The life of Pasteur

On Monday, October 19, Pasteur, though suffering from a strange tingling sensation of the left side, had a great desire to go and read to the Academié des Sciences a treatise by Salimbeni, an Italian, who, having studied and verified Pasteur’s results, declared that the best means of regenerating the culture of silkworms was due to the French scientist. This treatise, the diploma of the Bonn University, the Rumford medal offered by the English, all those testimonials from neighbouring nations were infinitely agreeable to Pasteur, who was proud to lay such homage before the shrine of France. On that day, October 19, 1868, a date which became a bitter memory to his family and friends—in spite of an alarming shivering fit which had caused him to lie down immediately after lunch instead of working as usual—he insisted on going to the Academy sitting at half past two.

Mme. Pasteur, vaguely uneasy, made a pretext of some shopping beyond the Quai Conti and accompanied him as far as the vestibule of the Institute. As she was turning back, she met Balard, who was coming up with the quick step of a young man, stopped him and asked him to walk back with Pasteur, and not to leave him before reaching his own door, though indeed it seemed a curious exchange of parts to ask Balard at sixty years of age to watch over Pasteur still so young. Pasteur read Salimbeni’s paper in his usual steady voice, remained until the end of the sitting and walked back with Balard and Sainte Claire Deville. He dined very lightly and went to bed at nine o’clock; he had hardly got into bed when he felt himself attacked by the strange symptoms of the afternoon. He tried to speak, but in vain; after a few moments he was able to call for assistance. Mme. Pasteur sent at once for Dr. Godélier, an intimate friend of the family, an army surgeon, Clinical Professor at the Ecole du Val-de-Grâce[27]; and Pasteur, paralysed one moment and free again the next, explained his own symptoms during the intervals of the dark struggle which endangered his life.

The cerebral hæmorrhage gradually brought about absence of movement along the entire left side. When the next morning Dr. Noël Gueneau de Mussy, going his regulation round of the Ecole Normale students, came into his room and said, so as not to alarm him, “I heard you were unwell, and thought I would come to see you,” Pasteur smiled the sad smile of a patient with no illusions. Drs. Godélier and Gueneau de Mussy decided to call Dr. Andral in consultation, and went to fetch him at three o’clock at the Académie de Médecine. Somewhat disconcerted by the singular character of this attack of hemiplegia, Andral prescribed the application of sixteen leeches behind the ears; blood flowed abundantly, and Dr. Godélier wrote in the evening bulletin (Tuesday): “Speech clearer, some movements of the paralysed limbs; intelligence perfect.” Later, at ten o’clock: “Complains of his paralysed arm.” “It is like lead; if it could only be cut off!” groaned Pasteur. About 2 a.m. Mme Pasteur thought all hope was gone. The hastily written bulletin reads thus: “Intense cold, anxious agitation, features depressed, eyes languid.” The sleep which followed was as the sleep of death.

At dawn Pasteur awoke from this drowsiness. “Mental faculties still absolutely intact,” wrote M. Godélier at 12.30 on Wednesday, October 21. “The cerebral lesion, whatever it may be, is not worse; there is an evident pause.” Two hours later the words, “Mind active,” were followed by the startling statement, “Would willingly talk science.”

While these periods of calm, agitation, renewed hopes, and despair were succeeding each other in the course of those thirty-six hours, Pasteur’s friends hastened to his bedside. He said to Henri Sainte Claire Deville, one of the first to come: “I am sorry to die; I wanted to do much more for my country.” Sainte Claire Deville, trying to hide his grief under apparent confidence, answered, “Never fear; you will recover, you will make many more marvellous discoveries, you will live happy days; I am your senior, you will survive me. Promise me that you will pronounce my funeral oration.... I wish you would; you would say nice things of me,” he added between tears and smiles.

Bertin, Gernez, Duclaux, Baulin, Didon, then a curator at the Ecole Normale, Professor Auguste Lamy, the geologist Marcou (the two latter being Franche-comté friends), all claimed the privilege of helping Mme. Pasteur and M. Godélier in nursing one who inspired them all, not merely with an admiring and devoted affection, but with a feeling of tenderness amounting almost to a cult.

