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Updated: June 17, 2025
The builders' men had distributed here and there in the harmas great mounds of sand and heaps of stones, with a view to running up some surrounding walls. The work dragged on slowly; and the materials found occupants from the first year. The mason bees had chosen the interstices between the stones as a dormitory where to pass the night, in serried groups.
He could scarcely drag his weary limbs across the pebbles of his Harmas; but he bore his eighty-seven years with a fine disdain for age and its failings, and although the fire of his glance and that whole, eager countenance still expressed his passion for the truth, his abrupt gestures, touched with irony, his simple bearing, and the extreme modesty of his whole person, spoke sufficiently of his profound indifference toward outside contingencies, for the baubles of fame and all the stupidities of life.
The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of thistles and centauries. By a most fortunate chance, with this populous family of honey-gatherers was allied the whole hunting tribe. The builders' men had distributed here and there, in the harmas, great mounds of sand and heaps of stones, with a view of running up some surrounding walls.
Yes, this is the bill of fare which the proud Pompilus provides for her larva. This spectacle, one of the most striking with which the Hunting Wasps have ever provided me, has as yet been offered to my eyes but once; and that was close beside my rural home, in the famous laboratory of the harmas. Cf. "The Life of the Fly," by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapter 1.
That morning the gate of the Harmas was left open to all, and many of the people of Sérignan who invaded the garden were able to look for the first time on the face of their fellow-citizen, who had so long lived among them, and whom they had now, to their astonishment, discovered.
The common clary and the Babylonian centaury, with which I have stocked the harmas, shall be the harvest-fields; the reaper shall be the Diadem Anthidium, the inmate of my reeds. The common clary, or toute-bonne, forms part, I know, of our French flora to-day; but it is an acclimatized foreigner.
Thus even the most recent incidents find their way into the solitude of the Harmas and help to sustain the conversation. "The first time we resume our Sérignan evenings," he wrote to his nephew on the morrow of one of these intimate gatherings, "we will have a little chat about your Justinian, whom the recent drama of "Théodora" has just made the fashion.
They customarily spent Thursday and Sunday afternoons at the Harmas; but these beloved disciples might call at any hour; the master always welcomed them, even in the morning, even when he was entirely absorbed in his work and could not bear any one about him.
Nevertheless, this represented to them a distant expedition, an unknown country; for I do not see them go on long excursions. By day, they visit the nests or the flowers in the garden; at night, they take refuge in the old galleries or in the interstices of the stone-heaps in the harmas. The most numerous is the first, the Three-horned Osmia.
He was no less modest than the sage of Sérignan; self-effacing before others, says one of his biographers, so that they were never made to feel his superiority. In the midst of the beautiful and spacious gardens at the end of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where he finally made his home, he also contrived to create for himself a Harmas after his own heart.
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