Pasteur was in the midst of some new experiments when he heard that the date of the election to the Académie Fran?aise was fixed for December 8. Certain candidates spent half their time in fiacres, paying the traditional calls, counting the voters, calculating their chances, and taking every polite phrase for a promise. Pasteur, with perfect simplicity, contented himself with saying to the Academicians whom he went to see, “I had never in my life contemplated the great honour of entering the Académie Fran?aise. People have been kind enough to say to me, ‘Stand and you will be elected.’ It is impossible to resist an invitation so glorious for Science and so flattering to myself.” One member of the Académie, Alexandre Dumas, refused to let Pasteur call on him. “I will not allow him to come and see me,” he said; “I will myself go and thank him for consenting to become one of us.” He agreed with M. Grandeau, who wrote to Pasteur that “when Claude Bernard and Pasteur consent to enter the ranks of a Society, all the honour is for the latter.”
When Pasteur was elected, his youthfulness of sentiment was made apparent; it seemed to him an immense honour to be one of the Forty. He therefore prepared his reception speech with the greatest care, without however allowing his scientific work to suffer. The life of his predecessor interested him more and more; to work in the midst of family intimacy had evidently been Littré’s ideal of happiness.
Few people, beyond Littré’s colleagues, know that his wife and daughter collaborated in his great work; they looked out the quotations necessary to that Dictionary, of which, if laid end to end, the columns would reach a length of thirty-seven kilometres. The Dictionary, commenced in 1857, when{342} Littré was almost sixty years old, was only interrupted twice: in 1861, when Auguste Comte’s widow asked Littré for a biography of the founder of positive philosophy; and in 1870, when the life of France was compromised and arrested during long months.
Littré, poor and disinterested as he was, had been able to realize his only dream, which was to possess a house in the country. Pasteur, bringing to bear in this, as in all things, his habits of scrupulous accuracy, left his laboratory for one day, and visited that villa, situated near Maisons-Laffitte.
The gardener who opened the door to him might have been the owner of that humble dwelling; the house was in a bad state of repair, but the small garden gave a look of comfort to the little property. It had been the only luxury of the philosopher, who enjoyed cultivating vegetables while quoting Virgil, Horace or La Fontaine, and listened to the nightingale when early dawn found him still sitting at his work.
After visiting this house and garden, reflecting as they did the life of a sage, Pasteur said sadly, “Is it possible that such a man should have been so misjudged!”
A crucifix, hanging in the room where Littré’s family were wont to work, testified to his respect for the beliefs of his wife and daughter. “I know too well,” he said one day, “what are the sufferings and difficulties of human life, to wish to take from any one convictions which may comfort them.”
Pasteur also studied the Positivist doctrine of which Auguste Comte had been the pontiff and Littré the prophet. This scientific conception of the world affirms nothing, denies nothing, beyond what is visible and easily demonstrated. It suggests altruism, a “subordination of personality to sociability,” it inspires patriotism and the love of humanity. Pasteur, in his scrupulously positive and accurate work, his constant thought for others, his self-sacrificing devotion to humanity, might have been supposed to be an adept of this doctrine. But he found it lacking in one great point. “Positivism,” he said, “does not take into account the most important of positive notions, that of the Infinite.” He wondered that Positivism should confine the mind within limits; with an impulse of deep feeling, Pasteur, the scientist, the slow and precise observer, wrote the following passage in his speech: “What is beyond? the human mind, actuated by an invincible force, will never cease to ask itself: What is{343} beyond?... It is of no use to answer: Beyond is limitless space, limitless time or limitless grandeur; no one understands those words. He who proclaims the existence of the Infinite—and none can avoid it—accumulates in that affirmation more of the supernatural than is to be found in all the miracles of all the religions; for the notion of the Infinite presents that double character that it forces itself upon us and yet is incomprehensible. When this notion seizes upon our understanding, we can but kneel.... I see everywhere the inevitable expression of the Infinite in the world; through it, the supernatural is at the bottom of every heart. The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite. As long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs on human thought, temples will be erected for the worship of the Infinite, whether God is called Brahma, Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus; and on the pavement of those temples, men will be seen kneeling, prostrated, annihilated in the thought of the Infinite.”
At that time, when triumphant Positivism was inspiring many leaders of men, the very man who might have given himself up to what he called “the enchantment of Science” proclaimed the Mystery of the universe; with his intellectual humility, Pasteur bowed before a Power greater than human power. He continued with the following words, worthy of being preserved for ever, for they are of those which pass over humanity like a Divine breath: “Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.”
Pasteur concluded by a supreme homage to Littré. “Often have I fancied him seated by his wife, as in a picture of early Christian times: he, looking down upon earth, full of compassion for human suffering; she, a fervent Catholic, her eyes raised to heaven: he, inspired by all earthly virtues; she, by every Divine grandeur; uniting in one impulse and in one heart the twofold holiness which forms the aureole of the Man-God, the one proceeding from devotion to humanity, the other emanating from ardent love for the Divinity: she a saint in the canonic sense of the word, he a lay-saint. This last word is not mine; I have gathered it on the lips of all those that knew him.”
The two colleagues whom Pasteur had chosen for his{344} Academic sponsors were J. B. Dumas and Nisard. Dumas, who appreciated more than any one the scientific progress due to Pasteur, and who applauded his brilliant success, was touched by the simplicity and modesty which his former pupil showed, now as in the distant past, when the then obscure young man sat taking notes on the Sorbonne benches.
Their mutual relationship had remained unchanged when Pasteur, accompanied by one of his family, rang at Dumas’ door in March, 1882, with the manuscript of his noble speech in his pocket; he seemed more like a student, respectfully calling on his master, than like a savant affectionately visiting a colleague.
