Pasteur, on his return, spent forty-eight hours in Strasburg, which was for him full of memories of his laborious days at the Faculty of that town, between 1848 and 1854, at a time when rivalry already existed between France and Germany, a generous rivalry of moral and intellectual effort. He then heard for the first time of the threatening war; all his hopes of progress founded on peace, through scientific discoveries, began to crumble away, and his disappointment was embittered by the recollection of many illusions. Never was more cruel rebuff given to the generous efforts of a policy of sentiment: after having laid the foundation of the independence and unity of Italy, France had sympathized with Germany’s desire for unity, and few of the counsellors, or even the adversaries of the Empire, would not have defended this idea, which was supposed to lead to civilization. During that period of anxious waiting (beginning of July, 1870), when the most alarming news was daily published in Strasburg, it did not occur to any one to look back upon quotations from papers only a few years old, though in that very town a pamphlet might have been found, written by Edmond About in 1860, and containing the following words—
“Let Germany become united! France has no dearer or more ardent desire, for she loves the German nation with a disinterested friendship. France is not alarmed at seeing the formation of an Italian nation of 26,000,000 men in the South; she need not fear to see 32,000,000 Germans found a great people on the Eastern frontier.”
Proud to be first to proclaim the rights of nations; influenced by mingled feelings of kindliness, trustfulness, optimism and a certain vanity of disinterestedness, France, who loves to be loved, imagined that the world would be grateful for her{178} international sociability, and that her smiles were sufficient to maintain peace and joy in Europe.
Far from being alarmed by certain symptoms in her neighbours, she voluntarily closed her eyes to the man?uvres of the Prussian troops, her ears to the roar of the artillery practice constantly heard across her eastern frontier; in 1863 patrols of German cavalry had come as far as Wissemburg. But people thought that Germany was “playing soldiers.” Duruy, who shared at that time the general delusion, wrote in some traveller’s notes published in 1864: “We have had your German Rhine, and though you have garnished it with bristling fortresses and cannon turning France-wards, we do not wish to have it again, ... for the time for conquests is past. Conquests shall only now be made with the free consent of nations. Too much blood has been poured into the Rhine! What an immense people would arise if they who were struck down by the sword along its banks could be restored to life!”
After the thunderclap of Sadowa, the French Government, believing, in its infatuation, that it was entitled to a share of gratitude and security, asked for the land along the Rhine as far as Mayence; this territorial aggrandizement might have compensated for Prussia’s redoubtable conquests. The refusal was not long in coming. The Rhenish provinces immediately swarmed with Prussian troops. The Emperor, awaking from his dream, hesitating to make war, sent another proposition to Prussia: that the Rhenish provinces should become a buffer State. The same haughty answer was returned. France then hoped for the cession of Luxemburg, a hope all the more natural in that the populations of Luxemburg were willing to vote for annexation to France, and such a policy would have been in accordance with the rights of nations. But this request, apparently entertained at first by Prussia, was presently hampered by intrigues which caused its rejection. Duped, not even treated as an arbiter, but merely as a contemptible witness, France dazzled herself for a moment with the brilliant Exhibition of 1867. But it was a last and splendid flash; the word which is the bane of nations and of sovereigns, “to-morrow,” was on the lips of the ageing Emperor. The reform in the French army, which should have been bold and immediate, was postponed and afterwards begun jerkily and unmethodically. Prussia however affected to be alarmed. Then irritation at having been duped, the evidence{179} of a growing peril, a lingering hope in the military fortune of France—everything conspired to give an incident, provoked by Prussia, the proportions of a casus belli. But, in spite of so many grievances, people did not yet believe in this sudden return to barbarism. The Imperial policy had indeed been blindly inconsistent; after opening a wide prospect of unity before the German people it had been thought possible to say “No further than the Main,” as if the impetuous force of a popular movement could be arrested after once being started. France suddenly opened her eyes to her danger and to the failure of her policy. But if a noble sentiment of generosity had been mingled with the desire to increase her territory without shedding a drop of blood, she had had the honour of being in the vanguard of progress. Were great ideas of peace and human brotherhood about to be engulfed in a war which would throw Europe into an era of violence and brutality?
Pasteur, profoundly saddened, could not bear to realize that his ideal of the peaceful and beneficent destiny of France was about to vanish; he left Strasburg—never to return to it—a prey to the most sombre thoughts.
When he returned to Paris, he met Sainte Claire Deville, who had come back from a scientific mission in Germany, and who had for the first time lost his brightness and optimism. The war appeared to him absolutely disastrous. He had seen the Prussian army, redoubtable in its skilful organization, closing along the frontier; the invasion was certain, and there was nothing to stay it. Everything was lacking in France, even in arsenals like Strasburg. At Toul, on the second line of fortifications, so little attention was paid to defence that the Government had thought that the place could be used as a dép?t for the infantry and cavalry reserves, who could await there the order for crossing the Rhine.
“Ah! my lads, my poor lads!” said Sainte Claire Deville to his Ecole Normale students, “it is all up with us!” And he was seen, between two experiments, wiping his eyes with the comer of his laboratory apron.
The students, with the ordinary confidence of youth, could not believe that an invasion should be so imminent. However, in spite of the privilege which frees Normaliens from any military service in exchange for a ten years’ engagement at the University, they put patriotic duty above any future University appointments, and entered the ranks as private{180} soldiers. Those who had been favoured by being immediately incorporated in a battalion of chasseurs à pied the dép?t of which was at Vincennes, spent their last evening—their vigil as they called it—in the drawing-room of the sub-director of the Ecole, Bertin. Sainte Claire Deville and Pasteur were there, also Duruy, whose three sons had enlisted. Pasteur’s son, aged eighteen, was also on the eve of his departure.
