the eye of the mind before being seen with the eyes of the body. I delight my little rascals by making the hydrogen flame sing in a glass tube, which trickles with the drops of water resulting from the combustion; I make them jump with the explosions of the thunderous mixture. Later, I show them, with the same invariable success, the splendors of phosphorus, the violent powers of chlorine, the loathsome smells of sulfur, the metamorphoses of carbon and so on. In short, in a series of lessons, the principal nonmetallic elements and their compounds are passed in review during the course of the year.

The thing was bruited abroad. Fresh pupils came to me, attracted by the marvels of the school. Additional places were laid in the dining hall; and the principal, who was more interested in the profits on his beans and bacon than in chemistry, congratulated me on this accession of boarders. I was fairly started. Time and an indomitable will would do the rest.



CHAPTER XX. INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY

Everything happens sooner or later. When, through the low windows overlooking the garden of the school, my eye glanced at the laboratory, where the madder vats were steaming; when, in the sanctuary itself, I was present, by way of a first and last chemistry lesson, at the explosion of the retort of sulfuric acid that nearly disfigured every one of us, I was far indeed from suspecting the part which I was destined to play under that same vaulted roof. Had a prophet foretold that I should one day succeed the master, never would I have believed him. Time works these surprises for us.

Stones would have theirs too, if anything were able to astonish them. The Saint Martial building was originally a church; it is a protestant place of worship now. Men used to pray there in Latin; today they pray in French. In the intervening period, it was for some years in the service of science, the noble orison that dispels the darkness. What has the future in store for it? Like many another in the ringing city, to use Rabelais' epithet, will it become a home for the fuller's teasels, a warehouse for scrap iron, a carrier's stable? Who knows? Stones have their destinies no less unexpected than ours.

When I took possession of it as a laboratory for the municipal course of lectures, the nave remained as it was at the time of my former short and disastrous visit. To the right, on the wall, a number of black stains struck the eye. It was as though a madman's hand, armed with the inkpot, had smashed its fragile projectile at that spot. I recognized the stains at once. They were the marks of the corrosive which the retort had splashed at our heads. Since those days of long ago, no one had thought fit to hide them under a coat of whitewash. So much the better: they will serve me as excellent counselors. Always before my eyes, at every lesson, they will speak to me incessantly of prudence.

For all its attractions, however, chemistry did not make me forget a long cherished plan well suited to my tastes, that of teaching natural history at a university. Now, one day, at the grammar school, I had a visit from a chief inspector which was not of an encouraging nature. 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 for 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.

With the aid of a system of tangents of which I first showed him the rule and the method of construction, my artist has obtained the ordinary cycloid, followed by the interior and the exterior epicycloid and, lastly, the same curves both lengthened and shortened. His drawings are admirable Spider's webs, encircling the cunning curve in their net. The draftsmanship is so accurate that it is easy to deduce from it beautiful theorems, which would be very laborious to work out by the calculus.

I submit the geometrical masterpieces to my chief inspector, who is himself said to be smitten with geometry. I modestly describe the method of construction, I call his attention to the fine deductions which the drawing enables one to make. It is labor lost: he gives but a heedless glance at my sheets and flings each on the table as I hand it to him.

'Alas!' said I to myself. 'There is a storm brewing; the cycloid won't save you; it's your turn for a bite from the Crocodile!'

Not a bit of it. Behold the bugbear growing genial. He sits down on a bench, with one leg here, another there, invites me to take a seat by his side and, in a moment, we are discussing graphics. Then, bluntly: 'Have you any money?' he asks.

Astounded at this strange question, I answer with a smile.

'Don't be afraid,' he says. 'Confide in me. I'm asking you in your own interest. Have you any capital?'

'I have no reason to be ashamed of my poverty, monsieur l'inspecteur general. I frankly admit, I possess nothing; my means are limited to my modest salary.'

A frown greets my answer; and I hear, spoken in an undertone, as though my confessor were talking to himself: 'That's sad, that's really very sad.'

