An epidemic was ruining in terrible proportions the industry of the cultivation of silkworms. J. B. Dumas had been desired, as Senator, to draw up a report on the wishes of over 3,500 proprietors in sericicultural departments, all begging the public authorities to study the question of the causes of the protracted epidemic. Dumas was all the more preoccupied as to the fate of sericiculture that he himself came from one of the stricken departments. He was born on July 14, 1800, in one of the back streets of the town of Alais, to which he enjoyed returning as a celebrated scientist and a dignitary of the Empire. He gave much attention to all the problems which interested the national prosperity and considered that the best judges in these matters were the men of science. He well knew the conscientious tenacity—besides other characteristics—which his pupil and friend brought into any undertaking, and anxiously urged him to undertake this study. “Your proposition,” wrote Pasteur in a few hurried lines, “throws me into a great perplexity; it is indeed most flattering and the object is a high one, but it troubles and embarrasses me! Remember, if you please, that I have never even touched a silkworm. If I had some of your knowledge on the subject I should not hesitate; it may even come within the range of my present studies. However, the recollection of your many kindnesses to me would leave me bitter regrets if I were to decline your pressing invitation. Do as you like with me.” On May 17, 1865, Dumas wrote: “I attach the greatest value to seeing your attention fixed on the question which interests my poor country; the distress is beyond anything you can imagine.” Before his departure for Alais, Pasteur had read an essay on the history of the silkworm, published by one of his col{116}leagues, Quatrefages, born like Dumas in the Gard. Quatrefages attributed to an Empress of China the first knowledge of the art of utilizing silk, more than 4,000 years ago. The Chinese, in possession of the precious insect, had jealously preserved the monopoly of its culture, even to the point of making it a capital offence to take beyond the frontiers of the Empire the eggs of the silkworm. A young princess, 2,000 years later, had the courage to infringe this law for love of her betrothed, whom she was going to join in the centre of Asia, and also through the almost equally strong desire to continue her fairy-like occupation after her marriage.
Pasteur appreciated the pretty legend, but was more interested in the history of the acclimatizing of the mulberry tree. From Provence Louis XI took it to Touraine: Catherine de Medici planted it in Orléanais. Henry IV had some mulberry trees planted in the park at Fontainebleau and in the Tuileries where they succeeded admirably. He also encouraged a Treatise on the Gathering of Silk by Olivier de Serres. This earliest agricultural writer in France was much appreciated by the king, in spite of the opposition of Sully, who did not believe in this new fortune for France. Documentary evidence is lacking as to the development of the silk industry.
From 1700 to 1788, wrote Quatrefages, France produced annually about 6,000,000 kilogrammes of cocoons. This was decreased by one-half under the Republic; wool replaced silk perhaps from necessity, perhaps from affectation.
Napoleon I restored that luxury. The sericicultural industry prospered from the Imperial Epoch until the reign of Louis Philippe, to such an extent as to reach in one year a total of 20,000,000 kilogrammes of cocoons, representing 100,000,000 francs. The name of Tree of Gold given to the mulberry, had never been better deserved.
Suddenly all these riches fell away. A mysterious disease was destroying the nurseries. “Eggs, worms, chrysalides, moths, the disease may manifest itself in all the organs,” wrote Dumas in his report to the Senate. “Whence does it come? how is it contracted? No one knows. But its invasion is recognized by little brown or black spots.” It was therefore called “corpuscle disease”; it was also designated as “gattine” from the Italian gattino, kitten; the sick worms held up their heads and put out their hooked feet like cats about{117} to scratch. But of all those names, that of “pébrine” adopted by Quatrefages was the most general. It came from the patois word pébré (pepper). The spots on the diseased worms were, in fact, rather like pepper grains.
The first symptoms had been noticed by some in 1845, by others in 1847. But in 1849 it was a disaster. The South of France was invaded. In 1853, seed had to be procured from Lombardy. After one successful year the same disappointments recurred. Italy was attacked, also Spain and Austria. Seed was procured from Greece, Turkey, the Caucasus, but the evil was still on the increase; China itself was attacked, and, in 1864, it was only in Japan that healthy seed could be found.
Every hypothesis was suggested, atmospheric conditions, degeneration of the race of silkworms, disease of the mulberry tree, etc.—books and treatises abounded, but in vain.
When Pasteur started for Alais (June 16, 1865), entrusted with this scientific mission by the Minister of Agriculture, his mind saw but that one point of interrogation, “What caused these fatal spots?” On his arrival he sympathetically questioned the Alaisians. He received confused and contradictory answers, indications of chimerical remedies; some cultivators poured sulphur or charcoal powder on the worms, some mustard meal or castor sugar; ashes and soot were used, quinine powders, etc. Some cultivators preferred liquids, and syringed the mulberry leaves with wine, rum or absinthe. Fumigations of chlorine, of coal tar, were approved by some and violently objected to by others. Pasteur, more desirous of seeking the origin of the evil than of making a census of these remedies, unceasingly questioned the nursery owners, who invariably answered that it was something like the plague or cholera. Some worms languished on the frames in their earliest days, others in the second stage only, some passed through the third and fourth moultings, climbed the twig and spun their cocoon. The chrysalis became a moth, but that diseased moth had deformed antenn? and withered legs, the wings seemed singed. Eggs (technically called seed) from those moths were inevitably unsuccessful the following year. Thus, in the same nursery, in the course of the two months that a larva takes to become a moth, the pébrine disease was alternately sudden or insidious: it burst out or disappeared, it hid itself within the chrysalis and reappeared in the moth or the eggs of a moth{118} which had seemed sound. The discouraged Alaisians thought that nothing could overcome pébrine.
Pasteur did not admit such resignation. But he began by one aspect only of the problem. He resolved to submit those corpuscles of the silkworm which had been observed since 1849 to microscopical study. He settled down in a small magnanerie near Alais; two series of worms were being cultivated. The first set was full grown; it came from some Japanese seed guaranteed as sound, and had produced very fine cocoons. The cultivator intended to keep the seed of the moths to compensate himself for the failure of the second set, also of Japanese origin, but not officially guaranteed. The worms of this second series were sickly and did not feed properly. And yet these worms, seen through the microscope, only exceptionally presented corpuscles; whilst Pasteur was surprised to find some in almost every moth or chrysalis from the prosperous nursery. Was it then elsewhere than in the worms that the secret of the pébrine was to be found?
Pasteur was interrupted in the midst of his experiments by a sudden blow. Nine days after his arrival, a telegram called him to Arbois: his father was very ill. He started, full of anguish, remembering the sudden death of his mother before he had had time to reach her, and that of Jeanne, his eldest daughter, who had also died far away from him in the little house at Arbois. His sad presentiment oppressed him during the whole of the long journey, and was fully justified; he arrived to find, already in his coffin, the father he so dearly loved and whose name he had made an illustrious one.
In the evening, in the empty room above the tannery, Pasteur wrote: “Dear Marie, dear children, the dear grandfather is no more; we have taken him this morning to his last resting place, close to little Jeanne’s. In the midst of my grief I have felt thankful that our little girl had been buried there.... Until the last moment I hoped I should see him again, embrace him for the last time ... but when I arrived at the station I saw some of our cousins all in black, coming from Salins; it was only then that I understood that I could but accompany him to the grave.
“He died on the day of your first communion, dear Cécile; those two memories will remain in your heart, my poor child. I had a presentiment of it when that very morning, at the hour when he was struck down, I was asking you to pray for{119} the grandfather at Arbois. Your prayers will have been acceptable unto God, and perhaps the dear grandfather himself knew of them and rejoiced with dear little Jeanne over Cécile’s piety.
“I have been thinking all day of the marks of affection I have had from my father. For thirty years I have been his constant care, I owe everything to him. When I was young he kept me from bad company and instilled into me the habit of working and the example of the most loyal and best-filled life. He was far above his position both in mind and in character.... You did not know him, dearest Marie, at the time when he and my mother were working so hard for the children they loved, for me especially, whose books and schooling cost so much.... And the touching part of his affection for me is that it never was mixed with ambition. You remember that he would have been pleased to see me the headmaster of Arbois College? He foresaw that advancement would mean hard work, perhaps detrimental to my health. And yet I am sure that some of the success in my scientific career must have filled him with joy and pride; his son! his name! the child he had guided and cherished! My dear father, how thankful I am that I could give him some satisfaction!
“Farewell, dearest Marie, dear children. We shall often talk of the dear grandfather. How glad I am that he saw you all again a short time ago, and that he lived to know little Camille. I long to see you all, but must go back to Alais, for my studies would be retarded by a year if I could not spend a few days there now.
“I have some ideas on this disease, which is indeed a scourge for all those southern departments. The one arrondissement of Alais has lost an income of 120,000,000 francs during the last fifteen years. M. Dumas is a million times right; it must be seen to, and I am going to continue my experiments. I am writing to M. Nisard to have the admission examinations in my absence, which can easily be done.”
Nisard wrote to him (June 19): “My dear friend, I heard of your loss, and I sympathize most cordially with you.... Take all the time necessary to you. You are away in the service of science, probably of humanity. Everything will be done according to your precise indications. I foresee {120}no difficulty ... everything is going on well at the Ecole. In spite of your reserve—which is a part of your talent—I see that you are on the track, as M. Biot would have said, and that you will have your prey. Your name will stand next to that of Olivier de Serres in the annals of sericiculture.”
On his return to Alais Pasteur went back to his observations with his scientific ardour and his customary generous eagerness to lighten the burden of others. He wrote in the introduction to his Studies on Silkworm Disease the following heartfelt lines—
“A traveller coming back to the Cévennes mountains after an absence of fifteen years would be saddened to see the change wrought in that countryside within such a short time. Formerly he might have seen robust men breaking up the rock to build terraces against the side and up to the summit of each mountain; then planting mulberry trees on these terraces. These men, in spite of their hard work, were then bright and happy, for ease and contentment reigned in their homes.
“Now the mulberry plantations are abandoned, the ‘golden tree’ no longer enriches the country, faces once beaming with health and good humour are now sad and drawn. Distress and hunger have succeeded to comfort and happiness.”
Pasteur thought with sorrow of the sufferings of the Cévenol populations. The scientific problem was narrowing itself down. Faced by the contradictory facts that one successful set of cocoons had produced corpuscled moths, while an apparently unsuccessful set of worms showed neither corpuscles nor spots, he had awaited the last period of these worms with an impatient curiosity. He saw, amongst those which had started spinning, some which as yet showed no spots and no corpuscles. But corpuscles were abundant in the chrysalides, those especially which were in full maturity, on the eve of becoming moths; and none of the moths were free from them. Perhaps the fact that the disease appeared in the chrysalis and moth only explained the failures of succeeding series. “It was a mistake,” wrote Pasteur (June 26, 1865), “to look for the symptom, the corpuscle, exclusively in the eggs or the worms; either might carry in themselves the germ of the disease, without presenting distinct and microscopically visible corpuscles.” The evil developed itself chiefly in the chrysalides and the moths, it was there that it should chiefly be sought. There should be an infallible means of procuring healthy seed by having recourse to moths free from corpuscles.{121}
This idea was like a searchlight flashed into the darkness. Pasteur thus formulated his hypothesis: “Every moth containing corpuscles must give birth to diseased seed. If a moth only has a few corpuscles, its eggs will provide worms without any, or which will only develop them towards the end of their life. If the moth is much infected, the disease will show itself in the earliest stages of the worm, either by corpuscles or by other unhealthy symptoms.”
Pasteur studied hundreds of moths under the microscope. Nearly all, two or three couples excepted, were corpuscled, but that restricted quantity was increased by a precious gift. Two people, who had heard Pasteur ventilate his theories, brought him five moths born of a local race of silkworms and nurtured in the small neighbouring town of Anduze in the Turkish fashion, i.e. without any of the usual precautions consisting in keeping the worms in nurseries heated at an equal temperature. Everything having been tried, this system had also had its turn, without any appreciable success. By a fortunate circumstance, four out of those five moths were healthy.
Pasteur looked forward to the study in comparisons that the following spring would bring when worms were hatched both from the healthy and the diseased seed. In the meanwhile, only a few of the Alaisians, including M. Pagès, the Mayor, and M. de Lachadenède, really felt any confidence in these results. Most of the other silkworm cultivators were disposed to criticize everything, without having the patience to wait for results. They expressed much regret that the Government should choose a “mere chemist” for those investigations instead of some zoologist or silkworm cultivator. Pasteur only said, “Have patience.”
He returned to Paris, where fresh sorrow awaited him: Camille, his youngest child, only two years old, was seriously ill. He watched over her night after night, spending his days at his task in the laboratory, and returning in the evening to the bedside of his dying child. During that same period he was asked for an article on Lavoisier by J. B. Dumas, who had been requested by the Government to publish his works.
“No one,” wrote Dumas to Pasteur—“has read Lavoisier with more attention than you have; no one can judge of him better.... The chance which caused me to be born before you has placed me in communication with surroundings and with men in whom I have found the ideas and feelings which{122} have guided me in this work. But, had it been yours, I should have allowed no one else to be the first in drawing the world’s attention to it. It is from this motive, also from a certain conformity of tastes and of principles which has long made you dear to me, that I now ask you to give up a few hours to Lavoisier.”
“My dear and illustrious master,” answered Pasteur (July 18, 1865), “in the face of your letter and its expressions of affectionate confidence, I cannot refuse to submit to you a paper which you must promise to throw away if it should not be exactly what you want. I must also ask you to grant me much time, partly on account of my inexperience, and partly on account of the fatigue both mental and bodily imposed on me by the illness of our dear child.”
Dumas replied: “Dear friend and colleague, I thank you for your kind acquiescence in Lavoisier’s interests, which might well be your own, for no one at this time represents better than you do his spirit and method,—a method in which reasoning had more share than anything else.
“The art of observation and that of experimentation are very distinct. In the first case, the fact may either proceed from logical reasons or be mere good fortune; it is sufficient to have some penetration and the sense of truth in order to profit by it. But the art of experimentation leads from the first to the last link of the chain, without hesitation and without a blank, making successive use of Reason, which suggests an alternative, and of Experience, which decides on it, until, starting from a faint glimmer, the full blaze of light is reached. Lavoisier made this art into a method, and you possess it to a degree which always gives me a pleasure for which I am grateful to you.
“Take your time. Lavoisier has waited seventy years! It is a century since his first results were produced! What are weeks and months?
