The inn was a sort of hut, letting in wind and rain. The thirteen open vessels were exposed to all the dusts in the room where Pasteur slept; nearly all of them presented alterations.

In the meanwhile the guide was sent to Chamonix where a tinker undertook to modify the lamp in view of the coming experiment.

The next morning, twenty flasks, which have remained celebrated in the world of scientific investigators, were brought to the Mer de Glace. Pasteur gathered the air with infinite precautions; he used to enjoy relating these details to those people who call everything easy. After tracing with a steel point a line on the glass, careful lest dusts should become a cause of error, he began by heating the neck and fine point of the bulb in the flame of the little spirit-lamp. Then raising the vessel above his head, he broke the point with steel nippers, the long ends of which had also been heated in order to burn the dusts which might be on their surface and which would have been driven into the vessel by the quick inrush of the air. Of those twenty flasks, closed again immediately, only one was altered. “If all the results are compared that I have obtained until now,” he wrote, on March 5, 1880, when relating this journey to the Académie, “it seems to me that it can be affirmed that the dusts suspended in atmospheric air are the exclusive origin, the necessary condition of life in infusions.”

And in an unnoticed little sentence, pointing already then to the goal he had in view, “What would be most desirable would be to push those studies far enough to prepare the road for a serious research into the origin of various diseases.” The action of those little beings, agents not only of fermentation but also of disorganization and putrefaction, already dawned upon him.

While Pasteur was going from the Observatoire cellars to the Mer de Glace, Pouchet was gathering air on the plains of Sicily, making experiments on Etna, and on the sea. He saw everywhere, he wrote, “air equally favourable to organic genesis, whether surcharged with detritus in the midst of our populous cities, or taken on the summit of a mountain, or on the sea, where it offers extreme purity. With a cubic decimetre of air, taken where you like, I affirm that you can ever produce legions of microzoa.”

And the heterogenists proclaimed in unison that “everywhere, strictly everywhere, air is constantly favourable to life.” Those who followed the debate nearly all leaned towards Pouchet. “I am afraid,” wrote a scientific journalist in La Presse (1860), “that the experiments you quote, M. Pasteur, will turn against you.... The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic....”

And yet some adversaries should have been struck by the efforts of a mind which, while marching forward to establish new facts, was ever seeking arguments against itself, and turned back to strengthen points which seemed yet weak. In November, Pasteur returned to his studies on fermentations in general and lactic fermentation in particular. Endeavouring to bring into evidence the animated nature of the lactic ferment, and to indicate the most suitable surroundings for the self-development of that ferment, he had come across some complications which hampered the purity and the progress of that culture. Then he had perceived another fermentation, following upon lactic fermentation and known as butyric fermentation. As he did not immediately perceive the origin of this butyric acid—which causes the bad smell in rancid butter—he ended by being struck by the inevitable coincidence between the (then called) infusory animalculæ and the production of this acid.

“The most constantly repeated tests,” he wrote in February, 1861, “have convinced me that the transformation of sugar, mannite and lactic acid into butyric acid is due exclusively to those Infusories, and they must be considered as the real butyric ferment.” Those vibriones that Pasteur described as under the shape of small cylindric rods with rounded ends, sliding about, sometimes in a chain of three or four articles, he sowed in an appropriate medium, as he sowed beer yeast. But, by a strange phenomenon, “those infusory animalculæ,” he said, “live and multiply indefinitely, without requiring the least quantity of air. And not only do they live without air, but air actually kills them. It is sufficient to send a current of atmospheric air during an hour or two through the liquor where those vibriones were multiplying to cause them all to perish and thus to arrest butyric fermentation, whilst a current of pure carbonic acid gas passing through that same liquor hindered them in no way. Thence this double proposition,” concluded Pasteur; “the butyric ferment is an infusory; that infusory lives without free oxygen.” He afterwards called anaërobes those beings which do not require air, in opposition to the name of aërobes given to other microscopic beings who require air to live.

Biot, without knowing all the consequences of these studies, had not been long in perceiving that he had been far too sceptical, and that physiological discoveries of the very first rank would be the outcome of researches on so-called spontaneous generation. He would have wished, before he died, not only that Pasteur should be the unanimously selected candidate for the 1861 Zecker prize in the Chemistry Section, but also that his friend, forty-eight years younger than himself, should be a member of the Institute. At the beginning of 1861, there was one vacancy in the Botanical Section. Biot took advantage of the researches pursued by Pasteur within the last three years, to say and to print that he should be nominated as a candidate. “I can hear the commonplace objection: he is a chemist, a physicist, not a professional botanist.... But that very versatility, ever active and ever successful, should be a title in his favour.... Let us judge of men by their works and not by the destination more or less wide or narrow that they have marked out for themselves. Pasteur made his début before the Académie in 1848, with the remarkable treatise which contained by implication the resolution of the paratartaric acid into its two components, right and left. He was then twenty-six; the sensation produced is not forgotten. Since then, during the twelve years which followed, he has submitted to your appreciation twenty-one papers, the last ten relating to vegetable physiology. All are full of new facts, often very unexpected, several very far reaching, not one of which has been found inaccurate by competent judges. If to-day, by your suffrage, you introduce M. Pasteur into the Botanical Section, as you might safely have done for Théodore de Saussure or Ingenhousz, you will have acquired for the Académie and for that particular section an experimentalist of the same order as those two great men.”

Balard, who in this academic campaign made common cause with Biot, was also making efforts to persuade several members of the Botanical Section. He was walking one day in the Luxembourg with Moquin-Tandon, pouring out, in his rasping voice, arguments in favour of Pasteur. “Well,” said Moquin-Tandon, “let us go to Pasteur’s, and if you find a botanical work in his library I shall put him on the list.” It was a witty form given to the scruples of the botanists. Pasteur only had twenty-four votes; Duchartre was elected.

The study of a microscopic fungus, capable by itself of transforming wine into vinegar, the bringing to light of the action of that mycoderma, endowed with the power of taking oxygen from air and fixing it upon alcohol, thus transforming the latter into acetic acid; the most ingenious experiments to demonstrate the absolute and exclusive power of the little plant, all gave reason to Biot’s affirmation that such skill in the observation of inferior vegetables equalled any botanist’s claim. Pasteur, showing that the interpretations of the causes which act in the formation of vinegar were false, and that alone the microscopic fungus did everything, was constantly dwelling on this power of the infinitesimally small. “Mycoderma,” he said, “can bring the action of combustion of the oxygen in air to bear on a number of organic materia. If microscopic beings were to disappear from our globe, the surface of the earth would be encumbered with dead organic matter and corpses of all kinds, animal and vegetable. It is chiefly they who give to oxygen its powers of combustion. Without them, life would become impossible because death would be incomplete.”

Pasteur’s ideas on fermentation and putrefaction were being adopted by disciples unknown to him. “I am sending you,” he wrote to his father, “a treatise on fermentation, which was the subject of a recent competition at the Montpellier Faculty. This work is dedicated to me by its author, whom I do not know at all, a circumstance which shows that my results are spreading and exciting some attention.