Dumas received Pasteur in a little private study adjoining the fine drawing-room where he was accustomed to dispense an elegant hospitality. Pasteur drew a stool up to a table and began to read, but in a shy and hurried manner, without even raising his eyes towards Dumas, who listened, enthroned in his armchair, with an occasional murmur of approbation. Whilst Pasteur’s careworn face revealed some of his ardent struggles and persevering work, nothing perturbed Dumas’ grave and gentle countenance. His smile, at most times prudently affable and benevolent in varying degree, now frankly illumined his face as he congratulated Pasteur. He called to mind his own reception speech at the Academy when he had succeeded Guizot, and the fact that he too had concluded by a confession of faith in his Creator.
Pasteur’s other sponsor, Nisard, almost an octogenarian, was not so happy as Dumas; death had deprived him of almost all his old friends. It was a great joy to him when Pasteur came to see him on the wintry Sunday afternoons; he fancied himself back again at the Ecole Normale and the happy days when he reigned supreme in that establishment. Pasteur’s deference, greater even perhaps than it had been in former times, aided the delightful delusion. Though Nisard was ever inclined to bring a shade of patronage into every intimacy, he was a conversationalist of the old and rare stamp. Pasteur enjoyed hearing Nisard’s recollections and watching for a smile lighting up the almost blind face. Those Sunday talks reminded him of the old delightful conversations with Chappuis at the Besan?on College when, in their youthful fervour, they read together André Chénier’s and Lamartine’s verses. Eighteen years later, Pasteur had not missed one of Sainte{345} Beuve’s lectures to the Ecole Normale students; he liked that varied and penetrating criticism, opening sidelights on every point of the literary horizon. Nisard understood criticism rather as a solemn treaty, with clauses and conditions; with his taste for hierarchy, he even gave different ranks to authors as if they had been students before his chair. But, when he spoke, the rigidity of his system was enveloped in the grace of his conversation. Pasteur had but a restricted corner of his mind to give to literature, but that corner was a privileged one; he only read what was really worth reading, and every writer worthy of the name inspired him with more than esteem, with absolute respect. He had a most exalted idea of Literature and its influence on society; he was saying one day to Nisard that Literature was a great educator: “The mind alone can if necessary suffice to Science; both the mind and the heart intervene in Literature, and that explains the secret of its superiority in leading the general train of thought.” This was preaching to an apostle: no homage to literature ever seemed too great in the eyes of Nisard.
He approved of the modest exordium in Pasteur’s speech—
“At this moment when presenting myself before this illustrious assembly, I feel once more the emotion with which I first solicited your suffrages. The sense of my own inadequacy is borne in upon me afresh, and I should feel some confusion in finding myself in this place, were it not my duty to attribute to Science itself the honour—so to speak, an impersonal one—which you have bestowed upon me.”
The Permanent Secretary, Camille Doucet, well versed in the usages of the Institute, and preoccupied with the effect produced, thought that the public would not believe in such self-effacement, sincere as it was, and sent the following letter to Pasteur with the proof-sheet of his speech—
“Dear and honoured colleague, allow me to suggest to you a modification of your first sentence; your modesty is excessive.”
Camille Doucet had struck out the sense of my own inadequacy is borne in upon me afresh, and further so to speak, an impersonal one. Pasteur consulted Nisard, and the sense of my own inadequacy was replaced by the sense of my deficiencies, while Pasteur adhered energetically to so to speak, an impersonal one; he saw in his election less a particular distinction than a homage rendered to Science in general.
A reception at the Académie Fran?aise is like a sensational{346} first night at a theatre; a special public is interested days beforehand in every coming detail. Wives, daughters, sisters of Academicians, great ladies interested in coming candidates, widows of deceased Academicians, laureates of various Academy prizes—the whole literary world agitates to obtain tickets. Pasteur’s reception promised to be full of interest, some even said piquancy, for it fell to Renan to welcome him.
In order to have a foretaste of the contrast between the two men it was sufficient to recall Renan’s opening speech three years before, when he succeeded Claude Bernard. His thanks to his colleagues began thus—
“Your cenaculum is only reached at the age of Ecclesiastes, a delightful age of serene cheerfulness, when after a laborious prime, it begins to be seen that all is but vanity, but also that some vain things are worthy of being lingeringly enjoyed.”
The two minds were as different as the two speeches; Pasteur took everything seriously, giving to words their absolute sense; Renan, an incomparable writer, with his supple, undulating style, slipped away and hid himself within the sinuosities of his own philosophy. He disliked plain statements, and was ever ready to deny when others affirmed, even if he afterwards blamed excessive negation in his own followers. He religiously consoled those whose faith he destroyed, and, whilst invoking the Eternal, claimed the right of finding fault even there. When applauded by a crowd, he would willingly have murmured Noli me tangere, and even added with his joyful mixture of disdain and good-fellowship, “Let infinitely witty men come unto me.”
On that Thursday, April 27, 1882, the Institute was crowded. When the noise had subsided, Renan, seated at the desk as Director of the Academy between Camille Doucet, the Permanent Secretary, and Maxime du Camp, the Chancellor, declared the meeting opened. Pasteur, looking paler than usual, rose from his seat, dressed in the customary green-embroidered coat of an Academician, wearing across his breast the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour. In a clear, grave voice, he began by expressing his deep gratification, and, with the absolute knowledge and sincerity which always compelled the attention of his audience, of whatever kind, he proceeded to praise his predecessor. There was no artifice of composition, no struggle after effect, only a homage to the man, followed almost immediately by a confession of dissent on{347} philosophic questions. He was listened to with attentive emotion, and when he showed the error of Positivism in attempting to do away with the idea of the Infinite, and proclaimed the instinctive and necessary worship by Man of the great Mystery, he seemed to bring out all the weakness and the dignity of Man—passing through this world bowed under the law of Toil and with the prescience of the Ideal—into a startling and consolatory light.