“I feel for you with all my heart! I know how heartrending are those moments by the deathbed of a suffering child. I hope and trust this great sorrow will be spared you, as indeed you deserve that it should be.”
The promise made by Dumas to give to France an edition of Lavoisier’s works dated very far back. It was in May, 1836, in one of his eloquent lectures at the Collège de France, that Dumas had declared his intention of raising a scientific monu{123}ment to the memory of this, perhaps the greatest of all French scientists. He had hoped that a Bill would be passed by the Government of Louis Philippe decreeing that this edition of Lavoisier’s works would be produced at the expense of the State. But the usual obstacles and formalities came in the way. Governments succeeded each other, and it was only in 1861 that Dumas obtained the decree he wished for and that the book appeared.
Certainly Pasteur knew and admired as much as any one the discoveries of Lavoisier. But, in the presence of the series of labours accomplished, in spite of many other burdens, during that life cut off in its prime by the Revolutionary Tribunal (1792), labours collated for the first time by Dumas, Pasteur was filled with a new and vivid emotion. His logic in reasoning and his patience in observing nature had in no wise diminished the impetuous generosity of his feelings; a beautiful book, a great discovery, a brilliant exploit or a humble act of kindness would move him to tears. Concerning such a man as Lavoisier, Pasteur’s curiosity became a sort of worship. He would have had the history of such a life spread everywhere. “Though one discovery always surpasses another, and though the chemical and physical knowledge accumulated since his time has gone beyond all Lavoisier’s dreams,” wrote Pasteur, “his work, like that of Newton and a few other rare spirits, will remain ever young. Certain details will age, as do the fashions of another time, but the foundation, the method, constitute one of those great aspects of the human mind, the majesty of which is only increased by years....”
Pasteur’s article appeared in the Moniteur and was much praised by the celebrated critic Sainte Beuve, whose literary lectures were often attended by Pasteur, between 1857 and 1861. The chronological order that we are following in this history of Pasteur’s life allows us to follow the ideas and feelings with which he lived his life of hard daily work combined with daily devotion to others. Joys and sorrows can be chronicled, thanks to the confidences of those who loved him. His fame is indeed part of the future, but the tenderness which he inspired revives the memories of the past.
In September, 1865, little Camille died. Pasteur took the tiny coffin to Arbois and went back to his work. A letter written in November alludes to the depth of his grief.
It was à propos of a candidature to the Académie des{124} Sciences, Sainte Beuve was asked to help that of a young friend of his, Charles Robin. Robin occupied a professor’s chair specially created for him at the Faculté de Médecine; he had made a deep microscopical study of the tissues of living bodies, of cellular life, of all which constitutes histology. He was convinced that outside his own studies, numerous questions would fall more and more into the domain of experimentation, and he believed that the faith in spiritual things could not “stand the struggle against the spirit of the times, wholly turned to positive things.” He did not, like Pasteur, understand the clear distinction between the scientist on the one hand and the man of sentiment on the other, each absolutely independent. Neither did he imitate the reserve of Claude Bernard who did not allow himself to be pressed by any urgent questioner into enrolment with either the believers or the unbelievers, but answered: “When I am in my laboratory, I begin by shutting the door on materialism and on spiritualism; I observe facts alone; I seek but the scientific conditions under which life manifests itself.” Robin was a disciple of Auguste Comte, and proclaimed himself a Positivist, a word which for superficial people was the equivalent of materialist. The same efforts which had succeeded in keeping Littré out of the Académie Fran?aise in 1863 were now attempted in order to keep Robin out of the Académie des Sciences in 1865.
Sainte Beuve, whilst studying medicine, had been a Positivist; his quick and impressionable nature had then turned to a mysticism which had inspired him to pen some fine verses. He had now returned to his former philosophy, but kept an open mind, however, criticism being for him not the art of dictating, but of understanding, and he was absolutely averse to irrelevant considerations when a candidature was in question.
The best means with Pasteur, who was no diplomat, was to go straight to the point. Sainte Beuve therefore wrote to him: “Dear Sir, will you allow me to be indiscreet enough to solicit your influence in favour of M. Robin, whose work I know you appreciate?
“M. Robin does not perhaps belong to the same philosophical school as you do; but it seems to me—from an outsider’s point of view—that he belongs to the same scientific school. If he should differ essentially—whether in metaphysics or otherwise—would it not be worthy of a great scientist{125} to take none but positive work into account? Nothing more, nothing less.
“Forgive me; I have much resented the injustice towards you of certain newspapers, and I have sometimes asked myself if there were not some simple means of showing up all that nonsense, and of disproving those absurd and ill-intentioned statements. If M. Robin deserves to be of the Académie why should he not attain to it through you?...
“My sense of gratitude towards you for those four years during which you have done me the honour of including such a man as you are in my audience, also a feeling of friendship, are carrying me too far. I intended to mention this to you the other day at the Princess’s; she had wished me to do so, but I feel bolder with a pen....”
The Princess in question was Princess Mathilde. Her salon, a rendezvous of men of letters, men of science and artists, was a sort of second Academy which consoled Théophile Gautier for not belonging to the other. Sainte Beuve prided himself on being, so to speak, honorary secretary to this accomplished and charming hostess.
Pasteur answered by return of post. “Sir and illustrious colleague, I feel strongly inclined towards M. Robin, who would represent a new scientific element at the Academy—the microscope applied to the study of the human organism. I do not trouble about his philosophical school save for the harm it may do to his work.... I confess frankly, however, that I am not competent on the question of our philosophical schools. Of M. Comte I have only read a few absurd passages; of M. Littré I only know the beautiful pages you were inspired to write by his rare knowledge and some of his domestic virtues. My philosophy is of the heart and not of the mind, and I give myself up, for instance, to those feelings about eternity which come naturally at the bedside of a cherished child drawing its last breath. At those supreme moments, there is something in the depths of our souls which tells us that the world may be more than a mere combination of phenomena proper to a mechanical equilibrium brought out of the chaos of the elements simply through the gradual action of the forces of matter. I admire them all, our philosophers! We have experiments to straighten and modify our ideas, and we constantly find that nature is other than we had imagined. They, who are always guessing, how can they know!...{126}”
Sainte Beuve was probably not astonished at Pasteur’s somewhat hasty epithet applied to Auguste Comte, whom he had himself defined as “an obscure, abstruse, often diseased brain.” After Robin’s election he wrote to his “dear and learned colleague”—
“I have not allowed myself to thank you for the letter, so beautiful, if I may say so, so deep and so exalted in thought, which you did me the honour of writing in answer to mine. Nothing now forbids me to tell you how deeply I am struck with your way of thinking and with your action in this scientific matter.”
That “something in the depths of our souls” of which Pasteur spoke in his letter to Sainte Beuve, was often perceived in his conversation; absorbed as he was in his daily task, he yet carried in himself a constant aspiration towards the Ideal, a deep conviction of the reality of the Infinite and a trustful acquiescence in the Mystery of the universe.
During the last term of the year 1865, he turned from his work for a time in order to study cholera. Coming from Egypt, the scourge had lighted on Marseilles, then on Paris, where it made in October more than two hundred victims per day; it was feared that the days of 1832 would be repeated, when the deaths reached twenty-three per 1,000. Claude Bernard, Pasteur, and Sainte Claire Deville went into the attics of the Lariboisière hospital, above a cholera ward.
“We had opened,” said Pasteur, “one of the ventilators communicating with the ward; we had adapted to the opening a glass tube surrounded by a refrigerating mixture, and we drew the air of the ward into our tube, so as to condense into it as many as we could of the products of the air in the ward.”
Claude Bernard and Pasteur afterwards tried blood taken from patients, and many other things; they were associated in those experiments, which gave no result. Henri Sainte Claire Deville once said to Pasteur, “Studies of that sort require much courage.” “What about duty?” said Pasteur simply, in a tone, said Deville afterwards, worth many sermons. The cholera did not last long; by the end of the autumn all danger had disappeared.
Napeoleon the Third loved science, and found in it a sense of assured stability which politics did not offer him. He de{127}sired Pasteur to come and spend a week at the Palace of Compiègne.
The very first evening a grand reception took place. The diplomatic world was represented by M. de Budberg, ambassador of Russia, and the Prussian ambassador, M. de Goltz. Among the guests were: Dr. Longet, celebrated for his researches and for his Treatise on Physiology, a most original physician, whose one desire was to avoid patients and so have more time for pure science; Jules Sandeau, the tender and delicate novelist, with his somewhat heavy aspect of a captain in the Garde Nationals; Paul Baudry, the painter, then in the flower of his youth and radiant success; Paul Dubois, the conscientious artist of the Chanteur Florentin exhibited that very year; the architect, Viollet le Duc, an habitué of the palace. The Emperor drew Pasteur aside towards the fireplace, and the scientist soon found himself instructing his Sovereign, talking about ferments and molecular dissymmetry.
Pasteur was congratulated by the courtiers on the favour shown by this immediate confidential talk, and the Empress sent him word that she wished him to talk with her also. Pasteur remembered this conversation, an animated one, a little disconnected, chiefly about animalcul?, infusories and ferments. When the guests returned to the immense corridor into which the rooms opened, each with the name of the guests on the door, Pasteur wrote to Paris for his microscope and for some samples of diseased wines.
The next morning a stag hunt was organized; riders in handsome costumes, open carriages drawn by six horses and containing guests, entered the forest; a stag was soon brought to bay by the hounds. In the evening, after dinner, there was a torchlight procession in the great courtyard. Amid a burst of trumpets, the footmen in state livery, standing in a circle, held aloft the flaming torches. In the centre, a huntsman held part of the carcase of the stag and waved it to and fro before the greedy eyes of the hounds, who, eager to hurl themselves upon it, and now restrained by a word, then let loose, and again called back all trembling at their discomfiture, were at length permitted to rush upon and devour their prey.
The next day offered another item on the programme, a visit to the castle of Pierrefonds, marvellously restored by{128} Viollet le Duc at the expense of the Imperial purse. Pasteur, who, like the philosopher, might have said, “I am never bored but when I am being entertained,” made his arrangements so that the day should not be entirely wasted. He made an appointment for his return with the head butler, hoping to find a few diseased wines in the Imperial cellar. That department, however, was so well administered that he was only able to find seven or eight suspicious-looking bottles. The tall flunkeys, who scarcely realized the scientific interest offered by a basketful of wine bottles, watched Pasteur more or less ironically as he returned to his room, where he had the pleasure of finding his microscope and case of instruments sent from the Rue d’Ulm. He remained upstairs, absorbed as he would have been in his laboratory, in the contemplation of a drop of bitter wine revealing the tiny mycoderma which caused the bitterness.
In the meanwhile some of the other guests were gathered in the smoking room, smilingly awaiting the Empress’s five o’clock tea, whilst others were busy with the preparations for the performance of Racine’s Plaideurs, which Provost, Regnier, Got, Delaunay, Coquelin, and Mademoiselle Jouassain were going to act that very evening in the theatre of the palace.
On the Sunday, at 4 p.m., he was received privately by their Majesties, for their instruction and edification. He wrote in a letter to a friend: “I went to the Emperor with my microscope, my wine samples, and all my paraphernalia. When I was announced, the Emperor came up to meet me and asked me to come in. M. Conti, who was writing at a table, rose to leave the room, but was invited to stay. Then he fetched the Empress, and I began to show their Majesties various objects under the microscope and to explain them; it lasted a whole hour.”
The Empress had been much interested, and wished that her five o’clock friends—who were waiting in the room where tea was served—should also acquire some notions of these studies. She merrily took up the microscope, laughing at her new occupation of laboratory attendant, and arrived thus laden in the drawing-room, much to the surprise of her privileged guests. Pasteur came in behind her, and gave a short and simple account of a few general ideas and precise discoveries.{129}
In the same way, the preceding week, Le Verrier[25] had spoken of his planet, and Dr. Longet had given a lecture on the circulation of the blood. That butterfly world of the Court, taking a momentary interest in scientific things, did not foresee that the smallest discovery made in the poor laboratory of the Rue d’Ulm would leave a more lasting impression than the fêtes of the Tuileries of Fontainebleau and of Compiègne.
In the course of their private interview, Napoleon and Eugénie manifested some surprise that Pasteur should not endeavour to turn his discoveries and their applications to a source of legitimate profit. “In France,” he replied, “scientists would consider that they lowered themselves by doing so.”
He was convinced that a man of pure science would complicate his life, the order of his thoughts, and risk paralysing his inventive faculties, if he were to make money by his discoveries. For instance, if he had followed up the industrial results of his studies on vinegar, his time would have been too much and too regularly occupied, and he would not have been free for new researches.
“My mind is free,” he said. “I am as full of ardour for the new question of silkworm disease as I was in 1863, when I took up the wine question.”
What he most wished was to be able to watch the growth of the silkworms from the very first day, and to pursue without interruption this serious study in which the future of France was interested. That, and the desire to have one day a laboratory adequate to the magnitude of his works were his only ambitions. On his return to Pam he obtained leave to go back to Alais.
“My dear Raulin,” wrote Pasteur to his former pupil in January, 1866. “I am again entrusted by the Minister of Agriculture with a mission for the study of silkworm disease, which will last at least five months, from February 1 to the end of June. Would you care to join me?{130}”
Raulin excused himself; he was then preparing, with his accustomed slow conscientiousness, his doctor’s thesis, a work afterwards considered by competent judges to be a masterpiece.
“I must console myself,” wrote Pasteur, expressing his regrets, “by thinking that you will complete your excellent thesis.”
One of Raulin’s fellow students at the Ecole Normale, M. Gernez, was now a professor at the Collège Louis le Grand. His mind was eminently congenial to Pasteur’s. Duruy, then Minister of Public Instruction, was ever anxious to smooth down all difficulties in the path of science: he gave a long leave of absence to M. Gernez, in order that he might take Raulin’s place. Another young Normalien, Maillot, prepared to join the scientific party, much to his delight. The three men left Paris at the beginning of February. They began by spending a few days in an hotel at Alais, trying to find a suitable house where they would set up their temporary laboratory. After a week or two in a house within the town, too far, to be convenient, from the restaurant where they had their meals, Maillot discovered a lonely house at the foot of the Mount of the Hermitage, a mountain once covered with flourishing mulberry trees, but now abandoned, and growing but a few olive trees.
This house, at Pont Gisquet, not quite a mile from Alais, was large enough to hold Pasteur, his family and his pupils; a laboratory was soon arranged in an empty orangery.