“I have only read the last pages, which have pleased me; if the rest is the same, it is a very good résumé, entirely conceived in the new direction of my labours, evidently well understood by this young doctor.

“M. Biot is very well, only suffering a little from insomnia. He has, fortunately for his health, finished that great account of my former results which will be the greatest title I can have to the esteem of scientists.”

Biot died without having realized his last wish, which was to have Pasteur for a colleague. It was only at the end of the year 1862 that Pasteur was nominated by the Mineralogical Section for the seat of Senarmont. This new candidature did not go without a hitch. In his study on tartrates, Pasteur, as will be remembered, had discovered that their crystalline forms were hemihedral. When he examined the characteristic faces, he held the crystal in a particular way and said: “It is hemihedral on the right side.” A German mineralogist, named Rammelsberg, holding the crystal in the opposite direction, said: “It is hemihedral on the left side.” It was a mere matter of conventional orientation; nothing was changed in the scientific results announced by Pasteur. But some adversaries made a weapon of that inverted crystal; not a dangerous weapon, thought Pasteur at first, fancying that a few words would clear the misunderstanding. But the campaign persisted, with insinuations, murmurs, whisperings. When Pasteur saw this simple difference in the way the crystal was held stigmatised as a cause of error, he desired to cut short this quarrel made in Germany. He then had with him no longer Raulin, but M. Duclaux, who was beginning his scientific life. M. Duclaux remembers one day when Pasteur, seeing that incontrovertible arguments were required, sent for a cabinet maker with his tools. He superintended the making of a complete wooden set of the crystalline forms of tartrates, a gigantic set, such as Gulliver might have seen in Brobdingnag if he had studied geometrical forms in that island. A coating of coloured paper finished the work; green paper marked the hemihedral face. A member of the Philomathic Society, Pasteur asked the Society to give up the meeting of November 8, 1862, to the discussion of that subject. Several of his colleagues vainly endeavoured to dissuade him from that intention; Pasteur hearkened to no one. He took with him his provision of wooden crystals, and gave a vivid and impassioned lecture. “If you know the question,” he asked his adversaries, “where is your conscience? If you know it not, why meddle with it?” And with one of his accustomed sudden turns, “What is all this?” he added. “One of those incidents to which we all, more or less, are exposed by the conditions of our career; no bitterness remains behind. Of what account is it in the presence of those mysteries, so varied, so numerous, that we all, in divers directions, are working to clear? It is true I have had recourse to an unusual means of defending myself against attacks not openly published, but I think that means was safe and loyal, and deferential towards you. And,” he added, thinking of Biot and Senarmont, “will you have my full confession? You know that I had during fifteen years the inestimable advantage of the intercourse of two men who are no more, but whose scientific probity shone as one of the beacons of the Académie des Sciences. Before deciding on the course I have now followed, I questioned my memory and endeavoured to revive their advice, and it seemed to me that they would not have disowned me.”

M. Duclaux said about this meeting: “Pasteur has since then won many oratorical victories. I do not know of a greater one than that deserved by that acute and penetrating improvisation. He was still much heated as we were walking back to the Rue d’Ulm, and I remember making him laugh by asking him why, in the state of mind he was in, he had not concluded by hurling his wooden crystals at his adversaries’ heads.”

On December 8, 1862, Pasteur was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences; out of sixty voters he received thirty-six suffrages.

The next morning, when the gates of the Montparnasse cemetery were opened, a woman walked towards Biot’s grave with her hands full of flowers. It was Mme. Pasteur who was bringing them to him who lay there since February 5, 1862, and who had loved Pasteur with so deep an affection.

A letter picked up at a sale of autographs, one of the last Biot wrote, gives a finishing touch to his moral portrait. It is addressed to an unknown person discouraged with this life. “Sir,—The confidence you honour me with touches me. But I am not a physician of souls. However, in my opinion, you could not do better than seek remedies to your moral suffering in work, religion, and charity. A useful work taken up with energy and persevered in will revive by occupation the forces of your mind. Religious feelings will console you by inspiring you with patience. Charity manifested to others will soften your sorrows and teach you that you are not alone to suffer in this life. Look around you, and you will see afflicted ones more to be pitied than yourself. Try to ease their sufferings; the good you will do to them will fall back upon yourself and will show you that a life which can thus be employed is not a burden which cannot, which must not be borne.”

On his entering the Académie des Sciences, Balard and Dumas advised Pasteur to let alone his wooden crystals and to continue his studies on ferments. He undertook to demonstrate that “the hypothesis of a phenomenon of mere contact is not more admissible than the opinion which placed the ferment character exclusively in dead albuminoid matter.” Whilst continuing his researches on beings which could live without air, he tried, as he went along, à propos of spontaneous generation, to find some weak point in his work. Until now the liquids he had used, however alterable they were, had been brought up to boiling point. Was there not some new and decisive experiment to make? Could he not study organic matter as constituted by life and expose to the contact of air deprived of its germs some fresh liquids, highly putrescible, such as blood and urine? Claude Bernard, joining in these experiments of Pasteur’s, himself took some blood from a dog. This blood was sealed up in a glass phial, with every condition of purity, and the phial remained in a stove constantly heated up to 30°C. from March 3 until April 20, 1862, when Pasteur laid it on the Académie table. The blood had suffered no sort of putrefaction; neither had some urine treated in the same way. “The conclusions to which I have been led by my first series of experiments,” said Pasteur before the Académie, “are therefore applicable in all cases to organic substances.”

While studying putrefaction, which is itself but a fermentation applied to animal materia, while showing the marvellous power of the infinitesimally small, he foresaw the immensity of the domain he had conquered, as will be proved by the following incident. Some time after the Académie election, in March, 1863, the Emperor, who took an interest in all that took place in the small laboratory of the Rue d’Ulm, desired to speak with Pasteur. J. B. Dumas claimed the privilege of presenting his former pupil, and the interview took place at the Tuileries. Napoleon questioned Pasteur with a gentle, slightly dreamy insistence. Pasteur wrote the next day: “I assured the Emperor that all my ambition was to arrive at the knowledge of the causes of putrid and contagious diseases.”

In the meanwhile, the chapter on ferments was not yet closed; Pasteur was attracted by studies on wine. At the beginning of the 1863 holidays, just before starting for Arbois, he drew up this programme with one of his pupils: “From the 20th to the 30th (August) preparation in Paris of all the vessels, apparatus, products, that we must take. September 1, departure for the Jura; installation; purchase of the products of a vineyard. Immediate beginning of tests of all kinds. We shall have to hurry; grapes do not keep long.”