One of the privileges of the Academician who receives a new member is to remain seated in his armchair before a table, and to comfortably prepare to read his own speech, in answer, often in contradiction, to the first. Renan, visibly enjoying the presidential chair, smiled at the audience with complex feelings, understood by some who were his assiduous readers. Respect for so much work achieved by a scientist of the first rank in the world; a gratified feeling of the honour which reverted to France; some personal pleasure in welcoming such a man in the name of the Académie, and, at the same time, in the opportunity for a light and ironical answer to Pasteur’s beliefs—all these sensations were perceptible in Renan’s powerful face, the benevolence of whose soft blue eyes was corrected by the redoubtable keenness of the smile.
He began in a caressing voice by acknowledging that the Academy was somewhat incompetent to judge of the work and glory of Pasteur. “But,” he added, with graceful eloquence, “apart from the ground of the doctrine, which is not within our attributions, there is, Sir, a greatness on which our experience of the human mind gives us a right to pronounce an opinion; something which we recognize in the most varied applications, which belongs in the same degree to Galileo, Pascal, Michael-Angelo, or Molière; something which gives sublimity to the poet, depth to the philosopher, fascination to the orator, divination to the scientist.
“That common basis of all beautiful and true work, that divine fire, that indefinable breath which inspires Science, Literature, and Art—we have found it in you, Sir—it is Genius. No one has walked so surely through the circles of elemental nature; your scientific life is like unto a luminous tract in the great night of the Infinitesimally Small, in that last abyss where life is born.”
After a brilliant and rapid enumeration of the Pastorian discoveries, congratulating Pasteur on having touched through{348} his art the very confines of the springs of life, Renan went on to speak of truth as he would have spoken of a woman: “Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with too much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference. She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervour.” And further: “Nature is plebeian, and insists upon work, preferring horny hands and careworn brows.”
He then commenced a courteous controversy. Whilst Pasteur, with his vision of the Infinite, showed himself as religious as Newton, Renan, who enjoyed moral problems, spoke of Doubt with delectation. “The answer to the enigma which torments and charms us will never be given to us.... What matters it, since the imperceptible corner of reality which we see is full of delicious harmonies, and since life, as bestowed upon us, is an excellent gift, and for each of us a revelation of infinite goodness?”
Legend will probably hand to posterity a picture of Renan as he was in those latter days, ironically cheerful and unctuously indulgent. But, before attaining the quizzical tranquillity he now exhibited to the Academy, he had gone through a complete evolution. When about the age of forty-eight, he might bitterly have owned that there was not one basis of thought which in him had not crumbled to dust. Beliefs, political ideas, his ideal of European civilization, all had fallen to the ground. After his separation from the Church, he had turned to historical science; Germany had appeared to him, as once to Madame de Sta?l and so many others, as a refuge for thinkers. It had seemed to him that a collaboration between France, England, and Germany would create “An invincible trinity, carrying the world along the road of progress through reason.” But that German fa?ade which he took for that of a temple hid behind it the most formidable barracks which Europe had ever known, and beside it were cannon foundries, death-manufactories, all the preparations of the German people for the invasion of France. His awakening was bitter; war as practised by the Prussians, with a method in their cruelty, filled him with grief.
Time passed and his art, like a lily of the desert growing amongst ruins, gave flowers and perfumes to surrounding moral devastation, A mixture of disdain and nobility now{349} made him regard as almost imperceptible the number of men capable of understanding his philosophical elevation. Pasteur had bared his soul; Renan took pleasure in throwing light on the intellectual antithesis of certain minds, and on their points of contact.
“Allow me, Sir, to recall to you your fine discovery of right and left tartaric acids.... There are some minds which it is as impossible to bring together as it is impossible, according to your own comparison, to fit two gloves one into the other. And yet both gloves are equally necessary; they complete each other. One’s two hands cannot be superposed, they may be joined. In the vast bosom of nature, the most diverse efforts, added to each other, combine with each other, and result in a most majestic unity.”
Renan handled the French language, “this old and admirable language, poor but to those who do not know it,” with a dexterity, a choice of delicate shades, of tasteful harmonies which have never been surpassed. Able as he was to define every human feeling, he went on from the above comparison, painting divergent intellectual capabilities, to the following imprecation against death: “Death, according to a thought admired by M. Littré, is but a function, the last and quietest of all. To me it seems odious, hateful, insane, when it lays its cold blind hand on virtue and on genius. A voice is in us, which only great and good souls can hear, and that voice cries unceasingly ‘Truth and Good are the ends of thy life; sacrifice all to that goal’; and when, following the call of that siren within us, claiming to bear the promises of life, we reach the place where the reward should await us, the deceitful consoler fails us. Philosophy, which had promised us the secret of death, makes a lame apology, and the ideal which had brought us to the limits of the air we breathe disappears from view at the supreme hour when we look for it. Nature’s object has been attained; a powerful effort has been realized, and then, with characteristic carelessness, the enchantress abandons us and leaves us to the hooting birds of the night.”
Renan, save in one little sentence in his answer to Pasteur—“The divine work accomplishes itself by the intimate tendency to what is Good and what is True in the universe”—did not go further into the statement of his doctrines. Perhaps he thought them too austere for his audience; he was wont to eschew critical and religious considerations when in a world{350} which he looked upon as frivolous. Moreover, he thought his own century amusing, and was willing to amuse it further. If he raised his eyes to Heaven, he said that we owe virtue to the Eternal, but that we have the right to add to it irony. Pasteur thought it strange that irony should be applied to subjects which have beset so many great minds and which so many simple hearts solve in their own way.