Every one of the students at the Ecole Normale enlisted, some as chasseurs à pied, some in a line regiment, others with the marines, in the artillery, even with the franc tireurs. Pasteur wished to be enrolled in the garde nationale with Duruy and Bertin, but he had to be reminded that a half-paralysed man was unfit for service. After the departure of all the students, the Ecole Normale fell into the silence of deserted houses. M. Bouillier, the director, and Bertin decided to turn it into an ambulance, a sort of home for the Normaliens who were stationed in various quarters of Paris.
Pasteur, unable to serve his country except by his scientific researches, had the firm intention of continuing his work; but he was overwhelmed by the reverses which fell upon France, the idea of the bloodshed and of his invaded country oppressed him like a monomania.
“Do not stay in Paris,” Bertin said to him, echoed by Dr. Godélier. “You have no right to stay; you would be a useless mouth during the siege,” he added, almost cheerfully, earnestly desiring to see his friend out of harm’s way. Pasteur allowed himself to be persuaded, and started for Arbois on September 5, his heart aching for the sorrows of France.
Some notes and letters enable us to follow him there, in the daily detail of his life, amongst his books, his plans of future work, and now and then his outbursts of passionate grief. He tried to return to the books he loved, to feel over again the attraction of “all that is great and beautiful” to quote a favourite phrase. He read at that time Laplace’s Exposition du Système du Monde, and even copied out some fragments, general ideas, concurring with his own. The vision of a Galileo or a Newton rising through a series of inductions from “particular phenomena to others more far-reaching, and from those to the general laws of Nature,” on this earth, “itself so small a part of the solar system, and disappearing entirely in the immensity of the heavens, of which that system is but an unimportant corner,”—that vision enveloped Pasteur{181} with the twofold feeling with which every man must be imbued: humility before the Great Mystery, and admiration for those who, raising a corner of the veil, prove that genius is divinely inspired. Such reading helped Pasteur through the sad time of anxious waiting, and he would repeat as in brighter days, “Laboremus.”
But sometimes, when he was sitting quietly with his wife and daughter, the trumpet call would sound, with which the Arbois crier preceded the proclaiming of news. Then everything was forgotten, the universal order of things of no account, and Pasteur’s anguished soul would concentrate itself on that imperceptible comer of the universe, France, his suffering country. He would go downstairs, mix with groups standing on the little bridge across the Cuisance, listen breathlessly to the official communication, and sadly go back to the room where the memories of his father only emphasized the painful contrast with the present time. In the most prominent place hung a large medallion of General Bonaparte, by the Franc-Comtois Huguenin, the habit of authority visible in the thin energetic face; then a larger effigy in bronzed plaster of Napoleon in profile, in a very simple uniform; by the mantelpiece a lithograph of the little King of Rome with his curly head; on the bookshelves, well within reach, books on the Great Epoch, read over and over again by the old soldier who had died in the humble room which still reflected some of the Imperial glory.
That glory, that legend had enveloped the childhood and youth of Pasteur, who, as he advanced in life, still preserved the same enthusiasm. His imagination pictured the Emperor, calm in the midst of battles, or reviewing his troops surrounded by an escort of field marshals, entering as a sovereign a capital not his own, then overwhelmed by numbers at Waterloo, and finally condemned to exile and inactivity, and dying in a long drawn agony. Glorious or lugubrious, those visions came back to him with poignant insistency in those days of September, 1870. What was Waterloo compared to Sedan! The departure for St. Helena had the grandeur of the end of an epic; it seemed almost enviable by the side of that last episode of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III, vanquished, spared by the death which he wooed, left Sedan by the Donchery road to enter the cottage where Bismarck was to inform him of the rendezvous given by the King of Prussia.
The Emperor had now but a shadow of power, having made{182} the Empress Regent before he left Paris; it was therefore not the sword of France, but his own, that he was about to surrender. But he thought he might hope that the King of Prussia would show clemency to the French army and people, having many times declared that he made war on the Emperor and not on France.
“Can it be credited,” said Bismarck, speaking afterwards of that interview, “that he actually believed in our generosity!” The chancellor added, speaking of that somewhat protracted tête-à-tête, “I felt as I used to in my youth, when my partner in a cotillon was a girl to whom I did not quite know what to say, and whom nobody would fetch away for a turn!”
Napoleon III and the King of Prussia met in the Chateau of Bellevue, in the neighbourhood of Sedan, opposite a peninsula henceforth known by the sad name of “Camp of Misery.” The Emperor looked for the last time upon his 83,000 soldiers, disarmed, starving, waiting in the mud for the Prussian escort which was to convey them as prisoners far beyond the Rhine. Wilhelm did not even pronounce the word peace.
Jules Favre, taking possession on September 6 of the department of Foreign Affairs, recalled to the diplomatic agents the fall of the Empire and the words of the King of Prussia; then in an unaccustomed outburst of eloquence exclaimed: “Does the King of Prussia wish to continue an impious struggle which will be as fatal to him as to us? Does he wish to give to the world in the nineteenth century the cruel spectacle of two nations destroying each other and forgetful of human feelings, of reason and of science, heaping up ruin and death? Let him then assume the responsibility before the world and before posterity!” And then followed the celebrated phrase with which he has been violently and iniquitously reproached, and which expressed the unanimous sentiment of France: “We will not concede one inch of our territory nor a stone of our fortifications.”
