The Life of Pasteur · René Vallery-Radot
A great wave of enthusiasm and generosity swept from one end of France to another and reached foreign countries. A newspaper of Milan, the Perseveranza, which had opened a subscription, collected 6,000 fr. in its first list. The Journal d’Alsace headed a propaganda in favour of this work, “sprung from Science and Charity.” It reminded its readers that Pasteur had occupied a professor’s chair in the former brilliant Faculty of Science of Strasburg, and that his first inoculation was made on an Alsatian boy, Joseph Meister. The newspaper intended to send the subscriptions to Pasteur with these words: “Offerings from Alsace-Lorraine to the Pasteur Institute.”
The war of 1870 still darkened the memories of nations. Amongst eager and numerous inventions of instruments of death and destruction, humanity breathed when fresh news came from the laboratory, where a continued struggle was taking place against diseases. The most mysterious, the most cruel of all was going to be reduced to impotence.
Yet the method was about to meet with a few more cases like Louise Pelletier’s; accidents would result, either from delay or from exceptionally serious wounds. Happy days were still in store for those who sowed doubt and hatred.
During the early part of March, Pasteur received nineteen Russians, coming from the province of Smolensk. They had been attacked by a rabid wolf and most of them had terrible wounds: one of them, a priest, had been surprised by the infuriated beast as he was going into church, his upper lip and right cheek had been torn off, his face was one gaping wound. Another, the youngest of them, had had the skin of his forehead torn off by the wolf’s teeth; other bites were like knife cuts. Five of these unhappy wretches were in such a condition that they had to be carried to the Hôtel Dieu Hospital as soon as they arrived.
The Russian doctor who had accompanied these mujiks related how the wolf had wandered for two days and two nights, tearing to pieces every one he met, and how he had finally been struck down with an axe by one of those he had bitten most severely.
Because of the gravity of the wounds, and in order to make up for the time lost by the Russians before they started, Pasteur decided on making two inoculations every day, one in the morning and one in the evening; the patients at the Hôtel Dieu could be inoculated upon at the hospital.
The fourteen others came every morning in their touloupes and fur caps, with their wounds bandaged, and joined without a word the motley groups awaiting treatment at the laboratory--an English family, a Basque peasant, a Hungarian in his national costume, etc., etc.
In the evening, the dumb and resigned band of mujiks came again to the laboratory door. They seemed led by Fate, heedless of the struggle between life and death of which they were the prize. “Pasteur” was the only French word they knew, and their set and melancholy faces brightened in his presence as with a ray of hope and gratitude.
Their condition was the more alarming that a whole fortnight had elapsed between their being bitten and the date of the first inoculations. Statistics were terrifying as to the results of wolf-bites, the average proportion of deaths being 82 per 100. General anxiety and excitement prevailed concerning the hapless Russians, and the news of the death of three of them produced an intense emotion.
Pasteur had unceasingly continued his visits to the Hôtel Dieu. He was overwhelmed with grief. His confidence in his method was in no wise shaken, the general results would not allow it. But questions of statistics were of little account in his eyes when he was the witness of a misfortune; his charity was not of that kind which is exhausted by collective generalities: each individual appealed to his heart. As he passed through the wards at the Hôtel Dieu, each patient in his bed inspired him with deep compassion. And that is why so many who only saw him pass, heard his voice, met his pitiful eyes resting on them, have preserved of him a memory such as the poor had of St. Vincent de Paul.
“The other Russians are keeping well so far,” declared Pasteur at the Academy sitting of April 12, 1886. Whilst certain opponents in France continued to discuss the three deaths and apparently saw nought but those failures, the return of the sixteen survivors was greeted with an almost religious emotion. Other Russians had come before them and were saved, and the Tsar, knowing these things, desired his brother, the Grand Duke Vladimir, to bring to Pasteur an imperial gift, the Cross of the Order of St. Anne of Russia, in diamonds. He did more, he gave 100,000 fr. in aid of the proposed Pasteur Institute.
In April, 1886, the English Government, seeing the practical results of the method for the prophylaxis of hydrophobia, appointed a Commission to study and verify the facts. Sir James Paget was the president of it, and the other members were:--Dr. Lauder-Brunton, Mr. Fleming, Sir Joseph Lister, Dr. Quain, Sir Henry Roscoe, Professor Burdon Sanderson, and Mr. Victor Horsley, secretary. The résumé of the programme was as follows--
Development of the rabic virus in the medulla oblongata of animals dying of rabies.