 
The week which followed Pasteur’s reception at the Académie Fran?aise brought him a manifestation of applause in the provinces. The town of Aubenas in the Ardèche was erecting a statue to Olivier de Serres, and desired to associate with the name of the founder of the silk industry in France in the sixteenth century that of its preserver in the nineteenth.
This was the second time that a French town proclaimed its gratitude towards Pasteur. A few months before, the Melun Agricultural Society had held a special meeting in his honour, and had decided “to strike a medal with Pasteur’s effigy on it, in commemoration of one of the greatest services ever rendered by Science to Agriculture.”
But amidst this p?an of praise, Pasteur, instead of dwelling complacently on the recollection of his experiments at Pouilly le Fort, was absorbed in one idea, characteristic of the man: he wanted to at once begin some experiments on the peripneumonia of horned cattle. The veterinary surgeon, Rossignol, had just been speaking on this subject to the meeting. Pasteur, who had recently been asked by the Committee of Epizootic Diseases to inquire into the mortality often caused by the inoculation of the peripneumonia virus, reminded his hearers in a few words of the variable qualities of virus and how the slightest impurity in a virus may exercise an influence on the effects of that virus.
He and his collaborators had vainly tried to cultivate the virus of peripneumonia in chicken-broth, veal-broth, yeast-water, etc. They had to gather the virus from the lung of a cow which had died of peripneumonia, by means of tubes previously sterilized; it was injected, with every precaution against alteration, under the skin of the tail of the animal, this part being chosen on account of the thickness of the skin and of the cellular tissue. By operating on other parts, serious accidents were apt to occur, the virus being extremely{351} violent, so much so in fact that the local irritation sometimes went so far as to cause the loss of part of the tail. At the end of the same year (1882), Pasteur published in the Recueil de la Médecine Vétérinaire a paper indicating the following means of preserving the virus in a state of purity—
“Pure virus remains virulent for weeks and months. One lung is sufficient to provide large quantities of it, and its purity can easily be tested in a stove and even in ordinary temperature. From one lung only, enough can be procured to be used for many animals. Moreover, without having recourse to additional lungs, the provision of virus could be maintained in the following manner; it would suffice, before exhausting the first stock of virus, to inoculate a young calf behind the shoulder. Death speedily supervenes, and all the tissues are infiltrated with a serosity, which in its turn becomes virulent. This also can be collected and preserved in a state of purity.” It remained to be seen whether virus thus preserved would become so attenuated as to lose all degree of virulence.
Aubenas, then, wished to follow the example of Melun. In deference to the unanimous wish of the inhabitants of the little town, Pasteur went there on the 4th of May. His arrival was a veritable triumph; there were decorations at the station, floral arches in the streets, brass and other bands, speeches from the Mayor, presentation of the Municipal Council, of the Chamber of Commerce, etc., etc. Excitement reigned everywhere, and the music of the bands was almost drowned by the acclamations of the people. At the meeting of the Agricultural Society, Pasteur was offered a medal with his own effigy, and a work of art representing genii around a cup, their hands full of cocoons. A little microscope—that microscope which had been called an impracticable instrument, fit for scientists only—figured as an attribute.
“For us all,” said the President of the Aubenas Spinning Syndicate, “you have been the kindly magician whose intervention conjured away the scourge which threatened us; in you we hail our benefactor.”
Pasteur, effacing his own personality as he had done at the Académie, laid all this enthusiasm and gratitude as an offering to Science.
“I am not its object, but rather a pretext for it,” he said, and continued: “Science has been the ruling passion of my life. I have lived but for Science, and in the hours of difficulty{352} which are inherent to protracted efforts, the thought of France upheld my courage. I associated her greatness with the greatness of Science.
“By erecting a statue to Olivier de Serres, the illustrious son of the Vivarais, you give to France a noble example; you show to all that you venerate great men and the great things they have accomplished. Therein lies fruitful seed; you have gathered it, may your sons see it grow and fructify. I look back upon the time, already distant, when, desirous of responding to the suggestions of a kind and illustrious friend, I left Paris to study in a neighbouring Department the scourge which was decimating your magnaneries. For five years I struggled to obtain some knowledge of the evil and the means of preventing it; and, after having found it, I still had to struggle to implant in other minds the convictions I had acquired.
“All that is past and gone now, and I can speak of it with moderation. I am not often credited with that characteristic, and yet I am the most hesitating of men, the most fearful of responsibility, so long as I am not in possession of a proof. But when solid scientific proofs confirm my convictions, no consideration can prevent me from defending what I hold to be true.
“A man whose kindness to me was truly paternal (Biot) had for his motto: Per vias rectas. I congratulate myself that I borrowed it from him. If I had been more timid or more doubtful in view of the principles I had established, many points of science and of application might have remained obscure and subject to endless discussion. The hypothesis of spontaneous generation would still throw its veil over many questions. Your nurseries of silkworms would be under the sway of charlatanism, with no guide to the production of good seed. The vaccination of charbon, destined to preserve agriculture from immense losses, would be misunderstood and rejected as a dangerous practice.
“Where are now all the contradictions? They pass away, and Truth remains. After an interval of fifteen years, you now render it a noble testimony. I therefore feel a deep joy in seeing my efforts understood and celebrated in an impulse of sympathy which will remain in my memory and in that of my family as a glorious recollection.”
Pasteur was not allowed to return at once to his laboratory. The agricultors and veterinary surgeons of N?mes, who had{353} taken an interest in all the tests on the vaccination of charbon, had, in their turn, drawn up a programme of experiments.