Bismarck refused the interview Jules Favre asked of him (September 10), under the pretext that the new Government was irregular. The enemy was coming nearer and nearer to Paris. The French city was resolved to resist; thousands upon thousands of oxen were being corralled in the Bois de Boulogne; poor people from the suburbs were coming to take refuge in the city. On the Place de la Concorde, the statue which repre{183}sents the city of Strasburg was covered with flowers and flags, and seemed to incarnate the idea of the Patrie itself.
Articles and letters came to Arbois in that early September, bringing an echo of the sorrows of Paris. Pasteur was then reading the works of General Foy, wherein he found thoughts in accordance with his own, occasionally copying out such passages as the following: “Right and Might struggle for the world; Right, which constitutes and preserves Society; Might, which overcomes nations and bleeds them to death.”
General Foy fought for France during twenty-five years, and, writing in 1820, recalled with a patriotic shudder the horrors of foreign invasions. Long after peace was signed, by a chance meeting in a street in Paris, General Foy found himself face to face with Wellington. The sight was so odious to him that he spoke of this meeting in the Chambre with an accent of sorrowful humiliation which breathed the sadness of Waterloo over the whole assembly. Pasteur could well understand the long continued vibration of that suffering chord, he, who never afterwards could speak without a thrill of sorrow of that war which Germany, in defiance of humanity, was inexcusably pursuing.
It was the fourth time in less than a hundred years that a Prussian invasion overflowed into France. But instead of 42,000 Prussians, scattered in 1792 over the sacred soil of the Patrie—Pasteur pronounced the word with the faith and tenderness of a true son of France—there were now 518,000 men to fight 285,000 French.
The thought that they had been armed in secret for the conquest of neighbouring lands, the memory of France’s optimism until that diplomatic incident, invented so that France might stumble over it, and the inaction of Europe, inspired Pasteur with reflections which he confided to his pupil Raulin. “What folly, what blindness,” he wrote (September 17), “there are in the inertia of Austria, Russia, England! What ignorance in our army leaders of the respective forces of the two nations! We savants were indeed right when we deplored the poverty of the department of Public Instruction! The real cause of our misfortunes lies there. It is not with impunity—as it will one day be recognized, too late—that a great nation is allowed to lose its intellectual standard. But, as you say, if we rise again from those disasters, we shall again see our statesmen lose themselves in endless{184} discussions on forms of government and abstract political questions instead of going to the root of the matter. We are paying the penalty of fifty years’ forgetfulness of science, of its conditions of development, of its immense influence on the destiny of a great people, and of all that might have assisted the diffusion of light.... I cannot go on, all this hurts me. I try to put away all such memories, and also the sight of our terrible distress, in which it seems that a desperate resistance is the only hope we have left. I wish that France may fight to her last man, to her last fortress. I wish that the war may be prolonged until the winter, when, the elements aiding us, all these Vandals may perish of cold and distress. Every one of my future works will bear on its title page the words: ‘Hatred to Prussia. Revenge! revenge!’”
There is a passage in the Psalms where the captives of Israel, led to Babylonian rivers, weep at the memory of Jerusalem. After swearing never to forget their country, they wish their enemies every misfortune, and hurl this last imprecation at Babylon: “Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones.”[29] One of the most Christlike souls of our time, Henri Perreyve, speaking of Poland, of vanquished and oppressed nations, quoted this Psalm and exclaimed: “O Anger, man’s Anger, how difficult it is to drive thee out of man’s heart! and how irresistible are the flames kindled by the insolence of injustice!” Those flames were kindled in the soul of Pasteur, full as it was of human tenderness, and they burst out in that sobbing cry of despair.
On that 17th of September, the day before Paris was invested, Jules Favre made another attempt to obtain peace. He published an account of that interview which took place at the Chateau of Ferrières, near Meaux; this printed account reached every town in France, and was read with grief and anger.
Jules Favre had deluded himself into thinking that victorious Prussia would limit its demands to a war indemnity, probably a formidable one. But Bismarck, besides the indemnity, intended to take a portion of French soil, and claimed Strasburg first of all. “It is the key of the house; I must have it.” And with Strasburg he wanted the whole Department of the Haut-Rhin, that of the Bas-Rhin, Metz, and a part of the Department of Moselle. Jules Favre, character{185}istically French, exhausted his eloquence in putting sentiment into politics, spoke of European rights, of the right of the people to dispose of themselves, tried to bring out the fact that a brutal annexation was in direct opposition to the progress of civilization. “I know very well,” said Bismarck, “that they (meaning the Alsatians and Lorrainers) do not want us; they will give us a deal of trouble, but we must annex them.” In the event of a future war Prussia was to have the advantage. All this was said with an authoritative courtesy, an insolent tranquillity, through which contempt for men was visible, evidently the best means of governing them in Bismarck’s eyes. As Jules Favre was pleading the cause of heroic Strasburg, whose long resistance was the admiration of Paris, “Strasburg will now fall into our hands,” said Bismarck coldly; “it is but a question for engineers; therefore I request that the garrison should surrender as prisoners of war.”
Jules Favre “leapt in his grief”—the words are his—but King Wilhelm exacted this condition. Jules Favre, almost breaking down, turning away to hide the tears that welled into his eyes, ended the interview with these words: “It is an indefinite struggle between two nations who should go hand in hand.”
Traces of this patriotic anguish are to be found in one of Pasteur’s notebooks, as well as a circular addressed by Jules Favre to the diplomatic representatives in answer to certain points disputed by Bismarck. Pasteur admiringly took note of the following passage: “I know not what destinies Fate has in store for us. But I do feel most deeply that if I had to choose between the present situation of France and that of Prussia, I should decide for the former. Better far our sufferings, our perils, our sacrifices, than the cruel and inflexible ambition of our foe.”