Whilst he was preparing this vintage tour, which he intended to make with three “Normaliens,” Duclaux, Gernez and Lechartier, the three heterogenists, Pouchet, Joly and Musset, proposed to use that same time in fighting Pasteur on his own ground. They started from Bagnères-de-Luchon followed by several guides and taking with them all kinds of provisions and some little glass flasks with a slender pointed neck. They crossed the pass of Venasque without incident, and decided to go further, to the Rencluse. Some isard-stalkers having come towards the strange-looking party, they were signalled away; even the guides were invited to stand aside. It was necessary to prevent any dusts from reaching the bulbs, which were thus opened at 8 p.m. at a height of 2,083 metres. But eighty-three metres higher than the Montanvert did not seem to them enough, they wished to go higher. “We shall sleep on the mountain,” said the three scientists. Fatigue and bitter cold, they withstood everything with the courage inspired by a problem to solve. The next morning they climbed across that rocky chaos, and at last reached the foot of one of the greatest glaciers of the Maladetta, 3,000 metres above the sea-level. “A very deep narrow crevasse,” says Pouchet, “seemed to us the most suitable place for our experiments.” Four phials (filled with a decoction of hay) were opened and sealed again with precautions that Pouchet considered as exaggerated.

Pouchet, in his merely scientific report, does not relate the return journey, yet more perilous than the ascent. At one of the most dangerous places, Joly slipped, and would have rolled into a precipice, but for the strength and presence of mind of one of the guides. All three at last came back to Luchon, forgetful of dangers run, and glorying at having reached 1,000 metres higher than Pasteur. They triumphed when they saw alteration in their flasks! “Therefore,” said Pouchet, “the air of the Maladetta, and of high mountains in general, is not incapable of producing alteration in an eminently putrescible liquor; therefore heterogenia or the production of a new being devoid of parents, but formed at the expense of ambient organic matter, is for us a reality.”

The Academy of Sciences was taking more and more interest in this debate. In November, 1863, Joly and Musset expressed a wish that the Academy should appoint a Commission, before whom the principal experiments of Pasteur and of his adversaries should be repeated. On this occasion Flourens expressed his opinion thus: “I am blamed in certain quarters for giving no opinion on the question of spontaneous generation. As long as my opinion was not formed, I had nothing to say. It is now formed, and I give it: M. Pasteur’s experiments are decisive. If spontaneous generation is real, what is required to obtain animalculæ? Air and putrescible liquor. M. Pasteur puts air and putrescible liquor together and nothing happens. Therefore spontaneous generation is not. To doubt further is to misunderstand the question.”

Already in the preceding year, the Académie itself had evidenced its opinion by giving Pasteur the prize of a competition proposed in these terms: “To attempt to throw some new light upon the question of so-called spontaneous generation by well-conducted experiments.” Pasteur’s treatise on Organized Corpuscles existing in Atmosphere had been unanimously preferred. Pasteur might have entrenched himself behind the suffrages of the Academy, but begged it, in order to close those incessant debates, to appoint the Commission demanded by Joly and Musset.

The members of the Commission were Flourens, Dumas, Brongniart, Milne-Edwards, and Balard. Pasteur wished that the discussion should take place as soon as possible, and it was fixed for the first fortnight in March. But Pouchet, Joly and Musset asked for a delay on account of the cold. “We consider that it might compromise, perhaps prevent, our results, to operate in a temperature which often goes below zero even in the south of France. How do we know that it will not freeze in Paris between the first and fifteenth of March?” They even asked the Commission to adjourn experiments until the summer. “I am much surprised,” wrote Pasteur, “at the delay sought by Messrs. Pouchet, Joly and Musset; it would have been easy with a stove to raise the temperature to the degree required by those gentlemen. For my part I hasten to assure the Academy that I am at its disposal, and that in summer, or in any other season, I am ready to repeat my experiments.”

Some evening scientific lectures had just been inaugurated at the Sorbonne; such a subject as spontaneous generation was naturally on the programme. When Pasteur entered the large lecture room of the Sorbonne on April 7, 1864, he must have been reminded of the days of his youth, when crowds came, as to a theatrical performance, to hear J. B. Dumas speak. Dumas’ pupil, now a master, in his turn found a still greater crowd invading every corner. Amongst the professors and students, such celebrities as Duruy, Alexandre Dumas senior, George Sand, Princess Mathilde, were being pointed out. Around them, the inevitable “smart” people who must see everything and be seen everywhere, without whom no function favoured by fashion would be complete; in short what is known as the “Tout Paris.” But this “Tout Paris” was about to receive a novel impression, probably a lasting one. The man who stood before this fashionable audience was not one of those speakers who attempt by an insinuating exordium to gain the good graces of their hearers; it was a grave-looking man, his face full of quiet energy and reflective force. He began in a deep, firm voice, evidently earnestly convinced of the greatness of his mission as a teacher: “Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago, the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary. Such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.”

He had now, he continued, entered upon a subject accessible to experimentation, and which he had made the object of the strictest and most conscientious studies. Can matter organize itself? Can living beings come into the world without having been preceded by beings similar to them? After showing that the doctrine of spontaneous generation had gradually lost ground, he explained how the invention of the microscope had caused it to reappear at the end of the seventeenth century, “in the face of those beings, so numerous, so varied, so strange in their shapes, the origin of which was connected with the presence of all dead vegetable and animal matter in a state of disorganization.” He went on to say how Pouchet had taken up this study, and to point out the errors that this new partisan of an old doctrine had committed, errors difficult to recognize at first. With perfect clearness and simplicity, Pasteur explained how the dusts which are suspended in air contain germs of inferior organized beings and how a liquid preserved, by certain precautions, from the contact of these germs can be kept indefinitely, giving his audience a glimpse of his laboratory methods.

“Here,” he said, “is an infusion of organic matter, as limpid as distilled water, and extremely alterable. It has been prepared to-day. To-morrow it will contain animalculæ, little infusories, or flakes of mouldiness.

“I place a portion of that infusion into a flask with a long neck, like this one. Suppose I boil the liquid and leave it to cool. After a few days, mouldiness or animalculæ will develop in the liquid. By boiling, I destroyed any germs contained in the liquid or against the glass; but that infusion being again in contact with air, it becomes altered, as all infusions do. Now suppose I repeat this experiment, but that, before boiling the liquid, I draw (by means of an enameller’s lamp) the neck of the flask into a point, leaving, however, its extremity open. This being done, I boil the liquid in the flask, and leave it to cool. Now the liquid of this second flask will remain pure not only two days, a month, a year, but three or four years—for the experiment I am telling you about is already four years old, and the liquid remains as limpid as distilled water. What difference is there, then, between those two vases? They contain the same liquid, they both contain air, both are open! Why does one decay and the other remain pure? The only difference between them is this: in the first case, the dusts suspended in air and their germs can fall into the neck of the flask and arrive into contact with the liquid, where they find appropriate food and develop; thence microscopic beings. In the second flask, on the contrary, it is impossible, or at least extremely difficult, unless air is violently shaken, that dusts suspended in air should enter the vase; they fall on its curved neck. When air goes in and out of the vase through diffusions or variations of temperature, the latter never being sudden, the air comes in slowly enough to drop the dusts and germs that it carries at the opening of the neck or in the first curves.

“This experiment is full of instruction; for this must be noted, that everything in air save its dusts can easily enter the vase and come into contact with the liquid. Imagine what you choose in the air—electricity, magnetism, ozone, unknown forces even, all can reach the infusion. Only one thing cannot enter easily, and that is dust, suspended in air. And the proof of this is that if I shake the vase violently two or three times, in a few days it contains animalculæ or mouldiness. Why? because air has come in violently enough to carry dust with it.