Astonished to find my penury treated as sad, I ask for an explanation: I was not accustomed to this solicitude on the part of my superiors.

'Why, yes, it's a great pity,' continues the man reputed so terrible. 'I have read your articles in the Annales des sciences naturelles. You have an observant mind, a taste for research, a lively style and a ready pen. You would have made a capital university professor.'

'But that's just what I'm aiming at!'

'Give up the idea.'

'Haven't I the necessary attainment?'

'Yes, you have; but you have no capital.' The great obstacle stands revealed to me: woe to the poor in pocket! University teaching demands a private income. Be as ordinary, as commonplace as you please, but, above all, possess the coin that lets you cut a dash. That is the main thing; the rest is a secondary condition.

And the worthy man tells me what poverty in a frock coat means. Though less of a pauper than I, he has known the mortification of it; he describes it to me, excitedly, in all its bitterness. I listen to him with an aching heart; I see the refuge which was to shelter my future crumbling before my eyes: 'You have done me a great service, sir,' I answered. 'You put an end to my hesitation. For the moment, I give up my plan. I will first see if it is possible to earn the small fortune which I shall need if I am to teach in a decent manner.'

Thereupon we exchanged a friendly grip of the hand and parted. I never saw him again. His fatherly arguments had soon convinced me: I was prepared to hear the blunt truth. A few months earlier, I had received my nomination as an assistant lecturer in zoology at the university of Poitiers. They offered me a ridiculous salary. After paying the costs of moving, I should have had hardly three francs a day left; and, on this income, I had to keep my family, numbering seven in all. I hastened to decline the very great honor.

No, science ought not to practice these jests. If we humble persons are of use to her, she should at least enable us to live. If she can't do that, then let her leave us to break stones on the highway. Oh, yes, I was prepared for the truth when that honest fellow talked to me of frock coated poverty! I am telling the story of a not very distant past. Since then, things have improved considerably; but, when the pear was properly ripened, I was no longer of an age to pick it.

And what was I to do now, to overcome the difficulty mentioned by my inspector and confirmed by my personal experience? I would take up industrial chemistry. The municipal lectures at Saint Martial placed a spacious and fairly well-equipped laboratory at my disposal. Why not make the most of it?

The chief manufacture of Avignon was madder. The farmer supplied the raw material to the factories, where it was turned into purer and more concentrated products. My predecessor had gone in for it and done well by it, so people said. I would follow in his footsteps and use the vats and furnaces, the expensive plant which I had inherited. So to work.

What should I set myself to produce? I proposed to extract the coloring substance, alizarin, to separate it from the other matters found with it in the root, to obtain it in the pure state and in a form that allowed of the direct printing of the stuffs, a much quicker and more artistic method than the old dyeing process.

Nothing could be simpler than this problem, once the solution was known; but how tremendously obscure while it had still to be solved! I dare not call to mind all the imagination and patience spent upon endless endeavors which nothing, not even the madness of them, discouraged. What mighty meditations in the somber church! What glowing dreams, soon to be followed by sore disappointment, when experiment spoke the last word and upset the scaffolding of my plans. Stubborn as the slave of old amassing a peculium for his enfranchisement, I used to reply to the check of yesterday by the fresh attempt of tomorrow, often as faulty as the others, sometimes the richer by an improvement, and I went on indefatigably, for I too cherished the indomitable ambition to set myself free.

Should I succeed? Perhaps so. I at last had a satisfactory answer. I obtained, in a cheap and practical fashion, the pure coloring matter, concentrated in a small volume and excellent for both printing and dyeing. One of my friends took up my process on a large scale in his works; a few calico factories adopted the produce and expressed themselves delighted with it. The future smiled at last; a pink rift opened in my gray sky. I should possess the modest fortune without which I must deny myself the pleasure of teaching in a university. Freed of the torturing anxiety about my daily bread, I should be able to live at ease among my insects.