Pasteur arrived at a meeting of the Agricultural Society of the Gard in time to hear the report of the veterinary surgeons and to receive the congratulations of the Society. The President expressed to him the gratitude of all the cattle-owners and breeders, hitherto powerless to arrest the progress of the disease which he had now vanquished. Whilst a commemoration medal was being offered to him and a banquet being prepared—for Southern enthusiasm always implies a series of toasts—Pasteur thanked these enterprising men who were contemplating new experiments in order to dispel the doubts of a few veterinary surgeons, and especially the characteristic distrust, felt by some of the shepherds, of everything that did not come from the South. Sheep, oxen, and horses, some of them vaccinated, others intact, were put at Pasteur’s disposal; he, with his usual energy, fixed the experiments for the next morning at eight o’clock. After inoculating all the animals with the charbon virus, Pasteur announced that those which had been vaccinated would remain unharmed, but that the twelve unvaccinated sheep would be dead or dying within forty-eight hours. An appointment was made for next day but one, on May 11, at the town knacker’s, near the Bridge of Justice, where post-mortem examinations were made. Pasteur then went on to Montpellier, where he was expected by the Hérault Central Society of Agriculture, who had also made some experiments and had asked him to give a lecture at the Agricultural School. He entered the large hall, feeling very tired, almost ill, but his face lighted up at the sight of that assembly of professors and students who had hurried from all the neighbouring Faculties, and those agricultors crowding from every part of the Department, all of them either full of scientific curiosity or moved by their agricultural interests. His voice, at first weak and showing marks of weariness, soon became strengthened, and, forgetting his fatigue, he threw himself into the subject of virulent and contagious diseases. He gave himself up, heart and soul, to this audience for two whole hours, inspiring every one with his own enthusiasm. He stopped now and then to invite questions, and his answers to the objectors swept away the last shred of resistance.
“We must not,” said the Vice-President of the Agricultural Society, M. Vialla, “encroach further on the time of M.{354} Pasteur, which belongs to France itself. Perhaps, however he will allow me to prefer a last request: he has delivered us from the terrible scourge of splenic fever; will he now turn to a no less redoubtable infection, viz. rot, which is, so to speak, endemic in our regions? He will surely find the remedy for it.”
“I have hardly finished my experiments on splenic fever,” answered Pasteur gently, “and you want me to find a remedy for rot! Why not for phylloxera as well?” And, while regretting that the days were not longer, he added, with the energy of which he had just given a new proof: “As to efforts, I am yours usque ad mortem.”
He afterwards was the honoured guest at the banquet prepared for him. It was now not only Sericiculture, but also Agriculture, which proclaimed its infinite gratitude to him; he was given an enthusiastic ovation, in which, as usual, he saw no fame for himself, but for work and science only.
On May 11, at nine o’clock in the morning, he was again at N?mes to meet the physicians, veterinary surgeons, cattle-breeders, and shepherds at the Bridge of Justice. Of the twelve sheep, six were already dead, the others dying; it was easy to see that their symptoms were the same as are characteristic of the ordinary splenic fever. “M. Pasteur gave all necessary explanations with his usual modesty and clearness,” said the local papers.
“And now let us go back to work!” exclaimed Pasteur, as he stepped into the Paris express; he was impatient to return to his laboratory.
 
In order to give him a mark of public gratitude greater still than that which came from this or that district, the Académie des Sciences resolved to organize a general movement of Scientific Societies. It was decided to present him with a medal, engraved by Alphée Dubois, and bearing on one side Pasteur’s profile and on the other the inscription: “To Louis Pasteur, his colleagues, his friends, and his admirers.”
On June 25, a Sunday, a delegation, headed by Dumas, and composed of Boussingault, Bouley, Jamin, Daubrée, Bertin, Tisserand and Davaine arrived at the Ecole Normale and found Pasteur in the midst of his family.
“My dear Pasteur,” said Dumas, in his deep voice, “forty years ago, you entered this building as a student. From the{355} very first, your masters foresaw that you would be an honour to it, but no one would have dared to predict the startling services which you were destined to render to science, France, and the world.”
And after summing up in a few words Pasteur’s great career, the sources of wealth which he had discovered or revived, the benefits he had acquired to medicine and surgery: “My dear Pasteur,” continued Dumas, with an affectionate emotion, “your life has known but success. The scientific method which you use in such a masterly manner owes you its greatest triumphs. The Ecole Normale is proud to number you amongst its pupils; the Académie des Sciences is proud of your work; France ranks you amongst its glories.
“At this time, when marks of public gratitude are flowing towards you from every quarter, the homage which we have come to offer you, in the name of your admirers and friends, may seem worthy of your particular attention. It emanates from a spontaneous and universal feeling, and it will preserve for posterity the faithful likeness of your features.
“May you, my dear Pasteur, long live to enjoy your fame, and to contemplate the rich and abundant fruit of your work. Science, agriculture, industry, and humanity will preserve eternal gratitude towards you, and your name will live in their annals amongst the most illustrious and the most revered.”
Pasteur, standing with bowed head, his eyes full of tears, was for a few moments unable to reply, and then, making a violent effort, he said in a low voice—
“My dear master—it is indeed forty years since I first had the happiness of knowing you, and since you first taught me to love science.
“I was fresh from the country; after each of your classes, I used to leave the Sorbonne transported, often moved to tears. From that moment, your talent as a professor, your immortal labours and your noble character have inspired me with an admiration which has but grown with the maturity of my mind.
“You have surely guessed my feelings, my dear master. There has not been one important circumstance in my life or in that of my family, either happy or painful, which you have not, as it were, blessed by your presence and sympathy.
“Again to-day, you take the foremost rank in the expression of that testimony, very excessive, I think, of the esteem of my masters, who have become my friends. And what you{356} have done for me, you have done for all your pupils; it is one of the distinctive traits of your nature. Behind the individual, you have always considered France and her greatness.
“What shall I do henceforth? Until now, great praise had inflamed my ardour, and only inspired me with the idea of making myself worthy of it by renewed efforts; but that which you have just given me in the names of the Académie and of the Scientific Societies is in truth beyond my courage.”