Transmission of this virus by subdural or subcutaneous inoculation.
Intensification of this virus by successive passages from rabbit to rabbit.
Possibility either of protecting healthy animals from ulterior bites from rabid animals, or of preventing the onset of rabies in animals already bitten, by means of vaccinal inoculations.
Applications of this method to man and value of its results.
Burdon Sanderson and Horsley came to Paris, and two rabbits, inoculated on by Pasteur, were taken to England; a series of experiments was to be begun on them, and an inquiry was to take place afterwards concerning patients treated both in France and in England. Pasteur, who lost his temper at prejudices and ill-timed levity, approved and solicited inquiry and careful examination.
Long lists of subscribers appeared in the Journal Officiel--millionaires, poor workmen, students, women, etc. A great festival was organized at the Trocadéro in favour of the Pasteur Institute; the greatest artistes offered their services. Coquelin recited verses written for the occasion which excited loud applause from the immense audience. Gounod, who had conducted his Ave Maria, turned round after the closing bars, and, in an impulse of heartfelt enthusiasm, kissed both his hands to the savant.
In the evening at a banquet, Pasteur thanked his colleagues and the organizers of this incomparable performance. “Was it not,” he said, “a touching sight, that of those immortal composers, those great charmers of fortunate humanity coming to the assistance of those who wish to study and to serve suffering humanity? And you too come, great artistes, great actors, like so many generals re-entering the ranks to give greater vigour to a common feeling. I cannot easily describe what I felt. Dare I confess that I was hearing most of you for the first time? I do not think I have spent more than ten evenings of my whole life at a theatre. But I can have no regrets now that you have given me, in a few hours’ interval, as in an exquisite synthesis, the feelings that so many others scatter over several months, or rather several years.”
A few days later, the subscription from Alsace-Lorraine brought in 43,000 fr. Pasteur received it with grateful emotion, and was pleased and touched to find the name of little Joseph Meister among the list of private subscribers. It was now eleven months since he had been bitten so cruelly by the dog, whose rabic condition had immediately been recognized by the German authorities. Pasteur ever kept a corner of his heart for the boy who had caused him such anxiety.
Pasteur’s name was now familiar to all those who were trying to benefit humanity; his presence at charitable gatherings was considered as a happy omen, and he was asked to preside on many such occasions. He was ever ready with his help and sympathy, speaking in public, answering letters from private individuals, giving wholesome advice to young people who came to him for it, and doing nothing by halves. If he found the time, even during that period when the study of rabies was absorbing him, to undertake so many things and to achieve so many tasks, he owed it to Mme. Pasteur, who watched over his peace, keeping him safe from intrusions and interruptions. This retired, almost recluse life, enabled him to complete many works, a few of which would have sufficed to make several scientists celebrated.
Every morning, between ten and eleven o’clock, Pasteur walked down the Rue Claude-Bernard to the Rue Vauquelin, where a few temporary buildings had been erected to facilitate the treatment of hydrophobia, close to the rabbit hutches, hencoops, and dog kennels which occupied the yard of the old Collège Rollin. The patients under treatment walked about cheerfully amidst these surroundings, looking like holiday makers in a Zoological Garden. Children, whose tears were already dried at the second inoculation, ran about merrily. Pasteur, who loved the little ones, always kept sweets or new copper coins for them in his drawer. One little girl amused herself by having holes bored in those coins, and hung them round her neck like a necklace; she was wearing this ornament on the day of her departure, when she ran to kiss the great man as she would have kissed her grandfather.
Drs. Grancher, Roux, Chantemesse, and Charrin came by turns to perform the inoculations. A surgery ward had been installed to treat the numerous wounds of the patients, and entrusted to the young and energetic Dr. Terrillon.
In August, 1886, while staying at Arbois, Pasteur spent much time over his notes and registers; he was sometimes tempted to read over certain articles of passionate criticism. “How difficult it is to obtain the triumph of truth!” he would say. “Opposition is a useful stimulant, but bad faith is such a pitiable thing. How is it that they are not struck with the results as shown by statistics? From 1880 to 1885, sixty persons are stated to have died of hydrophobia in the Paris hospitals; well, since November 1, 1885, when the prophylactic method was started in my laboratory, only three deaths have occurred in those hospitals, two of which were cases which had not been treated. It is evident that very few people who had been bitten did not come to be treated. In France, out of that unknown but very restricted number, seventeen cases of death have been noted, whilst out of the 1,726 French and Algerians who came to the laboratory only ten died after the treatment.”