“Then began a period of intense work,” writes M. Gernez. “Pasteur undertook a great number of trials, which he himself followed in their minutest details; he only required our help over similar operations by which he tested his own. The result was that above the fatigues of the day, easily borne by us strong young men, he had to bear the additional burden of special researches, importunate visitors, and an equally importunate correspondence, chiefly dealing out criticisms....”
Madame Pasteur, who had been detained in Paris for her children’s education, set out for Alais with her two daughters. Her mother being then on a visit to the rector of the Chambéry Academy, M. Zevort, she arranged to spend a day or two in that town. But hardly had she arrived when her daughter Cécile, then twelve years old, became ill with typhoid fever.{131} Madame Pasteur had the courage not to ask her husband to leave his work and come to her; but her letters alarmed him, and the anxious father gave up his studies for a few days and arrived at Chambéry. The danger at that time seemed averted, and he only remained three days at Chambéry. Cécile, apparently convalescent, had recovered her smile, that sweet, indefinable smile which gave so much charm to her serious, almost melancholy face. She smiled thus for the last time at her little sister Marie-Louise, about the middle of May, lying on a sofa by a sunny window.
On May 21, her doctor, Dr. Flesschutt, wrote to Pasteur: “If the interest I take in the child were not sufficient to stimulate my efforts, the mother’s courage would keep up my hopes and double my ardent desire for a happy issue.” Cécile died on May 23 after a sudden relapse. Pasteur only arrived at Chambéry in time to take to Arbois the remains of the little girl, which were buried near those of his mother, of his two other daughters, Jeanne and Camille, and of his father, Joseph Pasteur. The little cemetery indeed represented a cup of sorrows for Pasteur.
“Your father has returned from his sad journey to Arbois,” wrote Madame Pasteur from Chambéry to her son who was at school in Paris. “I did think of going back to you, but I could not leave your poor father to go back to Alais alone after this great sorrow.” Accompanied by her who was his greatest comfort, and who gave him some of her own courage, Pasteur came back to the Pont Gisquet and returned to his work. M. Duclaux in his turn joined the hard-working little party.
At the beginning of June, Duruy, with the solicitude of a Minister who found time to be also a friend, wrote affectionately to Pasteur—
“You are leaving me quite in the dark, yet you know the interest I take in your work. Where are you? and what are you doing? Finding out something I feel certain....”
Pasteur answered, “Monsieur le Ministre, I hasten to thank you for your kind reminder. My studies have been associated with sorrow; perhaps your charming little daughter, who used to play sometimes at M. Le Verrier’s, will remember Cécile Pasteur among other little girls of her age that she used to meet at the Observatoire. My dear child was coming with her mother to spend the Easter holidays with me at Alais,{132} when, during a few days’ stay at Chambéry, she was seized with an attack of typhoid fever, to which she succumbed after two months of painful suffering. I was only able to be with her for a few days, being kept here by my work, and full of deceiving hopes for a happy issue from that terrible disease.
“I am now wholly wrapped up in my studies, which alone take my thoughts from my deep sorrow.
“Thanks to the facilities which you have put in my way, I have been able to collect a quantity of experimental observations, and I think I understand on many points this disease which has been ruining the South for fifteen or twenty years. I shall be able on my return to propose to the Commission of Sericiculture a practical means of fighting the evil and suppressing it in the course of a few years.
“I am arriving at this result that there is no silkworm disease. There is but an exaggeration of a state of things which has always existed, and it is not difficult, in my view, to return to the former situation, even to improve on it. The evil was sought for in the worm and even in the seed; that was something, but my observations prove that it develops chiefly in the chrysalis, especially in the mature chrysalis, at the moment of the moth’s formation, on the eve of the function of reproduction. The microscope then detects its presence with certitude, even when the seed and the worm seem very healthy. The practical result is this: you have a nursery full; it has been successful or it has not; you wish to know whether to smother the cocoons or whether to keep them for reproduction. Nothing is simpler. You hasten the development of about 100 moths through an elevation of temperature, and you examine these moths through the microscope, which will tell you what to do.
“The sickly character is then so easy to detect that a woman or a child can do it. If the cultivator should be a peasant, without the material conditions required for this study, he can do this: instead of throwing away the moths after they have laid their eggs, he can bottle a good many of them in brandy and send them to a testing office or to some experienced person who will determine the value of the seed for the following year.”
The Japanese Government sent some cases of seed supposed to be healthy to Napoleon III, who distributed them in the{133} silkworm growing departments. Pasteur, in the meanwhile, was stating the results he had arrived at, and they were being much criticized. In order to avoid the pébrine, which was indeed the disease caused by the corpuscles so clearly visible through the microscope, he averred that no seed should be used that came from infected moths. In order to demonstrate the infectious character of the pébrine he would give to some worms meals of leaves previously contaminated by means of a brush dipped in water containing corpuscles. The worms absorbed the food, and the disease immediately appeared and could be found in the chrysalides and moths from those worms.
“I hope I am in the right road—close to the goal, perhaps, but I have not yet reached it,” wrote Pasteur to his faithful Chappuis; “and as long as the final proof is not acquired complications and errors are to be feared. Next year, the growth of the numerous eggs I have prepared will obviate my scruples, and I shall be sure of the value of the preventive means I have indicated. It is tiresome to have to wait a year before testing observations already made; but I have every hope of success.”
While awaiting the renewal of the silkworm season, he was busy editing his book on wine, full of joy at contributing to the national riches through practical application of his observations. It was, in fact, sufficient to heat the wines by the simple process already at that time known in Austria as pasteurisation, to free them from all germs of disease and make them suitable for keeping and for exportation. He did not accord much attention to the talk of old gourmets who affirmed that wines thus “mummified” could not mellow with age, being convinced on the contrary that the most delicate wines could only be improved by heating. “The ageing of wines,” he said, “is due, not to fermentation, but to a slow oxidation which is favoured by heat.”
He alluded in his book to the interest taken by Napoleon III in those researches which might be worth millions to France. He also related how the Imperial solicitude had been awakened, and acknowledged gratitude for this to General Favé, one of the Emperor’s aides de camp.
The General, on reading the proofs, declared that his name must disappear. Pasteur regretfully gave in to his scruples, but wrote the following words on the copy presented to General Favé: “General, this book contains a serious omission—that of your name: it would be an unpardonable one had it not been{134} made at your own request, according to your custom of keeping your good works secret. Without you, these studies on wine would not exist; you have helped and encouraged them. Leave me at least the satisfaction of writing that name on the first page of this copy, of which I beg you to accept the homage, while renewing the expression of my devoted gratitude.”
Another incident gives us an instance of Pasteur’s kindness of heart. In the year 1866 Claude Bernard suffered from a gastric disease so serious that his doctors, Rayer and Davaine, had to admit their impotence. Bernard was obliged to leave his laboratory and retire to his little house at St. Julien (near Villefranche), his birthplace. But the charm of his recollections of childhood was embittered by present sadness. His mind full of projects, his life threatened in its prime, he had the courage, a difficult thing to unselfish people, of resolutely taking care of himself. But preoccupied solely with his own diet, his own body now a subject for experiments, he became a prey to a deep melancholia. Pasteur, knowing to what extent moral influences react on the physique, had the idea of writing a review of his friend’s works, and published it in the Moniteur Universel of November 7, 1866, under the following title: Claude Bernard: the Importance of his Works, Teaching and Method. He began thus: “Circumstances have recently caused me to re-peruse the principal treatises which have founded the reputation of our great physiologist, Claude Bernard.
“I have derived from them so great a satisfaction, and my admiration for his talent has been confirmed and increased to such an extent that I cannot resist the somewhat rash desire of communicating my impressions....”
Amongst Claude Bernard’s discoveries, Pasteur chose that which seemed to him most instructive, and which Claude Bernard himself appreciated most: “When M. Bernard became in 1854 a candidate for the Académie des Sciences, his discovery of the glycogenic functions of the liver was neither the first nor the last among those which had already placed him so high in the estimation of men of science; yet it was by that one that he headed his list of the claims which could recommend him to the suffrages of the illustrious body. That preference on the part of the master decides me in mine.”
Claude Bernard had begun by meditating deeply on the{135} disease known as diabetes and which is characterized, as everybody knows, by a superabundance of sugar in the whole of the organism, the urine often being laden with it. But how is it, wondered Claude Bernard, that the quantity of sugar expelled by a diabetic patient can so far surpass that with which he is provided by the starchy or sugary substances which form part of his food? How is it that the presence of sugary matter in the blood and its expulsion through urine are never completely arrested, even when all sugary or starchy alimentation is suppressed? Are there in the human organism sugar-producing phenomena unknown to chemists and physiologists? All the notions of science were contrary to that mode of thinking; it was affirmed that the vegetable kingdom only could produce sugar, and it seemed an insane hypothesis to suppose that the animal organism could fabricate any. Claude Bernard dwelt upon it however, his principle in experimentation being this: “When you meet with a fact opposed to a prevailing theory, you should adhere to the fact and abandon the theory, even when the latter is supported by great authorities and generally adopted.”
This is what he imagined, summed up in a few words by Pasteur—
“Meat is an aliment which cannot develop sugar by the digestive process known to us. Now M. Bernard having fed some carnivorous animals during a certain time exclusively with meat, he assured himself, with his precise knowledge of the most perfect means of investigation offered him by chemistry, that the blood which enters the liver by the portal vein and pours into it the nutritive substances prepared and rendered soluble by digestion is absolutely devoid of sugar; whilst the blood which issues from the liver by the hepatic veins is always abundantly provided with it.... M. Claude Bernard has also thrown full light on the close connection which exists between the secretion of sugar in the liver and the influence of the nervous system. He has demonstrated, with a rare sagacity, that by acting on some determined portion of that system it was possible to suppress or exaggerate at will the production of sugar. He has done more still; he has discovered within the liver the existence of an absolutely new substance which is the natural source whence this organ draws the sugar that it produces.”
Pasteur, starting from this discovery of Claude Bernard’s,{136} spoke of the growing close connection between medicine and physiology. Then, with his constant anxiety to incite students to enthusiasm, he recommended them to read the lectures delivered by Bernard at the Collège de France. Speaking of the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Pasteur wrote: “A long commentary would be necessary to present this splendid work to the reader; it is a monument raised to honour the method which has constituted Physical and Chemical Science since Galileo and Newton, and which M. Bernard is trying to introduce into physiology and pathology. Nothing so complete, so profound, so luminous has ever been written on the true principles of the difficult art of experimentation.... This book will exert an immense influence on medical science, its teaching, its progress, its language even.” Pasteur took pleasure in adding to his own tribute praise from other sources. He quoted, for instance, J. B. Dumas’ answer to Duruy, who asked him, “What do you think of this great physiologist?” “He is not a great physiologist; he is Physiology itself.” “I have spoken of the man of science,” continued Pasteur. “I might have spoken of the man in everyday life, the colleague who has inspired so many with a solid friendship, for I should seek in vain for a weak point in M. Bernard; it is not to be found. His personal distinction, the noble beauty of his physiognomy, his gentle kindliness attract at first sight; he has no pedantry, none of a scientist’s usual faults, but an antique simplicity, a perfectly natural and unaffected manner, while his conversation is deep and full of ideas....” Pasteur, after informing the public that the graver symptoms of Bernard’s disease had now disappeared, ended thus: “May the publicity now given to these thoughts and feelings cheer the illustrious patient in his enforced idleness, and assure him of the joy with which his return will be welcomed by his friends and colleagues.”
The very day after this article reached him (November 19, 1860) Bernard wrote to Pasteur: “My dear friend,—I received yesterday the Moniteur containing the superb article you have written about me. Your great praise indeed makes me proud, though I feel I am yet very far from the goal I would reach. If I return to health, as I now hope I may do, I think I shall find it possible to pursue my work in a more methodical order and with more complete means of demonstration, better indicating the general idea towards which my{137} various efforts converge. In the meanwhile it is a very precious encouragement to me to be approved and praised by a man such as you. Your works have given you a great name, and have placed you in the first rank among experimentalists of our time. The admiration which you profess for me is indeed reciprocated; and we must have been born to understand each other, for true science inspires us both with the same passion and the same sentiments.
“Forgive me for not having answered your first letter; but I was really not equal to writing the notice you wanted. I have deeply felt for you in your family sorrow; I have been through the same trial, and I can well understand the sufferings of a tender and delicate soul such as yours.”
Henri Sainte Claire Deville, who was as warm-hearted as he was witty, had, on his side, the ingenious idea of editing an address of collective wishes for Claude Bernard, who answered: “My dear friend,—You are evidently as clever in inventing friendly surprises as in making great scientific discoveries. It was indeed a most charming idea, and one for which I am very grateful to you—that of sending me a collective letter from my friends. I shall carefully preserve that letter: first, because the feelings it expresses are very dear to me; and also because it is a collection of illustrious autographs which should go down to posterity. I beg you will transmit my thanks to our friends and colleagues, E. Renan, A. Maury, F. Ravaisson and Bellaguet. Tell them how much I am touched by their kind wishes and congratulations on my recovery. It is, alas, not yet a cure, but I hope I am on a fair way to it.
“I have received the article Pasteur has written about me in the Moniteur; that article paralysed the vasomotor nerves of my sympathetic system, and caused me to blush to the roots of my hair. I was so amazed that I don’t know what I wrote to Pasteur; but I did not dare say to him that he had wrongly exaggerated my merits. I know he believes all that he writes, and I am happy and proud of his opinion, because it is that of a scientist and experimentalist of the very first rank. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that he has seen me through the prism of his kindly heart, and that I do not deserve such excessive praise. I am more than thankful for all the marks of esteem and friendship which are showered upon me. They make me cling closer to life, and feel that I should be very{138} foolish not to take care of myself and continue to live amongst those who love me, and who deserve my love for all the happiness they give me. I intend to return to Paris some time this month, and, in spite of your kind advice, I should like to take up my Collège de France classes again this winter. I hope to be allowed not to begin before January. But we shall talk of all this in Paris. I remain your devoted and affectionate friend.”
To end this academic episode, we will quote from Joseph Bertrand’s letter of thanks to Pasteur, who had sent him the article: “...The public will learn, among other things, that the eminent members of the Academy admire and love each other sometimes with no jealousy. This was rare in the last century, and, if all followed your example, we should have over our predecessors one superiority worth many another.”
