In the same way, the preceding week, Le Verrier[25] had spoken of his planet, and Dr. Longet had given a lecture on the circulation of the blood. That butterfly world of the Court, taking a momentary interest in scientific things, did not foresee that the smallest discovery made in the poor laboratory of the Rue d’Ulm would leave a more lasting impression than the fêtes of the Tuileries of Fontainebleau and of Compiègne.

In the course of their private interview, Napoleon and Eugénie manifested some surprise that Pasteur should not endeavour to turn his discoveries and their applications to a source of legitimate profit. “In France,” he replied, “scientists would consider that they lowered themselves by doing so.”

He was convinced that a man of pure science would complicate his life, the order of his thoughts, and risk paralysing his inventive faculties, if he were to make money by his discoveries. For instance, if he had followed up the industrial results of his studies on vinegar, his time would have been too much and too regularly occupied, and he would not have been free for new researches.

“My mind is free,” he said. “I am as full of ardour for the new question of silkworm disease as I was in 1863, when I took up the wine question.”

What he most wished was to be able to watch the growth of the silkworms from the very first day, and to pursue without interruption this serious study in which the future of France was interested. That, and the desire to have one day a laboratory adequate to the magnitude of his works were his only ambitions. On his return to Pam he obtained leave to go back to Alais.

“My dear Raulin,” wrote Pasteur to his former pupil in January, 1866. “I am again entrusted by the Minister of Agriculture with a mission for the study of silkworm disease, which will last at least five months, from February 1 to the end of June. Would you care to join me?”

Raulin excused himself; he was then preparing, with his accustomed slow conscientiousness, his doctor’s thesis, a work afterwards considered by competent judges to be a masterpiece.

“I must console myself,” wrote Pasteur, expressing his regrets, “by thinking that you will complete your excellent thesis.”

One of Raulin’s fellow students at the Ecole Normale, M. Gernez, was now a professor at the Collège Louis le Grand. His mind was eminently congenial to Pasteur’s. Duruy, then Minister of Public Instruction, was ever anxious to smooth down all difficulties in the path of science: he gave a long leave of absence to M. Gernez, in order that he might take Raulin’s place. Another young Normalien, Maillot, prepared to join the scientific party, much to his delight. The three men left Paris at the beginning of February. They began by spending a few days in an hotel at Alais, trying to find a suitable house where they would set up their temporary laboratory. After a week or two in a house within the town, too far, to be convenient, from the restaurant where they had their meals, Maillot discovered a lonely house at the foot of the Mount of the Hermitage, a mountain once covered with flourishing mulberry trees, but now abandoned, and growing but a few olive trees.

This house, at Pont Gisquet, not quite a mile from Alais, was large enough to hold Pasteur, his family and his pupils; a laboratory was soon arranged in an empty orangery.

“Then began a period of intense work,” writes M. Gernez. “Pasteur undertook a great number of trials, which he himself followed in their minutest details; he only required our help over similar operations by which he tested his own. The result was that above the fatigues of the day, easily borne by us strong young men, he had to bear the additional burden of special researches, importunate visitors, and an equally importunate correspondence, chiefly dealing out criticisms....”

Madame Pasteur, who had been detained in Paris for her children’s education, set out for Alais with her two daughters. Her mother being then on a visit to the rector of the Chambéry Academy, M. Zevort, she arranged to spend a day or two in that town. But hardly had she arrived when her daughter Cécile, then twelve years old, became ill with typhoid fever. Madame Pasteur had the courage not to ask her husband to leave his work and come to her; but her letters alarmed him, and the anxious father gave up his studies for a few days and arrived at Chambéry. The danger at that time seemed averted, and he only remained three days at Chambéry. Cécile, apparently convalescent, had recovered her smile, that sweet, indefinable smile which gave so much charm to her serious, almost melancholy face. She smiled thus for the last time at her little sister Marie-Louise, about the middle of May, lying on a sofa by a sunny window.

On May 21, her doctor, Dr. Flesschutt, wrote to Pasteur: “If the interest I take in the child were not sufficient to stimulate my efforts, the mother’s courage would keep up my hopes and double my ardent desire for a happy issue.” Cécile died on May 23 after a sudden relapse. Pasteur only arrived at Chambéry in time to take to Arbois the remains of the little girl, which were buried near those of his mother, of his two other daughters, Jeanne and Camille, and of his father, Joseph Pasteur. The little cemetery indeed represented a cup of sorrows for Pasteur.

“Your father has returned from his sad journey to Arbois,” wrote Madame Pasteur from Chambéry to her son who was at school in Paris. “I did think of going back to you, but I could not leave your poor father to go back to Alais alone after this great sorrow.” Accompanied by her who was his greatest comfort, and who gave him some of her own courage, Pasteur came back to the Pont Gisquet and returned to his work. M. Duclaux in his turn joined the hard-working little party.

At the beginning of June, Duruy, with the solicitude of a Minister who found time to be also a friend, wrote affectionately to Pasteur—

“You are leaving me quite in the dark, yet you know the interest I take in your work. Where are you? and what are you doing? Finding out something I feel certain....”

Pasteur answered, “Monsieur le Ministre, I hasten to thank you for your kind reminder. My studies have been associated with sorrow; perhaps your charming little daughter, who used to play sometimes at M. Le Verrier’s, will remember Cécile Pasteur among other little girls of her age that she used to meet at the Observatoire. My dear child was coming with her mother to spend the Easter holidays with me at Alais, when, during a few days’ stay at Chambéry, she was seized with an attack of typhoid fever, to which she succumbed after two months of painful suffering. I was only able to be with her for a few days, being kept here by my work, and full of deceiving hopes for a happy issue from that terrible disease.

“I am now wholly wrapped up in my studies, which alone take my thoughts from my deep sorrow.

“Thanks to the facilities which you have put in my way, I have been able to collect a quantity of experimental observations, and I think I understand on many points this disease which has been ruining the South for fifteen or twenty years. I shall be able on my return to propose to the Commission of Sericiculture a practical means of fighting the evil and suppressing it in the course of a few years.

“I am arriving at this result that there is no silkworm disease. There is but an exaggeration of a state of things which has always existed, and it is not difficult, in my view, to return to the former situation, even to improve on it. The evil was sought for in the worm and even in the seed; that was something, but my observations prove that it develops chiefly in the chrysalis, especially in the mature chrysalis, at the moment of the moth’s formation, on the eve of the function of reproduction. The microscope then detects its presence with certitude, even when the seed and the worm seem very healthy. The practical result is this: you have a nursery full; it has been successful or it has not; you wish to know whether to smother the cocoons or whether to keep them for reproduction. Nothing is simpler. You hasten the development of about 100 moths through an elevation of temperature, and you examine these moths through the microscope, which will tell you what to do.

“The sickly character is then so easy to detect that a woman or a child can do it. If the cultivator should be a peasant, without the material conditions required for this study, he can do this: instead of throwing away the moths after they have laid their eggs, he can bottle a good many of them in brandy and send them to a testing office or to some experienced person who will determine the value of the seed for the following year.”