But Pasteur was not yet satisfied with this proportion, already so low; he was trying to forestall the outburst of hydrophobia by a greater rapidity and intensity of the treatment. He read a paper on the subject to the Academy of Sciences on November 2, 1886. Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, who was in the chair, said to him, “All great discoveries have gone through a time of trial. May your health withstand the troubles and difficulties in your way.”
Pasteur’s health had indeed suffered from so much work and anxiety, and there were symptoms of some heart trouble. Drs. Villemin and Grancher persuaded him to interrupt his work and to think of spending a restful winter in the south of France. M. Raphael Bischoffsheim, a great lover of science, placed at Pasteur’s disposal his beautiful villa at Bordighera, close to the French frontier, which he had on divers occasions lent to other distinguished guests, the Queen of Italy, Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, Gambetta, etc.
Pasteur consented to leave his work at the end of November, and started one evening from the Gare de Lyon with his wife, his daughter and her husband, and his two grandchildren; eighteen friends came to the station to see him off, including his pupils, M. Bischoffsheim, and some foreign physicians who were staying in Paris to study the prophylactic treatment of hydrophobia.
The bright dawn and the sunshine already appearing at Avignon contrasted with the foggy November weather left behind in Paris and brought a feeling of comfort, almost of returning health; a delegation of doctors met the train at Nice, bringing Pasteur their good wishes.
The travelling party drove from Vintimille to Bordighera under the deep blue sky reflected in a sea of a yet deeper blue, along a road bordered with cacti, palms and other tropical plants. The sight of the lovely gardens of the Villa Bischoffsheim gave Pasteur a delicious feeling of rest.
His health soon improved sufficiently for him to be able to take some short walks. But his thoughts constantly recurred to the laboratory. M. Duclaux was then thinking of starting a monthly periodical entitled Annals of the Pasteur Institute. Pasteur, writing to him on December 27, 1887, to express his approbation, suggested various experiments to be attempted. He attributed the action of the preventive inoculations to a vaccinal matter associated with the rabic microbe. Pasteur had thought at first that the first development of the pathogenic microbe caused the disappearance from the organism of an element necessary to the life of that microbe. It was, in other words, a theory of exhaustion. But since 1885, he adopted the other idea, supported indeed by biologists, that immunity was due to a substance left in the body by the culture of the microbe and which opposed the invasion--a theory of addition.
“I am happy to learn,” wrote Villemin, his friend and his medical adviser, “that your health is improving; continue to rest in that beautiful country, you have well deserved it, and rest is absolutely necessary to you. You have overtaxed yourself beyond all reason and you must make up for it. Repairs to the nervous system are worked chiefly by relaxation from the mental storms and moral anxieties which your rabid work has occasioned in you. Give the Bordighera sun a chance!”
But Pasteur was not allowed the rest he so much needed; on January 4, 1887, referring to a death which had occurred after treatment in the preceding December, M. Peter declared that the antirabic cure was useless; at the following meeting he called it dangerous when applied in the “intensive” form. Dujardin-Beaumetz, Chauveau and Verneuil immediately intervened, declaring that the alleged fact was “devoid of any scientific character.” A week later, MM. Grancher and Brouardel bore the brunt of the discussion. Grancher, Pasteur’s representative on this occasion, disproved certain allegations, and added: “The medical men who have been chosen by M. Pasteur to assist him in his work have not hesitated to practise the antirabic inoculation on themselves, as a safeguard against an accidental inoculation of the virus which they are constantly handling. What greater proof can they give of their bonâ fide convictions?” He showed that the mortality amongst the cases treated remained below 1 per 100. “M. Pasteur will soon publish foreign statistics from Samara, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Warsaw and Vienna: they are all absolutely favourable.”
As it was insinuated that the laboratory of the Ecole Normale kept its failures a secret, it was decided that the Annals of the Pasteur Institute would publish a monthly list and bulletin of patients under treatment.
Vulpian, at another meeting (it was almost the last time he was heard at the Académie de Médecine), said, à propos of what he called an inexcusable opposition, “This new benefit adds to the number of those which our illustrious Pasteur has already rendered to humanity.... Our works and our names will soon be buried under the rising tide of oblivion: the name and the works of M. Pasteur will continue to stand on heights too great to be reached by its sullen waves.” Pasteur was much disturbed by the noise of these discussions; every post increased his feverishness, and he spoke every morning of returning to Paris to answer his opponents.