A private letter from a cousin, Mme. Cribier, gives an idea of those dark days (October 26, 1868): “The news is rather good this morning; the patient was able to sleep for a few hours last night, which he had not yet done. He had been so restless all day that M. Godélier felt uneasy about him and ordered complete silence in the whole flat; it was only in the study which is farthest away from the bedroom, and which has padded doors, that one was allowed to talk. That room is full from morning till night. All scientific Paris comes to inquire anxiously after the patient; intimate friends take it in turns to watch by him. Dumas, the great chemist, was affectionately insisting on taking his turn yesterday. Every morning the Emperor and Empress send a footman for news, which M. Godélier gives him in a sealed envelope. In fact, every mark of sympathy is given to poor Marie, and I hope that the worst may be spared her in spite of the alarming beginning. His mind seems so absolutely untouched, and he is still so young, that with rest and care he might yet be able to do some work. His stroke is accompanied by symptoms which are now occupying the attention of the whole Academy of Medicine. Paralysis always comes abruptly, whilst for M. Pasteur, it came in little successive fits, twenty or thirty perhaps, and was only complete at the end of twenty-four hours, which completely disconcerted the doctors who watched him, and delayed their having recourse to an active treatment. It seems that this fact is observed for the first time, and is puzzling the whole Faculty.”

M. Pasteur’s mind remained clear, luminous, dominating his prostrate body; he was evidently afraid that he should die before having thoroughly settled the question of silkworm diseases. “One night that I was alone with him,” relates M. Gernez, who hardly left his bedside during that terrible week, “after endeavouring in vain to distract his thoughts, I despairingly gave up the attempt and allowed him to express the ideas which were on his mind; finding, to my surprise, that they had his accustomed clearness and conciseness, I wrote what he dictated without altering a word, and the next day I brought to his illustrious colleague, Dumas—who hardly credited his senses—the memorandum which appeared in the report of the Académie on October 26, 1868, a week after the stroke which nearly killed him! It was a note on a very ingenious process for discovering in the earlier tests those eggs which are predisposed to flachery.”

The members of the Academy were much cheered by the reading of this note, which seemed to bring Pasteur back into their midst.

The building of the laboratory had been begun, and hoardings erected around the site. Pasteur, from his bed, asked day by day, “How are they getting on?” But his wife and daughter, going to the window of the dining-room which overlooked the Ecole Normale garden, only brought him back vague answers, for, as a matter of fact, the workmen had disappeared from the very first day of Pasteur’s illness. All that could be seen was a solitary labourer wheeling a barrow aimlessly about, probably under the orders of some official who feared to alarm the patient.

As Pasteur was not expected to recover, the trouble and expense were deemed unnecessary. Pasteur soon became aware of this, and one day that General Favé had come to see him he gave vent to some bitter feelings as to this cautious interruption of the building works, saying that it would have been simpler and more straightforward to state from the beginning that the work was suspended in the expectation of a probable demise.

Napoleon was informed of this excess of zeal, not only by General Favé, but by Sainte Claire Deville, who was a guest at Compiègne at the beginning of November, 1868. He wrote to the Minister of Public Instruction—

“My dear M. Duruy,—I have heard that—unknown to you probably—the men who were working at M. Pasteur’s laboratory were kept away from the very day he became ill; he has been much affected by this circumstance, which seemed to point to his non-recovery. I beg you will issue orders that the work begun should be continued. Believe in my sincere friendship.—Napoleon.”

Duruy immediately sent on this note to M. du Mesnil, whose somewhat long title was that of “Chief of the Division of Academic Administration of Scientific Establishments and of Higher Education.” M. du Mesnil evidently repudiated the charge for himself or for his Minister, for he wrote in a large hand, on the very margin of the Imperial autograph—

“M. Duruy gave no orders and had to give none. It is at his solicitation that the works were undertaken, but it is the Direction of Civic Buildings alone which can have interrupted them; the fact should be verified.”

M. de Cardaillac, head of the Direction of Civic Buildings, made an inquiry and the building was resumed.

It was only on November 30 that Pasteur left his bed for the first time and spent an hour in his armchair. He clearly analyzed to himself his melancholy condition, stricken down as he was by hemiplegia in his forty-sixth year; but having noticed that his remarks saddened his wife and daughter, he spoke no more about his illness, and only expressed his anxiety not to be a trouble, a burden, he said, to his wife, his son and daughter, and the devoted friends who helped to watch him at night.