Thus Pasteur showed himself a man of sentiment as well as a man of science; the circle of his affections was enlarging, as was the scope of his researches, but without any detriment to the happy family life of his own intimate circle. That little group of his family and close friends identified itself absolutely with his work, his ideas and his hopes, each member of it willingly subordinating his or her private interests to the success of his investigations. He was at that time violently attacked by his old adversaries as well as his new contradictors. Pouchet announced everywhere that the question of spontaneous generation was being taken up again in England, in Germany, in Italy and in America. Joly, Pouchet’s inseparable friend, was about to make some personal studies and to write some general considerations on the new silkworm campaign. Pasteur, who had confidently said, “The year 1867 must be the last to bear the complaints of silkworm cultivators!” went back to Alais in January, 1867. But, before leaving Paris, Pasteur wrote out for himself a list of various improvements and reforms which he desired to effect in the administration of the Ecole Normale, showing that his interest in the great school had by no means abated, in spite of his necessary absence. He brought with him his wife and daughter, and Messrs. Gernez and Maillot; M. Duclaux was to come later. The worms hatched from the eggs of healthy moths and those from diseased ones were growing more interesting every day; they were in every instance exactly what Pasteur had prophesied they would be. But besides studying his own silk{139}worms, he liked to see what was going on in neighbouring magnaneries. A neighbour in the Pont Gisquet, a cultivator of the name of Cardinal, had raised with great success a brood originating from the famous Japanese seed. He was disappointed, however, in the eggs produced by the moths, and Pasteur’s microscope revealed the fact that those moths were all corpuscled, in spite of their healthy origin. Pasteur did not suspect that origin, for the worms had shown health and vigour through all their stages of growth, and seemed to have issued from healthy parents. But Cardinal had raised another brood, the produce of unsound seed, immediately above these healthy worms. The excreta from this second brood could fall on to the frames of those below them, and the healthy worms had become contaminated. Pasteur demonstrated that the pébrine contagion might take place in one or two different ways: either from direct contact between the worms on the same frame, or by the soiling of the food from the very infectious excreta. The remedy for the pébrine seemed now found. “The corpuscle disease,” said Pasteur, “is as easily avoided as it is easily contracted.” But when he thought he had reached his goal a sudden difficulty rose in his way. Out of sixteen broods of worms which he had raised, and which presented an excellent appearance, the sixteenth perished almost entirely immediately after the first moulting. “In a brood of a hundred worms,” wrote Pasteur, “I picked up fifteen or twenty dead ones every day, black and rotting with extraordinary rapidity.... They were soft and flaccid like an empty bladder. I looked in vain for corpuscles; there was not a trace of them.”
Pasteur was temporarily troubled and discouraged. But he consulted the writings of former students of silkworm diseases, and, when he discovered vibriones in those dead worms, he did not doubt that he had under his eyes a well characterized example of the flachery disease—a disease independent and distinct from the pébrine. He wrote to Duruy, and acquainted him with the results he had obtained and the obstacles he encountered. Duruy wrote back on April 9, 1867—
“Thank you for your letter and the good news it contains.
“Not very far from you, at Avignon, a statue has been erected to the Persian who imported into France the cultivation of madder; what then will not be done for the rescuer of two of our greatest industries! Do not forget to inform me{140} when you have mastered the one or two lame facts which still stand in the way. As a citizen, as head of the Université, and, if I may say so, as your friend, I wish I could follow your experiments day by day.
“You know that I should like to found a special college at Alais. Please watch for any useful information on that subject. We will talk about it on your return.
“I am obliged to M. Gernez for his assiduous and intelligent collaboration with you.”
This letter from the great Minister is all the more interesting that it is dated from the eve of the day when the law on the reorganization of primary teaching was promulgated.
The introduction into the curriculum of historical and geographical notions; the inauguration of 10,000 schools and 30,000 adult classes; the transformation of certain flagging classical colleges into technical training schools; a constant struggle to include the teaching of girls in Université organization; reforms and improvements in general teaching; the building of laboratories, etc., etc.—into the accomplishment of all these projects Duruy carried his bold and methodical activity. No one was more suited than he to the planning out of a complete system of national education. He and Pasteur were indeed fitted to understand each other, for each had in the same degree those three forms of patriotism: love for the land, memories for the past, and hero worship.
In May, 1867, Pasteur received at Alais the news that a grand prize medal of the 1867 exhibition was conferred upon him for his works on wines. He hastened to write to Dumas—
“My dear master, ... Nothing has surprised me more—or so agreeably,—than the news of this Exhibition prize medal, which I was far from expecting. It is a new proof of your kindness, for I feel sure that I have to thank you for originating such a favour. I shall do all I can to make myself worthy of it by my perseverance in putting all difficulties aside from the subject I am now engaged in, and in which the light is growing brighter every day. If that flachery disease had not come to complicate matters, everything would be well by now. I cannot tell you how absolutely sure I now feel of my conclusions concerning the corpuscle disease. I could say a great deal about the articles of Messrs. Béchamp, Estor and Balbiani, but I will follow your advice and answer nothing....”
Dumas had been advising Pasteur not to waste his time by{141} answering his adversaries and contradictors. Pasteur’s system was making way; ten microscopes were set up, here and there, in the town of Alais; most seed merchants were taking up the examination of the dead moths, and the Pont-Gisquet colony had samples brought in daily for inspection. “I have already prevented many failures for next year,” he wrote to Dumas (June, 1867), “but I always beg as a favour that a little of the condemned seed may be raised, so as to confirm the exactness of my judgment.”
His system was indeed quite simple; at the moment when the moths leave their cocoons and mate with each other, the cultivator separates them and places each female on a little square of linen where it lays its eggs. The moth is afterwards pinned up in a corner of the same square of linen, where it gradually dries up; later on, in autumn or even in winter, the withered moth is moistened in a little water, pounded in a mortar, and the paste examined with a microscope. If the least trace of corpuscles appears the linen is burnt, together with the seed which would have perpetuated the disease.
Pasteur came back to Paris to receive his medal; perhaps his presence was not absolutely necesary, but he did not question the summons he received. He always attached an absolute meaning to words and to things, not being one of those who accept titles and homage with an inward and ironical smile.
The pageant of that distribution of prizes was well worth seeing, and July 1, 1867, is now remembered by many who were children at that time. Paris afforded a beautiful spectacle; the central avenue of the Tuileries garden, the Place de la Concorde, the Avenue des Champs Elysées, were lined along their full length by regiments of infantry, dragoons, Imperial Guards, etc., etc., standing motionless in the bright sunshine, waiting for the Emperor to pass. The Imperial carriage, drawn by eight horses, escorted by the Cent-Gardes in their pale blue uniform, and by the Lancers of the Household, advanced in triumphant array. Napoleon III sat next to the Empress, the Prince Imperial and Prince Napoleon facing them. From the Palais de l’Elysée, amidst equally magnificent ceremonial, the Sultan Abdul-Aziz and his son arrived; then followed a procession of foreign princes: the Crown Prince of Prussia, the Prince of Wales, Prince Humbert of Italy, the Duke and Duchess of Aosta, the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, all of whom have since borne a part in{142} European politics. They entered the Palais de l’Industrie and sat around the throne. From the ground to the first floor an immense stand was raised, affording seats for 17,000 persons. The walls were decorated with eagles bearing olive branches, symbolical of strength and peace. The Emperor in his speech dwelt upon these hopes of peace, whilst the Empress in white satin, wearing a diadem, and surrounded by white-robed princesses, brightly smiled at these happy omens.
On their names being called out, the candidates who had won Grand Prizes, and those about to be promoted in the Legion of Honour, went up one by one to the throne. Marshal Vaillant handed each case to the Emperor, who himself gave it to the recipient. This old Field-Marshal, with his rough bronzed face, who had been a captain in the retreat from Moscow and was now a Minister of Napoleon III, seemed a natural and glorious link between the First and the Second Empires. He was born at Dijon in humble circumstances, of which he was somewhat proud, a very cultured soldier, interested in scientific things, a member of the Institute. The names of certain members of the Legion of Honour promoted to a higher rank, such as Gér?me and Meissonier, that of Ferdinand de Lesseps, rewarded for the achievement of the Suez Canal, excited great applause. Pasteur was called without provoking an equal curiosity: his scientific discoveries, in spite of their industrial applications, being as yet known but to a few. “I was struck,” writes an eye-witness, “with his simplicity and gravity; the seriousness of his life was visible in his stern, almost sad eyes.”
At the end of the ceremony, when the Imperial procession left the Palais de l’Industrie, an immense chorus, accompanied by an orchestra, sang Domine salvum fac imperatorem.
On his return to his study in the Rue d’Ulm, Pasteur again took up the management of the scientific studies of the Ecole Normale. But an incident put an end to his directorship, while bringing perturbation into the whole of the school. Sainte Beuve was the indirect cause of this small revolution. The Senate, of which he was a member, had had to examine a protest from 102 inhabitants of St. Etienne against the introduction into their popular libraries of the works of Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, Balzac, E. Renan, and others. The committee had approved this petition in terms which identified the report with the petition itself. Sainte Beuve, too exclusively{143} literary in his tastes, and too radical in his opinions to be popular in the Senate, rose violently against this absolute and arbitrary judgment, forgetting everything but the jeopardy of free opinions before the excessive and inquisitorial zeal of the Senate. His speech was very unfavourably received, and one of his colleagues, M. Lacaze, aged sixty-eight, challenged him to a duel. Sainte Beuve, himself then sixty-three years old, refused to enter into what he called “the summary jurisprudence which consists in strangling a question and suppressing a man within forty-eight hours.”
The students of the Ecole Normale deputed one of their number to congratulate Sainte Beuve on his speech, and wrote the following letter—
“We have already thanked you for defending freedom of thought when misjudged and attacked; now that you have again pleaded for it, we beg you to receive our renewed thanks.
“We should be happy if the expression of our grateful sympathy could console you for this injustice. Courage is indeed required to speak in the Senate in favour of the independence and the rights of thought; but the task is all the more glorious for being more difficult. Addresses are now being sent from everywhere; you will forgive the students of the Ecole Normale for having followed the general lead and having sent their address to M. Sainte Beuve.”
This letter was published in a newspaper. Etienne Arago published it without remembering the Université by-laws which forbade every sort of political manifestation to the students. It had given pleasure to Sainte Beuve, the pleasure that elderly men take in the applause of youth; but he soon became uneasy at the results of this noisy publicity.
Nisard, the Director of the school, could not very well tolerate this breach of discipline. In spite of the entreaties of Sainte Beuve, the student who had signed the letter was provisionally sent back to his family. His comrades revolted at this and imperiously demanded his immediate restoration. Pasteur attempted to pacify them by speaking to them, but failed utterly; his influence was very great over his own pupils, the students on the scientific side, but the others, the “littéraires,” were the most violent on this question, and he was not diplomatic and conciliating enough to bring them round. They rose in a body, marched to the door, and the whole{144} school was soon parading the streets. “Before such disorder,” concluded the Moniteur, relating the incident (July 10), “the authorities were obliged to order an immediate closure. The school will be reconstituted and the classes will reopen on October 15.”
Both the literary and the political world were temporarily agitated; the Minister was interviewed. M. Thiers wrote to Pasteur on July 10: “My dear M. Pasteur,—I have been talking with some members of the Left, and I am certain or almost certain, that the Ecole Normale affair will be smoothed over in the interest of the students. M. Jules Simon intends to work in that direction; keep this information for yourself, and do the best you can on your side.”
At the idea that the Ecole was about to be reconstituted, that is, that the three great chiefs, Nisard, Pasteur and Jacquinet, would be changed, deep regret was manifested by Pasteur’s scientific students. One of them, named Didon, expressed it in these terms: “If your departure from the school is not definitely settled, if it is yet possible to prevent it, all the students of the Ecole will be only too happy to do everything in their power.... As for me, it is impossible to express my gratitude towards you. No one has ever shown me so much interest, and never in my life shall I forget what you have done for me.”
Pasteur’s interest in young men, his desire to excite in them scientific curiosity and enthusiasm, were now so well known that Didon and several others who had successfully passed the entrance examinations both for the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale, had chosen to enter the latter in order to be under him; by the Normaliens of the scientific section, he was not only understood and admired, but beloved, almost worshipped.
Sainte Beuve, who continued to be much troubled at the consequences of his speech, wrote to the Minister of Public Instruction in favour of the rusticated student. Duruy thought so much of Sainte Beuve that the student, instead of being exiled to some insignificant country school, was made professor of seconde in the college of Sens. But it was specified that in the future no letter should be written, no public responsibility taken in the name of the Ecole without the authorization of the Director.
Nisard left; Dumas had just been made President of the{145} Monetary Commission, thus leaving vacant a place as Inspector-General of Higher Education. Duruy, anxious to do Pasteur justice, thought this post most suitable to him as it would allow him to continue his researches. The decree was about to be signed, when Balard, professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences, applied for the post. Pasteur wrote respectfully to the Minister of Public Instruction (July 31): “Your Excellency must know that twenty years ago, when I left the Ecole Normale, I was made a curator, thanks to M. Balard, who was then a professor at the Ecole Normale. A grateful pupil cannot enter into competition with a revered master, especially for a post where considerations of age and experience should have great weight.”
When Pasteur spoke of his masters, dead or living, Biot or Senarmont, Dumas or Balard, it might indeed have been thought that to them alone he owed it that he was what he was. He was heard on this occasion, and Balard obtained the appointment.
Nisard was succeeded by M. F. Bouillier, whose place as Inspector-General of Secondary Education devolved on M. Jacquinet. The directorship of scientific studies was given to Pasteur’s old and excellent friend, the faithful Bertin. After teaching in Alsace for eighteen years, he had become ma?tre des conférences at the Ecole Normale in 1866, and also assistant of Regnault at the Collège de France. It had only been by dint of much persuasion that Pasteur had enticed him to Paris. “What is the good?” said the unambitious Bertin; “beer is not so good in Paris as in Strasburg.... Pasteur does not understand life; he is a genius, that is all!” But, under this apparent indolence, Bertin was possessed of the taste for and the art of teaching; Pasteur knew this, and, when Bertin was appointed, Pasteur’s fears for the scientific future of his beloved Ecole were abated. Duruy, much regretting the break of Pasteur’s connection with the great school, offered him the post of ma?tre des conférences, besides the chair of chemistry which Balard’s appointment had left vacant at the Sorbonne. But Pasteur declined the tempting offer; he knew the care and trouble that his public lectures cost him, and felt that the two posts would be beyond his strength; if his time were taken up by that double task it would be almost impossible for him to pursue his private researches, which under no circumstances would he abandon.{146}
He carried his scruples so far as to give up his chemistry professorship at the School of Fine Arts, where he had been lecturing since 1863. He had endeavoured in his lessons to draw the attention of his artist pupils, who came from so many distant places, to the actual principles of Science. “Let us always make application our object,” he said, “but resting on the stern and solid basis of scientific principles. Without those principles, application is nothing more than a series of recipes and constitutes what is called routine. Progress with routine is possible, but desperately slow.”