It was a pitiful thing to note on his worn countenance the visible signs of the necessity of the peace and rest offered by this beautiful land of serene sunshine; and to hear at the same time a constant echo of those angry debates. Anonymous letters were sent to him, insulting newspaper articles--all that envy and hatred can invent; the seamy side of human nature was being revealed to him. “I did not know I had so many enemies,” he said mournfully. He was consoled to some extent by the ardent support of the greatest medical men in France.
Vulpian, in a statement to the Académie des Sciences, constituted himself Pasteur’s champion. Pasteur indeed was safe from attacks in that centre, but certain low slanderers who attended the public meetings of the Académie continued to accuse Pasteur of concealing the failures of his method. Vulpian--who was furiously angry at such an insinuation against “a man like M. Pasteur, whose good faith, loyalty and scientific integrity should be an example to his adversaries as they are to his friends”--thought that it was in the interest both of science and of humanity to state once more the facts recently confirmed by new statistics; the public is so impressionable and so mobile in its opinions that one article is often enough to shake general confidence. He was therefore anxious to reassure all those who had been inoculated on and who might be induced by those discussions to wonder with anguish whether they really were saved. The Academy of Sciences decided that Vulpian’s statement should be inserted in extenso in all the reports and a copy of it sent to every village in France. Vulpian wrote to Pasteur at the same time, “All your admirers hope that those interested attacks will merely excite your contempt. Fine weather is no doubt reigning at Bordighera: you must take advantage of it and become quite well.... The Academy of Medicine is almost entirely on your side; there are at the most but four or five exceptions.”
Pasteur had a few calm days after these debates. Whilst planning out new investigations, he was much interested in the plans for his Institute which were now submitted to him. His thoughts were always away from Bordighera, which he seemed to look upon as a sort of exile. This impression was partly due to the situation of the town, so close to the frontier, and the haunt of so many homeless wanderers. He once met a sad-faced, still beautiful woman, in mourning robes, and recognized the Empress Eugénie.
Shortly afterwards, he received a visit from Prince Napoleon, who dragged his haughty ennui from town to town. He presented himself at the Villa Bischoffsheim under the name of Count Moncalieri, coming, he said, to greet his colleague of the Institute. Rabies formed the subject of their conversation. The next day, Pasteur called on the Prince, in his commonplace hotel rooms, a mere temporary resting place for the exiled Bonaparte, whose mysterious, uncompleted destiny was made more enigmatical by his startling resemblance to the great Emperor.
On February 23, the day after the carnival, early in the morning, a violent earthquake cast terror over that peaceful land where nature hides with flowers the spectre of death. At 6.20 a.m. a low and distant rumbling sound was heard, coming from the depths of the earth and resembling the noise of a train passing in an underground tunnel; houses began to rock and ominous cracks were heard. This first shock lasted more than a minute, during which the sense of solidity disappeared altogether, to be succeeded by a feeling of absolute, hopeless, impotence. No doubt, in every household, families gathered together, with a sudden yearning not to be divided. Pasteur’s wife, children and grandchildren had barely had time to come to him when another shock took place, more terrible than the first; everything seemed about to be engulfed in an abyss. Never had morning been more radiant; there was not a breath of wind, the air was absolutely transparent.
An early departure was necessary: the broken ceilings were dropping to pieces, shaken off by an incessant vibration of the ground which continued after the second shock, and of which Pasteur observed the effect on glass windows with much interest. Pasteur and his family dove off to Vintimille in a carriage, along a road lined with ruined houses, crowded with sick people in quest of carriages and peasants coming down from their mountain dwellings, destroyed by the shock, leading donkeys loaded with bedding, the women followed by little children hastily wrapt in blankets and odd clothes. At Vintimille station, terrified travellers were trying to leave France for Italy or Italy for France, fancying that the danger would cease on the other side of the frontier.
“We have resolved to go to Arbois,” wrote Mme. Pasteur to her son from Marseilles; “your father will be better able there than anywhere else to recover from this shock to his heart.”
After a few weeks’ stay at Arbois, Pasteur seemed quite well again. He was received with respect and veneration on his return to the Academies of Sciences and of Medicine. His best and greatest colleagues had realized what the loss of him would mean to France and to the world, and surrounded him with an anxious solicitude.
