In the Veterinary Press, of which M. Rossignol was one of the editors, an article by him might have been read on the 31st January, 1881, less than a month before that great discovery on charbon vaccine, wherein he expressed himself as follows: “Will you have some microbe? There is some everywhere. Microbiolatry is the fashion, it reigns undisputed; it is a doctrine which must not even be discussed, especially when its Pontiff, the learned M. Pasteur, has pronounced the sacramental words, I have spoken. The microbe alone is and shall be the characteristic of a disease; that is understood and settled; henceforth the germ theory must have precedence of pure clinics; the Microbe alone is true, and Pasteur is its prophet.”
At the end of March, M. Rossignol began a campaign, begging for subscriptions, pointing out how much the cultivators of the Brie—whose cattle suffered almost as much as that of the Beauce—were interested in the question. The discovery, if it were genuine, should not remain confined to the Ecole Normale laboratory, or monopolized by the privileged public of the Académie des Sciences, who had no use for it. M. Rossignol soon collected about 100 subscribers. Did he believe that Pasteur and his little phials would come to a hopeless fiasco in a farmyard before a public of old practitioners who had always been powerless in the presence of splenic fever? Microbes were a subject for ceaseless joking; people had hilarious visions of the veterinary profession confined some twenty years hence in a model laboratory assiduously cultivating numberless races, sub-races, varieties and sub-varieties of microbes.
It is probable that, if light comes from above, a good many practitioners would not have been sorry to see a strong wind from below putting out Pasteur’s light.
M. Rossignol succeeded in interesting every one in this undertaking. When the project was placed before the Melun Agricultural Society on the 2nd April, they hastened to approve of it and to accord their patronage.
The chairman, Baron de la Rochette, was requested to approach Pasteur and to invite him to organize public experiments on the preventive vaccination of charbon in the districts of Melun, Fontainebleau and Provins.
“The noise which those experiments will necessarily cause,” wrote M. Rossignol, “will strike every mind and convince those who may still be doubting; the evidence of facts will have the result of ending all uncertainty.”
Baron de la Rochette was a typical old French gentleman; his whole person was an ideal of old-time distinction and courtesy. Well up to date in all agricultural progress, and justly priding himself, with the ease of a great landowner, that he made of agriculture an art and a science, he could speak in any surroundings with knowledge of his subject and a winning grace of manner. When he entered the laboratory, he was at once charmed by the simplicity of the scientist, who hastened to accept the proposal of an extensive experiment.
At the end of April, Pasteur wrote out the programme which was to be followed near Melun at the farm of Pouilly le Fort. M. Rossignol had a number of copies of that programme printed, and distributed them, not only throughout the Department of Seine et Marne, but in the whole agricultural world. This programme was so decidedly affirmative that some one said to Pasteur, with a little anxiety: “You remember what Marshal Gouyion St. Cyr said of Napoleon, that ‘he liked hazardous games with a character of grandeur and audacity.’ It was neck or nothing with him; you are going on in the same way!”
“Yes,” answered Pasteur, who meant to compel a victory.
And as his collaborators, to whom he had just read the precise and strict arrangements he had made, themselves felt a little nervous, he said to them, “What has succeeded in the laboratory on fourteen sheep will succeed just as well at Melun on fifty.”