“And, therefore, gentlemen, I could point to that liquid and say to you, I have taken my drop of water from the immensity of creation, and I have taken it full of the elements appropriated to the development of inferior beings. And I wait, I watch, I question it, begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. But it is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago; it is dumb because I have kept it from the only thing man cannot produce, from the germs which float in the air, from Life, for Life is a germ and a germ is Life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.”

The public enthusiastically applauded these words, which ended the lecture:

“No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Those who affirm it have been duped by illusions, by ill-conducted experiments, spoilt by errors that they either did not perceive or did not know how to avoid.”

In the meanwhile, besides public lectures and new studies, Pasteur succeeded in “administering” the Ecole Normale in the most complete sense of the word. His influence was such that students acquired not a taste but a passion for study; he directed each one in his own line, he awakened their instincts. It was already through his wise inspiration that five “Normaliens agrégés” should have the chance of the five curators’ places; but his solicitude did not stop there. If some disappointment befell some former pupil, still in that period of youth which doubts nothing or nobody, he came vigorously to his assistance; he was the counsellor of the future. A few letters will show how he understood his responsibility.

A Normalien, Paul Dalimier, received 1st at the agrégation of Physics in 1858, afterwards Natural History curator at the Ecole, and who, having taken his doctor’s degree, asked to be sent to a Faculty, was ordered to go to the Lycée of Chaumont.

In the face of this almost disgrace he wrote a despairing letter to Pasteur. He could do nothing more, he said, his career was ruined. “My dear sir,” answered Pasteur, “I much regret that I could not see you before your departure for Chaumont. But here is the advice which I feel will be useful to you. Do not manifest your just displeasure; but attract attention from the very first by your zeal and talent. In a word, aggravate, by your fine discharge of your new duties, the injustice which has been committed. The discouragement expressed in your last letter is not worthy of a man of science. Keep but three objects before your eyes: your class, your pupils and the work you have begun.... Do your duty to the best of your ability, without troubling about the rest.”

Pasteur undertook the rest himself. He went to the Ministry to complain of the injustice and unfairness, from a general point of view, of that nomination.

“Sir,” answered the Chaumont exile, “I have received your kind letter. My deep respect for every word of yours will guarantee my intention to follow your advice. I have given myself up entirely to my class. I have found here a Physics cabinet in a deplorable state, and I have undertaken to reorganise it.”

He had not time to finish: justice was done, and Paul Dalimier was made maître des conférences at the Ecole Normale. He died at twenty-eight.

The wish that masters and pupils should remain in touch with each other after the three years at the Ecole Normale had already in 1859 inspired Pasteur to write a report on the desirableness of an annual report entitled, Scientific Annals of the Ecole Normale.

The initiative of pregnant ideas often is traced back to France. But, through want of tenacity, she allows those same ideas to fall into decay and they are taken up by other nations, transplanted, developed, until they come back unrecognized to their mother country. Germany had seen the possibilities of such a publication as Pasteur’s projected Annals. Renan wrote about that time to the editors of the Revue Germanique, a Review intended to draw France and Germany together: “In France, nothing is made public until achieved and ripened. In Germany, a work is given out provisionally, not as a teaching, but as an incitement to think, as a ferment for the mind.”

Pasteur felt all the power of that intellectual ferment. In the volume entitled Centenary of the Ecole Normale, M. Gernez has recalled Pasteur’s enthusiasm when he spoke of those Annals. Was it not for former pupils, away in the provinces, a means of collaborating with their old masters and of keeping in touch with Paris?

It was in June, 1864, that Pasteur presented the first number of this publication to the Académie des Sciences. M. Gernez, who was highly thought of by Pasteur, has not related in the Centenary that the book opened with some of his own researches on the rotatory power of certain liquids and their steam.

At that same time, the heterogenists had at last placed themselves at the disposal of the Académie and were invited to meet Pasteur before the Natural History Commission at M. Chevreul’s laboratory. “I affirm,” said Pasteur, “that in any place it is possible to take up from the ambient atmosphere a determined volume of air containing neither egg nor spore and producing no generation in putrescible solutions.” The Commission declared that, the whole contest bearing upon one simple fact, one experiment only should take place. The heterogenists wanted to recommence a whole series of experiments, thus reopening the discussion. The Commission refused, and the heterogenists, unwilling to concede the point, retired from the field, repudiating the arbiters that they had themselves chosen.

And yet Joly had written to the Académie, “If one only of our flasks remains pure, we will loyally own our defeat.” A scientist who later became Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Sciences, Jamin, wrote about this conflict: “The heterogenists, however they may have coloured their retreat, have condemned themselves. If they had been sure of the fact—which they had solemnly engaged to prove or to own themselves vanquished,—they would have insisted on showing it, it would have been the triumph of their doctrine.”

The heterogenists appealed to the public. A few days after their defeat, Joly gave a lecture at the Faculty of Medicine. He called the trial, as decided on by the Commission, a “circus competition”; he was applauded by those who saw other than scientific questions in the matter. The problem was now coming down from mountains and laboratories into the arena of society discussions. If all comes from a germ, people said, whence came the first germ? We must bow before that mystery, said Pasteur; it is the question of the origin of all things, and absolutely outside the domain of scientific research. But an invincible curiosity exists amongst most men which cannot admit that science should have the wisdom to content itself with the vast space between the beginning of the world and the unknown future. Many people transform a question of fact into a question of faith. Though Pasteur had brought into his researches a solely scientific preoccupation, many people approved or blamed him as the defender of a religious cause.

Vainly had he said, “There is here no question of religion, philosophy, atheism, materialism, or spiritualism. I might even add that they do not matter to me as a scientist. It is a question of fact; when I took it up I was as ready to be convinced by experiments that spontaneous generation exists as I am now persuaded that those who believe it are blindfolded.”

It might have been thought that Pasteur’s arguments were in support of a philosophical theory! It seemed impossible to those whose ideas came from an ardent faith, from the influence of their surroundings, from personal pride or from interested calculations to understand that a man should seek truth for its own sake and with no other object than to proclaim it. Hostilities were opened, journalists kept up the fire. A priest, the Abbé Moigno spoke of converting unbelievers through the proved non-existence of spontaneous generation. The celebrated novelist, Edmond About, took up Pouchet’s cause with sparkling irony. “M. Pasteur preached at the Sorbonne amidst a concert of applause which must have gladdened the angels.”

Thus, among the papers and reviews of that time we can follow the divers ideas brought out by these discussions. Guizot, then almost eighty, touched on this problem with the slightly haughty assurance of one conscious of having given much thought to his beliefs and destiny. “Man has not been formed through spontaneous generation, that is by a creative and organizing force inherent in matter; scientific observation daily overturns that theory, by which, moreover, it is impossible to explain the first appearance upon the earth of man in his complete state.” And he praised “M. Pasteur, who has brought into this question the light of his scrupulous criticism.”