At the beginning of July, Pasteur received the report presented to the House of Commons by the English Commission after a fourteen months’ study of the prophylactic method against hydrophobia. The English scientists had verified every one of the facts upon which the method was founded, but they had not been satisfied with their experimental researches in Mr. Horsley’s laboratory, and had carried out a long and minute inquiry in France. After noting on Pasteur’s registers the names of ninety persons treated, who had come from the same neighbourhood, they had interviewed each one of them in their own homes. “It may therefore be considered as certain”--thus ran the report--“that M. Pasteur has discovered a prophylactic method against hydrophobia which may be compared with that of vaccination against small-pox. It would be difficult to overestimate the utility of this discovery, both from the point of view of its practical side and of its application to general pathology. We have here a new method of inoculation, or vaccination, as M. Pasteur sometimes calls it, and similar means might be employed to protect man and domestic animals against other virus as active as that of hydrophobia.”
Pasteur laid this report on the desk of the Academy of Sciences on July 4. He spoke of its spirit of entire and unanimous confidence, and added--
“Thus fall to the ground the contradictions which have been published. I leave on one side the passionate attacks which were not justified by the least attempt at experiment, the slightest observation of facts in my laboratory, or even an exchange of words and ideas with the Director of the Hydrophobia Clinic, Professor Grancher, and his medical assistants.
“But, however deep is my satisfaction as a Frenchman, I cannot but feel a sense of deepest sadness at the thought that this high testimony from a commission of illustrious scientists was not known by him who, at the very beginning of the application of this method, supported me by his counsels and his authority, and who later on, when I was ill and absent, knew so well how to champion truth and justice; I mean our beloved colleague Vulpian.”
Vulpian had succumbed to a few days’ illness. His speech in favour of Pasteur was almost the farewell to the Academy of this great-hearted scientist.
The discussion threatened to revive. Other colleagues defended Pasteur at the Academy of Medicine on July 12. Professor Brouardel spoke, also M. Villemin, and then Charcot, who insisted on quoting word for word Vulpian’s true and simple phrase: “The discovery of the preventive treatment of hydrophobia after a bite, entirely due to M. Pasteur’s experimental genius, is one of the finest discoveries ever made, both from the scientific and the humanitarian point of view.” And Charcot continued: “I am persuaded that I express in these words the opinion of all the medical men who have studied the question with an open mind, free from prejudice; the inventor of antirabic vaccination may, now more than ever, hold his head high and continue to accomplish his glorious task, heedless of the clamour of systematic contradiction or of the insidious murmurs of slander.”
The Academy of Sciences begged Pasteur to become its Life Secretary in Vulpian’s place. Pasteur did not reply at once to this offer, but went to see M. Berthelot: “This high position,” he said, “would be more suitable to you than to me.” M. Berthelot, much touched, refused unconditionally, and Pasteur accepted. He was elected on July 18. He said, in thanking his colleagues, “I would now spend what time remains before me, on the one hand in encouraging to research and in training for scientific studies,--the future of which seems to me most promising,--pupils worthy of French science; and, on the other hand, in following attentively the work incited and encouraged by this Academy.
“Our only consolation, as we feel our own strength failing us, is to feel that we may help those who come after us to do more and to do better than ourselves, fixing their eyes as they can on the great horizons of which we only had a glimpse.”
He did not long fulfil his new duties. On October 23, Sunday morning, after writing a letter in his room, he tried to speak to Mme. Pasteur and could not pronounce a word; his tongue was paralyzed. He had promised to lunch with his daughter on that day, and, fearing that she might be alarmed, he drove to her house. After spending a few hours in an easy chair, he consented to remain at her house with Mme. Pasteur. In the evening his speech returned, and two days later, when he went back to the Ecole Normale, no one would have noticed any change in him. But, on the following Saturday morning, he had another almost similar attack, without any premonitory symptoms. His speech remained somewhat difficult, and his deep powerful voice completely lost its strength. In January, 1888, he was obliged to resign his secretaryship.
Ill-health had emaciated his features. A portrait of him by Carolus Duran represents him looking ill and weary, a sad look in his eyes. But goodness predominates in those worn features, revealing that lovable soul, full of pity for all human sufferings, and of which the painter has rendered the unspeakable thrill.