Pasteur, who for a year had been applauded by the crowd, received on that June 25, 1882, the testimony which he rated above every other: praise from his master.
Whilst he recalled the beneficent influence which Dumas had had over him, those who were sitting in his drawing-room at the Ecole Normale were thinking that Dumas might have evoked similar recollections with similar charm. He too had known enthusiasms which had illumined his youth. In 1822, the very year when Pasteur was born, Dumas, who was then living in a student’s attic at Geneva, received the visit of a man about fifty, dressed Directoire fashion, in a light blue coat with steel buttons, a white waistcoat and yellow breeches. It was Alexander von Humboldt, who had wished, on his way through Geneva, to see the young man who, though only twenty-two years old, had just published, in collaboration with Prévost, treatises on blood and on urea. That visit, the long conversations, or rather the monologues, of Humboldt had inspired Dumas with the feelings of surprise, pride, gratitude and devotion with which the first meeting with a great man is wont to fill the heart of an enthusiastic youth. When Dumas heard Humboldt speak of Laplace, Berthollet, Gay-Lussac, Arago, Thenard, Cuvier, etc., and describe them as familiarly accessible, instead of as the awe-inspiring personages he had imagined, Dumas became possessed with the idea of going to Paris, knowing those men, living near them and imbibing their methods. “On the day when Humboldt left Geneva,” Dumas used to say, “the town for me became empty.” It was thus that Dumas’ journey to Paris was decided on, and his dazzling career of sixty years begun.
He was now near the end of his scientific career, closing peacefully like a beautiful summer evening, and he was happy in the fame of his former pupil. As he left the Ecole Normale, on that June afternoon, he passed under the windows of the laboratory, where a few young men, imbued with Pasteu{357}r’s doctrines, represented a future reserve for the progress of science.
 
That year 1882 was the more interesting in Pasteur’s life, in that though victory on many points was quite indisputable, partial struggles still burst out here and there, and an adversary often arose suddenly when he had thought the engagement over.
The sharpest attacks came from Germany. The Record of the Works of the German Sanitary Office had led, under the direction of Dr. Koch and his pupils, a veritable campaign against Pasteur, whom they declared incapable of cultivating microbes in a state of purity. He did not even, they said, know how to recognize the septic vibrio, though he had discovered it. The experiments by which hens contracted splenic fever under a lowered temperature after inoculation signified nothing. The share of the earthworms in the propagation of charbon, the inoculation into guinea-pigs of the germs found in the little cylinders produced by those worms followed by the death of the guinea-pigs, all this they said was pointless and laughable. They even contested the preserving influence of vaccination.
Whilst these things were being said and written, the Veterinary School of Berlin asked the laboratory of the Ecole Normale for some charbon vaccine. Pasteur answered that he wished that experiments should be made before a commission nominated by the German Government. It was constituted by the Minister of Agriculture and Forests, and Virchow was one of the members of it. A former student of the Ecole Normale—who, after leaving the school first on the list of competitors for the agrégation of physical science, had entered the laboratory—one in whom Pasteur founded many hopes, Thuillier, left for Germany with his little tubes of attenuated virus. Pasteur was not satisfied; he would have liked to meet his adversaries face to face and oblige them publicly to own their defeat. An opportunity was soon to arise. He had come to Arbois, as usual, for the months of August and September, and was having some alterations made in his little house. The tannery pits were being filled up. “It will not improve the house itself,” he wrote to his son, “but it will be made brighter and more comfortable by having a tidy yard and a garden along the riverside.”
The Committee of the International Congress of Hygiene,{358} which was to meet at Geneva, interrupted these peaceful holidays by inviting Pasteur to read a paper on attenuated virus. As a special compliment, the whole of one meeting, that of Tuesday, September 5, was to be reserved for his paper only. Pasteur immediately returned to work; he only consented under the greatest pressure to go for a short walk on the Besan?on road at five o’clock every afternoon. After spending the whole morning and the whole afternoon sitting at his writing table over laboratory registers, he came away grumbling at being disturbed in his work. If any member of his family ventured a question on the proposed paper, he hastily cut them short, declaring that he must be let alone. It was only when Mme. Pasteur had copied out in her clear handwriting all the little sheets covered with footnotes, that the contents of the paper became known.
When Pasteur entered the Congress Hall, great applause greeted him on every side. The seats were occupied, not only by the physicians and professors who form the usual audience of a congress, but also by tourists, who take an interest in scientific things when they happen to be the fashion.
Pasteur spoke of the invitation he had received. “I hastened to accept it,” he said, “and I am pleased to find myself the guest of a country which has been a friend to France in good as in evil days. Moreover, I hoped to meet here some of the contradictors of my work of the last few years. If a congress is a ground for conciliation, it is in the same degree a ground for courteous discussion. We all are actuated by a supreme passion, that of progress and of truth.”
Almost always, at the opening of a congress, great politeness reigns in a confusion of languages. Men are seen offering each other pamphlets, exchanging visiting cards, and only lending an inattentive ear to the solemn speeches going on. This time, the first scene of the first act suspended all private conversation. Pasteur stood above the assembly in his full strength and glory. Though he was almost sixty, his hair had remained black, his beard alone was turning grey. His face reflected indomitable energy; if he had not been slightly lame, and if his left hand had not been a little stiff, no one could have supposed that he had been struck with paralysis fourteen years before. The feeling of the place France should hold in an International Congress gave him a proud look and an imposing accent of authority. He was visibly ready to meet his{359} adversaries and to make of this assembly a tribunal of judges. Except for a few diplomats who at the first words exchanged anxious looks at the idea of possible polemics, Frenchmen felt happy at being better represented than any other nation. Men eagerly pointed out to each other Dr. Koch, twenty-one years younger than Pasteur, who sat on one of the benches, listening, with impassive eyes behind his gold spectacles.