The Japanese Government sent some cases of seed supposed to be healthy to Napoleon III, who distributed them in the silkworm growing departments. Pasteur, in the meanwhile, was stating the results he had arrived at, and they were being much criticized. In order to avoid the pébrine, which was indeed the disease caused by the corpuscles so clearly visible through the microscope, he averred that no seed should be used that came from infected moths. In order to demonstrate the infectious character of the pébrine he would give to some worms meals of leaves previously contaminated by means of a brush dipped in water containing corpuscles. The worms absorbed the food, and the disease immediately appeared and could be found in the chrysalides and moths from those worms.

“I hope I am in the right road—close to the goal, perhaps, but I have not yet reached it,” wrote Pasteur to his faithful Chappuis; “and as long as the final proof is not acquired complications and errors are to be feared. Next year, the growth of the numerous eggs I have prepared will obviate my scruples, and I shall be sure of the value of the preventive means I have indicated. It is tiresome to have to wait a year before testing observations already made; but I have every hope of success.”

While awaiting the renewal of the silkworm season, he was busy editing his book on wine, full of joy at contributing to the national riches through practical application of his observations. It was, in fact, sufficient to heat the wines by the simple process already at that time known in Austria as pasteurisation, to free them from all germs of disease and make them suitable for keeping and for exportation. He did not accord much attention to the talk of old gourmets who affirmed that wines thus “mummified” could not mellow with age, being convinced on the contrary that the most delicate wines could only be improved by heating. “The ageing of wines,” he said, “is due, not to fermentation, but to a slow oxidation which is favoured by heat.”

He alluded in his book to the interest taken by Napoleon III in those researches which might be worth millions to France. He also related how the Imperial solicitude had been awakened, and acknowledged gratitude for this to General Favé, one of the Emperor’s aides de camp.

The General, on reading the proofs, declared that his name must disappear. Pasteur regretfully gave in to his scruples, but wrote the following words on the copy presented to General Favé: “General, this book contains a serious omission—that of your name: it would be an unpardonable one had it not been made at your own request, according to your custom of keeping your good works secret. Without you, these studies on wine would not exist; you have helped and encouraged them. Leave me at least the satisfaction of writing that name on the first page of this copy, of which I beg you to accept the homage, while renewing the expression of my devoted gratitude.”

Another incident gives us an instance of Pasteur’s kindness of heart. In the year 1866 Claude Bernard suffered from a gastric disease so serious that his doctors, Rayer and Davaine, had to admit their impotence. Bernard was obliged to leave his laboratory and retire to his little house at St. Julien (near Villefranche), his birthplace. But the charm of his recollections of childhood was embittered by present sadness. His mind full of projects, his life threatened in its prime, he had the courage, a difficult thing to unselfish people, of resolutely taking care of himself. But preoccupied solely with his own diet, his own body now a subject for experiments, he became a prey to a deep melancholia. Pasteur, knowing to what extent moral influences react on the physique, had the idea of writing a review of his friend’s works, and published it in the Moniteur Universel of November 7, 1866, under the following title: Claude Bernard: the Importance of his Works, Teaching and Method. He began thus: “Circumstances have recently caused me to re-peruse the principal treatises which have founded the reputation of our great physiologist, Claude Bernard.

“I have derived from them so great a satisfaction, and my admiration for his talent has been confirmed and increased to such an extent that I cannot resist the somewhat rash desire of communicating my impressions....”

Amongst Claude Bernard’s discoveries, Pasteur chose that which seemed to him most instructive, and which Claude Bernard himself appreciated most: “When M. Bernard became in 1854 a candidate for the Académie des Sciences, his discovery of the glycogenic functions of the liver was neither the first nor the last among those which had already placed him so high in the estimation of men of science; yet it was by that one that he headed his list of the claims which could recommend him to the suffrages of the illustrious body. That preference on the part of the master decides me in mine.”

Claude Bernard had begun by meditating deeply on the disease known as diabetes and which is characterized, as everybody knows, by a superabundance of sugar in the whole of the organism, the urine often being laden with it. But how is it, wondered Claude Bernard, that the quantity of sugar expelled by a diabetic patient can so far surpass that with which he is provided by the starchy or sugary substances which form part of his food? How is it that the presence of sugary matter in the blood and its expulsion through urine are never completely arrested, even when all sugary or starchy alimentation is suppressed? Are there in the human organism sugar-producing phenomena unknown to chemists and physiologists? All the notions of science were contrary to that mode of thinking; it was affirmed that the vegetable kingdom only could produce sugar, and it seemed an insane hypothesis to suppose that the animal organism could fabricate any. Claude Bernard dwelt upon it however, his principle in experimentation being this: “When you meet with a fact opposed to a prevailing theory, you should adhere to the fact and abandon the theory, even when the latter is supported by great authorities and generally adopted.”

This is what he imagined, summed up in a few words by Pasteur—

“Meat is an aliment which cannot develop sugar by the digestive process known to us. Now M. Bernard having fed some carnivorous animals during a certain time exclusively with meat, he assured himself, with his precise knowledge of the most perfect means of investigation offered him by chemistry, that the blood which enters the liver by the portal vein and pours into it the nutritive substances prepared and rendered soluble by digestion is absolutely devoid of sugar; whilst the blood which issues from the liver by the hepatic veins is always abundantly provided with it.... M. Claude Bernard has also thrown full light on the close connection which exists between the secretion of sugar in the liver and the influence of the nervous system. He has demonstrated, with a rare sagacity, that by acting on some determined portion of that system it was possible to suppress or exaggerate at will the production of sugar. He has done more still; he has discovered within the liver the existence of an absolutely new substance which is the natural source whence this organ draws the sugar that it produces.”

Pasteur, starting from this discovery of Claude Bernard’s, spoke of the growing close connection between medicine and physiology. Then, with his constant anxiety to incite students to enthusiasm, he recommended them to read the lectures delivered by Bernard at the Collège de France. Speaking of the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Pasteur wrote: “A long commentary would be necessary to present this splendid work to the reader; it is a monument raised to honour the method which has constituted Physical and Chemical Science since Galileo and Newton, and which M. Bernard is trying to introduce into physiology and pathology. Nothing so complete, so profound, so luminous has ever been written on the true principles of the difficult art of experimentation.... This book will exert an immense influence on medical science, its teaching, its progress, its language even.” Pasteur took pleasure in adding to his own tribute praise from other sources. He quoted, for instance, J. B. Dumas’ answer to Duruy, who asked him, “What do you think of this great physiologist?” “He is not a great physiologist; he is Physiology itself.” “I have spoken of the man of science,” continued Pasteur. “I might have spoken of the man in everyday life, the colleague who has inspired so many with a solid friendship, for I should seek in vain for a weak point in M. Bernard; it is not to be found. His personal distinction, the noble beauty of his physiognomy, his gentle kindliness attract at first sight; he has no pedantry, none of a scientist’s usual faults, but an antique simplicity, a perfectly natural and unaffected manner, while his conversation is deep and full of ideas....” Pasteur, after informing the public that the graver symptoms of Bernard’s disease had now disappeared, ended thus: “May the publicity now given to these thoughts and feelings cheer the illustrious patient in his enforced idleness, and assure him of the joy with which his return will be welcomed by his friends and colleagues.”