“We must preserve hope until the end,” wrote Pasteur after reading the above, “say nothing to discourage each other, and wish ardently for a prolonged struggle. Let us think of hopeful things; Bazaine may save us.”... How many French hearts were sharing that hope at the very time when Bazaine was preparing to betray Metz, his troops and his flag!
“Should we not cry: ‘Happy are the dead!’” wrote Pasteur a few days after the news burst upon France of that army lost without being allowed to fight, of that city of Metz, the strongest in France, surrendered without a struggle!
Through all Pasteur’s anxieties about the war, certain obser{186}vations, certain projected experiments resounded in his mind like the hours that a clock strikes, unheeded but not unheard, in a house visited by death. He could not put them away from him, they were part of his very life.
Any sort of laboratory work was difficult for him in the tanner’s house, which had remained the joint property of himself and his sister. His brother-in-law had continued Joseph Pasteur’s trade. Pasteur applied his spirit of observation to everything around him, and took the opportunity of studying the fermentation of tan. He would ask endless questions, trying to discover the scientific reason of every process and every routine. Whilst his sister was making bread he would study the raising of the crust, the influence of air in the kneading of the dough, and his imagination rising as usual from a minor point to the greatest problems, he began to seek for a means of increasing the nutritive powers of bread, and consequently of lowering its price.
The Salut Public of December 20 contained a notice on that very subject, which Pasteur transcribed. The Central Commission of Hygiene which included among its members Sainte Claire Deville, Wurtz, Bouchardat and Trélat, had tried, when dealing with this question of bread (a vital one during the siege), to prove to the Parisians that bread is the more wholesome for containing a little bran. “With what emotion,” wrote Pasteur, “I have just read all those names dear to science, greater now before their fellow-citizens and before posterity. Why could I not share their sufferings and their dangers!” He would have added “and their work” if some of the Académie des Sciences reports had reached him.
The history of the Academy during the war is worthy of brief mention. Moreover it was too deeply interesting to Pasteur, too constantly in his thoughts, not to be considered as forming part of his biography.
During the first period, the Academy, imagining, like the rest of France, that there was no doubt of a favourable issue of the war, continued its purely scientific task. When the first defeats were announced, the habitual communications ceased, and the Academy, unable to think of anything but the war, held sittings of three-quarters of an hour or even less.
One of the correspondents of the Institute, the surgeon Sédillot, who was in Alsace at the head of an ambulance corps, and who himself performed as many as fifteen amputations in{187} one day, addressed two noteworthy letters to the President of the Academy. Those letters mark a date in the history of surgery, and show how restricted was then in France the share of some of Pasteur’s ideas at the very time when in other countries they were adopted and followed. Lister, the celebrated English surgeon, having, he said, meditated on Pasteur’s theory of germs, and proclaimed himself his follower, convinced that complications and infection of wounds were caused by their giving access to living organisms and infectious germs, elements of trouble, often of death, had already in 1867 inaugurated a method of treatment. He attempted the destruction of germs floating in air by means of a vaporizer filled with a carbolic solution, then isolated and preserved the wound from the contact of the air. Sponges, drainage tubes, etc., were subjected to minute precautions; in one word, he created antisepsis. Four months before the war he had propounded the principles which should guide surgeons, but it occurred to no one in France, in the first battles, to apply the new method. “The horrible mortality amongst the wounded in battle,” writes Sédillot, “calls for the attention of all the friends of science and humanity. The surgeon’s art, hesitating and disconcerted, pursues a doctrine whose rules seem to flee before research.... Places where there are wounded are recognizable by the fetor of suppuration and gangrene.”
Hundreds and thousands of wounded, their faces pale, but full of hope and desire to live, succumbed between the eighth and tenth day to gangrene and erysipelas. Those failures of the surgery of the past are plain to us now that the doctrine of germs has explained everything; but, at that time, such an avowal of impotence before the mysterious contagium sui generis, which, the doctors averred, eluded all research, and such awful statistics of mortality embittered the anguish of defeat.
The Academy then attempted to take a share in the national co-operation by making a special study of any subject which interested the public health and defence. A sitting on methods of steering balloons was succeeded by another on various means of preserving meat during the siege. Then came an anxious inquiry into modes of alimentation of infants. At the end of October there were but 20,000 litres of milk per day to be procured in the whole of Paris, and the healthy were implored to abstain from it. It was a question of life and death for young{188} children, and already many little coffins were daily to be seen on the road to the cemetery.
Thus visions of death amongst soldiers in their prime and children in their infancy hung over the Academy meeting hall. It was at one of those mournful sittings, on a dark autumn afternoon, that Chevreul, an octogenarian member of the Institute, who, like Pasteur, had believed in civilization and in the binding together of nations through science, art and letters, looking at the sacks of earth piled outside the windows to save the library from the bursting shells, exclaimed in loud desolate tones—
“And yet we are in the nineteenth century, and a few months ago the French did not even think of a war which has put their capital into a state of siege and traced around its walls a desert zone where he who sowed does not reap! And there are public universities where they teach the Beautiful, the True, and the Right.”
“Might goes before Right,” Bismarck said. A German journalist invented another phrase which went the round of Europe: “the psychological moment for bombardment.” On January 5, one of the first Prussian shells sank into the garden of the Ecole Normale; another burst in the very ambulance of the Ecole. Bertin, the sub-director, rushed through the suffocating smoke and ascertained that none of the patients was hurt; he found the breech between two beds. The miserable patients dragged themselves downstairs to the lecture rooms on the ground floor, not a much safer refuge.