In the daytime each offered to read to him. General Favé, whose active and inquiring mind was ever on the alert, brought him on one of his almost daily visits an ideal sick man’s book, easy to read and offering food for meditation. It was the translation of an English book called Self-Help,[28] and it consisted in a series of biographies, histories of lives illustrating the power of courage, devotion or intelligence. The author, glad to expound a discovery, to describe a masterpiece, to relate noble enterprises, to dwell upon the prodigies which energy can achieve, had succeeded in making a homogeneous whole of these unconnected narratives, a sort of homage to Willpower.

Pasteur agreed with the English writer in thinking that the supremacy of a nation resides in “the sum total of private virtues, activities and energy.” His thoughts rose higher still; men of science could wish for a greater glory than that of contributing to the fame and fortune of their country, they might aspire to originating vast benefits to the whole of humanity.

It was indeed a sad and a sublime spectacle, that of the contrast between that ardent, soaring soul and that patient helpless body. It was probably when thinking of those biographies—some of them too succinct, to his mind, Jenner’s for instance—that Pasteur wrote: “From the life of men whose passage is marked by a trace of durable light, let us piously gather up every word, every incident likely to make known the incentives of their great soul, for the education of posterity.” He looked upon the cult of great men as a great principle of national education, and believed that children, as soon as they could read, should be made acquainted with the heroic or benevolent souls of great men. In his pious patriotism he saw a secret of strength and of hope for a nation in its reverence for the memories of the great, a sacred and intimate bond between the visible and the invisible worlds. His soul was deeply religious. During his illness—a time when the things of this world assume their real proportions—his mind rose far beyond this earth. The Infinite appeared to him as it did to Pascal, and with the same rapture; he was less attracted by Pascal, when, proud and disdainful, he exposes man’s weakness for humiliation’s sake, than when he declares that “Man is produced but for Infinity,” and “he finds constant instruction in progress.” Pasteur believed in material progress as well as in moral improvement; he invariably marked in the books he was reading—Pascal, Nicole and others—those passages which were both consoling and exalting.

In one of his favourite books, Of the Knowledge of God and of Self, he much appreciated the passage where Bossuet ascribes to human nature “the idea of an infinite wisdom, of an absolute power, of an infallible rectitude, in one word, the idea of perfection.” Another phrase in the same book seemed to him applicable to experimental method as well as to the conduct of life: “The greatest aberration of the mind consists in believing a thing because it is desirable.”

With December, joy began to return to the Ecole Normale: the laboratory was progressing and seemed an embodiment of renewed hopes of further work. M. Godélier’s little bulletins now ran: “General condition most satisfactory. Excellent morale; the progress evidenced daily by the return of action in the paralysed muscles inspires the patient with great confidence. He is planning out his future sericiculture campaign, receives many callers without too much fatigue, converses brightly and often dictates letters.”

One visit was a great pleasure to Pasteur—that of the Minister, his cordial friend, Duruy, who brought him good news of the future of Higher Education. The augmented credit which was granted in the 1869 budget would make it possible to rebuild other laboratories besides that of the Ecole Normale, and also to create in other places new centres of study and research. After so many efforts and struggles, it was at last possible to foresee the day when chemistry, physics, physiology, natural history and mathematics would each have an independent department in a great province, which should be called the Practical School of Higher Studies. There would be no constraint, no hard and fast rules, no curriculum but that of free study: young men who were attracted to pure science, and others who preferred practical application, would find a congenial career before them as well as those who desired to give themselves up to teaching. It can well be imagined with what delight Pasteur heard these good tidings.

The bulletins continued to be favourable: “(December 15): Progress slow but sure: he has walked from his bed to his armchair with some assistance. (December 22): he has gone into the dining-room for dinner, leaning on a chair. (29th): he has walked a few steps without support.”

Pasteur saw in his convalescence but the returning means of working, and declared himself ready to start again for the neighbourhood of Alais at once, instead of taking the few months’ rest he was advised to have.