The very day after this article reached him (November 19, 1860) Bernard wrote to Pasteur: “My dear friend,—I received yesterday the Moniteur containing the superb article you have written about me. Your great praise indeed makes me proud, though I feel I am yet very far from the goal I would reach. If I return to health, as I now hope I may do, I think I shall find it possible to pursue my work in a more methodical order and with more complete means of demonstration, better indicating the general idea towards which my various efforts converge. In the meanwhile it is a very precious encouragement to me to be approved and praised by a man such as you. Your works have given you a great name, and have placed you in the first rank among experimentalists of our time. The admiration which you profess for me is indeed reciprocated; and we must have been born to understand each other, for true science inspires us both with the same passion and the same sentiments.

“Forgive me for not having answered your first letter; but I was really not equal to writing the notice you wanted. I have deeply felt for you in your family sorrow; I have been through the same trial, and I can well understand the sufferings of a tender and delicate soul such as yours.”

Henri Sainte Claire Deville, who was as warm-hearted as he was witty, had, on his side, the ingenious idea of editing an address of collective wishes for Claude Bernard, who answered: “My dear friend,—You are evidently as clever in inventing friendly surprises as in making great scientific discoveries. It was indeed a most charming idea, and one for which I am very grateful to you—that of sending me a collective letter from my friends. I shall carefully preserve that letter: first, because the feelings it expresses are very dear to me; and also because it is a collection of illustrious autographs which should go down to posterity. I beg you will transmit my thanks to our friends and colleagues, E. Renan, A. Maury, F. Ravaisson and Bellaguet. Tell them how much I am touched by their kind wishes and congratulations on my recovery. It is, alas, not yet a cure, but I hope I am on a fair way to it.

“I have received the article Pasteur has written about me in the Moniteur; that article paralysed the vasomotor nerves of my sympathetic system, and caused me to blush to the roots of my hair. I was so amazed that I don’t know what I wrote to Pasteur; but I did not dare say to him that he had wrongly exaggerated my merits. I know he believes all that he writes, and I am happy and proud of his opinion, because it is that of a scientist and experimentalist of the very first rank. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that he has seen me through the prism of his kindly heart, and that I do not deserve such excessive praise. I am more than thankful for all the marks of esteem and friendship which are showered upon me. They make me cling closer to life, and feel that I should be very foolish not to take care of myself and continue to live amongst those who love me, and who deserve my love for all the happiness they give me. I intend to return to Paris some time this month, and, in spite of your kind advice, I should like to take up my Collège de France classes again this winter. I hope to be allowed not to begin before January. But we shall talk of all this in Paris. I remain your devoted and affectionate friend.”

To end this academic episode, we will quote from Joseph Bertrand’s letter of thanks to Pasteur, who had sent him the article: “...The public will learn, among other things, that the eminent members of the Academy admire and love each other sometimes with no jealousy. This was rare in the last century, and, if all followed your example, we should have over our predecessors one superiority worth many another.”

Thus Pasteur showed himself a man of sentiment as well as a man of science; the circle of his affections was enlarging, as was the scope of his researches, but without any detriment to the happy family life of his own intimate circle. That little group of his family and close friends identified itself absolutely with his work, his ideas and his hopes, each member of it willingly subordinating his or her private interests to the success of his investigations. He was at that time violently attacked by his old adversaries as well as his new contradictors. Pouchet announced everywhere that the question of spontaneous generation was being taken up again in England, in Germany, in Italy and in America. Joly, Pouchet’s inseparable friend, was about to make some personal studies and to write some general considerations on the new silkworm campaign. Pasteur, who had confidently said, “The year 1867 must be the last to bear the complaints of silkworm cultivators!” went back to Alais in January, 1867. But, before leaving Paris, Pasteur wrote out for himself a list of various improvements and reforms which he desired to effect in the administration of the Ecole Normale, showing that his interest in the great school had by no means abated, in spite of his necessary absence. He brought with him his wife and daughter, and Messrs. Gernez and Maillot; M. Duclaux was to come later. The worms hatched from the eggs of healthy moths and those from diseased ones were growing more interesting every day; they were in every instance exactly what Pasteur had prophesied they would be. But besides studying his own silkworms, he liked to see what was going on in neighbouring magnaneries. A neighbour in the Pont Gisquet, a cultivator of the name of Cardinal, had raised with great success a brood originating from the famous Japanese seed. He was disappointed, however, in the eggs produced by the moths, and Pasteur’s microscope revealed the fact that those moths were all corpuscled, in spite of their healthy origin. Pasteur did not suspect that origin, for the worms had shown health and vigour through all their stages of growth, and seemed to have issued from healthy parents. But Cardinal had raised another brood, the produce of unsound seed, immediately above these healthy worms. The excreta from this second brood could fall on to the frames of those below them, and the healthy worms had become contaminated. Pasteur demonstrated that the pébrine contagion might take place in one or two different ways: either from direct contact between the worms on the same frame, or by the soiling of the food from the very infectious excreta. The remedy for the pébrine seemed now found. “The corpuscle disease,” said Pasteur, “is as easily avoided as it is easily contracted.” But when he thought he had reached his goal a sudden difficulty rose in his way. Out of sixteen broods of worms which he had raised, and which presented an excellent appearance, the sixteenth perished almost entirely immediately after the first moulting. “In a brood of a hundred worms,” wrote Pasteur, “I picked up fifteen or twenty dead ones every day, black and rotting with extraordinary rapidity.... They were soft and flaccid like an empty bladder. I looked in vain for corpuscles; there was not a trace of them.”

Pasteur was temporarily troubled and discouraged. But he consulted the writings of former students of silkworm diseases, and, when he discovered vibriones in those dead worms, he did not doubt that he had under his eyes a well characterized example of the flachery disease—a disease independent and distinct from the pébrine. He wrote to Duruy, and acquainted him with the results he had obtained and the obstacles he encountered. Duruy wrote back on April 9, 1867—

“Thank you for your letter and the good news it contains.

“Not very far from you, at Avignon, a statue has been erected to the Persian who imported into France the cultivation of madder; what then will not be done for the rescuer of two of our greatest industries! Do not forget to inform me when you have mastered the one or two lame facts which still stand in the way. As a citizen, as head of the Université, and, if I may say so, as your friend, I wish I could follow your experiments day by day.

“You know that I should like to found a special college at Alais. Please watch for any useful information on that subject. We will talk about it on your return.

“I am obliged to M. Gernez for his assiduous and intelligent collaboration with you.”

This letter from the great Minister is all the more interesting that it is dated from the eve of the day when the law on the reorganization of primary teaching was promulgated.

The introduction into the curriculum of historical and geographical notions; the inauguration of 10,000 schools and 30,000 adult classes; the transformation of certain flagging classical colleges into technical training schools; a constant struggle to include the teaching of girls in Université organization; reforms and improvements in general teaching; the building of laboratories, etc., etc.—into the accomplishment of all these projects Duruy carried his bold and methodical activity. No one was more suited than he to the planning out of a complete system of national education. He and Pasteur were indeed fitted to understand each other, for each had in the same degree those three forms of patriotism: love for the land, memories for the past, and hero worship.

