Ferdinand Fabre was a French poet and novelist. In his youth he was preparing for a clergy rank and graduated from a course in a theological seminary.
Background
Ferdinand Fabre was born on June 9, 1827 at Bedarieux, in Herault, in a very picturesque district of the south of France, which he completely described in his literature. He was the son of a local architect, who failed in business, so Ferdinand was brought up by his uncle, the Abbe Fulcran Fabre, at Camplong among the mulberry woods.
Education
He was destined to the priesthood, and was sent for that purpose to the seminary of St Pons de Thomieres, where, in 1848, he had, as he believed, an ecstatic vision of Christ, who warned him "It is not the will of God that thou shouldst be a priest. "
Career
He had to look for a profession, and, after attempting medicine at Montpellier, he was articled as a lawyer's clerk in Paris. In 1853 he published a volume of verses, Feuilles de lierre, after that he broke down in health, and crept back, humble and apparently without ambition, to his old home at Bedarieux. After some eight or nine years of country life he reappeared in Paris. In his earliest novel, Les Courbezon (1862), he treated the subject which was to recur in almost all his books, the daily business of country priests in the Cevennes. This story enjoyed an immediate success with the literary class of readers; George Sand praised it, Sainte-Beuve hailed in its author " the strongest of the disciples of Balzac, " and it was crowned by the French Academy. From this time forth Fabre settled down to the production of novels, of which about twenty he had published by the time of his death. Among these the most important were Le Chevrier (1868), unique among his works as written in an experimental mixture of Cevenol patois and French of the 16th century; L'Abbe Tigrane, candidat a la papaute (1873), by common consent is the best of all Fabre's novels, a very powerful picture of unscrupulous priestly ambition; Mon Oncle Celestin (1881), a study of the entirely single and tender-hearted country abbe; and Lucifer (1884), a marvellous gallery of serious clerical portraits. In 1883 Fabre was appointed curator of the Mazarin Library, with rooms in the Institute, where, on nth February 1808, he died after a brief attack of pneumonia. Ferdinand Fabre occupies in French literature a position somewhat analogous to that of Mr Thomas Hardy amongst English waiters of fiction. He deals almost exclusively with the population of the mountain villages of I-Ierault, and particularly with its priests. He loved most of all to treat himself of the celibate virtues, the strictly ecclesiastical passions, the enduring tension of the young soul.