From the heights of Chatillon the enemy’s batteries were bombarding all the left bank of the Seine, the Prussians, regardless of the white flags bearing the red cross of Geneva, were aiming at the Val-de-Grace and the Panthéon. “Where is the Germany of our dreams?” wrote Paul de St. Victor on January 9, “the Germany of the poets? Between her and France an abyss of hatred has opened, a Rhine of blood and tears that no peace can ever bridge over.”
On that same date, Chevreul read the following declaration to the Academy of Science—
The Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in Paris
by an edict of King Louis XIII,
dated January, 1826,
{189}Converted into the Museum of Natural History
by a decree of the Convention on June 10, 1793,
was Bombarded,
under the reign of Wilhelm I King of
Prussia, Count von Bismarck, Chancellor,
by the Prussian army, during the night
of January 8-9, 1871.
It had until then been respected by all parties
and all powers, national or
foreign.
Pasteur, on reading this protest, regretted more than ever that he had not been there to sign it. It then occurred to him that he too might give vent to the proud plaint of the vanquished from his little house at Arbois. He remembered with a sudden bitterness the diploma he had received from the University of Bonn. Many years had passed since the time in the First Empire when one of the 110 French Departments had been that of Rhine and Moselle, with Coblentz as its préfecture and Bonn and Zimmern as sous-préfectures. When, in 1815, Prussia’s iron hand seized again those Rhenish provinces which had become so French at heart, the Prussian king and his ministers hit upon the highly politic idea of founding a University on the picturesque banks of the Rhine, thus morally conquering the people after reducing them by force. That University had been a great success and had become most prosperous. The Strasburg Faculty under the Second Empire, with its few professors and its general penury, seemed very poor compared to the Bonn University, with its fifty-three professors and its vast laboratories of chemistry, physics and medicine, and even a museum of antiquities. Pasteur and Duruy had often exchanged remarks on that subject. But that rivalry between the two Faculties was of a noble nature, animated as it was by the great feeling that science is superior to national distinctions. King Wilhelm had once said, “Prussia’s conquests must be of the moral kind,” and Pasteur had not thought of any other conquests.
When in 1868 the University of Bonn conferred upon him the diploma of Doctor of Medicine, saying that “by his very penetrating experiments, he had much contributed to the knowledge of the history of the generation of micro-organisms, and had happily advanced the progress of the science of fermentations,” he had been much pleased at this acknowledgment of{190} the future opened to medical studies by his work, and he was proud to show the Degree he had received.
“Now,” he wrote (January 18, 1871), to the Head of the Faculty of Medicine, after recalling his former sentiments, “now the sight of that parchment is odious to me, and I feel offended at seeing my name, with the qualification of Virum clarissimum that you have given it, placed under a name which is henceforth an object of execration to my country, that of Rex Gulielmus.
“While highly asseverating my profound respect for you, Sir, and for the celebrated professors who have affixed their signatures to the decision of the members of your Order, I am called upon by my conscience to ask you to efface my name from the archives of your Faculty, and to take back that diploma, as a sign of the indignation inspired in a French scientist by the barbarity and hypocrisy of him who, in order to satisfy his criminal pride, persists in the massacre of two great nations.” Pasteur’s protest ended with these words—
“Written at Arbois (Jura) on January 18, 1871, after reading the mark of infamy inscribed on the forehead of your King by the illustrious director of the Museum of Natural History M. Chevreul.”
“This letter will not have much weight with a people whose principles differ so totally from those that inspire us,” said Pasteur, “but it will at least echo the indignation of French scientists.”
He made a collection of stories, of episodes, and letters, which fell in his way; amongst other things we find an open letter from General Chanzy to the commandant of the Prussian troops at Vend?me, denouncing the insults, outrages, and inexcusable violence of the Prussians towards the inhabitants of St. Calais, who had shown great kindness to the enemy’s sick and wounded.
“You respond by insolence, destruction and pillage to the generosity with which we treat your prisoners and wounded. I indignantly protest, in the name of humanity and of the rights of men, which you trample under foot.”
Pasteur also gathered up tales of bravery, of heroism, and of resignation—that form of heroism so often illustrated by women—during the terrible siege of Paris. And, from all those things, arose the psychology of war in its two aspects: in the invading army a spirit of conquest carried to oppression, and even apart{191} from the thrilling moments of battle, giving to hatred and cruelty a cold-blooded sanction of discipline; in the vanquished nation, an irrepressible revolt, an intoxication of sacrifice. Those who have not seen war do not know what love of the mother country means.
France was the more loved that she was more oppressed; she inspired her true sons with an infinite tenderness. Sully-Prudhomme, the poet of pensive youth, renouncing his love for Humanity in general, promised himself that he would henceforth devote his life to the exclusive love of France. A greater poet than he, Victor Hugo, wrote at that time the first part of his Année Terrible, with its mingled devotion and despair.
The death of Henri Regnault was one of the sad episodes of the war. This brilliant young painter—he was only twenty-seven years of age—enlisted as a garde nationale, though exempt by law from any military service through being a laureate of the prix de Rome.[30] He did his duty valiantly, and on January 19, at the last sortie attempted by the Parisians, at Buzenval, the last Prussian shot struck him in the forehead. The Académie des Sciences, at its sitting of January 23, rendered homage to him whose coffin enclosed such dazzling prospects and some of the glory of France. The very heart of Paris was touched, and a great sadness was felt at the funeral procession of the great artist who seemed an ideal type of all the youth and talent so heroically sacrificed—and all in vain—for the surrender of Paris had just been officially announced.