In May, 1867, Pasteur received at Alais the news that a grand prize medal of the 1867 exhibition was conferred upon him for his works on wines. He hastened to write to Dumas—

“My dear master, ... Nothing has surprised me more—or so agreeably,—than the news of this Exhibition prize medal, which I was far from expecting. It is a new proof of your kindness, for I feel sure that I have to thank you for originating such a favour. I shall do all I can to make myself worthy of it by my perseverance in putting all difficulties aside from the subject I am now engaged in, and in which the light is growing brighter every day. If that flachery disease had not come to complicate matters, everything would be well by now. I cannot tell you how absolutely sure I now feel of my conclusions concerning the corpuscle disease. I could say a great deal about the articles of Messrs. Béchamp, Estor and Balbiani, but I will follow your advice and answer nothing....”

Dumas had been advising Pasteur not to waste his time by answering his adversaries and contradictors. Pasteur’s system was making way; ten microscopes were set up, here and there, in the town of Alais; most seed merchants were taking up the examination of the dead moths, and the Pont-Gisquet colony had samples brought in daily for inspection. “I have already prevented many failures for next year,” he wrote to Dumas (June, 1867), “but I always beg as a favour that a little of the condemned seed may be raised, so as to confirm the exactness of my judgment.”

His system was indeed quite simple; at the moment when the moths leave their cocoons and mate with each other, the cultivator separates them and places each female on a little square of linen where it lays its eggs. The moth is afterwards pinned up in a corner of the same square of linen, where it gradually dries up; later on, in autumn or even in winter, the withered moth is moistened in a little water, pounded in a mortar, and the paste examined with a microscope. If the least trace of corpuscles appears the linen is burnt, together with the seed which would have perpetuated the disease.

Pasteur came back to Paris to receive his medal; perhaps his presence was not absolutely necesary, but he did not question the summons he received. He always attached an absolute meaning to words and to things, not being one of those who accept titles and homage with an inward and ironical smile.

The pageant of that distribution of prizes was well worth seeing, and July 1, 1867, is now remembered by many who were children at that time. Paris afforded a beautiful spectacle; the central avenue of the Tuileries garden, the Place de la Concorde, the Avenue des Champs Elysées, were lined along their full length by regiments of infantry, dragoons, Imperial Guards, etc., etc., standing motionless in the bright sunshine, waiting for the Emperor to pass. The Imperial carriage, drawn by eight horses, escorted by the Cent-Gardes in their pale blue uniform, and by the Lancers of the Household, advanced in triumphant array. Napoleon III sat next to the Empress, the Prince Imperial and Prince Napoleon facing them. From the Palais de l’Elysée, amidst equally magnificent ceremonial, the Sultan Abdul-Aziz and his son arrived; then followed a procession of foreign princes: the Crown Prince of Prussia, the Prince of Wales, Prince Humbert of Italy, the Duke and Duchess of Aosta, the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, all of whom have since borne a part in European politics. They entered the Palais de l’Industrie and sat around the throne. From the ground to the first floor an immense stand was raised, affording seats for 17,000 persons. The walls were decorated with eagles bearing olive branches, symbolical of strength and peace. The Emperor in his speech dwelt upon these hopes of peace, whilst the Empress in white satin, wearing a diadem, and surrounded by white-robed princesses, brightly smiled at these happy omens.

On their names being called out, the candidates who had won Grand Prizes, and those about to be promoted in the Legion of Honour, went up one by one to the throne. Marshal Vaillant handed each case to the Emperor, who himself gave it to the recipient. This old Field-Marshal, with his rough bronzed face, who had been a captain in the retreat from Moscow and was now a Minister of Napoleon III, seemed a natural and glorious link between the First and the Second Empires. He was born at Dijon in humble circumstances, of which he was somewhat proud, a very cultured soldier, interested in scientific things, a member of the Institute. The names of certain members of the Legion of Honour promoted to a higher rank, such as Gérôme and Meissonier, that of Ferdinand de Lesseps, rewarded for the achievement of the Suez Canal, excited great applause. Pasteur was called without provoking an equal curiosity: his scientific discoveries, in spite of their industrial applications, being as yet known but to a few. “I was struck,” writes an eye-witness, “with his simplicity and gravity; the seriousness of his life was visible in his stern, almost sad eyes.”

At the end of the ceremony, when the Imperial procession left the Palais de l’Industrie, an immense chorus, accompanied by an orchestra, sang Domine salvum fac imperatorem.

On his return to his study in the Rue d’Ulm, Pasteur again took up the management of the scientific studies of the Ecole Normale. But an incident put an end to his directorship, while bringing perturbation into the whole of the school. Sainte Beuve was the indirect cause of this small revolution. The Senate, of which he was a member, had had to examine a protest from 102 inhabitants of St. Etienne against the introduction into their popular libraries of the works of Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, Balzac, E. Renan, and others. The committee had approved this petition in terms which identified the report with the petition itself. Sainte Beuve, too exclusively literary in his tastes, and too radical in his opinions to be popular in the Senate, rose violently against this absolute and arbitrary judgment, forgetting everything but the jeopardy of free opinions before the excessive and inquisitorial zeal of the Senate. His speech was very unfavourably received, and one of his colleagues, M. Lacaze, aged sixty-eight, challenged him to a duel. Sainte Beuve, himself then sixty-three years old, refused to enter into what he called “the summary jurisprudence which consists in strangling a question and suppressing a man within forty-eight hours.”

The students of the Ecole Normale deputed one of their number to congratulate Sainte Beuve on his speech, and wrote the following letter—

“We have already thanked you for defending freedom of thought when misjudged and attacked; now that you have again pleaded for it, we beg you to receive our renewed thanks.

“We should be happy if the expression of our grateful sympathy could console you for this injustice. Courage is indeed required to speak in the Senate in favour of the independence and the rights of thought; but the task is all the more glorious for being more difficult. Addresses are now being sent from everywhere; you will forgive the students of the Ecole Normale for having followed the general lead and having sent their address to M. Sainte Beuve.”

This letter was published in a newspaper. Etienne Arago published it without remembering the Université by-laws which forbade every sort of political manifestation to the students. It had given pleasure to Sainte Beuve, the pleasure that elderly men take in the applause of youth; but he soon became uneasy at the results of this noisy publicity.

Nisard, the Director of the school, could not very well tolerate this breach of discipline. In spite of the entreaties of Sainte Beuve, the student who had signed the letter was provisionally sent back to his family. His comrades revolted at this and imperiously demanded his immediate restoration. Pasteur attempted to pacify them by speaking to them, but failed utterly; his influence was very great over his own pupils, the students on the scientific side, but the others, the “littéraires,” were the most violent on this question, and he was not diplomatic and conciliating enough to bring them round. They rose in a body, marched to the door, and the whole school was soon parading the streets. “Before such disorder,” concluded the Moniteur, relating the incident (July 10), “the authorities were obliged to order an immediate closure. The school will be reconstituted and the classes will reopen on October 15.”

Both the literary and the political world were temporarily agitated; the Minister was interviewed. M. Thiers wrote to Pasteur on July 10: “My dear M. Pasteur,—I have been talking with some members of the Left, and I am certain or almost certain, that the Ecole Normale affair will be smoothed over in the interest of the students. M. Jules Simon intends to work in that direction; keep this information for yourself, and do the best you can on your side.”