Another reason prevented him from accepting the post offered him at the Ecole Normale; this was that the tiny pavilion which he had made his laboratory was much too small and too inconvenient to accommodate the pupils he would have to teach. The only suitable laboratory at the Ecole was that of his friend, Henri Sainte Claire Deville, and Pasteur was reluctant to invade it. He had a great affection for his brilliant colleague, who was indeed a particularly charming man, still youthful in spite of his forty-nine summers, active, energetic, witty. “I have no wit,” Pasteur would say quite simply. Deville was a great contrast to his two great friends, Pasteur and Claude Bernard, with their grave meditative manner. He enjoyed boarding at the Ecole and having his meals at the students’ table, where his gaiety brightened and amused everybody, effacing the distance between masters and pupils and yet never losing by this familiar attitude a particle of the respect he inspired.
Sometimes, however, when preoccupied with the heavy expenses of his laboratory, he would invite himself to lunch with Duruy, from whom—as from the Emperor or any one else—he usually succeeded in coaxing what he wanted. The general state of things connected with higher education was at that time most deplorable. The Sorbonne was as Richelieu had left it—the Museum was sadly inadequate. At the Collège de France, it was indeed impossible to call by the name of laboratory the narrow, damp and unhealthy cellars, which Claude Bernard called “scientists’ graves,” and where he had contracted the long illness from which he was only just recovering.
Duruy understood and deplored this penury, but his voice was scarcely heard in cabinet councils, the other Ministers being absorbed in politics. Pasteur, whose self-effacing modesty disappeared when the interests of science were in question, pre{147}sented to Napoleon, through the medium of his enlightened aide de camp, General Favé, the following letter, a most interesting one, for, in it, possibilities of future discoveries are hinted at, which later became accomplished facts.
“Sire,—My researches on fermentations and on microscopic organisms have opened to physiological chemistry new roads, the benefit of which is beginning to be felt both by agricultural industries and by medical studies. But the field still to be explored is immense. My great desire would be to explore it with a new ardour, unrestrained by the insufficiency of material means.
“I should wish to have a spacious laboratory, with one or two outhouses attached to it, which I could make use of when making experiments possibly injurious to health, such as might be the scientific study of putrid and infectious diseases.
“How can researches be attempted on gangrene, virus or inoculations, without a building suitable for the housing of animals, either dead or alive? Butchers’ meat in Europe reaches an exorbitant price, in Buenos Ayres it is given away. How, in a small and incomplete laboratory, can experiments be made, and various processes tested, which would facilitate its transport and preservation? The so-called ‘splenic fever’ costs the Beauce[26] about 4,000,000 francs annually; it would be indispensable to go and spend some weeks in the neighbourhood of Chartres during several consecutive summers, and make minute observations.
“These researches and a thousand others which correspond in my mind to the great act of transformation after death of organic matter, and the compulsory return to the ground and atmosphere of all which has once been living, are only compatible with the installation of a great laboratory. The time has now come when experimental science should be freed from its bonds....”
The Emperor wrote to Duruy the very next day, desiring that Pasteur’s wish should be acceded to. Duruy gladly acquiesced and plans began to be drawn out. Pasteur, who scarcely dared believe in these bright hopes, was consulted about the situation, size, etc., of the future building, and{148} looked forward to obtaining the help of Raulin, his former pupil, when he had room enough to experiment on a larger scale. The proposed site was part of the garden of the Ecole Normale, where the pavilion already existing could be greatly added to.
In the meanwhile Pasteur was interviewed by the Mayor and the President of the Chamber of Commerce of Orleans, who begged him to come to Orleans and give a public lecture on the results of his studies on vinegar. He consented with pleasure, ever willing to attempt awakening the interest of the public in his beloved Science—“Science, which brings man nearer to God.”
It was on the Monday, November 11, at 7.30 p.m., that Pasteur entered the lecture room at Orleans. A great many vinegar manufacturers, some doctors, apothecaries, professors, students, even ladies, had come to hear him. An account in a contemporary local paper gives us a description of the youngest member of the Académie des Sciences as he appeared before the Orleans public. He is described as of a medium height, his face pale, his eyes very bright through his glasses, scrupulously neat in his dress, with a tiny Legion of Honour rosette in his button hole.
He began his lecture with the following simple words: “The Mayor and the President of the Chamber of Commerce having heard that I had studied the fermentation which produces vinegar, have asked me to lay before the vinegar makers of this town the results of my work. I have hastened to comply with their request, fully sharing in the desire which instigated it, that of being useful to an industry which is one of the sources of the fortune of your city and of your department.”
He tried to make them understand scientifically the well known fact of the transformation of wine into vinegar. He showed that all the work came from a little plant, a microscopic fungus, the mycoderma aceti. After exhibiting an enlarged picture of that mycoderma, Pasteur explained that the least trace of that little vinegar-making plant, sown on the surface of any alcoholic and slightly acid liquid, was sufficient to produce a prodigious extension of it; in summer or artificial heat, said Pasteur, a surface of liquid of the same area as the Orleans Lecture room could be covered in forty-eight hours. The mycodermic veil is sometimes smooth and hardly visible, sometimes wrinkled and a little greasy to the touch. The fatty{149} matter which accompanies the development of the plant keeps it on the surface, air being necessary to the plant; it would otherwise perish and the acetification would be arrested. Thus floating, the mycoderma absorbs oxygen from the air and fixes it on the alcohol, which becomes transformed into acetic acid.
Pasteur explained all the details in his clear powerful voice. Why, in an open bottle, does wine left to itself become vinegar? Because, thanks to the air, and to the mycoderma aceti (which need never be sown, being ever mixed with the invisible dusts in the air), the chemical transformation of wine into vinegar can take place. Why does not a full, closed bottle become acetified? Because the mycoderma cannot multiply in the absence of air. Wine and air heated in the same vessel will not become sour, the high temperature having killed the germs of mycoderma aceti both in the wine itself and in the dusts suspended in the air. But, if a vessel containing wine previously heated is exposed to the free contact of ordinary air, the wine may become sour, for, though the germs in the wine have been killed, other germs may fall into it from the air and develop.
Finally, if pure alcoholized water does not become acetified, though germs can drop into it from the air, it is because it does not offer to those germs the food necessary to the plant—food which is present in wine but not in alcoholized water. But if a suitable aliment for the little plant is added to the water, acetification takes place.
When the acetification is complete, the mycoderma, if not submerged, continues to act, and, when not arrested in time, its oxidating power becomes dangerous; having no more alcohol to act upon, it ends by transforming acetic acid itself into water and carbonic acid gas, and the work of death and destruction is thus achieved.
Speaking of that last phase of the mycoderma aceti, he went on to general laws—laws of the universe by which all that has lived must disappear. “It is an absolute necessity that the matter of which living beings are formed should return after their death to the ground and to the atmosphere in the shape of mineral or gaseous substances, such as steam, carbonic acid gas, ammoniac gas or nitrogen—simple principles easily displaced by movements of the atmosphere and in which life is again enabled to seek the elements of its indefinite perpetuity. It is chiefly through acts of fermentation and slow combustion{150} that this law of dissolution and return to a gaseous state is accomplished.”
Coming back to his special subject, he pointed out to vinegar manufacturers the cause of certain failures and the danger of certain errors.
It was imagined for instance that some microscopic beings, anguillul?, of which Pasteur projected an enlarged wriggling image on the screen, and which were to be found in the tubs of some Orleans vinegar works, were of some practical utility. Pasteur explained their injurious character: as they require air to live, and as the mycoderma, in order to accomplish its work, is equally dependent on oxygen, a struggle takes place between the anguillul? and the mycoderma. If acetification is successful, if the mycoderma spreads and invades everything, the vanquished anguillul? are obliged to take refuge against the sides of the barrel, from which their little living army watches the least accidental break of the veil. Pasteur, armed with a magnifying glass, had many times witnessed the struggle for life which takes place between the little fungi and the tiny animals, each fighting for the surface of the liquid. Sometimes, gathering themselves into masses, the anguillul? succeed in sinking a fragment of the mycodermic veil and victoriously destroying the action of the drowned plants.
Pasteur related all this in a vivid manner, evidently happy that his long and delicate laboratory researches should now pass into the domain of industry. He had been pleased to find that some Orleans wine merchants heated wine according to his advice in order to preserve it; and he now informed them that the temperature of 55° C. which killed germs and vegetations in wine could be applied with equal success to vinegar after it was produced. The active germs of the mycoderma aceti were thus arrested at the right moment, the anguillul? were killed and the vinegar remained pure and unaltered. “Nothing,” concluded Pasteur, “is more agreeable to a man who has made science his career than to increase the number of discoveries, but his cup of joy is full when the result of his observations is put to immediate practical use.”
This year 1867 marks a specially interesting period in Pasteur’s life. At Alais he had shown himself an incomparable observer, solely preoccupied with the silkworm disease, thinking, speaking of nothing else. He would rise long before anyone else so as to begin earlier the study of the experiments he{151} had started, and would give his thought and attention to some detail for hours at a time. After this minute observation he would suddenly display a marvellous ingenuity in varying tests, foreseeing and avoiding causes of error, and at last, after so many efforts, a clear and decisive experiment would come, as it had done in the cases of spontaneous generation and of ferments.
The contrasts in his mind had their parallel in his character: this usually thoughtful, almost dreamy man, absorbed in one idea, suddenly revealed himself a man of action if provoked by some erroneous newspaper report or some illogical statement, and especially when he heard of some unscrupulous silkworm seed merchant sowing ruin in poor magnaneries for the sake of a paltry gain. When, on his return to Paris, he found himself mixed up with the small revolution in the Ecole Normale, he was seen to efface himself modestly before his masters when honours and titles came in question. Now he had interrupted his researches in order to do a kindness to the people of Orleans, who, practical as they were, and perhaps a little disdainful of laboratory theories, had been surprised to find him as careful of the smallest detail as they themselves were.
He was then in the full maturity of his forty-five years. His great intuition, his imagination, which equalled any poet’s, often carried him to a summit whence an immense horizon lay before him; he would then suddenly doubt this imagination, resolutely, with a violent effort, force his mind to start again along the path of experimental method, and, surely and slowly, gathering proofs as he went, he would once more reach his exalted and general ideas. This constant struggle within himself was almost dramatic; the words “Perseverance in Effort,” which he often used in the form of advice to others, or as a programme for his own work, seemed to bring something far away, something infinite before his dreamy eyes.
At the end of the year, an obstacle almost arrested the great experiments he contemplated. He heard that the promises made to him were vanishing away, the necessary credit having been refused for the building of the new laboratory. And this, Pasteur sadly reflected, when millions and millions of francs were being spent on the Opera house! Wounded in his feelings, both as a scientist and a patriot, he prepared for the Moniteur, then the official paper, an article destined to shake the culpable indifference of public authorities.{152}
“...The boldest conceptions,” he wrote, “the most legitimate speculations can be embodied but from the day when they are consecrated by observation and experiment. Laboratories and discoveries are correlative terms; if you suppress laboratories, Physical Science will become stricken with barrenness and death; it will become mere powerless information instead of a science of progress and futurity; give it back its laboratories, and life, fecundity and power will reappear. Away from their laboratories, physicists and chemists are but disarmed soldiers on a battlefield.
“The deduction from these principles is evident: if the conquests useful to humanity touch your heart—if you remain confounded before the marvels of electric telegraphy, of an?sthesia, of the daguerreotype and many other admirable discoveries—if you are jealous of the share your country may boast in these wonders—then, I implore you, take some interest in those sacred dwellings meaningly described as laboratories. Ask that they may be multiplied and completed. They are the temples of the future, of riches and of comfort. There humanity grows greater, better, stronger; there she can learn to read the works of Nature, works of progress and universal harmony, while humanity’s own works are too often those of barbarism, of fanaticism and of destruction.
“Some nations have felt the wholesome breath of truth. Rich and large laboratories have been growing in Germany for the last thirty years, and many more are still being built; at Berlin and at Bonn two palaces, worth four million francs each, are being erected for chemical studies. St. Petersburg has spent three and a half million francs on a Physiological Institute; England, America, Austria, Bavaria have made most generous sacrifices. Italy too has made a start.
“And France?
“France has not yet begun....” He mentioned the sepulchre-like cellar where the great physiologist, Claude Bernard, was obliged to live; “and where?” wrote Pasteur. “In the very establishment which bears the name of the mother country, the Collège de France!” The laboratory of the Sorbonne was no better—a damp, dark room, one metre below the level of the street. He went on, demonstrating that the provincial Faculties were as destitute as those of Paris. “Who will believe me when I affirm that the budget of Public Instruction provides not a penny towards the progress of physical{153} science in laboratories, that it is through a tolerated administrative fiction that some scientists, considered as professors, are permitted to draw from the public treasury towards the expenses of their own work, some of the allowance made to them for teaching purposes.”
The manuscript was sent to the Moniteur at the beginning of January, 1868. It had lately been publishing mild articles on Mussulman architecture, then on herring fishing in Norway. The official whose business it was to read over the articles sent to the paper literally jumped in his chair when he read this fiery denunciation; he declared those pages must be modified, cut down; the Administration could not be attacked in that way, especially by one of its own functionaries! M. Dalloz, the editor of the paper, knew that Pasteur would never consent to any alterations; he advised him to show the proofs to M. Conti, Napoleon III’s secretary.
“The article cannot appear in the Moniteur, but why not publish it in booklet form?” wrote M. Conti to Pasteur after having shown these revelations to the Emperor. Napoleon, talking to Duruy the next day, January 9, showed great concern at such a state of things. “Pasteur is right,” said Duruy, “to expose such deficiencies; it is the best way to have them remedied. Is it not deplorable, almost scandalous, that the official world should be so indifferent on questions of science?”