Pasteur’s various portraits, compared with one another, show us different aspects of his physiognomy. A luminous profile, painted by Henner ten years before, brings out the powerful harmony of the forehead. In 1886, Bonnat painted, for the brewer Jacobsen, who wished to present it to Mme. Pasteur, a large portrait which may be called an official one. Pasteur is standing in rather an artificial attitude, which might be imperious, if his left hand was not resting on the shoulder of his granddaughter, a child of six, with clear pensive eyes. In that same year, Edelfeldt, the Finnish painter, begged to be allowed to come into the laboratory for a few sketches. Pasteur came and went, attending to his work and taking no notice of the painter. One day that Edelfeldt was watching him thus, deep in observation, his forehead lined with almost painful thoughts, he undertook to portray the savant in his meditative attitude. Pasteur is standing clad in a short brown coat, an experimental card in his left hand, in his right, a phial containing a fragment of rabic marrow, the expression in his eyes entirely concentrated on the scientific problem.
During the year 1888, Pasteur, after spending the morning with his patients, used to go and watch the buildings for the Pasteur Institute which were being erected in the Rue Dutot. 11,000 square yards of ground had been acquired in the midst of some market gardens. Instead of rows of hand-lights and young lettuces, a stone building, with a Louis XIII façade, was now being constructed. An interior gallery connected the main building with the large wings. The Pasteur Institute was to be at the same time a great dispensary for the treatment of hydrophobia, a centre of research on virulent and contagious diseases, and also a teaching centre. M. Duclaux’s class of biological chemistry, held at the Sorbonne, was about to be transferred to the Pasteur Institute, where Dr. Roux would also give a course of lectures on technical microbia. The “service” of vaccinations against anthrax was entrusted to M. Chamberland. (The statistics of 1882--1887 gave a total of 1,600,000 sheep and nearly 200,000 oxen.) There would also be, under M. Metchnikoff’s direction, some private laboratories, the monkish cells of the Pastorians.
At the end of October, the work was almost completed; Pasteur invited the President of the Republic to come and inaugurate the Institute. “I shall certainly not fail to do so,” answered Carnot; “your Institute is a credit to France.”
On November 14, politicians, colleagues, friends, collaborators, pupils assembled in the large library of the new Institute. Pasteur had the pleasure of seeing before him, in the first rank, Duruy and Jules Simon; it was a great day for these former Ministers of Public Instruction. Like them, Pasteur had all his life been deeply interested in higher education. “If that teaching is but for a small number,” he said, “it is with this small number, this élite that the prosperity, glory and supremacy of a nation rest.”
Joseph Bertrand, chairman of the Institute Committee, knowing that by so doing he responded to Pasteur’s dearest wishes, spoke of the past and recalled the memories of Biot, Senarmont, Claude Bernard, Balard, and J. B. Dumas.
Professor Grancher, Secretary of the Committee, alluded to the way in which not only Vulpian but Breuardel, Charcot, Verneuil, Chauveau and Villemin had recently honoured themselves by supporting the cause of progress and preparing its triumph. These memories of early friends, associated with that of recent champions, brought before the audience a vision of the procession of years. After speaking of the obstacles Pasteur had so often encountered amongst the medical world--
“You know,” said M. Grancher, “that M. Pasteur is an innovator, and that his creative imagination, kept in check by rigorous observation of facts, has overturned many errors and built up in their place an entirely new science. His discoveries on ferments, on the generation of the infinitesimally small, on microbes, the cause of contagious diseases, and on the vaccination of those diseases, have been for biological chemistry, for the veterinary art and for medicine, not a regular progress, but a complete revolution. Now, revolutions, even those imposed by scientific demonstration, ever leave behind them vanquished ones who do not easily forgive. M. Pasteur has therefore many adversaries in the world, without counting those Athenian French who do not like to see one man always right or always fortunate. And, as if he had not enough adversaries, M. Pasteur makes himself new ones by the rigorous implacability of his dialectics and the absolute form he sometimes gives to his thought.”
Going on to the most recently acquired results, M. Grancher stated that the mortality amongst persons treated after bites from rabid dogs remained under 1 per 100.