He urged that, after certain moths and chrysalides, had been examined through a microscope, complete certainty would be acquired as to the condition of their seed, and that perfect seed would therefore become accessible to all tradesmen both great and small; would it not be absurd and culpable to let reasons of personal health interfere with saving so many poor people from ruin?

His family had to give way, and on January 18, exactly three months after his paralytic stroke, he was taken to the Gare de Lyon by his wife and daughter and M. Gernez. He then travelled, lying on the cushions of a coupé carriage, as far as Alais, and drove from Alais to St. Hippolyte le Fort, where tests were being made on forced silkworms by the agricultural society of Le Vigan.

The house he came into was cold and badly arranged. M. Gernez improvised a laboratory, with the assistance of Maillot and Raulin, who had followed their master down. From his sofa or from his bed, Pasteur directed certain experiments on the forced specimens. M. Gernez writes: “The operations, of which we watched the phases through the microscope, fully justified his anticipations; and he rejoiced that he had not given up the game.” In the world of the Institute his departure was blamed by some and praised by others; but Pasteur merely considered that one man’s life is worthless if not useful to others.

Dumas wrote to him early in February: “My dear friend and colleague,—I have been thinking of you so much! I dread fatigue for you, and wish I could spare it you, whilst hoping that you may successfully achieve your great and patriotic undertaking. I have hesitated to write to you for fear you should feel obliged to answer. However, I should like to have direct news of you, as detailed as possible, and, besides that, I should be much obliged if you could send me a line to enlighten me on the two following points—

“1. When are you going back to Alais? And when will your Alais broods be near enough to their time to be most interesting to visit?

“2. What should I say to people who beg for healthy seed as if my pockets were full of it? I tell them it is too late; but if you could tell me a means of satisfying them, I should be pleased, particularly in the case of General Randon and M. Husson. The Marshal (Vaillant) is full of solicitude for you, and we never meet but our whole conversation turns upon you. With me, it is natural. With him less so, perhaps, but anyhow, he thinks of you as much as is possible, and this gives me a great deal of pleasure.... Please present to Madame Pasteur our united compliments and wishes. We wish the South could have the virtues of Achilles’ lance—of healing the wounds it has caused.—Yours affectionately.”

Pasteur was reduced to complete helplessness through having slipped and fallen on the stone floor of his uncomfortable house, and was obliged to dictate the following letter—

“My dear master,—I thank you for thinking of the poor invalid. I am very much in the same condition as when I left Paris, my progress having been retarded by a fall on my left side. Fortunately, I sustained no fracture, but only bruises, which were naturally painful and very slow to disappear.

“There are now no remaining traces of that accident, and I am as I was three weeks ago. The improvement in the movements of the leg and arm appears to have begun again, but with excessive slowness. I am about to have recourse to electricity, under the advice and instructions of Dr. Godélier, by means of a small Ruhmkorff apparatus which he has kindly sent me. My brain is still very weak.

“This is how my days are spent: in the morning my three young friends come to see me, and I arrange the day’s work. I get up at twelve, after having my breakfast in bed, and having had the newspaper read to me. If fine, I then spend an hour or two in the little garden of this house. Usually, if I am feeling pretty well, I dictate to my dear wife a page, or more frequently half a page, of a little book I am preparing, and in which I intend to give a short account of the whole of my observations. Before dinner, which I have alone with my wife and my little girl in order to avoid the fatigue of conversation, my young collaborators bring me a report of their work. About seven or half past, I always feel terribly tired and inclined to sleep twelve consecutive hours; but I invariably wake at midnight, not to sleep again until towards morning, when I doze again for an hour or two. What makes me hope for an ultimate cure is the fact that my appetite keeps good, and that those short hours of sleep appear to be sufficient. You see that on the whole I am doing nothing rash, being moreover rigorously watched by my wife and little daughter. The latter pitilessly takes books, pens, papers and pencils away from me with a perseverance which causes me joy and despair.

“It is because I know your affection for your pupils that I venture to give you so many details. I will now answer the other questions in your letter.