Duruy felt his combative instincts awakening. How many times, in spite of his good humour and almost Roman intrepidity, he had asked himself whether he would ever succeed in causing his ideas on higher education to prevail with his colleagues, the other Ministers, who, carried away by their daily discussions, hardly seemed to realize that the true supremacy of a nation does not reside in speeches, but in the silent and tenacious work of a few men of science and of letters. Pasteur’s article entitled Science’s Budget appeared first in the Revue des cours scientifiques, then as a pamphlet. Pasteur, not content with this, continued his campaign by impetuous speeches whenever the opportunity offered. On March 10, he saw himself nearing his goal, and wrote to Raulin: “There is now a marked movement in favour of Science; I think I shall succeed.”
Six days later, on March 16, whilst the Court was celebrating the birthday of the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III, who, on reading Pasteur’s article, had expressed his intention of{154} consulting not only Pasteur, but also Milne-Edwards, Claude Bernard, and Henri Sainte Claire Deville, asked the four scientists to his study to meet Rouher, Marshal Vaillant and Duruy, perhaps the three men of the Empire who were best qualified to hear them. The Emperor in his slow, detached manner, invited each of his guests to express his opinion on the course to follow. All agreed in regretting that pure science should be given up. When Rouher said that it was not to be wondered at that the reign of applied science should follow that of pure science, “But if the sources of applications are dried up!” interposed the Emperor hastily. Pasteur, asked to express his opinion (he had brought with him notes of what he wished to say), recalled the fact that the Natural History Museum and the Ecole Polytechnique, which had had so great a share in the scientific movement of the early part of the century, were no longer in that heroic period. For the last twenty years the industrial prosperity of France had induced the cleverest Polytechnicians to desert higher studies and theoretical science, though the source of all applications was to be found in theory. The Ecole Polytechnique was obliged now to recruit its teaching staff outside, chiefly among Normaliens. What was to be done to train future scientists? This: to maintain in Paris, during two or three years, five or six graduates chosen from the best students of the large schools as curators or preparation masters, doing at the Ecole Polytechnique and other establishments what was done at the Ecole Normale. Thanks to that special institution, science and higher teaching would have a reserve of men who would become an honour to their country. Next, and this was the second point, no less important than the first, scientists should be given resources better appropriated to the pursuit of their work; as in Germany, for instance, where a scientist would leave one university for another on the express condition that a laboratory should be built for him, “a laboratory,” said Pasteur, “usually magnificent, not in its architecture (though sometimes that is the case, a proof of the national pride in scientific glory), but in the number and perfection of its appliances. Besides,” he added, “foreign scientists have their private homes adjoining their laboratories and collections,” indeed a most pressing inducement to work.
Pasteur did not suggest that a scientist should give up teaching; he recognized, on the contrary, that public teaching forces{155} him to embrace in succession every branch of the science he teaches. “But let him not give too frequent or too varied lectures! they paralyze the faculties,” he said, being well aware of the cost of preparing classes. He wished that towns should be interested in the working and success of their scientific establishments. The Universities of Paris, of Lyons, of Strasburg, of Montpellier, of Lille, of Bordeaux, and of Toulouse, forming as a whole the University of France, should be connected to the neighbourhood which they honour in the same way that German universities are connected with their surroundings.
Pasteur had the greatest admiration for the German system: popular instruction liberally provided, and, above it, an intellectually independent higher teaching. Therefore, when the University of Bonn resolved in that year, 1868, to offer him as a great homage the degree of M.D. on account of his works on micro-organisms, he was proud to see his researches rated at their proper value by a neighbouring nation. He did not then suspect the other side of German nature, the military side, then very differently preoccupied. Those preoccupations were pointed out to the French Government in a spirit of prophecy, and with some patriotic anguish, by two French officers, General Ducrot, commanding since 1865 the 6th Military Division, whose headquarters were at Strasburg, and Colonel Baron Stoffel, military attaché in Prussia since 1866. Their warnings were so little heeded that some Court intrigues were even then on foot to transfer General Ducrot from Strasburg to Bourges, so that he might no longer worry people with his monomania of Prussian ambition.
On March 10, the evening of the day when the Emperor decided upon making improvements, and when Duruy felt assured, thanks to the promised allowances, that he could soon offer to French professors “the necessary appliances with which to compete with their rivals beyond the Rhine,” Pasteur started for Alais, where his arrival was impatiently awaited, both by partisans and adversaries of his experiments on silkworm disease. He would much have liked to give the results of his work in his inaugural lecture at the Sorbonne. “But,” he wrote to Duruy, “these are but selfishly sentimental reasons, which must be outweighed by the interest of my researches.”
On his arrival he found to his joy that those who had prac{156}tised seeding according to his rigorous prescriptions had met with complete success. Other silkworm cultivators, less well advised, duped by the decoying appearances of certain broods, had not taken the trouble to examine whether the moths were corpuscled; they were witnesses and victims of the failure Pasteur had prophesied. He now looked upon pébrine as conquered; but flachery remained, more difficult to prevent, being greatly dependent upon the accidents which traverse the life of a silkworm. Some of those accidents happen in spite of all precautions, such as a sudden change of temperature or a stormy day; but at least the leaves of the mulberry tree could be carefully kept from fermentation, or from contamination by dusts in the nurseries. Either of those two causes was sufficient to provoke a fatal disorder in silkworms, the feeding of which is so important that they increase to fifteen thousand times their own weight during the first month of their life. Accidental flachery could therefore be avoided by hygienic precautions. In order to prevent it from becoming hereditary, Pasteur—who had pointed out that the micro-organism which causes it develops at first in the intestinal canal of the worm and then becomes localized in the digestive cavity of the chrysalis—advised the following means of producing a healthy strain of silkworms: “This means,” writes M. Gernez, Pasteur’s assiduous collaborator in these studies, “does not greatly complicate operations, and infallibly ensures healthy seed. It consists in abstracting with the point of a scalpel a small portion of the digestive cavity of a moth, then mixing it with a little water and examining it with a microscope. If the moths do not contain the characteristic micro-organism, the strain they come from may unhesitatingly be considered as suitable for seeding. The flachery micro-organism is as easily recognized as the pébrine corpuscle.”
The seed merchants, made uneasy by these discoveries which so gravely jeopardized their industry, spread the most slanderous reports about them and made themselves the willing echo of every imposture, however incredible. M. Laurent wrote to his daughter, Madame Pasteur, in a letter dated from Lyons (June 6): “It is being reported here that the failure of Pasteur’s process has excited the population of your neighbourhood so much that he has had to flee from Alais, pursued by infuriated inhabitants throwing stones after him.” Some of these legends lingered in the minds of ignorant people.{157}
Important news came from Paris to Pasteur in July, and on the 27th he was able to write to Raulin: “The building of my laboratory is going to be begun! the orders are given, and the money found. I heard this two days ago from the Minister.” 30,000 francs had been allowed for the work by the Minister of Public Instruction, and an equal sum was promised by the Minister of the Emperor’s household. Duruy was preparing at the same time a report on two projected decrees concerning laboratories for teaching purposes and for research. “The laboratory for research,” wrote Duruy, “will not be useful to the master alone, but more so even to the students, thus ensuring the future progress of science. Students already provided with extensive theoretical knowledge will be initiated in the teaching laboratories into the handling of instruments, elementary manipulations, and what I may call classical practice; this will gather them around eminent masters, from whom they will learn the art of observation and methods of experiment.... It is with similar institutions that Germany has succeeded in obtaining the great development of experimental science which we are now watching with an anxious sympathy.”
Pasteur returned to Paris with his enthusiastic mind overflowing with plans of all kinds of research. He wanted to be there when the builders began their work on the narrow space in the Rue d’Ulm. He wrote to Raulin on August 10, asking his opinion as he would that of an architect; then went on to say, planning out his busy holidays: “I shall leave Paris on the 16th with my wife and children to spend three weeks at the seaside, at St. George’s, near Bordeaux. If you were free at the end of the month, or at the beginning of September, I wish you could accompany me to Toulon, where experiments on the heating of wines will be made by the Minister of the Navy. Great quantities of heated and of non-heated wine are to be sent to Gabon so as to test the process; at present our colonial crews have to drink mere vinegar. A commission of very enlightened men is formed and has begun studies with which it seems satisfied.... See if you can join me at Bordeaux, where I shall await a notice from the chairman of the Commission, M. de Lapparent, director of naval construction at the Ministry of Marine.”
The Commission mentioned by Pasteur had been considering for the last two years the expediency of applying the heating{158} process to wines destined for the fleet and to the colonies. A first trial was made at Brest on the contents of a barrel of 500 litres, half of which was heated. Then the two wines were sealed in different barrels and placed in the ship Jean Bart, which remained away from the harbour for ten months. When the vessel returned, the Commission noted the limpidity and mellowness of the heated wine, adding in the official report that the wine had acquired the attractive colour peculiar to mature wines. The non-heated wine was equally limpid, but it had an astringent, almost acid flavour. It was still fit to drink, said the report, but it were better to consume it rapidly, as it would soon be entirely spoilt. Identical results were observed in some bottles of heated and non-heated wines at Rochefort and Orleans.
M. de Lapparent now organized a decisive experiment, to take place under Pasteur’s superintendence. The frigate la Sibylle started for a tour round the world with a complete cargo of heated wine. Pasteur, who returned to Arbois for a short rest before going back to Paris, wrote from there to his early confidant, Chappuis (September 21, 1868): “I am quite satisfied with my experiments at Toulon and with the success of the Navy tests. We heated 650 hectolitres in two days; the rapidity of this operation lends itself to quick and considerable commissariat arrangements. Those 650 hectolitres will be taken to the West Coast of Africa, together with 50 hectolitres of the same wine non-heated. If the trial succeeds, that is to say if the 650 hectolitres arrive and can be kept without alteration, and if the 50 hectolitres become spoilt (I feel confident after the experiments I have made that such will be the result), the question will be settled, and, in the future, all the wine for the Navy will be ensured against disease by a preliminary heating. The expense will not be more than five centimes per hectolitre. The result of these experiments will have a great influence on the trade, ever cautious and afraid of innovations. Yet we have seen, at Narbonne in particular, some heating practised on a large scale by several merchants who have spoken to me very favourably about it. The exportation of our French wines will increase enormously, for at present our ordinary table wines lend themselves to trade with England and other countries beyond seas, but only by means of a strong addition of alcohol, which raises their price and tampers with their hygienic qualities.{159}”
The experiments were successful. Pasteur’s life was now over full. He returned to Paris at the beginning of October, and threw himself into his work, his classes at the Sorbonne, the organization of his laboratory, some further polemics on the subject of silkworm disease, and projected experiments for the following year. This accumulation of mental work brought about extreme cerebral tension.
As soon as he saw M. Gernez, he spoke to him of the coming campaign of sericiculture, of his desire to reduce his adversaries to silence by heaping proof upon proof. Nothing could relieve him from that absorbing preoccupation, not even the gaiety of Bertin, who, living on the same floor at the Ecole Normale, often used to come in after dinner and try to amuse him.
On Monday, October 19, Pasteur, though suffering from a strange tingling sensation of the left side, had a great desire to go and read to the Academié des Sciences a treatise by Salimbeni, an Italian, who, having studied and verified Pasteur’s results, declared that the best means of regenerating the culture of silkworms was due to the French scientist. This treatise, the diploma of the Bonn University, the Rumford medal offered by the English, all those testimonials from neighbouring nations were infinitely agreeable to Pasteur, who was proud to lay such homage before the shrine of France. On that day, October 19, 1868, a date which became a bitter memory to his family and friends—in spite of an alarming shivering fit which had caused him to lie down immediately after lunch instead of working as usual—he insisted on going to the Academy sitting at half past two.
Mme. Pasteur, vaguely uneasy, made a pretext of some shopping beyond the Quai Conti and accompanied him as far as the vestibule of the Institute. As she was turning back, she met Balard, who was coming up with the quick step of a young man, stopped him and asked him to walk back with Pasteur, and not to leave him before reaching his own door, though indeed it seemed a curious exchange of parts to ask Balard at sixty years of age to watch over Pasteur still so young. Pasteur read Salimbeni’s paper in his usual steady voice, remained until the end of the sitting and walked back with Balard and Sainte Claire Deville. He dined very lightly and went to bed at nine o’clock; he had hardly got into bed when he felt himself attacked by the strange symptoms of the afternoon. He{160} tried to speak, but in vain; after a few moments he was able to call for assistance. Mme. Pasteur sent at once for Dr. Godélier, an intimate friend of the family, an army surgeon, Clinical Professor at the Ecole du Val-de-Grace[27]; and Pasteur, paralysed one moment and free again the next, explained his own symptoms during the intervals of the dark struggle which endangered his life.
The cerebral h?morrhage gradually brought about absence of movement along the entire left side. When the next morning Dr. No?l Gueneau de Mussy, going his regulation round of the Ecole Normale students, came into his room and said, so as not to alarm him, “I heard you were unwell, and thought I would come to see you,” Pasteur smiled the sad smile of a patient with no illusions. Drs. Godélier and Gueneau de Mussy decided to call Dr. Andral in consultation, and went to fetch him at three o’clock at the Académie de Médecine. Somewhat disconcerted by the singular character of this attack of hemiplegia, Andral prescribed the application of sixteen leeches behind the ears; blood flowed abundantly, and Dr. Godélier wrote in the evening bulletin (Tuesday): “Speech clearer, some movements of the paralysed limbs; intelligence perfect.” Later, at ten o’clock: “Complains of his paralysed arm.” “It is like lead; if it could only be cut off!” groaned Pasteur. About 2 a.m. Mme Pasteur thought all hope was gone. The hastily written bulletin reads thus: “Intense cold, anxious agitation, features depressed, eyes languid.” The sleep which followed was as the sleep of death.
At dawn Pasteur awoke from this drowsiness. “Mental faculties still absolutely intact,” wrote M. Godélier at 12.30 on Wednesday, October 21. “The cerebral lesion, whatever it may be, is not worse; there is an evident pause.” Two hours later the words, “Mind active,” were followed by the startling statement, “Would willingly talk science.”
While these periods of calm, agitation, renewed hopes, and despair were succeeding each other in the course of those thirty-six hours, Pasteur’s friends hastened to his bedside. He said to Henri Sainte Claire Deville, one of the first to come: “I am sorry to die; I wanted to do much more for my country.” Sainte Claire Deville, trying to hide his grief under{161} apparent confidence, answered, “Never fear; you will recover, you will make many more marvellous discoveries, you will live happy days; I am your senior, you will survive me. Promise me that you will pronounce my funeral oration.... I wish you would; you would say nice things of me,” he added between tears and smiles.