At the idea that the Ecole was about to be reconstituted, that is, that the three great chiefs, Nisard, Pasteur and Jacquinet, would be changed, deep regret was manifested by Pasteur’s scientific students. One of them, named Didon, expressed it in these terms: “If your departure from the school is not definitely settled, if it is yet possible to prevent it, all the students of the Ecole will be only too happy to do everything in their power.... As for me, it is impossible to express my gratitude towards you. No one has ever shown me so much interest, and never in my life shall I forget what you have done for me.”

Pasteur’s interest in young men, his desire to excite in them scientific curiosity and enthusiasm, were now so well known that Didon and several others who had successfully passed the entrance examinations both for the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale, had chosen to enter the latter in order to be under him; by the Normaliens of the scientific section, he was not only understood and admired, but beloved, almost worshipped.

Sainte Beuve, who continued to be much troubled at the consequences of his speech, wrote to the Minister of Public Instruction in favour of the rusticated student. Duruy thought so much of Sainte Beuve that the student, instead of being exiled to some insignificant country school, was made professor of seconde in the college of Sens. But it was specified that in the future no letter should be written, no public responsibility taken in the name of the Ecole without the authorization of the Director.

Nisard left; Dumas had just been made President of the Monetary Commission, thus leaving vacant a place as Inspector-General of Higher Education. Duruy, anxious to do Pasteur justice, thought this post most suitable to him as it would allow him to continue his researches. The decree was about to be signed, when Balard, professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences, applied for the post. Pasteur wrote respectfully to the Minister of Public Instruction (July 31): “Your Excellency must know that twenty years ago, when I left the Ecole Normale, I was made a curator, thanks to M. Balard, who was then a professor at the Ecole Normale. A grateful pupil cannot enter into competition with a revered master, especially for a post where considerations of age and experience should have great weight.”

When Pasteur spoke of his masters, dead or living, Biot or Senarmont, Dumas or Balard, it might indeed have been thought that to them alone he owed it that he was what he was. He was heard on this occasion, and Balard obtained the appointment.

Nisard was succeeded by M. F. Bouillier, whose place as Inspector-General of Secondary Education devolved on M. Jacquinet. The directorship of scientific studies was given to Pasteur’s old and excellent friend, the faithful Bertin. After teaching in Alsace for eighteen years, he had become maître des conférences at the Ecole Normale in 1866, and also assistant of Regnault at the Collège de France. It had only been by dint of much persuasion that Pasteur had enticed him to Paris. “What is the good?” said the unambitious Bertin; “beer is not so good in Paris as in Strasburg.... Pasteur does not understand life; he is a genius, that is all!” But, under this apparent indolence, Bertin was possessed of the taste for and the art of teaching; Pasteur knew this, and, when Bertin was appointed, Pasteur’s fears for the scientific future of his beloved Ecole were abated. Duruy, much regretting the break of Pasteur’s connection with the great school, offered him the post of maître des conférences, besides the chair of chemistry which Balard’s appointment had left vacant at the Sorbonne. But Pasteur declined the tempting offer; he knew the care and trouble that his public lectures cost him, and felt that the two posts would be beyond his strength; if his time were taken up by that double task it would be almost impossible for him to pursue his private researches, which under no circumstances would he abandon.

He carried his scruples so far as to give up his chemistry professorship at the School of Fine Arts, where he had been lecturing since 1863. He had endeavoured in his lessons to draw the attention of his artist pupils, who came from so many distant places, to the actual principles of Science. “Let us always make application our object,” he said, “but resting on the stern and solid basis of scientific principles. Without those principles, application is nothing more than a series of recipes and constitutes what is called routine. Progress with routine is possible, but desperately slow.”

Another reason prevented him from accepting the post offered him at the Ecole Normale; this was that the tiny pavilion which he had made his laboratory was much too small and too inconvenient to accommodate the pupils he would have to teach. The only suitable laboratory at the Ecole was that of his friend, Henri Sainte Claire Deville, and Pasteur was reluctant to invade it. He had a great affection for his brilliant colleague, who was indeed a particularly charming man, still youthful in spite of his forty-nine summers, active, energetic, witty. “I have no wit,” Pasteur would say quite simply. Deville was a great contrast to his two great friends, Pasteur and Claude Bernard, with their grave meditative manner. He enjoyed boarding at the Ecole and having his meals at the students’ table, where his gaiety brightened and amused everybody, effacing the distance between masters and pupils and yet never losing by this familiar attitude a particle of the respect he inspired.

Sometimes, however, when preoccupied with the heavy expenses of his laboratory, he would invite himself to lunch with Duruy, from whom—as from the Emperor or any one else—he usually succeeded in coaxing what he wanted. The general state of things connected with higher education was at that time most deplorable. The Sorbonne was as Richelieu had left it—the Museum was sadly inadequate. At the Collège de France, it was indeed impossible to call by the name of laboratory the narrow, damp and unhealthy cellars, which Claude Bernard called “scientists’ graves,” and where he had contracted the long illness from which he was only just recovering.

Duruy understood and deplored this penury, but his voice was scarcely heard in cabinet councils, the other Ministers being absorbed in politics. Pasteur, whose self-effacing modesty disappeared when the interests of science were in question, presented to Napoleon, through the medium of his enlightened aide de camp, General Favé, the following letter, a most interesting one, for, in it, possibilities of future discoveries are hinted at, which later became accomplished facts.

“Sire,—My researches on fermentations and on microscopic organisms have opened to physiological chemistry new roads, the benefit of which is beginning to be felt both by agricultural industries and by medical studies. But the field still to be explored is immense. My great desire would be to explore it with a new ardour, unrestrained by the insufficiency of material means.

“I should wish to have a spacious laboratory, with one or two outhouses attached to it, which I could make use of when making experiments possibly injurious to health, such as might be the scientific study of putrid and infectious diseases.

“How can researches be attempted on gangrene, virus or inoculations, without a building suitable for the housing of animals, either dead or alive? Butchers’ meat in Europe reaches an exorbitant price, in Buenos Ayres it is given away. How, in a small and incomplete laboratory, can experiments be made, and various processes tested, which would facilitate its transport and preservation? The so-called ‘splenic fever’ costs the Beauce[26] about 4,000,000 francs annually; it would be indispensable to go and spend some weeks in the neighbourhood of Chartres during several consecutive summers, and make minute observations.

“These researches and a thousand others which correspond in my mind to the great act of transformation after death of organic matter, and the compulsory return to the ground and atmosphere of all which has once been living, are only compatible with the installation of a great laboratory. The time has now come when experimental science should be freed from its bonds....”

The Emperor wrote to Duruy the very next day, desiring that Pasteur’s wish should be acceded to. Duruy gladly acquiesced and plans began to be drawn out. Pasteur, who scarcely dared believe in these bright hopes, was consulted about the situation, size, etc., of the future building, and looked forward to obtaining the help of Raulin, his former pupil, when he had room enough to experiment on a larger scale. The proposed site was part of the garden of the Ecole Normale, where the pavilion already existing could be greatly added to.