“I shall be at Alais from April 1; that will be the time when they will begin hatching seed for the industrial campaign, which will consequently be concluded about May 20 at the latest. Seeding will take place during June, more or less early according to departments. It is indeed very late to obtain seed, especially indigenous seed prepared according to my process. I had foreseen that I should receive demands at the last moment, and that I should do well to put by a few ounces; but, about three weeks ago, our energetic Minister wrote to ask me for some seed to distribute to schoolmasters, and I promised him what I had. However I will take some from his share and send you several lots of five grammes. The director of a most interesting Austrian establishment has also ordered two ounces, saying he is convinced of the excellence of my method. His establishment is a most interesting experimental magnanerie, founded in a handsome Illyrian property. Lastly, I have also promised two ounces to M. le Comte de Casabianca. One of my young men is going out to his place in Corsica to do the seeding.

“I was much touched by what you tell me of Marshal Vaillant’s kind interest in my health, and also by his kind thought in informing me of the encouragement given to my studies by the Society of Agriculture. I wish the cultivators of your South had a little of his scientific and methodical spirit.

“Madame Pasteur joins with me in sending you and your family, dear master, the expression of my gratitude and affectionate devotion.”

The normal season for the culture of silkworms was now aproaching, and Pasteur was impatient to accumulate the proofs which would vouch for the safety of his method; this had been somewhat doubted by the members of the Lyons Silks Commission, who possessed an experimental nursery. Most of those gentlemen averred that too much confidence should not be placed in the micrographs. “Our Commission,” thus ran their report of the preceding year, “considers the examination of corpuscles as a useful indication which should be consulted, but of which the results cannot be presented as a fact from which absolute consequences can be deducted.”

“They are absolute,” answered Pasteur, who did not admit reservations on a point which he considered as invulnerable.

On March 22, 1869, the Commission asked Pasteur for a little guaranteed healthy seed. Pasteur not only sent them this, but also sample lots, of which he thus predicted the future fate:—

1. One lot of healthy seed, which would succeed;

2. One lot of seed, which would perish exclusively from the corpuscle disease known as pébrine or gattine; 3. One lot of seed, which would perish exclusively from the flachery disease;

4. One lot of seeds, which would perish partly from corpuscle disease and partly from flachery.

“It seems to me,” added Pasteur, “that the comparison between the results of those different lots will do more to enlighten the Commission on the certainty of the principles I have established than could a mere sample of healthy seed.

“I desire that this letter should be sent to the Commission at its next meeting, and put down in the minutes.”

The Commission accepted with pleasure these unexpected surprise boxes.

About the same time one of his assistants, Maillot, started for Corsica at M. de Casabianca’s request. He took with him six lots of healthy seed to Vescovato, a few miles from Bastia.

The rest of the colony returned to the Pont Gisquet, near Alais, that mulberry-planted retreat, where, according to Pasteur, everything was conducive to work. Pasteur now looked forward to his definitive victory, and, full of confidence, organized his pupils’ missions. M. Duclaux, who was coming to the Pont Gisquet to watch the normal broods, would afterwards go into the Cévennes to verify the seedings made on the selection system. M. Gernez was to note the results of some seedings made by Pasteur himself the preceding year at M. Raibaud-Lange’s, at Paillerols, near Digne (Basses Alpes). Raulin alone would remain at the Pont Gisquet to study some points of detail concerning the flachery disease. So many results ought surely to reduce contradictors to silence!

“My dear friend and colleague,” wrote Dumas to Pasteur, “I need not tell you with what anxiety we are watching the progress of your precious health and of your silkworm campaign. I shall certainly be at Alais at the end of the week, and I shall see, under your kind direction, all that may furnish me with the means of guiding public opinion. You have quacks to fight and envy to conquer, probably a hopeless task; the best is to march right through them, Truth leading the way. It is not likely that they will be converted or reduced to silence.”

Whilst these expeditions were being planned, a letter from M. Gressier, the Minister of Agriculture, arrived very inopportunely. M. Gressier was better versed in sub rosâ ministerial combinations than in seeding processes, and he asked Pasteur to examine three lots of seeds sent to him by a Mademoiselle Amat, of Brives-la-Gaillarde, who was celebrated in the department of the Corrèze for her good management of silkworms. This magnanarelle, having had some successful results, was begging his Excellency to accord to those humble seeds his particular consideration, and to have them developed with every possible care.

