The life of Pasteur

by René Vallery-Radot

Time passed and his art, like a lily of the desert growing amongst ruins, gave flowers and perfumes to surrounding moral devastation, A mixture of disdain and nobility now made him regard as almost imperceptible the number of men capable of understanding his philosophical elevation. Pasteur had bared his soul; Renan took pleasure in throwing light on the intellectual antithesis of certain minds, and on their points of contact.

“Allow me, Sir, to recall to you your fine discovery of right and left tartaric acids.... There are some minds which it is as impossible to bring together as it is impossible, according to your own comparison, to fit two gloves one into the other. And yet both gloves are equally necessary; they complete each other. One’s two hands cannot be superposed, they may be joined. In the vast bosom of nature, the most diverse efforts, added to each other, combine with each other, and result in a most majestic unity.”

Renan handled the French language, “this old and admirable language, poor but to those who do not know it,” with a dexterity, a choice of delicate shades, of tasteful harmonies which have never been surpassed. Able as he was to define every human feeling, he went on from the above comparison, painting divergent intellectual capabilities, to the following imprecation against death: “Death, according to a thought admired by M. Littré, is but a function, the last and quietest of all. To me it seems odious, hateful, insane, when it lays its cold blind hand on virtue and on genius. A voice is in us, which only great and good souls can hear, and that voice cries unceasingly ‘Truth and Good are the ends of thy life; sacrifice all to that goal’; and when, following the call of that siren within us, claiming to bear the promises of life, we reach the place where the reward should await us, the deceitful consoler fails us. Philosophy, which had promised us the secret of death, makes a lame apology, and the ideal which had brought us to the limits of the air we breathe disappears from view at the supreme hour when we look for it. Nature’s object has been attained; a powerful effort has been realized, and then, with characteristic carelessness, the enchantress abandons us and leaves us to the hooting birds of the night.”

Renan, save in one little sentence in his answer to Pasteur—“The divine work accomplishes itself by the intimate tendency to what is Good and what is True in the universe”—did not go further into the statement of his doctrines. Perhaps he thought them too austere for his audience; he was wont to eschew critical and religious considerations when in a world which he looked upon as frivolous. Moreover, he thought his own century amusing, and was willing to amuse it further. If he raised his eyes to Heaven, he said that we owe virtue to the Eternal, but that we have the right to add to it irony. Pasteur thought it strange that irony should be applied to subjects which have beset so many great minds and which so many simple hearts solve in their own way.

The week which followed Pasteur’s reception at the Académie Française brought him a manifestation of applause in the provinces. The town of Aubenas in the Ardèche was erecting a statue to Olivier de Serres, and desired to associate with the name of the founder of the silk industry in France in the sixteenth century that of its preserver in the nineteenth.

This was the second time that a French town proclaimed its gratitude towards Pasteur. A few months before, the Melun Agricultural Society had held a special meeting in his honour, and had decided “to strike a medal with Pasteur’s effigy on it, in commemoration of one of the greatest services ever rendered by Science to Agriculture.”

But amidst this pæan of praise, Pasteur, instead of dwelling complacently on the recollection of his experiments at Pouilly le Fort, was absorbed in one idea, characteristic of the man: he wanted to at once begin some experiments on the peripneumonia of horned cattle. The veterinary surgeon, Rossignol, had just been speaking on this subject to the meeting. Pasteur, who had recently been asked by the Committee of Epizootic Diseases to inquire into the mortality often caused by the inoculation of the peripneumonia virus, reminded his hearers in a few words of the variable qualities of virus and how the slightest impurity in a virus may exercise an influence on the effects of that virus.

He and his collaborators had vainly tried to cultivate the virus of peripneumonia in chicken-broth, veal-broth, yeast-water, etc. They had to gather the virus from the lung of a cow which had died of peripneumonia, by means of tubes previously sterilized; it was injected, with every precaution against alteration, under the skin of the tail of the animal, this part being chosen on account of the thickness of the skin and of the cellular tissue. By operating on other parts, serious accidents were apt to occur, the virus being extremely violent, so much so in fact that the local irritation sometimes went so far as to cause the loss of part of the tail. At the end of the same year (1882), Pasteur published in the Recueil de la Médecine Vétérinaire a paper indicating the following means of preserving the virus in a state of purity—

“Pure virus remains virulent for weeks and months. One lung is sufficient to provide large quantities of it, and its purity can easily be tested in a stove and even in ordinary temperature. From one lung only, enough can be procured to be used for many animals. Moreover, without having recourse to additional lungs, the provision of virus could be maintained in the following manner; it would suffice, before exhausting the first stock of virus, to inoculate a young calf behind the shoulder. Death speedily supervenes, and all the tissues are infiltrated with a serosity, which in its turn becomes virulent. This also can be collected and preserved in a state of purity.” It remained to be seen whether virus thus preserved would become so attenuated as to lose all degree of virulence.

Aubenas, then, wished to follow the example of Melun. In deference to the unanimous wish of the inhabitants of the little town, Pasteur went there on the 4th of May. His arrival was a veritable triumph; there were decorations at the station, floral arches in the streets, brass and other bands, speeches from the Mayor, presentation of the Municipal Council, of the Chamber of Commerce, etc., etc. Excitement reigned everywhere, and the music of the bands was almost drowned by the acclamations of the people. At the meeting of the Agricultural Society, Pasteur was offered a medal with his own effigy, and a work of art representing genii around a cup, their hands full of cocoons. A little microscope—that microscope which had been called an impracticable instrument, fit for scientists only—figured as an attribute.