In the meanwhile Pasteur was interviewed by the Mayor and the President of the Chamber of Commerce of Orleans, who begged him to come to Orleans and give a public lecture on the results of his studies on vinegar. He consented with pleasure, ever willing to attempt awakening the interest of the public in his beloved Science—“Science, which brings man nearer to God.”

It was on the Monday, November 11, at 7.30 p.m., that Pasteur entered the lecture room at Orleans. A great many vinegar manufacturers, some doctors, apothecaries, professors, students, even ladies, had come to hear him. An account in a contemporary local paper gives us a description of the youngest member of the Académie des Sciences as he appeared before the Orleans public. He is described as of a medium height, his face pale, his eyes very bright through his glasses, scrupulously neat in his dress, with a tiny Legion of Honour rosette in his button hole.

He began his lecture with the following simple words: “The Mayor and the President of the Chamber of Commerce having heard that I had studied the fermentation which produces vinegar, have asked me to lay before the vinegar makers of this town the results of my work. I have hastened to comply with their request, fully sharing in the desire which instigated it, that of being useful to an industry which is one of the sources of the fortune of your city and of your department.”

He tried to make them understand scientifically the well known fact of the transformation of wine into vinegar. He showed that all the work came from a little plant, a microscopic fungus, the mycoderma aceti. After exhibiting an enlarged picture of that mycoderma, Pasteur explained that the least trace of that little vinegar-making plant, sown on the surface of any alcoholic and slightly acid liquid, was sufficient to produce a prodigious extension of it; in summer or artificial heat, said Pasteur, a surface of liquid of the same area as the Orleans Lecture room could be covered in forty-eight hours. The mycodermic veil is sometimes smooth and hardly visible, sometimes wrinkled and a little greasy to the touch. The fatty matter which accompanies the development of the plant keeps it on the surface, air being necessary to the plant; it would otherwise perish and the acetification would be arrested. Thus floating, the mycoderma absorbs oxygen from the air and fixes it on the alcohol, which becomes transformed into acetic acid.

Pasteur explained all the details in his clear powerful voice. Why, in an open bottle, does wine left to itself become vinegar? Because, thanks to the air, and to the mycoderma aceti (which need never be sown, being ever mixed with the invisible dusts in the air), the chemical transformation of wine into vinegar can take place. Why does not a full, closed bottle become acetified? Because the mycoderma cannot multiply in the absence of air. Wine and air heated in the same vessel will not become sour, the high temperature having killed the germs of mycoderma aceti both in the wine itself and in the dusts suspended in the air. But, if a vessel containing wine previously heated is exposed to the free contact of ordinary air, the wine may become sour, for, though the germs in the wine have been killed, other germs may fall into it from the air and develop.

Finally, if pure alcoholized water does not become acetified, though germs can drop into it from the air, it is because it does not offer to those germs the food necessary to the plant—food which is present in wine but not in alcoholized water. But if a suitable aliment for the little plant is added to the water, acetification takes place.

When the acetification is complete, the mycoderma, if not submerged, continues to act, and, when not arrested in time, its oxidating power becomes dangerous; having no more alcohol to act upon, it ends by transforming acetic acid itself into water and carbonic acid gas, and the work of death and destruction is thus achieved.

Speaking of that last phase of the mycoderma aceti, he went on to general laws—laws of the universe by which all that has lived must disappear. “It is an absolute necessity that the matter of which living beings are formed should return after their death to the ground and to the atmosphere in the shape of mineral or gaseous substances, such as steam, carbonic acid gas, ammoniac gas or nitrogen—simple principles easily displaced by movements of the atmosphere and in which life is again enabled to seek the elements of its indefinite perpetuity. It is chiefly through acts of fermentation and slow combustion that this law of dissolution and return to a gaseous state is accomplished.”

Coming back to his special subject, he pointed out to vinegar manufacturers the cause of certain failures and the danger of certain errors.

It was imagined for instance that some microscopic beings, anguillulæ, of which Pasteur projected an enlarged wriggling image on the screen, and which were to be found in the tubs of some Orleans vinegar works, were of some practical utility. Pasteur explained their injurious character: as they require air to live, and as the mycoderma, in order to accomplish its work, is equally dependent on oxygen, a struggle takes place between the anguillulæ and the mycoderma. If acetification is successful, if the mycoderma spreads and invades everything, the vanquished anguillulæ are obliged to take refuge against the sides of the barrel, from which their little living army watches the least accidental break of the veil. Pasteur, armed with a magnifying glass, had many times witnessed the struggle for life which takes place between the little fungi and the tiny animals, each fighting for the surface of the liquid. Sometimes, gathering themselves into masses, the anguillulæ succeed in sinking a fragment of the mycodermic veil and victoriously destroying the action of the drowned plants.

Pasteur related all this in a vivid manner, evidently happy that his long and delicate laboratory researches should now pass into the domain of industry. He had been pleased to find that some Orleans wine merchants heated wine according to his advice in order to preserve it; and he now informed them that the temperature of 55° C. which killed germs and vegetations in wine could be applied with equal success to vinegar after it was produced. The active germs of the mycoderma aceti were thus arrested at the right moment, the anguillulæ were killed and the vinegar remained pure and unaltered. “Nothing,” concluded Pasteur, “is more agreeable to a man who has made science his career than to increase the number of discoveries, but his cup of joy is full when the result of his observations is put to immediate practical use.”

This year 1867 marks a specially interesting period in Pasteur’s life. At Alais he had shown himself an incomparable observer, solely preoccupied with the silkworm disease, thinking, speaking of nothing else. He would rise long before anyone else so as to begin earlier the study of the experiments he had started, and would give his thought and attention to some detail for hours at a time. After this minute observation he would suddenly display a marvellous ingenuity in varying tests, foreseeing and avoiding causes of error, and at last, after so many efforts, a clear and decisive experiment would come, as it had done in the cases of spontaneous generation and of ferments.

The contrasts in his mind had their parallel in his character: this usually thoughtful, almost dreamy man, absorbed in one idea, suddenly revealed himself a man of action if provoked by some erroneous newspaper report or some illogical statement, and especially when he heard of some unscrupulous silkworm seed merchant sowing ruin in poor magnaneries for the sake of a paltry gain. When, on his return to Paris, he found himself mixed up with the small revolution in the Ecole Normale, he was seen to efface himself modestly before his masters when honours and titles came in question. Now he had interrupted his researches in order to do a kindness to the people of Orleans, who, practical as they were, and perhaps a little disdainful of laboratory theories, had been surprised to find him as careful of the smallest detail as they themselves were.

He was then in the full maturity of his forty-five years. His great intuition, his imagination, which equalled any poet’s, often carried him to a summit whence an immense horizon lay before him; he would then suddenly doubt this imagination, resolutely, with a violent effort, force his mind to start again along the path of experimental method, and, surely and slowly, gathering proofs as he went, he would once more reach his exalted and general ideas. This constant struggle within himself was almost dramatic; the words “Perseverance in Effort,” which he often used in the form of advice to others, or as a programme for his own work, seemed to bring something far away, something infinite before his dreamy eyes.