At the same time she was sending samples of the same seeds to various places in the Gard, the Bouches du Rhône, etc., etc.

M. Gressier (April 20) asked Pasteur to examine them and to give him a detailed report. Pasteur answered four days afterwards in terms which were certainly not softened by the usual administrative precautions—

“Monsieur le Ministre, ... these three sorts of seed are worthless. If they are developed, even in very small nurseries, they will in every instance succumb to corpuscle disease. If my seeding process had been employed, it would not have required ten minutes to discover that Mademoiselle Amat’s cocoons, though excellent for spinning purposes, were absolutely unfit for reproduction. My seeding process gives the means of recognizing those broods which are suitable for seed, whilst opposing the production of the infected eggs which year by year flood the silkworm cultivating departments.

“I shall be much obliged, Monsieur le Ministre, if you will kindly inform the Prefect of the Corrèze of the forecasts which I now impart to you, and if you will ask him to report to you the results of Mademoiselle Amat’s three lots.

“For my part, I feel so sure of what I now affirm, that I shall not even trouble to test, by hatching them, the samples which you have sent me. I have thrown them into the river....”

J. B. Dumas had come to Alais, Messrs. Gernez and Duclaux now returned from their expeditions. In two hundred broods, each of one or two ounces of seed, coming from three different sources and hatched in various localities, not one failure was recorded. The Lyons Commission, which had made a note of Pasteur’s bold prognosis, found it absolutely correct; the excellence of the method was acknowledged by all who had conscientiously tried it. Now that the scourge was really conquered, Pasteur imagined that all he had to do was to set up a table of the results sent to him. But, from the south of France and from Corsica, jealousies were beginning their work of undermining; pseudo-scientists in their vanity proclaimed that everything was illusory that was outside their own affirmations, and the seed merchants, willing to ruin everybody rather than jeopardize their miserable interests, “did not hesitate (we are quoting M. Gernez) to perpetrate the most odious falsehoods.”

Instead of being annoyed, saddened, often indignant as he was, Pasteur would have done more wisely to look back upon the history of most great discoveries and of the initial difficulties which beset them. But he could not look upon such things philosophically; stupidity astonished him and he could not easily bring himself to believe in bad faith. His friends in Alais society, M. de Lachadenède, M. Despeyroux, professor of chemistry, might have reminded him, in their evening conversations, of the difficulties ever encountered in the service of mankind. The prejudice against potatoes, for instance, had lasted three hundred years. When they were brought over from Peru in the fifteenth century, it was asserted that they caused leprosy; in the seventeenth century, that accusation was recognized to be absurd, but it was said that they caused fever. One century later, in 1771, the Besançon Academy of Medicine having opened a competition for the answer to the following question of general interest: “What plants can be used to supplement other foods in times of famine?” a military apothecary, named Parmentier, competed and proved victoriously that the potato was quite harmless. After that, he began a propagandist campaign in favour of potatoes. But prejudice still subsisted in spite of his experimental fields and of the dinners in the menu of which potatoes held a large place. Louis XVI had then an inspiration worthy of Henry IV; he appeared in public, wearing in his buttonhole Parmentier’s little mauve flower, and thus glorified it in the eyes of the Court and of the crowd.

But such comparisons had no weight with Pasteur; he was henceforth sure of his method and longed to see it adopted, unable to understand why there should be further discussions now that the silkworm industry was saved and the bread of so many poor families assured. He was learning to know all the bitterness of sterile polemics, and the obstacles placed one by one in the way of those who attempt to give humanity anything new and useful. Fortunately he had what so many men of research have lacked, the active and zealous collaboration of pupils imbued with his principles, and the rarer and priceless blessing of a home life mingling with his laboratory life. His wife and his daughter, a mere child, shared his sericiculture labours; they had become magnanarelles equal to the most capable in Alais. Another privilege was the advocacy of some champions quite unknown to him. Those who loved science and who understood that it would now become, thanks to Pasteur, an important factor in agricultural and sericicultural matters hailed his achievements with joy. For instance, a letter was published on July 8, 1869, in the Journal of Practical Agriculture by a cultivator who had obtained excellent results by applying Pasteur’s method; the letter concluded as follows: “We should be obliged, if, through the columns of your paper, you would express to M. Pasteur our feelings of gratitude for his laborious and valuable researches. We firmly hope that he will one day reap the fruit of his arduous labours, and be amply compensated for the passionate attacks of which he is now the object.”

