adults, the evening classes which enabled workmen, peasants, bourgeois, and
young women to fill the gaps in their education, he gave reality to the
generous and fruitful idea that it is possible for all to divide life into
two parts, one having for its object our material needs and our daily
bread, and the other consecrated to the spiritual life and the delights of
the Ideal.

At the same time he emancipated the young women of France, formerly under
the exclusive tutelage of the clergy, and opened to them for the first time
the golden gates of knowledge; an audacious innovation, and formidable
withal, for it shrewdly touched the interests of the Church, struck a blow
at her ever-increasing influence, and clashed with her consecrated
privileges and age-long prejudices. (4/25.)

At Avignon Fabre was instructed to give his personal services. He gave them
with all his heart; and it was then that he undertook, in the ancient Abbey
of Saint-Martial, those famous free lectures which have remained celebrated
in the memory of that generation. There, under the ancient Gothic vault,
among the pupils of the primary Normal College, an eager crowd of listeners
pressed to hear him; and among the most assiduous was Roumanille, the
friend of Mistral, he who so exquisitely wove into his harmonies "the
laughter of young maidens and the flowers of springtime." No one expounded
a fact better than Fabre; no one explained it so fully and so clearly. No
one could teach as he did, in a fashion so simple, so animated, so
picturesque, and by methods so original.

He was indeed convinced that even in early childhood it was possible for
both boys and girls to learn and to love many subjects which had hitherto
never been proposed; and in particular that Natural History which to him
was a book in which all the world might read, but that university methods