At the end of the year, an obstacle almost arrested the great experiments he contemplated. He heard that the promises made to him were vanishing away, the necessary credit having been refused for the building of the new laboratory. And this, Pasteur sadly reflected, when millions and millions of francs were being spent on the Opera house! Wounded in his feelings, both as a scientist and a patriot, he prepared for the Moniteur, then the official paper, an article destined to shake the culpable indifference of public authorities.

“...The boldest conceptions,” he wrote, “the most legitimate speculations can be embodied but from the day when they are consecrated by observation and experiment. Laboratories and discoveries are correlative terms; if you suppress laboratories, Physical Science will become stricken with barrenness and death; it will become mere powerless information instead of a science of progress and futurity; give it back its laboratories, and life, fecundity and power will reappear. Away from their laboratories, physicists and chemists are but disarmed soldiers on a battlefield.

“The deduction from these principles is evident: if the conquests useful to humanity touch your heart—if you remain confounded before the marvels of electric telegraphy, of anæsthesia, of the daguerreotype and many other admirable discoveries—if you are jealous of the share your country may boast in these wonders—then, I implore you, take some interest in those sacred dwellings meaningly described as laboratories. Ask that they may be multiplied and completed. They are the temples of the future, of riches and of comfort. There humanity grows greater, better, stronger; there she can learn to read the works of Nature, works of progress and universal harmony, while humanity’s own works are too often those of barbarism, of fanaticism and of destruction.

“Some nations have felt the wholesome breath of truth. Rich and large laboratories have been growing in Germany for the last thirty years, and many more are still being built; at Berlin and at Bonn two palaces, worth four million francs each, are being erected for chemical studies. St. Petersburg has spent three and a half million francs on a Physiological Institute; England, America, Austria, Bavaria have made most generous sacrifices. Italy too has made a start.

“And France?

“France has not yet begun....” He mentioned the sepulchre-like cellar where the great physiologist, Claude Bernard, was obliged to live; “and where?” wrote Pasteur. “In the very establishment which bears the name of the mother country, the Collège de France!” The laboratory of the Sorbonne was no better—a damp, dark room, one metre below the level of the street. He went on, demonstrating that the provincial Faculties were as destitute as those of Paris. “Who will believe me when I affirm that the budget of Public Instruction provides not a penny towards the progress of physical science in laboratories, that it is through a tolerated administrative fiction that some scientists, considered as professors, are permitted to draw from the public treasury towards the expenses of their own work, some of the allowance made to them for teaching purposes.”

The manuscript was sent to the Moniteur at the beginning of January, 1868. It had lately been publishing mild articles on Mussulman architecture, then on herring fishing in Norway. The official whose business it was to read over the articles sent to the paper literally jumped in his chair when he read this fiery denunciation; he declared those pages must be modified, cut down; the Administration could not be attacked in that way, especially by one of its own functionaries! M. Dalloz, the editor of the paper, knew that Pasteur would never consent to any alterations; he advised him to show the proofs to M. Conti, Napoleon III’s secretary.

“The article cannot appear in the Moniteur, but why not publish it in booklet form?” wrote M. Conti to Pasteur after having shown these revelations to the Emperor. Napoleon, talking to Duruy the next day, January 9, showed great concern at such a state of things. “Pasteur is right,” said Duruy, “to expose such deficiencies; it is the best way to have them remedied. Is it not deplorable, almost scandalous, that the official world should be so indifferent on questions of science?”

Duruy felt his combative instincts awakening. How many times, in spite of his good humour and almost Roman intrepidity, he had asked himself whether he would ever succeed in causing his ideas on higher education to prevail with his colleagues, the other Ministers, who, carried away by their daily discussions, hardly seemed to realize that the true supremacy of a nation does not reside in speeches, but in the silent and tenacious work of a few men of science and of letters. Pasteur’s article entitled Science’s Budget appeared first in the Revue des cours scientifiques, then as a pamphlet. Pasteur, not content with this, continued his campaign by impetuous speeches whenever the opportunity offered. On March 10, he saw himself nearing his goal, and wrote to Raulin: “There is now a marked movement in favour of Science; I think I shall succeed.”

Six days later, on March 16, whilst the Court was celebrating the birthday of the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III, who, on reading Pasteur’s article, had expressed his intention of consulting not only Pasteur, but also Milne-Edwards, Claude Bernard, and Henri Sainte Claire Deville, asked the four scientists to his study to meet Rouher, Marshal Vaillant and Duruy, perhaps the three men of the Empire who were best qualified to hear them. The Emperor in his slow, detached manner, invited each of his guests to express his opinion on the course to follow. All agreed in regretting that pure science should be given up. When Rouher said that it was not to be wondered at that the reign of applied science should follow that of pure science, “But if the sources of applications are dried up!” interposed the Emperor hastily. Pasteur, asked to express his opinion (he had brought with him notes of what he wished to say), recalled the fact that the Natural History Museum and the Ecole Polytechnique, which had had so great a share in the scientific movement of the early part of the century, were no longer in that heroic period. For the last twenty years the industrial prosperity of France had induced the cleverest Polytechnicians to desert higher studies and theoretical science, though the source of all applications was to be found in theory. The Ecole Polytechnique was obliged now to recruit its teaching staff outside, chiefly among Normaliens. What was to be done to train future scientists? This: to maintain in Paris, during two or three years, five or six graduates chosen from the best students of the large schools as curators or preparation masters, doing at the Ecole Polytechnique and other establishments what was done at the Ecole Normale. Thanks to that special institution, science and higher teaching would have a reserve of men who would become an honour to their country. Next, and this was the second point, no less important than the first, scientists should be given resources better appropriated to the pursuit of their work; as in Germany, for instance, where a scientist would leave one university for another on the express condition that a laboratory should be built for him, “a laboratory,” said Pasteur, “usually magnificent, not in its architecture (though sometimes that is the case, a proof of the national pride in scientific glory), but in the number and perfection of its appliances. Besides,” he added, “foreign scientists have their private homes adjoining their laboratories and collections,” indeed a most pressing inducement to work.

Pasteur did not suggest that a scientist should give up teaching; he recognized, on the contrary, that public teaching forces him to embrace in succession every branch of the science he teaches. “But let him not give too frequent or too varied lectures! they paralyze the faculties,” he said, being well aware of the cost of preparing classes. He wished that towns should be interested in the working and success of their scientific establishments. The Universities of Paris, of Lyons, of Strasburg, of Montpellier, of Lille, of Bordeaux, and of Toulouse, forming as a whole the University of France, should be connected to the neighbourhood which they honour in the same way that German universities are connected with their surroundings.

Pasteur had the greatest admiration for the German system: popular instruction liberally provided, and, above it, an intellectually independent higher teaching. Therefore, when the University of Bonn resolved in that year, 1868, to offer him as a great homage the degree of M.D. on account of his works on micro-organisms, he was proud to see his researches rated at their proper value by a neighbouring nation. He did not then suspect the other side of German nature, the military side, then very differently preoccupied. Those preoccupations were pointed out to the French Government in a spirit of prophecy, and with some patriotic anguish, by two French officers, General Ducrot, commanding since 1865 the 6th Military Division, whose headquarters were at Strasburg, and Colonel Baron Stoffel, military attaché in Prussia since 1866. Their warnings were so little heeded that some Court intrigues were even then on foot to transfer General Ducrot from Strasburg to Bourges, so that he might no longer worry people with his monomania of Prussian ambition.