In the midst of the joys of seeing these problems solved by chemistry, yet another ray of sunshine was reserved for me, adding its gladness to that of my success. Let us go back a couple of years. The chief inspectors visited our grammar school. These personages travel in pairs: one attends to literature, the other to science. When the inspection was over and the books checked, the staff was summoned to the principal's drawing room, to receive the parting admonitions of the two luminaries. The man of science began. I should be sadly put to it to remember what he said. It was cold professional prose, made up of soulless words which the hearer forgot once the speaker's back was turned, words merely boring to both. I had heard enough of these chilly sermons in my time; one more of them could not hope to make an impression on me.

The inspector in literature spoke next. At the first words which he uttered, I said to myself: 'Oho! This is a very different business!'

The speech was alive and vigorous and full of images; indifferent to scholastic commonplaces, the ideas soared, hovering gently in the serene heights of a kindly philosophy. This time, I listened with pleasure; I even felt stirred. Here was no official homily: it was full of impassioned zeal, of words that carried you with them, uttered by an honest man accomplished in the art of speaking, an orator in the true sense of the word. In all my school experience, I had never had such a treat.

When the meeting broke up, my heart beat faster than usual: 'What a pity,' I thought, 'that my side, the science side, cannot bring me into contact, some day, with that inspector! It seems to me that we should become great friends.'

I inquired his name of my colleagues, who were always better informed than I. They told me it was Victor Duruy.

Well, one day, two years later, as I was looking after my Saint Martial laboratory in the midst of the steam from my vats, with my hands the color of boiled lobster claws from constant dipping in the indelible red of my dyes, there walked in, unexpectedly, a person whose features straightway seemed familiar. I was right, it was the very man, the chief inspector whose speech had once stirred me. M. Duruy was now minister of public instruction. He was styled, 'Your excellency;' and this style, usually an empty formula, was well deserved in the present case, for our new minister excelled in his exalted functions. We all held him in high esteem. He was the workers' minister, the man for the humble toiler.

'I want to spend my last half-hour at Avignon with you,' said my visitor, with a smile. 'That will be a relief from the official bowing and scraping.'

Overcome by the honor paid me, I apologized for my costume—I was in my shirt sleeves—and especially for my lobster claws, which I had tried, for a moment, to hide behind my back.

'You have nothing to apologize for. I came to see the worker. The working man never looks better than in his overall, with the marks of his trade on him. Let us have a talk. What are you doing just now?'

I explained, in a few words, the object of my researches; I showed my product; I executed under the minister's eyes a little attempt at printing in madder red. The success of the experiment and the simplicity of my apparatus, in which an evaporating dish, maintained at boiling point under a glass funnel, took the place of a steam chamber, caused him some surprise.

'I will help you,' he said. 'What do you want for your laboratory?'

'Why, nothing, monsieur le ministre, nothing! With a little application, the plant I have is ample.'

'What, nothing! You are unique there! The others overwhelm me with requests; their laboratories are never well enough supplied. And you, poor as you are, refuse my offers!'

'No, there is one thing which I will accept.'

'What is that?'

'The signal honor of shaking you by the hand.'

'There you are, my friend, with all my heart. But that's not enough. What else do you want?'

'The Paris Jardin des Plantes is under your control. Should a crocodile die, let them keep the hide for me. I will stuff it with straw and hang it from the ceiling. Thus adorned, my workshop will rival the wizard's cave.'

The minister cast his eyes round the nave and glanced up at the Gothic vault: 'Yes, it would look very well.' And he gave a laugh at my sally. 'I now know you as a chemist,' he continued. 'I knew you already as a naturalist and a writer. I have heard about your little animals. I am sorry that I shall have to leave without seeing them. They must wait for another occasion. My train will be starting presently. Walk with me to the station, will you? We shall be alone and we can chat a bit more on the way.'

We strolled along, discussing entomology and madder. My shyness had disappeared. The self sufficiency of a fool would have left me dumb; the fine frankness of a lofty mind put me at my ease. I told him of my experiments in natural history, of my plans for a professorship, of my fight with harsh fate, my hopes and fears. He encouraged me, spoke to me of a better future. We reached the station and walked up and down outside, talking away delightfully.

