In order to make a living, Fabres, who was only fourteen years old, went out to work, worked as a coolie on the railway, worked as a lemon vendor in the market and often spent the night in the open air. However, despite all the difficulties, Fabres never gave up the pursuit of knowledge and never stopped teaching himself. Finally, at the age of 19, he was admitted to Yaweinong Normal School and won a scholarship. In normal schools, Fabres's interest in natural animals and plants is far greater than "the grammar that stifles human nature".
After graduating from school, fabrice became a primary school teacher. While working, he taught himself, and successively got bachelor's degrees in mathematics, physics and other disciplines. He believes that "whether anyone teaches you this thing or not, the most important thing is whether you have understanding and perseverance." After that, he also worked in middle schools in Corsica and avignon. When he became a middle school teacher, Fabres became more interested in insects. He often led and guided students to observe and study insects. The original text of the book Insect World is Memories of Entomology Research, and the subtitle is Research on Insect Instinct and its Customs, which shows that Fabres has been observing and studying the crystallization of insects for decades, getting up early and being greedy for the dark in the hot sun and cold wind, holding a magnifying glass and notebook.
Fabres had a high literary attainments and was deeply influenced by Renaissance writers, especially rabelais. It can be said that chateaubriand, a French romantic poet, pioneered the description of giant scenery such as oceans, mountains and forests in the literary field, while Fabres vividly recorded the feeding habits, preferences, survival skills, natural enemies, metamorphosis and reproduction of various small creatures in the insect world with a simple and fresh style.
Fabres's description of insects is full of childlike innocence, poetry and sense of humor. In his works, the pine beetle is "an ornament in the summer twilight and a beautiful jewel embedded in the summer solstice crown"; Fireflies are "light spots away from the bright full moon"; He described "fighting is a profession that is not conducive to the development of skills and talents ....., and it has no other specialty except killing people"; In his eyes, rhinoceros dung beetles are "selfless work" ... insisting on underground work and doing their best for the future of the family. No wonder Hugo, a famous French writer, praised Fabres as "Homer of the insect world".
Fabres's representative works have been translated into thirteen languages, which has aroused the interest of several generations of teenagers in natural science and biology for more than one hundred years. The original text consists of two volumes and ten chapters. Some of them were selected for translation in this book. Among them, "Spider" and "Scorpion" belong to the arthropod phylum with Insecta in classification, but fortunately, the author has explained it.
In his later years, Fabres was repeatedly recommended by French literary circles as a Nobel Prize in Literature judge, but all ended in failure. To this end, many people either published articles in newspapers or wrote letters to Fabres to express their grievances. Fabrice replied, "I work because I have fun, not for the pursuit of honor. You are angry that I have been forgotten by the public. Actually, I don't care too much.
Masterpiece: the world of insects