On March 10, the evening of the day when the Emperor decided upon making improvements, and when Duruy felt assured, thanks to the promised allowances, that he could soon offer to French professors “the necessary appliances with which to compete with their rivals beyond the Rhine,” Pasteur started for Alais, where his arrival was impatiently awaited, both by partisans and adversaries of his experiments on silkworm disease. He would much have liked to give the results of his work in his inaugural lecture at the Sorbonne. “But,” he wrote to Duruy, “these are but selfishly sentimental reasons, which must be outweighed by the interest of my researches.”

On his arrival he found to his joy that those who had practised seeding according to his rigorous prescriptions had met with complete success. Other silkworm cultivators, less well advised, duped by the decoying appearances of certain broods, had not taken the trouble to examine whether the moths were corpuscled; they were witnesses and victims of the failure Pasteur had prophesied. He now looked upon pébrine as conquered; but flachery remained, more difficult to prevent, being greatly dependent upon the accidents which traverse the life of a silkworm. Some of those accidents happen in spite of all precautions, such as a sudden change of temperature or a stormy day; but at least the leaves of the mulberry tree could be carefully kept from fermentation, or from contamination by dusts in the nurseries. Either of those two causes was sufficient to provoke a fatal disorder in silkworms, the feeding of which is so important that they increase to fifteen thousand times their own weight during the first month of their life. Accidental flachery could therefore be avoided by hygienic precautions. In order to prevent it from becoming hereditary, Pasteur—who had pointed out that the micro-organism which causes it develops at first in the intestinal canal of the worm and then becomes localized in the digestive cavity of the chrysalis—advised the following means of producing a healthy strain of silkworms: “This means,” writes M. Gernez, Pasteur’s assiduous collaborator in these studies, “does not greatly complicate operations, and infallibly ensures healthy seed. It consists in abstracting with the point of a scalpel a small portion of the digestive cavity of a moth, then mixing it with a little water and examining it with a microscope. If the moths do not contain the characteristic micro-organism, the strain they come from may unhesitatingly be considered as suitable for seeding. The flachery micro-organism is as easily recognized as the pébrine corpuscle.”

The seed merchants, made uneasy by these discoveries which so gravely jeopardized their industry, spread the most slanderous reports about them and made themselves the willing echo of every imposture, however incredible. M. Laurent wrote to his daughter, Madame Pasteur, in a letter dated from Lyons (June 6): “It is being reported here that the failure of Pasteur’s process has excited the population of your neighbourhood so much that he has had to flee from Alais, pursued by infuriated inhabitants throwing stones after him.” Some of these legends lingered in the minds of ignorant people.

Important news came from Paris to Pasteur in July, and on the 27th he was able to write to Raulin: “The building of my laboratory is going to be begun! the orders are given, and the money found. I heard this two days ago from the Minister.” 30,000 francs had been allowed for the work by the Minister of Public Instruction, and an equal sum was promised by the Minister of the Emperor’s household. Duruy was preparing at the same time a report on two projected decrees concerning laboratories for teaching purposes and for research. “The laboratory for research,” wrote Duruy, “will not be useful to the master alone, but more so even to the students, thus ensuring the future progress of science. Students already provided with extensive theoretical knowledge will be initiated in the teaching laboratories into the handling of instruments, elementary manipulations, and what I may call classical practice; this will gather them around eminent masters, from whom they will learn the art of observation and methods of experiment.... It is with similar institutions that Germany has succeeded in obtaining the great development of experimental science which we are now watching with an anxious sympathy.”

Pasteur returned to Paris with his enthusiastic mind overflowing with plans of all kinds of research. He wanted to be there when the builders began their work on the narrow space in the Rue d’Ulm. He wrote to Raulin on August 10, asking his opinion as he would that of an architect; then went on to say, planning out his busy holidays: “I shall leave Paris on the 16th with my wife and children to spend three weeks at the seaside, at St. George’s, near Bordeaux. If you were free at the end of the month, or at the beginning of September, I wish you could accompany me to Toulon, where experiments on the heating of wines will be made by the Minister of the Navy. Great quantities of heated and of non-heated wine are to be sent to Gabon so as to test the process; at present our colonial crews have to drink mere vinegar. A commission of very enlightened men is formed and has begun studies with which it seems satisfied.... See if you can join me at Bordeaux, where I shall await a notice from the chairman of the Commission, M. de Lapparent, director of naval construction at the Ministry of Marine.”

The Commission mentioned by Pasteur had been considering for the last two years the expediency of applying the heating process to wines destined for the fleet and to the colonies. A first trial was made at Brest on the contents of a barrel of 500 litres, half of which was heated. Then the two wines were sealed in different barrels and placed in the ship Jean Bart, which remained away from the harbour for ten months. When the vessel returned, the Commission noted the limpidity and mellowness of the heated wine, adding in the official report that the wine had acquired the attractive colour peculiar to mature wines. The non-heated wine was equally limpid, but it had an astringent, almost acid flavour. It was still fit to drink, said the report, but it were better to consume it rapidly, as it would soon be entirely spoilt. Identical results were observed in some bottles of heated and non-heated wines at Rochefort and Orleans.

M. de Lapparent now organized a decisive experiment, to take place under Pasteur’s superintendence. The frigate la Sibylle started for a tour round the world with a complete cargo of heated wine. Pasteur, who returned to Arbois for a short rest before going back to Paris, wrote from there to his early confidant, Chappuis (September 21, 1868): “I am quite satisfied with my experiments at Toulon and with the success of the Navy tests. We heated 650 hectolitres in two days; the rapidity of this operation lends itself to quick and considerable commissariat arrangements. Those 650 hectolitres will be taken to the West Coast of Africa, together with 50 hectolitres of the same wine non-heated. If the trial succeeds, that is to say if the 650 hectolitres arrive and can be kept without alteration, and if the 50 hectolitres become spoilt (I feel confident after the experiments I have made that such will be the result), the question will be settled, and, in the future, all the wine for the Navy will be ensured against disease by a preliminary heating. The expense will not be more than five centimes per hectolitre. The result of these experiments will have a great influence on the trade, ever cautious and afraid of innovations. Yet we have seen, at Narbonne in particular, some heating practised on a large scale by several merchants who have spoken to me very favourably about it. The exportation of our French wines will increase enormously, for at present our ordinary table wines lend themselves to trade with England and other countries beyond seas, but only by means of a strong addition of alcohol, which raises their price and tampers with their hygienic qualities.”

The experiments were successful. Pasteur’s life was now over full. He returned to Paris at the beginning of October, and threw himself into his work, his classes at the Sorbonne, the organization of his laboratory, some further polemics on the subject of silkworm disease, and projected experiments for the following year. This accumulation of mental work brought about extreme cerebral tension.

As soon as he saw M. Gernez, he spoke to him of the coming campaign of sericiculture, of his desire to reduce his adversaries to silence by heaping proof upon proof. Nothing could relieve him from that absorbing preoccupation, not even the gaiety of Bertin, who, living on the same floor at the Ecole Normale, often used to come in after dinner and try to amuse him.