“Your proposal touches me very much and it would be agreeable to me to owe a Deputy’s mandate to electors, several of whom have applied the results of my investigations. But politics frighten me and I have already refused a candidature in the Jura and a seat in the Senate in the course of this year.
“I might be tempted perhaps, if I no longer felt active enough for my laboratory work. But I still feel equal to further researches, and on my return to Paris, I shall be organizing a ‘service’ against rabies which will absorb all my energies. I now possess a very perfect method of prophylaxis against that terrible disease, a method equally adapted to human beings and to dogs, and by which your much afflicted Department will be one of the first to benefit.
“Before my departure for Jura I dared to treat a poor little nine-year-old lad whose mother brought him to me from Alsace, where he had been attacked on the 4th ult., and bitten on the thighs, legs, and hand in such a manner that hydrophobia would have been inevitable. He remains in perfect health.”
Whilst many political speeches were being prepared, Pasteur was thinking over a literary speech. He had been requested by the Académie Française to welcome Joseph Bertrand, elected in place of J. B. Dumas—the eulogium of a scientist, spoken by one scientist, himself welcomed by another scientist. This was an unusual programme for the Académie Française, perhaps too unusual in the eyes of Pasteur, who did not think himself worthy of speaking in the name of the Académie. Such was his modesty; he forgot that amongst the savants who had been members of the Académie, several, such as Fontenelle, Cuvier, J. B. Dumas, etc., had published immortal pages, and that some extracts from his own works would one day become classical.
The vacation gave him time to read over the writings of his beloved teacher, and also to study the life and works of Joseph Bertrand, already his colleague at the Académie des Sciences.
Bertrand’s election had been simple and easy, like everything he had undertaken since his birth. It seemed as if a good fairy had leant over his cradle and whispered to him, “Thou shalt know many things, without having had to learn them.” It is a fact that he could read without having held a book in his hands. He was ill and in bed whilst his brother Alexander was being taught to read; he listened to the lessons and kept the various combinations of letters in his mind. When he became convalescent, his parents brought him a book of Natural History so that he might look at the pictures. He took the volume and read from it fluently; he was not five years old. He learnt the elements of geometry very much in the same way.
Pasteur in his speech thus described Joseph Bertrand’s childhood: “At ten years old you were already celebrated, and it was prophesied that you would pass at the head of the list into the Ecole Polytechnique and become a member of the Academy of Sciences? No one doubted this, not even yourself. You were indeed a child prodigy. Sometimes it amused you to hide in a class of higher mathematics, and when the Professor propounded a difficult problem that no one could solve, one of the students would triumphantly lift you in his arms, stand you on a chair so that you might reach the board, and you would then give the required solution with a calm assurance, in the midst of applause from the professors and pupils.”
Pasteur, whose every progress had been painfully acquired, admired the ease with which Bertrand had passed through the first stages of his career. At an age when marbles and india-rubber balls are usually an important interest, Bertrand walked merrily to the Jardin des Plantes to attend a course of lectures by Gay-Lussac. A few hours later, he might be seen at the Sorbonne, listening with interest to Saint Marc Girardin, the literary moralist. The next day, he would go to a lecture on Comparative Legislation; never was so young a child seen in such serious places. He borrowed as many books from the Institute library as Biot himself; he learnt whole passages by heart, merely by glancing at them. He became a doctor ès sciences at sixteen, and a Member of the Institute at thirty-four.
Besides his personal works—such as those on Analytic Mechanics, which place him in the very first rank—his teaching had been brought to bear during forty years on all branches of mathematics. Bertrand’s life, apparently so happy, had been saddened by the irreparable loss, during the Commune, of a great many precious notes, letters, and manuscripts, which had been burnt with the house where he had left them. Discouraged by this ruin of ten years’ work, he had given way to a tendency to writing slight popular articles, of high literary merit, instead of continuing his deeper scientific work. His eulogy of J. B. Dumas was not quite seriously enthusiastic enough to please Pasteur, who had a veritable cult for the memory of his old teacher, and who eagerly grasped this opportunity of speaking again of J. B. Dumas’ influence on himself, of his admirable scientific discoveries, and of his political duties, undertaken in the hope of being useful to Science, but often proving a source of disappointment.
Pasteur enjoyed looking back on the beloved memory of J. B. Dumas, as he sat preparing his speech in his study at Arbois, looking out on the familiar landscape of his childhood, where the progress of practical science was evidenced by the occasional passing, through the distant pine woods, of the white smoke of the Switzerland express.