Pasteur analysed all the work he had done with the collaboration of MM. Chamberland, Roux, and Thuillier. He made clear to the most ignorant among his hearers his ingenious experiments either to obtain, preserve or modify the virulence of certain microbes. “It cannot be doubted,” he said, “that we possess a general method of attenuation.... The general principles are found, and it cannot be disbelieved that the future of those researches is rich with the greatest hopes. But, however obvious a demonstrated truth may be, it has not always the privilege of being easily accepted. I have met in France and elsewhere with some obstinate contradictors.... Allow me to choose amongst them the one whose personal merit gives him the greatest claims to our attention, I mean Dr Koch, of Berlin.”
Pasteur then summed up the various criticisms which had appeared in the Record of the Works of the German Sanitary Office. “Perhaps there may be some persons in this assembly,” he went on, “who share the opinions of my contradictors. They will allow me to invite them to speak; I should be happy to answer them.”
Koch, mounting the platform, declined to discuss the subject, preferring, he said, to make answer in writing later on. Pasteur was disappointed; he would have wished the Congress, or at least a Commission designated by Koch, to decide on the experiments. He resigned himself to wait. On the following days, as the members of the Congress saw him attending meetings on general hygiene, school hygiene, and veterinary hygiene, they hardly recognized in the simple, attentive man, anxious for instruction, the man who had defied his adversary. Outside the arena, Pasteur became again the most modest of men, never allowing himself to criticize what he had not thoroughly studied. But, when sure of his facts, he showed himself full of a violent passion, the passion of truth; when truth had triumphed, he preserved not the least bitterness of former struggles.{360}
That day of the 5th September was remembered in Geneva. “All the honour was for France,” wrote Pasteur to his son; “that was what I had wished.”
 
He was already keen in the pursuit of another malady which caused great damage, the “rouget” disease or swine fever. Thuillier, ever ready to start when a demonstration had to be made or an experiment to be attempted, had ascertained, in March, 1882, in a part of the Department of the Vienne, the existence of a microbe in the swine attacked with that disease.
In order to know whether this microbe was the cause of the evil, the usual operations of the sovereign method had to be resorted to. First of all, a culture medium had to be found which was suitable to the micro-organism (veal broth was found to be very successful); then a drop of the culture had to be abstracted from the little phials where the microbe was developing and sown into other flasks; lastly the culture liquid had to be inoculated into swine. Death supervened with all the symptoms of swine fever; the microbe was therefore the cause of the evil? Could it be attenuated and a vaccine obtained? Being pressed to study that disease, and to find the remedy for it, by M. Maucuer, a veterinary surgeon of the Department of Vaucluse, living at Bollène, Pasteur started, accompanied by his nephew, Adrien Loir, and M. Thuillier. The three arrived at Bollène on September 13.
“It is impossible to imagine more obliging kindness than that of those excellent Maucuers,” wrote Pasteur to his wife the next day. “Where, in what dark corner they sleep, in order to give us two bedrooms, mine and another with two beds, I do not like to think. They are young, and have an eight-year-old son at the Avignon College, for whom they have obtained a half-holiday to-day in order that he may be presented to ‘M. Pasteur.’ The two men and I are taken care of in a manner you might envy. It is colder here and more rainy than in Paris. I have a fire in my room, that green oak-wood fire that you will remember we had at the Pont Gisquet.
“I was much pleased to hear that the swine fever is far from being extinguished. There are sick swine everywhere, some dying, some dead, at Bollène and in the country around; the evil is disastrous this year. We saw some dead and dying yesterday afternoon. We have brought here a young hog who is very ill, and this morning we shall attempt vaccination at a{361} M. de Ballincourt’s, who has lost all his pigs, and who has just bought some more in the hope that the vaccine will be preservative. From morning till night we shall be able to watch the disease and to try to prevent it. This reminds me of the pébrine, with pigsties and sick pigs instead of nurseries full of dying silkworms. Not ten thousand, but at least twenty thousand swine have perished, and I am told it is worse still in the Ardèche.”
On the 17th, the day was taken up by the inoculation of some pigs on the estate of M. de la Gardette, a few kilometres from Bollène. In the evening, a former State Councillor, M. de Gaillard, came at the head of a delegation to compliment Pasteur and invite him to a banquet. Pasteur declined this honour, saying he would accept it when the swine fever was conquered. They spoke to him of his past services, but he had no thought for them; like all progress-seeking men, he saw but what was before him. Experiments were being carried out—he had hastened to have an experimental pigsty erected near M. Maucuer’s house—and already, on the 21st, he wrote to Mme. Pasteur, in one of those letters which resembled the loose pages of a laboratory notebook—
“Swine fever is not nearly so obscure to me now, and I am persuaded that with the help of time the scientific and practical problem will be solved.
“Three post-mortem examinations to-day. They take a long time, but that seems of no account to Thuillier, with his cool and patient eagerness.”
Three days later: “I much regret not being able to tell you yet that I am starting back for Paris. It is quite impossible to abandon all these experiments which we have commenced; I should have to return here at least once or twice. The chief thing is that things are getting clearer with every experiment. You know that nowadays a medical knowledge of disease is nothing; it must be prevented beforehand. We are attempting this, and I think I can foresee success; but keep this for yourself and our children. I embrace you all most affectionately.
“P.S.—I have never felt better. Send me 1,000 fr.; I have but 300 fr. left of the 1,600 fr. I brought. Pigs are expensive, and we are killing a great many.”