Nisard was a wondering witness of what took place in the small laboratory of the Ecole Normale. Ever preoccupied by the relations between science and religion, he heard with some surprise Pasteur saying modestly, “Researches on primary causes are not in the domain of Science, which only recognizes facts and phenomena which it can demonstrate.”

Pasteur did not disinterest himself from the great problems which he called the eternal subjects of men’s solitary meditations. But he did not admit the interference of religion with science any more than that of science with religion.

His eagerness during a conflict was only equalled by his absolute forgetfulness after the conflict was over. He answered some one who, years later, reminded him of that past so full of attacks and praises. “A man of science should think of what will be said of him in the following century, not of the insults or the compliments of one day.”

Pasteur, anxious to regain lost time, hurried to return to his studies on wine. “Might not the diseases of wines,” he said at the Académie des Sciences in January, 1864, “be caused by organized ferments, microscopic vegetations, of which the germs would develop when certain circumstances of temperature, of atmospheric variations, of exposure to air, would favour their evolution or their introduction into wines?... I have indeed reached this result that the alterations of wines are co-existent with the presence and multiplication of microscopic vegetations.” Acid wines, bitter wines, “ropy” wines, sour wines, he had studied them all with a microscope, his surest guide in recognizing the existence and form of the evil.

As he had more particularly endeavoured to remedy the cause of the acidity which often ruins the Jura red or white wines in the wood, the town of Arbois, proud of its celebrated rosy and tawny wines, placed an impromptu laboratory at his disposal during the holidays of 1864; the expenses were all to be covered by the town. “This spontaneous offer from a town dear to me for so many reasons,” answered Pasteur to the Mayor and Town Council, “does too much honour to my modest labours, and the way in which it is made covers me with confusion.” He refused it however, fearing that the services he might render should not be proportionate to the generosity of the Council. He preferred to camp out with his curators in an old coffee room at the entrance of the town, and they contented themselves with apparatus of the most primitive description, generally made by some local tinker or shoeing smith.

The problem consisted, in Pasteur’s view, in opposing the development of organized ferments or parasitic vegetations, causes of the diseases of wines. After some fruitless endeavours to destroy all vitality in the germs of these parasites, he found that it was sufficient to keep the wine for a few moments at a temperature of 50° C. to 60° C. “I have also ascertained that wine was never altered by that preliminary operation, and as nothing prevents it afterwards from undergoing the gradual action of the oxygen in the air—the only cause, as I think, of its improvement with age—it is evident that this process offers every advantage.”

It seems as if that simple and practical means, applicable to every quality of wine, now only had to be tried. But not so. Every progress is opposed by prejudice, petty jealousies, indolence even. A devoted obstinacy is required in order to overcome this opposition. Pasteur’s desire was that his country should benefit by his discovery. An Englishman had written to him: “People are astonished in France that the sale of French wines should not have become more extended here since the Commercial Treaties. The reason is simple enough. At first we eagerly welcomed those wines, but we soon had the sad experience that there was too much loss occasioned by the diseases to which they are subject.”

Pasteur was in the midst of those discussions, experimental sittings, etc., when J. B. Dumas suddenly asked of him the greatest of sacrifices, that of leaving the laboratory.

CHAPTER VI

1865—1870

Before his departure for Alais, Pasteur had read an essay on the history of the silkworm, published by one of his colleagues, Quatrefages, born like Dumas in the Gard. Quatrefages attributed to an Empress of China the first knowledge of the art of utilizing silk, more than 4,000 years ago. The Chinese, in possession of the precious insect, had jealously preserved the monopoly of its culture, even to the point of making it a capital offence to take beyond the frontiers of the Empire the eggs of the silkworm. A young princess, 2,000 years later, had the courage to infringe this law for love of her betrothed, whom she was going to join in the centre of Asia, and also through the almost equally strong desire to continue her fairy-like occupation after her marriage.

Pasteur appreciated the pretty legend, but was more interested in the history of the acclimatizing of the mulberry tree. From Provence Louis XI took it to Touraine: Catherine de Medici planted it in Orléanais. Henry IV had some mulberry trees planted in the park at Fontainebleau and in the Tuileries where they succeeded admirably. He also encouraged a Treatise on the Gathering of Silk by Olivier de Serres. This earliest agricultural writer in France was much appreciated by the king, in spite of the opposition of Sully, who did not believe in this new fortune for France. Documentary evidence is lacking as to the development of the silk industry.

From 1700 to 1788, wrote Quatrefages, France produced annually about 6,000,000 kilogrammes of cocoons. This was decreased by one-half under the Republic; wool replaced silk perhaps from necessity, perhaps from affectation.

Napoleon I restored that luxury. The sericicultural industry prospered from the Imperial Epoch until the reign of Louis Philippe, to such an extent as to reach in one year a total of 20,000,000 kilogrammes of cocoons, representing 100,000,000 francs. The name of Tree of Gold given to the mulberry, had never been better deserved.

Suddenly all these riches fell away. A mysterious disease was destroying the nurseries. “Eggs, worms, chrysalides, moths, the disease may manifest itself in all the organs,” wrote Dumas in his report to the Senate. “Whence does it come? how is it contracted? No one knows. But its invasion is recognized by little brown or black spots.” It was therefore called “corpuscle disease”; it was also designated as “gattine” from the Italian gattino, kitten; the sick worms held up their heads and put out their hooked feet like cats about to scratch. But of all those names, that of “pébrine” adopted by Quatrefages was the most general. It came from the patois word pébré (pepper). The spots on the diseased worms were, in fact, rather like pepper grains.

The first symptoms had been noticed by some in 1845, by others in 1847. But in 1849 it was a disaster. The South of France was invaded. In 1853, seed had to be procured from Lombardy. After one successful year the same disappointments recurred. Italy was attacked, also Spain and Austria. Seed was procured from Greece, Turkey, the Caucasus, but the evil was still on the increase; China itself was attacked, and, in 1864, it was only in Japan that healthy seed could be found.

Every hypothesis was suggested, atmospheric conditions, degeneration of the race of silkworms, disease of the mulberry tree, etc.—books and treatises abounded, but in vain.

When Pasteur started for Alais (June 16, 1865), entrusted with this scientific mission by the Minister of Agriculture, his mind saw but that one point of interrogation, “What caused these fatal spots?” On his arrival he sympathetically questioned the Alaisians. He received confused and contradictory answers, indications of chimerical remedies; some cultivators poured sulphur or charcoal powder on the worms, some mustard meal or castor sugar; ashes and soot were used, quinine powders, etc. Some cultivators preferred liquids, and syringed the mulberry leaves with wine, rum or absinthe. Fumigations of chlorine, of coal tar, were approved by some and violently objected to by others. Pasteur, more desirous of seeking the origin of the evil than of making a census of these remedies, unceasingly questioned the nursery owners, who invariably answered that it was something like the plague or cholera. Some worms languished on the frames in their earliest days, others in the second stage only, some passed through the third and fourth moultings, climbed the twig and spun their cocoon. The chrysalis became a moth, but that diseased moth had deformed antennæ and withered legs, the wings seemed singed. Eggs (technically called seed) from those moths were inevitably unsuccessful the following year. Thus, in the same nursery, in the course of the two months that a larva takes to become a moth, the pébrine disease was alternately sudden or insidious: it burst out or disappeared, it hid itself within the chrysalis and reappeared in the moth or the eggs of a moth which had seemed sound. The discouraged Alaisians thought that nothing could overcome pébrine.