A poor old woman passed, all in rags, her back bent by age and years of work in the fields. She furtively put out her hand for alms. Duruy felt in his waistcoat, found a two franc piece and placed it in the outstretched hand; I wanted to add a couple of sous as my contribution, but my pockets were empty, as usual. I went to the beggar woman and whispered in her ear: 'Do you know who gave you that? It's the emperor's minister.

The poor woman started; and her astounded eyes wandered from the open-handed swell to the piece of silver and from the piece of silver to the open-handed swell. What a surprise! What a windfall!

'Que lou bon Dieu ie done longo vido e santa, pecaire!' she said, in her cracked voice.

And, curtseying and nodding, she withdrew, still staring at the coin in the palm of her hand.

'What did she say?' asked Duruy.

'She wished you long life and health.' 'And pecaire?'

'Pecaire is a poem in itself: it sums up all the gentler passions.'

And I myself mentally repeated the artless vow. The man who stops so kindly when a beggar puts out her hand has something better in his soul than the mere qualities that go to make a minister.

We entered the station, still alone, as promised, and I quite without misgivings. Had I but foreseen what was going to happen, how I should have hastened to take my leave! Little by little, a group formed in front of us. It was too late to fly; I had to screw up my courage. Came the general of division and his officers, came the prefect and his secretary, the mayor and his deputy, the school inspector and the pick of the staff. The minister faced the ceremonial semicircle. I stood next to him. A crowd on one side, we two on the other. Followed the regulation spinal contortions, the empty obeisances which my dear Duruy had come to my laboratory to forget. When bowing to St. Roch, in his corner niche, the worshipper at the same time salutes the saint's humble companion. I was something like St. Roch's dog in the presence of those honors which did not concern me. I stood and looked on, with my awful red hands concealed behind my back, under the broad brim of my felt hat.

After the official compliments had been exchanged, the conversation began to languish; and the minister seized my right hand and gently drew it from the mysterious recesses of my wide awake.

'Why don't you show those gentlemen your hands?' he said. 'Most people would be proud of them.'

'Workman's hands,' said the prefect's secretary. 'Regular workman's hands.'

The general, almost scandalized at seeing me in such distinguished company, added: 'Hands of a dyer and cleaner.'

'Yes, workman's hands,' retorted the minister, 'and I wish you many like them. Believe me, they will do much to help the chief industry of your city. Skilled as they are in chemical work, they are equally capable of wielding the pen, the pencil, the scalpel and the lens. As you here seem unaware of it, I am delighted to inform you.'

This time, I should have liked the ground to open and swallow me up. Fortunately, the bell rang for the train to start. I said goodbye to the minister and, hurriedly taking to flight, left him laughing at the trick which he had played me.

The incident was noised about, could not help being so, for the peristyle of a railway station keeps no secrets. I then learned to what annoyances the shadow of the great exposes us. I was looked upon as an influential person, having the favor of the gods at my disposal. Place hunters and canvassers tormented me. One wanted a license to sell tobacco and stamps, another a scholarship for his son, another an increase of his pension. I had only to ask and I should obtain, said they.

O simple people, what an illusion was yours! You could not have hit upon a worse intermediary. I figuring as a postulant! I have many faults, I admit, but that is certainly not one of them. I got rid of the importunate people as best I could, though they were utterly unable to fathom my reserve. What would they have said had they known of the minister's offers with regard to my laboratory and my jesting reply, in which I asked for a crocodile skin to hang from my ceiling! They would have taken me for an idiot.

Six months elapsed; and I received a letter summoning me to call upon the minister at his office. I suspected a proposal to promote me to a more important grammar school and wrote begging that I might be left where I was, among my vats and my insects. A second letter arrived, more pressing than the first and signed by the minister's own hand. This letter said: 'Come at once, or I shall send my gendarmes to fetch you.'