At last on December 8: “I am sending M. Dumas a note for to-morrow’s meeting at the Academy. If I had time I would transcribe it for the laboratory and for René.{362}”
“Our researches”—thus ran the report to the Academy—“may be summed up in the following propositions—
“I. The swine fever, or rouget disease, is produced by a special microbe, easy to cultivate outside the animal’s body. It is so tiny that it often escapes the most attentive search. It resembles the microbe of chicken cholera more than any other; its shape is also that of a figure 8, but finer and less visible than that of the cholera. It differs essentially from the latter by its physiological properties; it kills rabbits and sheep, but has no effect on hens.
“II. If inoculated in a state of purity into pigs, in almost inappreciable doses, it speedily brings the fever and death, with all the characteristics usual in spontaneous cases. It is most deadly to the white, so-called improved, race, that which is most sought after by pork-breeders.
“III. Dr. Klein published in London (1878) an extensive work on swine fever which he calls Pneumo-enteritis of Swine; but that author is entirely mistaken as to the nature of the parasite. He has described as the microbe of the rouget a bacillus with spores, more voluminous even than the bacteridium of splenic fever. Dr. Klein’s microbe is very different from the true microbe of swine fever, and has, besides, no relation to the etiology of that disease.
“IV. After having satisfied ourselves by direct tests that the malady does not recur, we have succeeded in inoculating in a benignant form, after which the animal has proved refractory to the mortal disease.
“V. Though we consider that further control experiments are necessary, we have already great confidence in this, that, dating from next spring, vaccination by the virulent microbe of swine fever, attenuated, will become the salvation of pigsties.”
Pasteur ended thus his letter of December 3: “We shall start to-morrow, Monday. Adrien Loir and I shall sleep at Lyons. Thuillier will go straight to Paris, to take care of ten little pigs which we have bought, and which he will take with him. In this way they will not be kept waiting at stations. Pigs, young and old, are very sensitive to cold; they will be wrapped up in straw. They are very young and quite charming; one cannot help getting fond of them.”
The next day Pasteur wrote to his son: “Everything has gone off well, and we much hope, Thuillier and I, that preventive vaccination of this evil can be established in a practical{363} fashion. It would be a great boon in pork-breeding countries, where terrible ravages are made by the rouget (so called because the animals die covered with red or purple blotches, already developed during the fever which precedes death). In the United States, over a million swine died of this disease in 1879; it rages in England and in Germany. This year, it has desolated the C?tes-du-Nord, the Poitou, and the departments of the Rhone Valley. I sent to M. Dumas yesterday a résumé in a few lines of our results, to be read at to-day’s meeting.”
Pasteur, once more in Paris, returned eagerly to his studies on divers virus and on hydrophobia. If he was told that he over-worked himself, he replied: “It would seem to me that I was committing a theft if I were to let one day go by without doing some work.” But he was again disturbed in the work he enjoyed by the contradictions of his opponents.
Koch’s reply arrived soon after the Bollène episode. The German scientist had modified his views to a certain extent; instead of denying the attenuation of virus as in 1881, he now proclaimed it as a discovery of the first order. But he did not believe much, he said, in the practical results of the vaccination of charbon.
Pasteur put forward, in response, a report from the veterinary surgeon Boutet to the Chartres Veterinary and Agricultural School, made in the preceding October. The sheep vaccinated in Eure et Loir during the last year formed a total of 79,392. Instead of a mortality which had been more than nine per cent, on the average in the last ten years, the mortality had only been 518 sheep, much less than one per cent; 5,700 sheep had therefore been preserved by vaccination. Amongst cattle 4,562 animals had been vaccinated; out of a similar number 300 usually died every year. Since vaccination, only eleven cows had died.
“Such results appear to us convincing,” wrote M. Boutet. “If our cultivators of the Beauce understand their own interest, splenic fever and malignant pustules will soon remain a mere memory, for charbon diseases never are spontaneous, and, by preventing the death of their cattle by vaccination, they will destroy all possibility of propagation of that terrible disease, which will in consequence entirely disappear.”
Koch continued to smile at the discovery on the earthworms’ action in the etiology of anthrax. “You are mistaken, Sir,” replied Pasteur. “You are again preparing for yourself a{364} vexing change of opinion.” And he concluded as follows: “However violent your attacks, Sir, they will not hinder the success of the method of attenuated virus. I am confidently awaiting the consequences which it holds in reserve to help humanity in its struggle against the diseases which assault it.”
This debate was hardly concluded when new polemics arose at the Académie de Médecine. A new treatment of typhoid fever was under discussion.
In 1870, M. Glénard, a Lyons medical student, who had enlisted, was, with many others, taken to Stettin as prisoner of war. A German physician, Dr. Brand, moved with compassion by the sufferings of the vanquished French soldiers, showed them great kindness and devotion. The French student attached himself to him, helped him with his work, and saw him treat typhoid fever with success by baths at 20° C. Brand prided himself on this cold-bath treatment, which produced numerous cures. M. Glénard, on his return to Lyons, remembering with confidence this method of which he had seen the excellent results, persuaded the physician of the Croix Rousse hospital, where he resided, to attempt the same treatment. This was done for ten years, and nearly all the Lyons practitioners became convinced that Brand’s method was efficacious. M. Glénard came to Paris and read to the Academy of Medicine a paper on the cold-bath treatment of typhoid fever. The Academy appointed a commission, composed of civil and military physicians, and the discussion was opened.
The oratorical display which had struck Pasteur when he first came to the Académie de Médecine was much to the fore on that occasion; the merely curious hearers of that discussion had an opportunity of enjoying medical eloquence, besides acquiring information on the new treatment of typhoid fever. There were some vehement denunciations of the microbe which was suspected in typhoid fever. “You aim at the microbe and you bring down the patient!” exclaimed one of the orators, who added, amidst great applause, that it was time “to offer an impassable barrier to such adventurous boldness and thus to preserve patients from the unforeseen dangers of that therapeutic whirlwind!”
Another orator took up a lighter tone: “I do not much believe in that invasion of para............