Pasteur did not admit such resignation. But he began by one aspect only of the problem. He resolved to submit those corpuscles of the silkworm which had been observed since 1849 to microscopical study. He settled down in a small magnanerie near Alais; two series of worms were being cultivated. The first set was full grown; it came from some Japanese seed guaranteed as sound, and had produced very fine cocoons. The cultivator intended to keep the seed of the moths to compensate himself for the failure of the second set, also of Japanese origin, but not officially guaranteed. The worms of this second series were sickly and did not feed properly. And yet these worms, seen through the microscope, only exceptionally presented corpuscles; whilst Pasteur was surprised to find some in almost every moth or chrysalis from the prosperous nursery. Was it then elsewhere than in the worms that the secret of the pébrine was to be found?

Pasteur was interrupted in the midst of his experiments by a sudden blow. Nine days after his arrival, a telegram called him to Arbois: his father was very ill. He started, full of anguish, remembering the sudden death of his mother before he had had time to reach her, and that of Jeanne, his eldest daughter, who had also died far away from him in the little house at Arbois. His sad presentiment oppressed him during the whole of the long journey, and was fully justified; he arrived to find, already in his coffin, the father he so dearly loved and whose name he had made an illustrious one.

In the evening, in the empty room above the tannery, Pasteur wrote: “Dear Marie, dear children, the dear grandfather is no more; we have taken him this morning to his last resting place, close to little Jeanne’s. In the midst of my grief I have felt thankful that our little girl had been buried there.... Until the last moment I hoped I should see him again, embrace him for the last time ... but when I arrived at the station I saw some of our cousins all in black, coming from Salins; it was only then that I understood that I could but accompany him to the grave.

“He died on the day of your first communion, dear Cécile; those two memories will remain in your heart, my poor child. I had a presentiment of it when that very morning, at the hour when he was struck down, I was asking you to pray for the grandfather at Arbois. Your prayers will have been acceptable unto God, and perhaps the dear grandfather himself knew of them and rejoiced with dear little Jeanne over Cécile’s piety.

“I have been thinking all day of the marks of affection I have had from my father. For thirty years I have been his constant care, I owe everything to him. When I was young he kept me from bad company and instilled into me the habit of working and the example of the most loyal and best-filled life. He was far above his position both in mind and in character.... You did not know him, dearest Marie, at the time when he and my mother were working so hard for the children they loved, for me especially, whose books and schooling cost so much.... And the touching part of his affection for me is that it never was mixed with ambition. You remember that he would have been pleased to see me the headmaster of Arbois College? He foresaw that advancement would mean hard work, perhaps detrimental to my health. And yet I am sure that some of the success in my scientific career must have filled him with joy and pride; his son! his name! the child he had guided and cherished! My dear father, how thankful I am that I could give him some satisfaction!

“Farewell, dearest Marie, dear children. We shall often talk of the dear grandfather. How glad I am that he saw you all again a short time ago, and that he lived to know little Camille. I long to see you all, but must go back to Alais, for my studies would be retarded by a year if I could not spend a few days there now.

“I have some ideas on this disease, which is indeed a scourge for all those southern departments. The one arrondissement of Alais has lost an income of 120,000,000 francs during the last fifteen years. M. Dumas is a million times right; it must be seen to, and I am going to continue my experiments. I am writing to M. Nisard to have the admission examinations in my absence, which can easily be done.”

Nisard wrote to him (June 19): “My dear friend, I heard of your loss, and I sympathize most cordially with you.... Take all the time necessary to you. You are away in the service of science, probably of humanity. Everything will be done according to your precise indications. I foresee no difficulty ... everything is going on well at the Ecole. In spite of your reserve—which is a part of your talent—I see that you are on the track, as M. Biot would have said, and that you will have your prey. Your name will stand next to that of Olivier de Serres in the annals of sericiculture.”

On his return to Alais Pasteur went back to his observations with his scientific ardour and his customary generous eagerness to lighten the burden of others. He wrote in the introduction to his Studies on Silkworm Disease the following heartfelt lines—

“A traveller coming back to the Cévennes mountains after an absence of fifteen years would be saddened to see the change wrought in that countryside within such a short time. Formerly he might have seen robust men breaking up the rock to build terraces against the side and up to the summit of each mountain; then planting mulberry trees on these terraces. These men, in spite of their hard work, were then bright and happy, for ease and contentment reigned in their homes.

“Now the mulberry plantations are abandoned, the ‘golden tree’ no longer enriches the country, faces once beaming with health and good humour are now sad and drawn. Distress and hunger have succeeded to comfort and happiness.”

Pasteur thought with sorrow of the sufferings of the Cévenol populations. The scientific problem was narrowing itself down. Faced by the contradictory facts that one successful set of cocoons had produced corpuscled moths, while an apparently unsuccessful set of worms showed neither corpuscles nor spots, he had awaited the last period of these worms with an impatient curiosity. He saw, amongst those which had started spinning, some which as yet showed no spots and no corpuscles. But corpuscles were abundant in the chrysalides, those especially which were in full maturity, on the eve of becoming moths; and none of the moths were free from them. Perhaps the fact that the disease appeared in the chrysalis and moth only explained the failures of succeeding series. “It was a mistake,” wrote Pasteur (June 26, 1865), “to look for the symptom, the corpuscle, exclusively in the eggs or the worms; either might carry in themselves the germ of the disease, without presenting distinct and microscopically visible corpuscles.” The evil developed itself chiefly in the chrysalides and the moths, it was there that it should chiefly be sought. There should be an infallible means of procuring healthy seed by having recourse to moths free from corpuscles.

This idea was like a searchlight flashed into the darkness. Pasteur thus formulated his hypothesis: “Every moth containing corpuscles must give birth to diseased seed. If a moth only has a few corpuscles, its eggs will provide worms without any, or which will only develop them towards the end of their life. If the moth is much infected, the disease will show itself in the earliest stages of the worm, either by corpuscles or by other unhealthy symptoms.”

Pasteur studied hundreds of moths under the microscope. Nearly all, two or three couples excepted, were corpuscled, but that restricted quantity was increased by a precious gift. Two people, who had heard Pasteur ventilate his theories, brought him five moths born of a local race of silkworms and nurtured in the small neighbouring town of Anduze in the Turkish fashion, i.e. without any of the usual precautions consisting in keeping the worms in nurseries heated at an equal temperature. Everything having been tried, this system had also had its turn, without any appreciable success. By a fortunate circumstance, four out of those five moths were healthy.