Bertin, Gernez, Duclaux, Baulin, Didon, then a curator at the Ecole Normale, Professor Auguste Lamy, the geologist Marcou (the two latter being Franche-comté friends), all claimed the privilege of helping Mme. Pasteur and M. Godélier in nursing one who inspired them all, not merely with an admiring and devoted affection, but with a feeling of tenderness amounting almost to a cult.
A private letter from a cousin, Mme. Cribier, gives an idea of those dark days (October 26, 1868): “The news is rather good this morning; the patient was able to sleep for a few hours last night, which he had not yet done. He had been so restless all day that M. Godélier felt uneasy about him and ordered complete silence in the whole flat; it was only in the study which is farthest away from the bedroom, and which has padded doors, that one was allowed to talk. That room is full from morning till night. All scientific Paris comes to inquire anxiously after the patient; intimate friends take it in turns to watch by him. Dumas, the great chemist, was affectionately insisting on taking his turn yesterday. Every morning the Emperor and Empress send a footman for news, which M. Godélier gives him in a sealed envelope. In fact, every mark of sympathy is given to poor Marie, and I hope that the worst may be spared her in spite of the alarming beginning. His mind seems so absolutely untouched, and he is still so young, that with rest and care he might yet be able to do some work. His stroke is accompanied by symptoms which are now occupying the attention of the whole Academy of Medicine. Paralysis always comes abruptly, whilst for M. Pasteur, it came in little successive fits, twenty or thirty perhaps, and was only complete at the end of twenty-four hours, which completely disconcerted the doctors who watched him, and delayed their having recourse to an active treatment. It seems that this fact is observed for the first time, and is puzzling the whole Faculty.”
M. Pasteur’s mind remained clear, luminous, dominating his prostrate body; he was evidently afraid that he should die{162} before having thoroughly settled the question of silkworm diseases. “One night that I was alone with him,” relates M. Gernez, who hardly left his bedside during that terrible week, “after endeavouring in vain to distract his thoughts, I despairingly gave up the attempt and allowed him to express the ideas which were on his mind; finding, to my surprise, that they had his accustomed clearness and conciseness, I wrote what he dictated without altering a word, and the next day I brought to his illustrious colleague, Dumas—who hardly credited his senses—the memorandum which appeared in the report of the Académie on October 26, 1868, a week after the stroke which nearly killed him! It was a note on a very ingenious process for discovering in the earlier tests those eggs which are predisposed to flachery.”
The members of the Academy were much cheered by the reading of this note, which seemed to bring Pasteur back into their midst.
The building of the laboratory had been begun, and hoardings erected around the site. Pasteur, from his bed, asked day by day, “How are they getting on?” But his wife and daughter, going to the window of the dining-room which overlooked the Ecole Normale garden, only brought him back vague answers, for, as a matter of fact, the workmen had disappeared from the very first day of Pasteur’s illness. All that could be seen was a solitary labourer wheeling a barrow aimlessly about, probably under the orders of some official who feared to alarm the patient.
As Pasteur was not expected to recover, the trouble and expense were deemed unnecessary. Pasteur soon became aware of this, and one day that General Favé had come to see him he gave vent to some bitter feelings as to this cautious interruption of the building works, saying that it would have been simpler and more straightforward to state from the beginning that the work was suspended in the expectation of a probable demise.
Napoleon was informed of this excess of zeal, not only by General Favé, but by Sainte Claire Deville, who was a guest at Compiègne at the beginning of November, 1868. He wrote to the Minister of Public Instruction—
“My dear M. Duruy,—I have heard that—unknown to you probably—the men who were working at M. Pasteur’s laboratory were kept away from the very day he became ill; he has{163} been much affected by this circumstance, which seemed to point to his non-recovery. I beg you will issue orders that the work begun should be continued. Believe in my sincere friendship.—Napoleon.”
Duruy immediately sent on this note to M. du Mesnil, whose somewhat long title was that of “Chief of the Division of Academic Administration of Scientific Establishments and of Higher Education.” M. du Mesnil evidently repudiated the charge for himself or for his Minister, for he wrote in a large hand, on the very margin of the Imperial autograph—
“M. Duruy gave no orders and had to give none. It is at his solicitation that the works were undertaken, but it is the Direction of Civic Buildings alone which can have interrupted them; the fact should be verified.”
M. de Cardaillac, head of the Direction of Civic Buildings, made an inquiry and the building was resumed.
It was only on November 30 that Pasteur left his bed for the first time and spent an hour in his armchair. He clearly analyzed to himself his melancholy condition, stricken down as he was by hemiplegia in his forty-sixth year; but having noticed that his remarks saddened his wife and daughter, he spoke no more about his illness, and only expressed his anxiety not to be a trouble, a burden, he said, to his wife, his son and daughter, and the devoted friends who helped to watch him at night.
In the daytime each offered to read to him. General Favé, whose active and inquiring mind was ever on the alert, brought him on one of his almost daily visits an ideal sick man’s book, easy to read and offering food for meditation. It was the translation of an English book called Self-Help,[28] and it consisted in a series of biographies, histories of lives illustrating the power of courage, devotion or intelligence. The author, glad to expound a discovery, to describe a masterpiece, to relate noble enterprises, to dwell upon the prodigies which energy can achieve, had succeeded in making a homogeneous whole of these unconnected narratives, a sort of homage to Willpower.
Pasteur agreed with the English writer in thinking that the supremacy of a nation resides in “the sum total of private virtues, activities and energy.” His thoughts rose higher still; men of science could wish for a greater glory than that of con{164}tributing to the fame and fortune of their country, they might aspire to originating vast benefits to the whole of humanity.
It was indeed a sad and a sublime spectacle, that of the contrast between that ardent, soaring soul and that patient helpless body. It was probably when thinking of those biographies—some of them too succinct, to his mind, Jenner’s for instance—that Pasteur wrote: “From the life of men whose passage is marked by a trace of durable light, let us piously gather up every word, every incident likely to make known the incentives of their great soul, for the education of posterity.” He looked upon the cult of great men as a great principle of national education, and believed that children, as soon as they could read, should be made acquainted with the heroic or benevolent souls of great men. In his pious patriotism he saw a secret of strength and of hope for a nation in its reverence for the memories of the great, a sacred and intimate bond between the visible and the invisible worlds. His soul was deeply religious. During his illness—a time when the things of this world assume their real proportions—his mind rose far beyond this earth. The Infinite appeared to him as it did to Pascal, and with the same rapture; he was less attracted by Pascal, when, proud and disdainful, he exposes man’s weakness for humiliation’s sake, than when he declares that “Man is produced but for Infinity,” and “he finds constant instruction in progress.” Pasteur believed in material progress as well as in moral improvement; he invariably marked in the books he was reading—Pascal, Nicole and others—those passages which were both consoling and exalting.
In one of his favourite books, Of the Knowledge of God and of Self, he much appreciated the passage where Bossuet ascribes to human nature “the idea of an infinite wisdom, of an absolute power, of an infallible rectitude, in one word, the idea of perfection.” Another phrase in the same book seemed to him applicable to experimental method as well as to the conduct of life: “The greatest aberration of the mind consists in believing a thing because it is desirable.”
With December, joy began to return to the Ecole Normale: the laboratory was progressing and seemed an embodiment of renewed hopes of further work. M. Godélier’s little bulletins now ran: “General condition most satisfactory. Excellent morale; the progress evidenced daily by the return of action in the paralysed muscles inspires the patient with great confidence.{165} He is planning out his future sericiculture campaign, receives many callers without too much fatigue, converses brightly and often dictates letters.”
One visit was a great pleasure to Pasteur—that of the Minister, his cordial friend, Duruy, who brought him good news of the future of Higher Education. The augmented credit which was granted in the 1869 budget would make it possible to rebuild other laboratories besides that of the Ecole Normale, and also to create in other places new centres of study and research. After so many efforts and struggles, it was at last possible to foresee the day when chemistry, physics, physiology, natural history and mathematics would each have an independent department in a great province, which should be called the Practical School of Higher Studies. There would be no constraint, no hard and fast rules, no curriculum but that of free study: young men who were attracted to pure science, and others who preferred practical application, would find a congenial career before them as well as those who desired to give themselves up to teaching. It can well be imagined with what delight Pasteur heard these good tidings.
The bulletins continued to be favourable: “(December 15): Progress slow but sure: he has walked from his bed to his armchair with some assistance. (December 22): he has gone into the dining-room for dinner, leaning on a chair. (29th): he has walked a few steps without support.”
Pasteur saw in his convalescence but the returning means of working, and declared himself ready to start again for the neighbourhood of Alais at once, instead of taking the few months’ rest he was advised to have.
He urged that, after certain moths and chrysalides, had been examined through a microscope, complete certainty would be acquired as to the condition of their seed, and that perfect seed would therefore become accessible to all tradesmen both great and small; would it not be absurd and culpable to let reasons of personal health interfere with saving so many poor people from ruin?
His family had to give way, and on January 18, exactly three months after his paralytic stroke, he was taken to the Gare de Lyon by his wife and daughter and M. Gernez. He then travelled, lying on the cushions of a coupé carriage, as far as Alais, and drove from Alais to St. Hippolyte le Fort, where{166} tests were being made on forced silkworms by the agricultural society of Le Vigan.
The house he came into was cold and badly arranged. M. Gernez improvised a laboratory, with the assistance of Maillot and Raulin, who had followed their master down. From his sofa or from his bed, Pasteur directed certain experiments on the forced specimens. M. Gernez writes: “The operations, of which we watched the phases through the microscope, fully justified his anticipations; and he rejoiced that he had not given up the game.” In the world of the Institute his departure was blamed by some and praised by others; but Pasteur merely considered that one man’s life is worthless if not useful to others.
Dumas wrote to him early in February: “My dear friend and colleague,—I have been thinking of you so much! I dread fatigue for you, and wish I could spare it you, whilst hoping that you may successfully achieve your great and patriotic undertaking. I have hesitated to write to you for fear you should feel obliged to answer. However, I should like to have direct news of you, as detailed as possible, and, besides that, I should be much obliged if you could send me a line to enlighten me on the two following points—
“1. When are you going back to Alais? And when will your Alais broods be near enough to their time to be most interesting to visit?
“2. What should I say to people who beg for healthy seed as if my pockets were full of it? I tell them it is too late; but if you could tell me a means of satisfying them, I should be pleased, particularly in the case of General Randon and M. Husson. The Marshal (Vaillant) is full of solicitude for you, and we never meet but our whole conversation turns upon you. With me, it is natural. With him less so, perhaps, but anyhow, he thinks of you as much as is possible, and this gives me a great deal of pleasure.... Please present to Madame Pasteur our united compliments and wishes. We wish the South could have the virtues of Achilles’ lance—of healing the wounds it has caused.—Yours affectionately.”
Pasteur was reduced to complete helplessness through having slipped and fallen on the stone floor of his uncomfortable house, and was obliged to dictate the following letter—
“My dear master,—I thank you for thinking of the poor invalid. I am very much in the same condition as when I{167} left Paris, my progress having been retarded by a fall on my left side. Fortunately, I sustained no fracture, but only bruises, which were naturally painful and very slow to disappear.
“There are now no remaining traces of that accident, and I am as I was three weeks ago. The improvement in the movements of the leg and arm appears to have begun again, but with excessive slowness. I am about to have recourse to electricity, under the advice and instructions of Dr. Godélier, by means of a small Ruhmkorff apparatus which he has kindly sent me. My brain is still very weak.
“This is how my days are spent: in the morning my three young friends come to see me, and I arrange the day’s work. I get up at twelve, after having my breakfast in bed, and having had the newspaper read to me. If fine, I then spend an hour or two in the little garden of this house. Usually, if I am feeling pretty well, I dictate to my dear wife a page, or more frequently half a page, of a little book I am preparing, and in which I intend to give a short account of the whole of my observations. Before dinner, which I have alone with my wife and my little girl in order to avoid the fatigue of conversation, my young collaborators bring me a report of their work. About seven or half past, I always feel terribly tired and inclined to sleep twelve consecutive hours; but I invariably wake at midnight, not to sleep again until towards morning, when I doze again for an hour or two. What makes me hope for an ultimate cure is the fact that my appetite keeps good, and that those short hours of sleep appear to be sufficient. You see that on the whole I am doing nothing rash, being moreover rigorously watched by my wife and little daughter. The latter pitilessly takes books, pens, papers and pencils away from me with a perseverance which causes me joy and despair.
“It is because I know your affection for your pupils that I venture to give you so many details. I will now answer the other questions in your letter.
“I shall be at Alais from April 1; that will be the time when they will begin hatching seed for the industrial campaign, which will consequently be concluded about May 20 at the latest. Seeding will take place during June, more or less early according to departments. It is indeed very late to obtain seed, especially indigenous seed prepared according to my process. I had foreseen that I should receive demands at{168} the last moment, and that I should do well to put by a few ounces; but, about three weeks ago, our energetic Minister wrote to ask me for some seed to distribute to schoolmasters, and I promised him what I had. However I will take some from his share and send you several lots of five grammes. The director of a most interesting Austrian establishment has also ordered two ounces, saying he is convinced of the excellence of my method. His establishment is a most interesting experimental magnanerie, founded in a handsome Illyrian property. Lastly, I have also promised two ounces to M. le Comte de Casabianca. One of my young men is going out to his place in Corsica to do the seeding.
“I was much touched by what you tell me of Marshal Vaillant’s kind interest in my health, and also by his kind thought in informing me of the encouragement given to my studies by the Society of Agriculture. I wish the cultivators of your South had a little of his scientific and methodical spirit.
“Madame Pasteur joins with me in sending you and your family, dear master, the expression of my gratitude and affectionate devotion.”
The normal season for the culture of silkworms was now aproaching, and Pasteur was impatient to accumulate the proofs which would vouch for the safety of his method; this had been somewhat doubted by the members of the Lyons Silks Commission, who possessed an experimental nursery. Most of those gentlemen averred that too much confidence should not be placed in the micrographs. “Our Commission,” thus ran their report of the preceding year, “considers the examination of corpuscles as a useful indication which should be consulted, but of which the results cannot be presented as a fact from which absolute consequences can be deducted.”
“They are absolute,” answered Pasteur, who did not admit reservations on a point which he considered as invulnerable.