“If those figures are indeed eloquent,” said M. Christophle, the treasurer, who spoke after M. Grancher, “other figures are touching. I would advise those who only see the dark side of humanity,” he remarked, before entering upon the statement of accounts--“those who go about repeating that everything here below is for the worst, that there is no disinterestedness, no devotion in this world--to cast their eyes over the ‘human documents’ of the Pasteur Institute. They would learn therein, beginning at the beginning, that Academies contain colleagues who are not offended, but proud and happy in the fame of another; that politicians and journalists often have a passion for what is good and true; that at no former epoch have great men been more beloved in France; that justice is already rendered to them during their lifetime, which is very much the best way of doing so; that we have cheered Victor Hugo’s birthday, Chevreul’s centenary, and the inauguration of the Pasteur Institute. When a Frenchman runs himself down, said one of M. Pasteur’s colleagues, do not believe him; he is boasting! Reversing a celebrated and pessimistic phrase, it might be said that in this public subscription all the virtues flow into unselfishness like rivers into the sea.”
M. Christophle went on to show how rich and poor had joined in this subscription and raised an amount of 2,586,680 fr. The French Chambers had voted 200,000 fr., to which had been added international gifts from the Tsar, the Emperor of Brazil, and the Sultan. The total expenses would probably reach 1,563,786 fr., leaving a little more than a million to form an endowment for the Pasteur Institute, a fund which was to be increased every year by the product of the sale of vaccines from the laboratory, which Pasteur and Messrs. Chamberland and Roux agreed to give up to the Institute.
“It is thus, Sir,” concluded the treasurer, directly addressing Pasteur, “that public generosity, practical help from the Government, and your own disinterestedness have founded and consolidated the establishment which we are to-day inaugurating.” And, persuaded that the solicitude of the public would never fail to support this great work, “This is for you, Sir, a rare and almost unhoped for happiness; let it console you for the passionate struggles, the terrible anxiety and the many emotions you have gone through.”
Pasteur, overcome by his feelings, had to ask his son to read his speech. It began by a rapid summary of what France had done for education in all its degrees. “From village schools to laboratories, everything has been founded or renovated.” After acknowledging the help given him in later years by the public authorities, he continued--
“And when the day came that, foreseeing the future which would be opened by the discovery of the attenuation of virus, I appealed to my country, so that we should be allowed, through the strength and impulse of private initiative, to build laboratories to be devoted, not only to the prophylactic treatment of hydrophobia, but also to the study of virulent and contagious diseases--on that day again, France gave in handfuls.... It is now finished, this great building, of which it might be said that there is not a stone but what is the material sign of a generous thought. All the virtues have subscribed to build this dwelling place for work.
“Alas! mine is the bitter grief that I enter it, a man ‘vanquished by Time,’ deprived of my masters, even of my companions in the struggle, Dumas, Bouley, Paul Bert, and lastly Vulpian, who, after having been with you, my dear Grancher, my counsellor at the very first, became the most energetic, the most convinced champion of this method.
“However, if I have the sorrow of thinking that they are no more, after having valiantly taken their part in discussions which I have never provoked but have had to endure; if they cannot hear me proclaim all that I owe to their counsels and support; if I feel their absence as deeply as on the morrow of their death, I have at least the consolation of believing that all that we struggled for together will not perish. The collaborators and pupils who are now here share our scientific faith....” He continued, as in a sort of testament: “Keep your early enthusiasm, dear collaborators, but let it ever be regulated by rigorous examinations and tests. Never advance anything which cannot be proved in a simple and decisive fashion.
“Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself, it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word. What I am now asking you, and you will ask of your pupils later on, is what is most difficult to an inventor.
“It is indeed a hard task, when you believe you have found an important scientific fact and are feverishly anxious to publish it, to constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, to fight with yourself, to try and ruin your own experiments and only to proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses.
“But when, after so many efforts, you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul, and the thought that you will have contributed to the honour of your country renders that joy still deeper.
“If science has no country, the scientist should have one, and ascribe to it the influence which his works may have in this world. If I might be allowed, M. le Président, to conclude by a philosophical remark inspired by your presence in this Home of Work, I should say that two contrary laws seem to be wrestling with each other nowadays; the one, a law of blood and of death, ever imagining new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield--the other, a law of peace, work and health, ever evolving new means of delivering man from the scourges which beset him.
“The one seeks violent conquests, the other the relief of humanity. The latter places one human life above any victory; while the former would sacrifice hundreds and thousands of lives to the ambition of one. The law of which we are the instruments seeks, even in the midst of carnage, to cure the sanguinary ills of the law of war; the treatment inspired by our antiseptic methods may preserve thousands of soldiers. Which of those two laws will ultimately prevail, God alone knows. But we may assert that French Science will have tried, by obeying the law of Humanity, to extend the frontiers of Life.”
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End of part 23 of 24
Continue readingChapter 14: 1889-1895
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