Regnault’s father, the celebrated physicist, a member of the Institute, was at Geneva when he received this terrible blow. Another grief—not however comparable to the despair of a bereaved parent—befell him—an instance of the odious side of war, not in its horrors, its pools of blood and burnt dwellings, but in its premeditated cruelty. Regnault had left his laboratory utensils in his rooms at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, of which he was the manager. Everything was apparently left in the same place, not a window was broken, no locks forced; but a Prussian, evidently an expert, had been there. “Nothing seemed changed,” writes J. B. Dumas, “in that abode of science, and yet everything was destroyed; the glass tubes of barometers, thermometers, etc., were broken; scales{192} and other similar instruments had been carefully knocked out of shape with a hammer.” In a corner was a heap of ashes; they were the registers, notes, manuscripts, all Regnault’s work of the last ten years. “Such cruelty,” exclaimed J. B. Dumas, “is unexampled in history. The Roman soldier who butchered Archimedes in the heat of the onslaught may be excused—he did not know him; but with what sacrilegious meanness could such a work of destruction as this be accomplished!!!”
On the very day when the Académie des Sciences was condoling with Henri Regnault’s sorrowing father, Pasteur, anxious at having had no news of his son, who had been fighting before Héricourt, determined to go and look for him in the ranks of the Eastern Army Corps. By Poligny and Lons-le-Saulnier, the roads were full of stragglers from the various regiments left several days behind, their route completely lost, who begged for bread as they marched, barely covered by the tattered remnants of their uniforms. The main body of the army was on the way to Besan?on, a sad procession of French soldiers, hanging their heads under the cold grey sky and tramping painfully in the snow.
Bourbaki, the general-in-chief, a hero of African battlefields, was becoming more and more unnerved by the combinations of this war. Whilst the Minister, in a dispatch from Bordeaux, had ordered him to move back towards D?le, to prevent the taking of Dijon, then to hurry to Nevers or Joigny, where 20,000 men would be ready to be incorporated, Bourbaki, overwhelmed by the lamentable spectacle under his eyes, could see no resource for his corps but a last line of retreat, Pontarlier.
It was among that stream of soldiers that Pasteur attempted to find his son. His old friend and neighbour, Jules Vercel, saw him start, accompanied by his wife and daughter, on Tuesday, January 24, in a half broken down old carriage, the last that was left in the town. After journeying for some hours in the snow, the sad travellers spent the night in a little wayside inn near Montrond; the old carriage with its freight of travelling boxes stood on the roadside like a gipsy’s caravan. The next morning they went on through a pine forest where the deep silence was unbroken save by the falling masses of snow from the spreading branches. They slept at Censeau, the next day at Chaffois, and it was only on the Friday that they reached Pontarlier, by roads made almost impracticable by the snow, the carriage now a mere wreck.{193}
The town was full of soldiers, some crouching round fires in the street, others stepping across their dead horses and begging for a little straw to lie on. Many had taken refuge in the church and were lying on the steps of the altar; a few were attempting to bandage their frozen feet, threatened with gangrene.
Suddenly the news spread that the general-in-chief, Bourbaki, had shot himself through the brain. This did not excite much surprise. He had telegraphed two days before to the Minister of War: “You cannot have an idea of the sufferings that the army has endured since the beginning of December. It is martyrdom to be in command at such a time,” he added despairingly.
“The retreat from Moscow cannot have been worse than this,” said Pasteur to a staff officer, Commandant Bourboulon, a nephew of Sainte Claire Deville, whom he met in the midst of those horrors and who could give him no information as to his son’s battalion of Chasseurs. “All that I can tell you,” said a soldier anxiously questioned by Mme. Pasteur, “is that out of the 1,200 men of that battalion there are but 300 left.” As she was questioning another, a soldier who was passing stopped: “Sergeant Pasteur? Yes, he is alive; I slept by him last night at Chaffois. He has remained behind; he is ill. You might meet him on the road towards Chaffois.”
The Pasteurs started again on the road followed the day before. They had barely passed the Pontarlier gate when a rough cart came by. A soldier muffled in his great coat, his hands resting on the edge of the cart, started with surprise. He hurried down, and the family embraced without a word, so great was their emotion.
The capitulation of starving Paris and the proposed armistice are historical events still present in the memory of men who were then beginning to learn the meaning of defeat. The armistice, which Jules Favre thought would be applied without restriction to all the army corps, was interpreted by Bismarck in a peculiar way. He and Jules Favre between them had drawn up a protocol in general terms; it had been understood in those preliminary confabulations that, before drawing up the limits of the neutral zone applicable to the Eastern Army Corps, some missing information would be awaited, the respective positions of the belligerents being unknown. The information did not come, and Jules Favre in his imprudent{194} trustfulness supposed that the delimitation would be done on the spot by the officers in command. When he heard that the Prussian troops were continuing their march eastwards, he complained to Bismarck, who answered that “the incident cannot have compromised the Eastern Army Corps, as it already was completely routed when the armistice was signed.” This calculated reserve on Bismarck’s part was eminently characteristic of his moral physiognomy, and this encounter between the two Ministers proved once again the inferiority—when great interests are at stake—of emotional men to hard-hearted business men; however it must be acknowledged that Bismarck’s statement was founded on fact. The Eastern Corps could have fought no more; its way was blocked. Without food, without clothes, in many cases without arms, nothing remained to the unfortunate soldiers but the refuge offered by Switzerland.