“Monsieur Pasteur,” once said the Mayor of Alais, Dr. Pagès, “if what you are showing me becomes verified in current practice, nothing can repay you for your work, but the town of Alais will raise a golden statue to you.”

Marshal Vaillant began to take more and more interest in this question, which was not darkened, in his eyes at least, by the dust of polemics. The old soldier, always scrupulously punctual at the meetings of the Institute and of the Imperial and Central Society of Agriculture, had amused himself by organizing a little silkworm nursery on the Pasteur system, in his own study, in the very centre of Paris. These experiments, in the Imperial palace might have reminded an erudite reader of Olivier de Serres’ Théâtre d’Agriculture of the time when the said Olivier de Serres planted mulberry trees in the Tuileries gardens at Henry IV’s request, and when, according to the old agricultural writer, a house was arranged at the end of the gardens “accommodated with all things necessary as well for the feeding of the worms as for the preparation of silk.”

The Marshal, though calling himself the most modest of sericicultors, had been able to appreciate the safety of a method which produced the same results in Paris as at the Pont Gisquet; the octogenarian veteran dwelt with complacency on the splendid condition of his silkworms in all their phases from the minute worm hatched from the seed-like egg to the splendid cocoon of white or yellow silk.

It occurred to Vaillant to suggest a decisive experiment in favour of Pasteur and of the silkworm industry. The Prince Imperial owned in Illyria, about six leagues from Trieste, a property called Villa Vicentina. One of Napoleon’s sisters, Elisa Bonaparte, had lived peacefully there after the fall of the first Empire, and had left it to her daughter, Princess Baciocchi, who bequeathed it to the Prince Imperial, with the rest of her fortune. Vines and mulberry trees grew plentifully on that vast domain, but the produce of cocoons was nil, pébrine and flachery having devastated the place. Marshal Vaillant, Minister of the Emperor’s Household, desired to render the princely property once again productive and, at the same time, to give his colleague of the Institute an opportunity of “definitely silencing the opposition created by ignorance and jealousy.” In a letter dated October 9, he requested Pasteur to send out 900 ounces of seed to Villa Vicentina, a large quantity, for one ounce produced, on an average, thirty kilogrammes of cocoons. Six days later the Marshal wrote to M. Tisserand, the director of the Crown agricultural establishments, who knew Villa Vicentina: “I have suggested to the Emperor that M. Pasteur should be offered a lodging at Villa Vicentina; the Emperor acquiesces in the most gracious manner. Tell me whether that is possible.”

M. Tisserand, heartily applauding the Marshal’s excellent idea, described the domain and the dwelling house, Villa Elisa, a white Italian two-storied house, situated amongst lawns and trees in a park of sixty hectares. “It would indeed be well,” continued M. Tisserand, “that M. Pasteur should find peace, rest, and a return of the health he has so valiantly compromised in his devotion to his country, in the midst of the lands which will be the first to profit by the fruit of his splendid discoveries and where his name will be blessed before long.”

Pasteur started three weeks later with his family; the long journey had to be taken in short stages, the state of his health still being very precarious. He stopped at Alais on the way, in order to fetch the selected seed, and on November 25, at 9 p.m., he reached Villa Vicentina. The fifty tenants of the domain did not suspect that the new arrival would bring back with him the prosperity of former years. Raulin, the “temporizer,” joined his master a few weeks later.

This was a period not of rest, but of a great calm, with regular work under a pure sky. Whilst waiting for hatching time, Pasteur continued to dictate to his wife the book he had mentioned to J. B. Dumas in a letter from St. Hippolyte le Fort. But the projected little book was changing its shape and growing into a two-volume work full of facts and documents. It was ready to publish by April, 1870.

