The tortured bitten people of the world began to pour into the laboratory of the miracle-man of the Rue d’Ulm. Research for a moment came to an end in the messy small suite of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland sorted out polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in a score of tongues: “Pasteur—save us!”

And this man who was no physician—who used to say with proud irony: “I am only a chemist,”—this man of science who all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors, answered these cries and saved them. He shot his complicated, illogical fourteen doses of partly weakened germs of rabies—unknown microbes of rabies—into them and sent these people healthy back to the four corners of the earth.

From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, moujiks who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days before, and five of them were so terribly mangled they could not walk at all, and had to be taken to the Hotel Dieu. Strange figures in fur caps they came, saying: “Pasteur—Pasteur,” and this was the only word of French they knew.

Then Paris went mad—as only Paris can—with excited concern about these bitten Russians who must surely die—it was so long since they had been attacked—and the town talked of nothing else while Pasteur and his men started their injections. The chances of getting hydrophobia from the bites of mad wolves are eight out of ten: out of these nineteen Russians, fifteen were sure to die....

“Maybe,” said every one, “they will all die—it is more than two weeks since they were attacked, poor fellows; the malady must have a terrible start, they have no chance....” Such was the gabble of the Boulevards.

Perhaps, indeed, it was too late. Pasteur could not eat nor did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morning and night, twice as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen injections—twice a day to make up for lost time—he and his men shot the vaccine into the arms of the Russians.

And at last a great shout of pride went up for this man Pasteur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the world raised a pæan of thanks to him—for the vaccine marvelously saved all but three of the doomed peasants. The moujiks returned to Russia and were welcomed with the kind of awe that greets the return of hopeless sick ones who have been healed at some miraculous shrine. And the Tsar of All the Russias sent Pasteur the diamond cross of Ste. Anne, and a hundred thousand francs to start the building of that house of microbe hunters in the Rue Dutot in Paris—that laboratory now called the Institut Pasteur. From all over the world—it was the kind of burst of generosity that only great disasters usually call out—from every country in the earth came money, piling up into millions of francs for the building of a laboratory in which Pasteur might have everything needed to track down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons against them....

The laboratory was built, but Pasteur’s own work was done; his triumph was too much for him; it was a kind of trigger, perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of never before heard-of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895 in a little house near the kennels where they now kept his rabid dogs, at Villeneuve l’Etang, just outside of Paris. His end was that of the devout Catholic, the mystic he had always been. In one hand he held a crucifix and in the other lay the hand of the most patient, obscure and important of his collaborators—Madame Pasteur. Around him, too, were Roux and Chamberland and those other searchers he had worn to tatters with his restless energy, those faithful ones he had abused, whom he had above all inspired; and these men who had risked their lives in the carrying out of his wild forays against death would now have died to save him, if they could.

That was the perfect end of this so human, so passionately imperfect hunter of microbes and saver of lives.

But there is another end of his career that I like to think of more—and that was the day, in 1892, of Pasteur’s seventieth birthday—when a medal was given to him at a great meeting held to honor him, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lister was there, and many other famous men from other nations, and in tier upon tier, above these magnificoes who sat in the seats of honor, were the young men of France—the students of the Sorbonne and the colleges and the high schools. There was a great buzz of young voices—all at once a hush, as Pasteur limped up the aisle, leaning on the arm of the President of the French Republic. And then—it is the kind of business that is usually pulled off to welcome generals and that kind of hero who has directed the futile butchering of thousands of enemies—the band of the Republican Guard blared out into a triumphal march.

Lister, the prince of surgeons, rose from his seat and hugged Pasteur and the gray-bearded important men and the boys in the top galleries cried and shook the walls with the roar of their cheering. At last the old microbe hunter gave his speech—the voice of the fierce arguments was gone and his son had to speak it for him—and his last words were a hymn of hope, not so much for the saving of life as a kind of religious cry for a new way of life for men. It was to the students, to the boys of the high schools he was calling:

“... Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecating and barren skepticism, do not let yourselves be discouraged by the sadness of certain hours which pass over nations. Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves first: What have I done for my instruction? and, as you gradually advance, What have I done for my country? until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the progress and good of humanity....”