Pasteur went to Geneva with his son, who, after recovering from the illness caused by fatigue and privation, succeeded in getting back to France to rejoin his regiment in the early days of February. Pasteur then went on to Lyons and stayed there with his brother-in-law, M. Loir, Dean of the Lyons Faculty of Science. He intended to go back to Paris, but a letter from Bertin dated February 18 advised him to wait. “This is the present state of the Ecole: south wing: pulled down; will be built up again; workmen expected. Third year dormitory: ambulance occupied by eight students. Science dormitory and drawing classroom: ambulance again, forty patients. Ground floor classroom: 120 artillery-men. Pasteur laboratory: 210 gardes nationaux, refugees from Issy. You had better wait.” Bertin added, with his indomitable good humour, speaking of the bombardment: “The first day I did not go out, but I took my bearings and found the formula: in leaving the school, walk close along the houses on my left; on coming back, keep close to them on my right; with that I went out as usual. The population of Paris has shown magnificent resignation and patience.... In order to have our revenge, everything will have to be rebuilt from the top to the bottom, the top especially.”
Pasteur also thought that reforms should begin from the top. He prepared a paper dated from Lyons, and entitled “Why France found no superior men in the hours of peril.” Amongst the mistakes committed, one in particular had been before his mind for twenty years, ever since he left the Ecole Normale:{195} “The forgetfulness, disdain even, that France had had for great intellectual men, especially in the realm of exact science.” This seemed the more sad to him that things had been very different at the end of the eighteenth century. Pasteur enumerated the services rendered by science to his threatened country. If in 1792 France was able to face danger on all sides, it was because Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Chaptal, Berthollet, etc., discovered new means of extracting saltpetre and manufacturing gunpowder; because Monge found a method of founding cannon with great rapidity; and because the chemist Clouet invented a quick system of manufacturing steel. Science, in the service of patriotism, made a victorious army of a perturbed nation. If Marat, with his slanderous and injurious insinuations, had not turned from their course the feelings of the mob, Lavoisier never would have perished on the scaffold. The day after his execution, Lagrange said: “One moment was enough for his head to fall, and 200 years may not suffice to produce such another.” Monge and Berthollet, also denounced by Marat, nearly shared the same fate: “In a week’s time we shall be arrested, tried, condemned and executed,” said Berthollet placidly to Monge, who answered with equal composure, thinking only of the country’s defence, “All I know is that my gun factories are working admirably.”
Bonaparte, from the first, made of science what he would have made of everything—a means of reigning. When he started for Egypt, he desired to have with him a staff of scientists, and Monge and Berthollet undertook to organize that distinguished company. Later, when Bonaparte became Napoleon I, he showed, in the intervals between his wars, so much respect for the place due to science as to proclaim the effacement of national rivalry when scientific discoveries were in question. Pasteur, when studying this side of the Imperial character, found in some pages by Arago on Monge that, after Waterloo, Napoleon, in a conversation he had with Monge at the Elysée, said, “Condemned now to command armies no longer, I can see but Science with which to occupy my mind and my soul....”
Alluding to the scientific supremacy of France during the early part of the nineteenth century, Pasteur wrote: “All the other nations acknowledged our superiority, though each could take pride in some great men: Berzelius in Sweden, Davy in England, Volta in Italy, other eminent men in Ger{196}many and Switzerland; but in no country were they as numerous as in France....” He added these regretful lines: “A victim of her political instability, France has done nothing to keep up, to propagate and to develop the progress of science in our country; she has merely obeyed a given impulse; she has lived on her past, thinking herself great by the scientific discoveries to which she owed her material prosperity, but not perceiving that she was imprudently allowing the sources of those discoveries to become dry, whilst neighbouring nations, stimulated by her past example, were diverting for their own benefit the course of those springs, rendering them fruitful by their works, their efforts and their sacrifices.
“Whilst Germany was multiplying her universities, establishing between them the most salutary emulation, bestowing honours and consideration on the masters and doctors, creating vast laboratories amply supplied with the most perfect instruments, France, enervated by revolutions, ever vainly seeking for the best form of government, was giving but careless attention to her establishments for higher education....
“The cultivation of science in its highest expression is perhaps even more necessary to the moral condition than to the material prosperity of a nation.
“Great discoveries—the manifestations of thought in Art, in Science and in Letters, in a word the disinterested exercise of the mind in every direction and the centres of instruction from which it radiates, introduce into the whole of Society that philosophical or scientific spirit, that spirit of discernment, which submits everything to severe reasoning, condemns ignorance and scatters errors and prejudices. They raise the intellectual level and the moral sense, and through them the Divine idea itself is spread abroad and intensified.”
At the very time when Pasteur was preoccupied with the desire of directing the public mind towards the principles of truth, justice and sovereign harmony, Sainte Claire Deville, speaking of the Academy, expressed similar ideas, proclaiming that France had been vanquished by science and that it was now time to free scientific bodies from the tyranny of red tape. Why should not the Academy become the centre of all measures relating to science, independently of government offices or officials?
J. B. Dumas took part in the discussion opened by Sainte Claire Deville, and agreed with his suggestions. He might{197} have said more, however, on a subject which he often took up in private: the utility of pure science in daily experience. With his own special gift of generalization, he could have expounded the progress of all kinds due to the workers who, by their perseverance in resolving difficult problems, have brought about so many precious and unexpected results. Few men in France realized at that time that laboratories could be the vestibule of farms, factories, etc.; it was indeed a noble task, that of proving that science was intended to lighten the burden of humanity, not merely to be applied to devastation, carnage, and hatred.