When the moment for hatching the seed had arrived, Pasteur distributed twenty-five ounces among the tenants and kept twenty-five ounces for himself. An incident disturbed these days of work: a steward, who had by him an old box of Japanese seed, sold this suspicious seed with the rest. The idea that confiding peasants had thus been swindled sent Pasteur beside himself; in his violent anger he sent for this steward, overwhelmed him with reproaches and forbade him ever to show his face before him again.

“The Marshal,” wrote Dumas to Pasteur, “has told me of the swindles you have come across and which have upset you so much. Do not worry unreasonably; if I were you I would merely insert a line in a local paper: ‘M. Pasteur is only answerable for the seeds he himself sells to cultivators.’” Those cultivators soon were duly edified. The results of the seeding process were represented by a harvest of cocoons which brought in, after all expenses were paid, a profit of 22,000 francs, the first profit earned by the property for ten years. This was indeed an Imperial present from Pasteur; the Emperor was amazed and delighted.

The Government then desired to do for Pasteur what had been done for Dumas and Claude Bernard, that is, give him a seat in the Senate. His most decided partisan was the competitor that several political personages suggested against him: Henri Sainte Claire Deville. Deville wrote to Mme. Pasteur in June: “You must know that if Pasteur becomes a Senator, and Pasteur alone, you understand—for they cannot elect two chemists at once!—it will be a triumph for your friend—a triumph and an unmixed pleasure.”

The projected decree was one of eighteen then in preparation. The final list—the last under the Empire—where Emile Augier was to represent French literature was postponed from day to day.

Pasteur left Villa Vicentina on July 6, taking with him the gratitude of the people whose good genius he had been for nearly eight months. In northern Italy, as well as in Austria, his process of cellular seeding was now applied with success.

Before returning to France he went to Vienna and then to Munich: he desired to talk with the German chemist, Liebig, the most determined of his adversaries. He thought it impossible that Liebig’s ideas on fermentation should not have been shaken and altered in the last thirteen years. Liebig could not still be affirming that the presence of decomposing animal or vegetable matter should be necessary to fermentation! That theory had been destroyed by a simple and decisive experiment of Pasteur’s: he had sown a trace of yeast in water containing but sugar and mineral crystallized salts, and had seen this yeast multiply itself and produce a regular alcoholic fermentation.

Since all nitrogenized organic matter (constituting the ferment, according to Liebig) was absent, Pasteur considered that he thus proved the life of the ferment and the absence of any action from albuminoid matter in a stage of decomposition. The death phenomenon now appeared as a life phenomenon. How could Liebig deny the independent existence of ferments in their infinite littleness and their power of destroying and transforming everything? What did he think of all these new ideas? would he still write, as in 1845: “As to the opinion which explains putrefaction of animal substances by the presence of microscopic animalculæ, it may be compared to that of a child who would explain the rapidity of the Rhine current by attributing it to the violent movement of the numerous mill wheels of Mayence?”

Since that ingeniously fallacious paragraph, many results had come to light. Perhaps Liebig, who in 1851 hailed J. B. Dumas as a master, had now come to Dumas’ point of view respecting the fruitfulness of the Pastorian theory. That theory was extended to diseases; the infinitely small appeared as disorganizers of living tissues. The part played by the corpuscles in the contagious and hereditary pébrine led to many reflections on the contagious and hereditary element of human diseases. Even the long-postponed transmission of certain diseases was becoming clearer now that, within the vibrio of flachery, other corpuscles were found, germs of the flachery disease, ready to break out from one year to another.

To convince Liebig, to bring him to acknowledge the triumph of those ideas with the pleasure of a true savant, such was Pasteur’s desire when he entered Liebig’s laboratory. The tall old man, in a long frock coat, received him with kindly courtesy; but when Pasteur, who was eager to come to the object of his visit, tried to approach the delicate subject, Liebig, without losing his amenity, refused all discussion, alleging indisposition. Pasteur did not insist, but promised himself that he would return to the charge.

CHAPTER VII

1870—1872

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 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 manœuvres 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 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 dépôt 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 soldiers. Those who had been favoured by being immediately incorporated in a battalion of chasseurs à pied the dépôt 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 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 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 Château 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 represents 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 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 Château 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, characteristically 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 observations, 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 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 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 Châtillon 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-Grâce 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—