Though all my efforts, which were the more deserving because I had
to work alone, led to almost nothing in that congenial calling, I
would begin it all over again if I could. I should love to be
conversing for the first time with Leibnitz and Newton, with
Laplace and Lagrange, with Cuvier and Jussieu, even if I had
afterwards to solve that other arduous problem: how to procure
one's daily bread. Ah, young men, my successors, what an easy time
you have of it today! If you don't know it, then let me tell you so
by means of these few pages from the life of one of your elders.

But let us not forget our insects, while listening to the echoes of
illusions and difficulties roused in my memories by the cupboard
window and the hired blackboard. Let us go back to the sunken
roads of the Legue, which have become classic, so they say, since
the appearance of my notes on the Oil beetles. Ye illustrious
ravines, with your sun-baked slopes, if I have contributed a little
to your fame, you, in your turn, have given me many fair hours of
forgetfulness in the happiness of learning. You, at least, did not
lure me with vain hopes; all that you promised you gave me and
often a hundredfold. You are my promised land, where I would have
sought at the last to pitch my observer's tent. My wish was not to
be realized. Let me, at least, in passing, greet my beloved
animals of the old days.

I raise my hat to Cerceris tuberculata, whom I see engaged on that
slant, storing her Cleonus [a large species of weevil]. As I saw
her then, so I see her now: the same staggering attempts to hoist
the prey to the mouth of the burrow; the same brawls between males
watching in the brushwood of the kermes oak. The sight of them
sends a younger blood coursing through my veins; I receive as it