On March 22, 1869, the Commission asked Pasteur for a little guaranteed healthy seed. Pasteur not only sent them this, but also sample lots, of which he thus predicted the future fate:—
1. One lot of healthy seed, which would succeed;
2. One lot of seed, which would perish exclusively from the corpuscle disease known as pébrine or gattine;{169} 3. One lot of seed, which would perish exclusively from the flachery disease;
4. One lot of seeds, which would perish partly from corpuscle disease and partly from flachery.
“It seems to me,” added Pasteur, “that the comparison between the results of those different lots will do more to enlighten the Commission on the certainty of the principles I have established than could a mere sample of healthy seed.
“I desire that this letter should be sent to the Commission at its next meeting, and put down in the minutes.”
The Commission accepted with pleasure these unexpected surprise boxes.
About the same time one of his assistants, Maillot, started for Corsica at M. de Casabianca’s request. He took with him six lots of healthy seed to Vescovato, a few miles from Bastia.
The rest of the colony returned to the Pont Gisquet, near Alais, that mulberry-planted retreat, where, according to Pasteur, everything was conducive to work. Pasteur now looked forward to his definitive victory, and, full of confidence, organized his pupils’ missions. M. Duclaux, who was coming to the Pont Gisquet to watch the normal broods, would afterwards go into the Cévennes to verify the seedings made on the selection system. M. Gernez was to note the results of some seedings made by Pasteur himself the preceding year at M. Raibaud-Lange’s, at Paillerols, near Digne (Basses Alpes). Raulin alone would remain at the Pont Gisquet to study some points of detail concerning the flachery disease. So many results ought surely to reduce contradictors to silence!
“My dear friend and colleague,” wrote Dumas to Pasteur, “I need not tell you with what anxiety we are watching the progress of your precious health and of your silkworm campaign. I shall certainly be at Alais at the end of the week, and I shall see, under your kind direction, all that may furnish me with the means of guiding public opinion. You have quacks to fight and envy to conquer, probably a hopeless task; the best is to march right through them, Truth leading the way. It is not likely that they will be converted or reduced to silence.”
Whilst these expeditions were being planned, a letter from M. Gressier, the Minister of Agriculture, arrived very inopportunely. M. Gressier was better versed in sub rosa ministerial combinations than in seeding processes, and he asked Pasteur{170} to examine three lots of seeds sent to him by a Mademoiselle Amat, of Brives-la-Gaillarde, who was celebrated in the department of the Corrèze for her good management of silkworms. This magnanarelle, having had some successful results, was begging his Excellency to accord to those humble seeds his particular consideration, and to have them developed with every possible care.
At the same time she was sending samples of the same seeds to various places in the Gard, the Bouches du Rh?ne, etc., etc.
M. Gressier (April 20) asked Pasteur to examine them and to give him a detailed report. Pasteur answered four days afterwards in terms which were certainly not softened by the usual administrative precautions—
“Monsieur le Ministre, ... these three sorts of seed are worthless. If they are developed, even in very small nurseries, they will in every instance succumb to corpuscle disease. If my seeding process had been employed, it would not have required ten minutes to discover that Mademoiselle Amat’s cocoons, though excellent for spinning purposes, were absolutely unfit for reproduction. My seeding process gives the means of recognizing those broods which are suitable for seed, whilst opposing the production of the infected eggs which year by year flood the silkworm cultivating departments.
“I shall be much obliged, Monsieur le Ministre, if you will kindly inform the Prefect of the Corrèze of the forecasts which I now impart to you, and if you will ask him to report to you the results of Mademoiselle Amat’s three lots.
“For my part, I feel so sure of what I now affirm, that I shall not even trouble to test, by hatching them, the samples which you have sent me. I have thrown them into the river....”
J. B. Dumas had come to Alais, Messrs. Gernez and Duclaux now returned from their expeditions. In two hundred broods, each of one or two ounces of seed, coming from three different sources and hatched in various localities, not one failure was recorded. The Lyons Commission, which had made a note of Pasteur’s bold prognosis, found it absolutely correct; the excellence of the method was acknowledged by all who had conscientiously tried it. Now that the scourge was really conquered, Pasteur imagined that all he had to do was to set up a table of the results sent to him. But, from the south of France and from Corsica, jealousies were beginning{171} their work of undermining; pseudo-scientists in their vanity proclaimed that everything was illusory that was outside their own affirmations, and the seed merchants, willing to ruin everybody rather than jeopardize their miserable interests, “did not hesitate (we are quoting M. Gernez) to perpetrate the most odious falsehoods.”
Instead of being annoyed, saddened, often indignant as he was, Pasteur would have done more wisely to look back upon the history of most great discoveries and of the initial difficulties which beset them. But he could not look upon such things philosophically; stupidity astonished him and he could not easily bring himself to believe in bad faith. His friends in Alais society, M. de Lachadenède, M. Despeyroux, professor of chemistry, might have reminded him, in their evening conversations, of the difficulties ever encountered in the service of mankind. The prejudice against potatoes, for instance, had lasted three hundred years. When they were brought over from Peru in the fifteenth century, it was asserted that they caused leprosy; in the seventeenth century, that accusation was recognized to be absurd, but it was said that they caused fever. One century later, in 1771, the Besan?on Academy of Medicine having opened a competition for the answer to the following question of general interest: “What plants can be used to supplement other foods in times of famine?” a military apothecary, named Parmentier, competed and proved victoriously that the potato was quite harmless. After that, he began a propagandist campaign in favour of potatoes. But prejudice still subsisted in spite of his experimental fields and of the dinners in the menu of which potatoes held a large place. Louis XVI had then an inspiration worthy of Henry IV; he appeared in public, wearing in his buttonhole Parmentier’s little mauve flower, and thus glorified it in the eyes of the Court and of the crowd.
But such comparisons had no weight with Pasteur; he was henceforth sure of his method and longed to see it adopted, unable to understand why there should be further discussions now that the silkworm industry was saved and the bread of so many poor families assured. He was learning to know all the bitterness of sterile polemics, and the obstacles placed one by one in the way of those who attempt to give humanity anything new and useful. Fortunately he had what so many men of research have lacked, the active and zealous collabora{172}tion of pupils imbued with his principles, and the rarer and priceless blessing of a home life mingling with his laboratory life. His wife and his daughter, a mere child, shared his sericiculture labours; they had become magnanarelles equal to the most capable in Alais. Another privilege was the advocacy of some champions quite unknown to him. Those who loved science and who understood that it would now become, thanks to Pasteur, an important factor in agricultural and sericicultural matters hailed his achievements with joy. For instance, a letter was published on July 8, 1869, in the Journal of Practical Agriculture by a cultivator who had obtained excellent results by applying Pasteur’s method; the letter concluded as follows: “We should be obliged, if, through the columns of your paper, you would express to M. Pasteur our feelings of gratitude for his laborious and valuable researches. We firmly hope that he will one day reap the fruit of his arduous labours, and be amply compensated for the passionate attacks of which he is now the object.”
“Monsieur Pasteur,” once said the Mayor of Alais, Dr. Pagès, “if what you are showing me becomes verified in current practice, nothing can repay you for your work, but the town of Alais will raise a golden statue to you.”
Marshal Vaillant began to take more and more interest in this question, which was not darkened, in his eyes at least, by the dust of polemics. The old soldier, always scrupulously punctual at the meetings of the Institute and of the Imperial and Central Society of Agriculture, had amused himself by organizing a little silkworm nursery on the Pasteur system, in his own study, in the very centre of Paris. These experiments, in the Imperial palace might have reminded an erudite reader of Olivier de Serres’ Théatre d’Agriculture of the time when the said Olivier de Serres planted mulberry trees in the Tuileries gardens at Henry IV’s request, and when, according to the old agricultural writer, a house was arranged at the end of the gardens “accommodated with all things necessary as well for the feeding of the worms as for the preparation of silk.”
The Marshal, though calling himself the most modest of sericicultors, had been able to appreciate the safety of a method which produced the same results in Paris as at the Pont Gisquet; the octogenarian veteran dwelt with complacency on the splendid condition of his silkworms in all their phases from{173} the minute worm hatched from the seed-like egg to the splendid cocoon of white or yellow silk.
It occurred to Vaillant to suggest a decisive experiment in favour of Pasteur and of the silkworm industry. The Prince Imperial owned in Illyria, about six leagues from Trieste, a property called Villa Vicentina. One of Napoleon’s sisters, Elisa Bonaparte, had lived peacefully there after the fall of the first Empire, and had left it to her daughter, Princess Baciocchi, who bequeathed it to the Prince Imperial, with the rest of her fortune. Vines and mulberry trees grew plentifully on that vast domain, but the produce of cocoons was nil, pébrine and flachery having devastated the place. Marshal Vaillant, Minister of the Emperor’s Household, desired to render the princely property once again productive and, at the same time, to give his colleague of the Institute an opportunity of “definitely silencing the opposition created by ignorance and jealousy.” In a letter dated October 9, he requested Pasteur to send out 900 ounces of seed to Villa Vicentina, a large quantity, for one ounce produced, on an average, thirty kilogrammes of cocoons. Six days later the Marshal wrote to M. Tisserand, the director of the Crown agricultural establishments, who knew Villa Vicentina: “I have suggested to the Emperor that M. Pasteur should be offered a lodging at Villa Vicentina; the Emperor acquiesces in the most gracious manner. Tell me whether that is possible.”
M. Tisserand, heartily applauding the Marshal’s excellent idea, described the domain and the dwelling house, Villa Elisa, a white Italian two-storied house, situated amongst lawns and trees in a park of sixty hectares. “It would indeed be well,” continued M. Tisserand, “that M. Pasteur should find peace, rest, and a return of the health he has so valiantly compromised in his devotion to his country, in the midst of the lands which will be the first to profit by the fruit of his splendid discoveries and where his name will be blessed before long.”
Pasteur started three weeks later with his family; the long journey had to be taken in short stages, the state of his health still being very precarious. He stopped at Alais on the way, in order to fetch the selected seed, and on November 25, at 9 p.m., he reached Villa Vicentina. The fifty tenants of the domain did not suspect that the new arrival would bring back with him the prosperity of former years. Raulin, the “temporizer,” joined his master a few weeks later.{174}
This was a period not of rest, but of a great calm, with regular work under a pure sky. Whilst waiting for hatching time, Pasteur continued to dictate to his wife the book he had mentioned to J. B. Dumas in a letter from St. Hippolyte le Fort. But the projected little book was changing its shape and growing into a two-volume work full of facts and documents. It was ready to publish by April, 1870.
When the moment for hatching the seed had arrived, Pasteur distributed twenty-five ounces among the tenants and kept twenty-five ounces for himself. An incident disturbed these days of work: a steward, who had by him an old box of Japanese seed, sold this suspicious seed with the rest. The idea that confiding peasants had thus been swindled sent Pasteur beside himself; in his violent anger he sent for this steward, overwhelmed him with reproaches and forbade him ever to show his face before him again.
“The Marshal,” wrote Dumas to Pasteur, “has told me of the swindles you have come across and which have upset you so much. Do not worry unreasonably; if I were you I would merely insert a line in a local paper: ‘M. Pasteur is only answerable for the seeds he himself sells to cultivators.’” Those cultivators soon were duly edified. The results of the seeding process were represented by a harvest of cocoons which brought in, after all expenses were paid, a profit of 22,000 francs, the first profit earned by the property for ten years. This was indeed an Imperial present from Pasteur; the Emperor was amazed and delighted.
The Government then desired to do for Pasteur what had been done for Dumas and Claude Bernard, that is, give him a seat in the Senate. His most decided partisan was the competitor that several political personages suggested against him: Henri Sainte Claire Deville. Deville wrote to Mme. Pasteur in June: “You must know that if Pasteur becomes a Senator, and Pasteur alone, you understand—for they cannot elect two chemists at once!—it will be a triumph for your friend—a triumph and an unmixed pleasure.”
The projected decree was one of eighteen then in preparation. The final list—the last under the Empire—where Emile Augier was to represent French literature was postponed from day to day.
Pasteur left Villa Vicentina on July 6, taking with him the gratitude of the people whose good genius he had been for{175} nearly eight months. In northern Italy, as well as in Austria, his process of cellular seeding was now applied with success.
Before returning to France he went to Vienna and then to Munich: he desired to talk with the German chemist, Liebig, the most determined of his adversaries. He thought it impossible that Liebig’s ideas on fermentation should not have been shaken and altered in the last thirteen years. Liebig could not still be affirming that the presence of decomposing animal or vegetable matter should be necessary to fermentation! That theory had been destroyed by a simple and decisive experiment of Pasteur’s: he had sown a trace of yeast in water containing but sugar and mineral crystallized salts, and had seen this yeast multiply itself and produce a regular alcoholic fermentation.
Since all nitrogenized organic matter (constituting the ferment, according to Liebig) was absent, Pasteur considered that he thus proved the life of the ferment and the absence of any action from albuminoid matter in a stage of decomposition. The death phenomenon now appeared as a life phenomenon. How could Liebig deny the independent existence of ferments in their infinite littleness and their power of destroying and transforming everything? What did he think of all these new ideas? would he still write, as in 1845: “As to the opinion which explains putrefaction of animal substances by the presence of microscopic animalcul?, it may be compared to that of a child who would explain the rapidity of the Rhine current by attributing it to the violent movement of the numerous mill wheels of Mayence?”
Since that ingeniously fallacious paragraph, many results had come to light. Perhaps Liebig, who in 1851 hailed J. B. Dumas as a master, had now come to Dumas’ point of view respecting the fruitfulness of the Pastorian theory. That theory was extended to diseases; the infinitely small appeared as disorganizers of living tissues. The part played by the corpuscles in the contagious and hereditary pébrine led to many reflections on the contagious and hereditary element of human diseases. Even the long-postponed transmission of certain diseases was becoming clearer now that, within the vibrio of flachery, other corpuscles were found, germs of the flachery disease, ready to break out from one year to another.
To convince Liebig, to bring him to acknowledge the triumph of those ideas with the pleasure of a true savant, such{176} was Pasteur’s desire when he entered Liebig’s laboratory. The tall old man, in a long frock coat, received him with kindly courtesy; but when Pasteur, who was eager to come to the object of his visit, tried to approach the delicate subject, Liebig, without losing his amenity, refused all discussion, alleging indisposition. Pasteur did not insist, but promised himself that he would return to the charge.