Pasteur looked forward to the study in comparisons that the following spring would bring when worms were hatched both from the healthy and the diseased seed. In the meanwhile, only a few of the Alaisians, including M. Pagès, the Mayor, and M. de Lachadenède, really felt any confidence in these results. Most of the other silkworm cultivators were disposed to criticize everything, without having the patience to wait for results. They expressed much regret that the Government should choose a “mere chemist” for those investigations instead of some zoologist or silkworm cultivator. Pasteur only said, “Have patience.”

He returned to Paris, where fresh sorrow awaited him: Camille, his youngest child, only two years old, was seriously ill. He watched over her night after night, spending his days at his task in the laboratory, and returning in the evening to the bedside of his dying child. During that same period he was asked for an article on Lavoisier by J. B. Dumas, who had been requested by the Government to publish his works.

“No one,” wrote Dumas to Pasteur—“has read Lavoisier with more attention than you have; no one can judge of him better.... The chance which caused me to be born before you has placed me in communication with surroundings and with men in whom I have found the ideas and feelings which have guided me in this work. But, had it been yours, I should have allowed no one else to be the first in drawing the world’s attention to it. It is from this motive, also from a certain conformity of tastes and of principles which has long made you dear to me, that I now ask you to give up a few hours to Lavoisier.”

“My dear and illustrious master,” answered Pasteur (July 18, 1865), “in the face of your letter and its expressions of affectionate confidence, I cannot refuse to submit to you a paper which you must promise to throw away if it should not be exactly what you want. I must also ask you to grant me much time, partly on account of my inexperience, and partly on account of the fatigue both mental and bodily imposed on me by the illness of our dear child.”

Dumas replied: “Dear friend and colleague, I thank you for your kind acquiescence in Lavoisier’s interests, which might well be your own, for no one at this time represents better than you do his spirit and method,—a method in which reasoning had more share than anything else.

“The art of observation and that of experimentation are very distinct. In the first case, the fact may either proceed from logical reasons or be mere good fortune; it is sufficient to have some penetration and the sense of truth in order to profit by it. But the art of experimentation leads from the first to the last link of the chain, without hesitation and without a blank, making successive use of Reason, which suggests an alternative, and of Experience, which decides on it, until, starting from a faint glimmer, the full blaze of light is reached. Lavoisier made this art into a method, and you possess it to a degree which always gives me a pleasure for which I am grateful to you.

“Take your time. Lavoisier has waited seventy years! It is a century since his first results were produced! What are weeks and months?

“I feel for you with all my heart! I know how heartrending are those moments by the deathbed of a suffering child. I hope and trust this great sorrow will be spared you, as indeed you deserve that it should be.”

The promise made by Dumas to give to France an edition of Lavoisier’s works dated very far back. It was in May, 1836, in one of his eloquent lectures at the Collège de France, that Dumas had declared his intention of raising a scientific monument to the memory of this, perhaps the greatest of all French scientists. He had hoped that a Bill would be passed by the Government of Louis Philippe decreeing that this edition of Lavoisier’s works would be produced at the expense of the State. But the usual obstacles and formalities came in the way. Governments succeeded each other, and it was only in 1861 that Dumas obtained the decree he wished for and that the book appeared.

Certainly Pasteur knew and admired as much as any one the discoveries of Lavoisier. But, in the presence of the series of labours accomplished, in spite of many other burdens, during that life cut off in its prime by the Revolutionary Tribunal (1792), labours collated for the first time by Dumas, Pasteur was filled with a new and vivid emotion. His logic in reasoning and his patience in observing nature had in no wise diminished the impetuous generosity of his feelings; a beautiful book, a great discovery, a brilliant exploit or a humble act of kindness would move him to tears. Concerning such a man as Lavoisier, Pasteur’s curiosity became a sort of worship. He would have had the history of such a life spread everywhere. “Though one discovery always surpasses another, and though the chemical and physical knowledge accumulated since his time has gone beyond all Lavoisier’s dreams,” wrote Pasteur, “his work, like that of Newton and a few other rare spirits, will remain ever young. Certain details will age, as do the fashions of another time, but the foundation, the method, constitute one of those great aspects of the human mind, the majesty of which is only increased by years....”

Pasteur’s article appeared in the Moniteur and was much praised by the celebrated critic Sainte Beuve, whose literary lectures were often attended by Pasteur, between 1857 and 1861. The chronological order that we are following in this history of Pasteur’s life allows us to follow the ideas and feelings with which he lived his life of hard daily work combined with daily devotion to others. Joys and sorrows can be chronicled, thanks to the confidences of those who loved him. His fame is indeed part of the future, but the tenderness which he inspired revives the memories of the past.

In September, 1865, little Camille died. Pasteur took the tiny coffin to Arbois and went back to his work. A letter written in November alludes to the depth of his grief.

It was à propos of a candidature to the Académie des Sciences, Sainte Beuve was asked to help that of a young friend of his, Charles Robin. Robin occupied a professor’s chair specially created for him at the Faculté de Médecine; he had made a deep microscopical study of the tissues of living bodies, of cellular life, of all which constitutes histology. He was convinced that outside his own studies, numerous questions would fall more and more into the domain of experimentation, and he believed that the faith in spiritual things could not “stand the struggle against the spirit of the times, wholly turned to positive things.” He did not, like Pasteur, understand the clear distinction between the scientist on the one hand and the man of sentiment on the other, each absolutely independent. Neither did he imitate the reserve of Claude Bernard who did not allow himself to be pressed by any urgent questioner into enrolment with either the believers or the unbelievers, but answered: “When I am in my laboratory, I begin by shutting the door on materialism and on spiritualism; I observe facts alone; I seek but the scientific conditions under which life manifests itself.” Robin was a disciple of Auguste Comte, and proclaimed himself a Positivist, a word which for superficial people was the equivalent of materialist. The same efforts which had succeeded in keeping Littré out of the Académie Française in 1863 were now attempted in order to keep Robin out of the Académie des Sciences in 1865.

Sainte Beuve, whilst studying medicine, had been a Positivist; his quick and impressionable nature had then turned to a mysticism which had inspired him to pen some fine verses. He had now returned to his former philosophy, but kept an open mind, however, criticism being for him not the art of dictating, but of understanding, and he was absolutely averse to irrelevant considerations when a candidature was in question.

The best means with Pasteur, who was no diplomat, was to go straight to the point. Sainte Beuve therefore wrote to him: “Dear Sir, will you allow me to be indiscreet enough to solicit your influence in favour of M. Robin, whose work I know you appreciate?

“M. Robin does not perhaps belong to the same philosophical school as you do; but it seems to me—from an outsider’s point of view—that he belongs to the same scientific school. If he should differ essentially—whether in metaphysics or otherwise—would it not be worthy of a great scientist to take none but positive work into account? Nothing more, nothing less.

“Forgive me; I have much resented the injustice towards you of certain newspapers, and I have sometimes asked myself if there were not some simple means of showing up all that nonsense, and of disproving those absurd and ill-intentioned statements. If M. Robin deserves to be of the Académie why should he not attain to it through you?...

“My sense of gratitude towards you for those four years during which you have done me the honour of including such a man as you are in my audience, also a feeling of friendship, are carrying me too far. I intended to mention this to you the other day at the Princess’s; she had wished me to do so, but I feel bolder with a pen....”

