Having heard that yellow fever had just been brought into the Gironde, at the Pauillac lazaretto by the vessel Condé from Senegal, Pasteur immediately started for Bordeaux. He hoped to find the microbe in the blood of the sick or the dead, and to succeed in cultivating it. M. Roux hastened to join his master.
If people spoke to Pasteur of the danger of infection, “What does it matter?” he said. “Life in the midst of danger is the life, the real life, the life of sacrifice, of example, of fruitfulness.”
He was vexed to find his arrival notified in the newspapers; it worried him not to be able to work and to travel incognito.
On September 17, he wrote to Mme. Pasteur: “...We rowed out to a great transport ship which is lying in the Pauillac roads, having just arrived. From our boat, we were able to speak to the men of the crew. Their health is good, but they lost seven persons at St. Louis, two passengers and five men of the crew. Save the captain and one engineer, they are all Senegalese negroes on that ship. We have been near another large steamboat, and yet another; their health is equally good....
“The most afflicted ship is the Condé, which is in quarantine in the Pauillac roads, and near which we have not been able to go. She has lost eighteen persons, either at sea or at the lazaretto....”
No experiment could be attempted—the patients were convalescent. “But,” he wrote the next day, “the Richelieu will arrive between the 25th and 28th, I think with some passengers.... It is more than likely that there will have been deaths during the passage, and patients for the lazaretto. I am therefore awaiting the arrival of that ship with the hope—God forgive a scientist’s passion!!—that I may attempt some researches at the Pauillac lazaretto, where I will arrange things in consequence. You may be sure I shall take every precaution. In the meanwhile, what shall I do in Bordeaux?
“I have made the acquaintance of the young librarian of the town library, which is a few doors from the Hôtel Richelieu, in the Avenues of Tourny. The library is opened to me at all hours: I am there even now, alone and very comfortably seated, surrounded with more Littré than I can possibly get through.”
For some months, several members of the Académie Française—according to the traditions of the Society which has ever thought it an honour to number among its members scientists such as Cuvier, Flourens, Biot, Claude Bernard, J. B. Dumas—had been urging Pasteur to become a candidate to the place left vacant by Littré. Pasteur was anxious to know not only the works, but the life of him whose place he might be called upon to fill. It was with some emotion that he first came upon the following lines printed on the title-page of the translation of the works of Hippocrates; they are a dedication by Littré to the memory of his father, a sergeant-major in the Marines under the Revolution.
“...Prepared by his lessons and by his example, I have been sustained through this long work by his ever present memory. I wish to inscribe his name on the first page of this book, in the writing of which he has had so much share from his grave, so that the work of the father should not be forgotten in the work of the son, and that a pious and just gratitude should connect the work of the living with the heritage of the dead....”
Pasteur in 1876 had obeyed a similar filial feeling when he wrote on the first page of his Studies on Beer—