Pasteur was in the midst of these philosophical reflections when he received the following answer from the principal of the Faculty of Medicine of Bonn:
“Sir, the undersigned, now Principal of the Faculty of Medicine of Bonn, is requested to answer the insult which you have dared to offer to the German nation in the sacred person of its august Emperor, King Wilhelm of Prussia, by sending you the expression of its entire contempt.”—Dr. Maurice Naumann.
“P.S.—Desiring to keep its papers free from taint, the Faculty herewith returns your screed.”
Pasteur’s reply contained the following: “I have the honour of informing you, Mr. Principal, that there are times when the expression of contempt in a Prussian mouth is equivalent for a true Frenchman to that of Virum clarissimum which you once publicly conferred upon me.”
After invoking in favour of Alsace-Lorraine, Truth, of Justice, and the laws of humanity, Pasteur added in a postscript—
“And now, Mr. Principal, after reading over both your letter and mine, I sorrow in my heart to think that men who like yourself and myself have spent a lifetime in the pursuit of truth and progress, should address each other in such a fashion, founded on my part on such actions. This is but one of the results of the character your Emperor has given to this war. You speak to me of taint. Mr. Principal, taint will rest, you may be assured, until far-distant ages, on the memory of those who began the bombardment of Paris when capitulation by famine was inevitable, and who continued this act of savagery after it had become evident to all men that it would not advance by one hour the surrender of the heroic city.{198}”
Whilst Pasteur thus felt those simple and strong impressions as a soldier or the man in the street might do, the creative power of his nature was urging him to great and useful achievements. He wrote from Lyons in March to M. Duclaux—
“My head is full of splendid projects; the war sent my brain to grass, but I now feel ready for further work. Perhaps I am deluding myself; anyhow I will try.... Oh! why am I not rich, a millionaire? I would say to you, to Raulin, to Gernez, to Van Tieghem, etc., come, we will transform the world by our discoveries. How fortunate you are to be young and strong! Why can I not begin a new life of study and work! Unhappy France, beloved country, if I could only assist in raising thee from thy disasters!”
A few days later, in a letter to Raulin, this desire for devoted work was again expressed almost feverishly. He could foresee, in the dim distance, secret affinities between apparently dissimilar things. He had at that time returned to the researches which had absorbed his youth (because those studies were less materially difficult to organize), and he could perceive laws and connections between the facts he had observed and those of the existence of which he felt assured.
“I have begun here some experiments in crystallization which will open a great prospect if they should lead to positive results. You know that I believe that there is a cosmic dissymmetric influence which presides constantly and naturally over the molecular organization of principles immediately essential to life; and that, in consequence of this, the species of the three kingdoms, by their structure, by their form, by the disposition of their tissues, have a definite relation to the movements of the universe. For many of those species, if not for all, the sun is the primum movens of nutrition; but I believe in another influence which would affect the whole organization, for it would be the cause of the molecular dissymmetry proper to the chemical components of life. I want to be able by experiment to grasp a few indications as to the nature of this great cosmic dissymmetrical influence. It must, it may be electricity, magnetism.... And, as one should always proceed from the simple to the complex, I am now trying to crystallize double racemate of soda and ammonia under the influence of a spiral solenoid.
“I have various other forms of experiment to attempt. If one of them should succeed, we shall have work for the rest of{199} our lives, and in one of the greatest subjects man could approach, for I should not despair of arriving by this means at a very deep, unexpected and extraordinary modification of the animal and vegetable species.
“Good-bye, my dear Raulin. Let us endeavour to distract our thoughts from human turpitudes by the disinterested search after truth.”
In a little notebook where he jotted down some intended experiments we find evidence of those glimpses of divination in a few summary lines: “Show that life is in the germ, that it has been but in a state of transmission since the origin of creation. That the germ possesses possibilities of development, either of intelligence and will, or—and in the same way—of physical organs. Compare these possibilities with those possessed by the germ of chemical species which is in the chemical molecule. The possibilities of development in the germ of the chemical molecule consist in crystallization, in its form, in its physical and chemical properties. Those properties are in power in the germ of the molecule in the same way as the organs and tissues of animals and plants are in their respective germs. Add: nothing is more curious than to carry the comparison of living species with mineral species into the study of the wounds of either, and of their healing by means of nutrition—a nutrition coming from within in living beings, and from without through the medium of crystallization in the others. Here detail facts....”
In that same notebook, Pasteur, after writing down the following heading, “Letter to prepare on the species in connection with molecular dissymmetry,” added, “I could write that letter to Bernard. I should say that being deprived of a laboratory by the present state of France, I am going to give him the preconceived ideas that I shall try to experiment upon when better times come. There is no peril in expressing ideas a priori, when they are taken as such, and can be gradually modified, perhaps even completely transformed, according to the result of the observation of facts.”
He once compared those preconceived ideas with searchlights guiding the experimentalist, saying that they only became dangerous when they became fixed ideas.
Civil war had now come, showing, as Renan said, “a sore under the sore, an abyss below the abyss.” What were the hopes and projects of Pasteur and of Sainte Claire Deville now{200} that the very existence of the divided country was jeopardized under the eyes of the Prussians? The world of letters and of science, helpless amidst such disorders, had dispersed; Saint Claire Deville was at Gex, Dumas at Geneva. Some were wondering whether lectures could not be organized in Switzerland and in Belgium as they had been under the Empire, thus spreading abroad the influence of French thought. Examples might be quoted of men............