The Princess in question was Princess Mathilde. Her salon, a rendezvous of men of letters, men of science and artists, was a sort of second Academy which consoled Théophile Gautier for not belonging to the other. Sainte Beuve prided himself on being, so to speak, honorary secretary to this accomplished and charming hostess.

Pasteur answered by return of post. “Sir and illustrious colleague, I feel strongly inclined towards M. Robin, who would represent a new scientific element at the Academy—the microscope applied to the study of the human organism. I do not trouble about his philosophical school save for the harm it may do to his work.... I confess frankly, however, that I am not competent on the question of our philosophical schools. Of M. Comte I have only read a few absurd passages; of M. Littré I only know the beautiful pages you were inspired to write by his rare knowledge and some of his domestic virtues. My philosophy is of the heart and not of the mind, and I give myself up, for instance, to those feelings about eternity which come naturally at the bedside of a cherished child drawing its last breath. At those supreme moments, there is something in the depths of our souls which tells us that the world may be more than a mere combination of phenomena proper to a mechanical equilibrium brought out of the chaos of the elements simply through the gradual action of the forces of matter. I admire them all, our philosophers! We have experiments to straighten and modify our ideas, and we constantly find that nature is other than we had imagined. They, who are always guessing, how can they know!...”

Sainte Beuve was probably not astonished at Pasteur’s somewhat hasty epithet applied to Auguste Comte, whom he had himself defined as “an obscure, abstruse, often diseased brain.” After Robin’s election he wrote to his “dear and learned colleague”—

“I have not allowed myself to thank you for the letter, so beautiful, if I may say so, so deep and so exalted in thought, which you did me the honour of writing in answer to mine. Nothing now forbids me to tell you how deeply I am struck with your way of thinking and with your action in this scientific matter.”

That “something in the depths of our souls” of which Pasteur spoke in his letter to Sainte Beuve, was often perceived in his conversation; absorbed as he was in his daily task, he yet carried in himself a constant aspiration towards the Ideal, a deep conviction of the reality of the Infinite and a trustful acquiescence in the Mystery of the universe.

During the last term of the year 1865, he turned from his work for a time in order to study cholera. Coming from Egypt, the scourge had lighted on Marseilles, then on Paris, where it made in October more than two hundred victims per day; it was feared that the days of 1832 would be repeated, when the deaths reached twenty-three per 1,000. Claude Bernard, Pasteur, and Sainte Claire Deville went into the attics of the Lariboisière hospital, above a cholera ward.

“We had opened,” said Pasteur, “one of the ventilators communicating with the ward; we had adapted to the opening a glass tube surrounded by a refrigerating mixture, and we drew the air of the ward into our tube, so as to condense into it as many as we could of the products of the air in the ward.”

Claude Bernard and Pasteur afterwards tried blood taken from patients, and many other things; they were associated in those experiments, which gave no result. Henri Sainte Claire Deville once said to Pasteur, “Studies of that sort require much courage.” “What about duty?” said Pasteur simply, in a tone, said Deville afterwards, worth many sermons. The cholera did not last long; by the end of the autumn all danger had disappeared.

Napeoleon the Third loved science, and found in it a sense of assured stability which politics did not offer him. He desired Pasteur to come and spend a week at the Palace of Compiègne.

The very first evening a grand reception took place. The diplomatic world was represented by M. de Budberg, ambassador of Russia, and the Prussian ambassador, M. de Goltz. Among the guests were: Dr. Longet, celebrated for his researches and for his Treatise on Physiology, a most original physician, whose one desire was to avoid patients and so have more time for pure science; Jules Sandeau, the tender and delicate novelist, with his somewhat heavy aspect of a captain in the Garde Nationals; Paul Baudry, the painter, then in the flower of his youth and radiant success; Paul Dubois, the conscientious artist of the Chanteur Florentin exhibited that very year; the architect, Viollet le Duc, an habitué of the palace. The Emperor drew Pasteur aside towards the fireplace, and the scientist soon found himself instructing his Sovereign, talking about ferments and molecular dissymmetry.

Pasteur was congratulated by the courtiers on the favour shown by this immediate confidential talk, and the Empress sent him word that she wished him to talk with her also. Pasteur remembered this conversation, an animated one, a little disconnected, chiefly about animalculæ, infusories and ferments. When the guests returned to the immense corridor into which the rooms opened, each with the name of the guests on the door, Pasteur wrote to Paris for his microscope and for some samples of diseased wines.

The next morning a stag hunt was organized; riders in handsome costumes, open carriages drawn by six horses and containing guests, entered the forest; a stag was soon brought to bay by the hounds. In the evening, after dinner, there was a torchlight procession in the great courtyard. Amid a burst of trumpets, the footmen in state livery, standing in a circle, held aloft the flaming torches. In the centre, a huntsman held part of the carcase of the stag and waved it to and fro before the greedy eyes of the hounds, who, eager to hurl themselves upon it, and now restrained by a word, then let loose, and again called back all trembling at their discomfiture, were at length permitted to rush upon and devour their prey.

The next day offered another item on the programme, a visit to the castle of Pierrefonds, marvellously restored by Viollet le Duc at the expense of the Imperial purse. Pasteur, who, like the philosopher, might have said, “I am never bored but when I am being entertained,” made his arrangements so that the day should not be entirely wasted. He made an appointment for his return with the head butler, hoping to find a few diseased wines in the Imperial cellar. That department, however, was so well administered that he was only able to find seven or eight suspicious-looking bottles. The tall flunkeys, who scarcely realized the scientific interest offered by a basketful of wine bottles, watched Pasteur more or less ironically as he returned to his room, where he had the pleasure of finding his microscope and case of instruments sent from the Rue d’Ulm. He remained upstairs, absorbed as he would have been in his laboratory, in the contemplation of a drop of bitter wine revealing the tiny mycoderma which caused the bitterness.

In the meanwhile some of the other guests were gathered in the smoking room, smilingly awaiting the Empress’s five o’clock tea, whilst others were busy with the preparations for the performance of Racine’s Plaideurs, which Provost, Regnier, Got, Delaunay, Coquelin, and Mademoiselle Jouassain were going to act that very evening in the theatre of the palace.

On the Sunday, at 4 p.m., he was received privately by their Majesties, for their instruction and edification. He wrote in a letter to a friend: “I went to the Emperor with my microscope, my wine samples, and all my paraphernalia. When I was announced, the Emperor came up to meet me and asked me to come in. M. Conti, who was writing at a table, rose to leave the room, but was invited to stay. Then he fetched the Empress, and I began to show their Majesties various objects under the microscope and to explain them; it lasted a whole hour.”

The Empress had been much interested, and wished that her five o’clock friends—who were waiting in the room where tea was served—should also acquire some notions of these studies. She merrily took up the microscope, laughing at her new occupation of laboratory attendant, and arrived thus laden in the drawing-room, much to the surprise of her privileged guests. Pasteur came in behind her, and gave a short and simple account of a few general ideas and precise discoveries.