When in his laboratory in Paris, Pasteur hated to be disturbed whilst making experiments or writing out notes of his work. Any visitor was unwelcome; one day that some one was attempting to force his way in, M. Roux was amused at seeing Pasteur—vexed at being disturbed and anxious not to pain the visitor—come out to say imploringly, “Oh! not now, please! I am too busy!”
“When Chamberland and I,” writes Dr. Roux, “were engaged in an interesting occupation, he mounted guard before us, and when, through the glazed doors, he saw people coming, he himself would go and meet them in order to send them away. He showed so artlessly that his sole thought was for the work, that no one ever could be offended.”
But, at Arbois, where he only spent his holidays, he did not exercise so much severity; any one could come in who liked. He received in the morning a constant stream of visitors, begging for advice, recommendations, interviews, etc.
“It is both comical and touching,” wrote M. Girard, a local journalist, “to see the opinion the vineyard labourers have of him. These good people have heard M. Pasteur’s name in connection with the diseases of wine, and they look upon him as a sort of wine doctor. If they notice a barrel of wine getting sour, they knock at the savant’s door, bottle in hand; this door is never closed to them. Peasants are not precise in their language; they do not know how to begin their explanations or how to finish them. M. Pasteur, ever calm and serious, listens to the very end, takes the bottle and studies it at his leisure. A week later, the wine is ‘cured.’”
He was consulted also on many other subjects—virus, silkworms, rabies, cholera, swine-fever, etc.; many took him for a physician. Whilst telling them of their mistake, he yet did everything he could for them.
During this summer of 1885, he had the melancholy joy of seeing a bust erected in the village of Monay to the memory of a beloved friend of his, J. J. Perraud, a great and inspired sculptor, who had died in 1876. Perraud, whose magnificent statue of Despair is now at the Louvre, had had a sad life, and, on his lonely death-bed (he was a widower, with no children), Pasteur’s tender sympathy had been an unspeakable comfort. Pasteur now took a leading part in the celebration of his friend’s fame, and was glad to speak to the assembled villagers at Monay of the great and disinterested artist who had been born in their midst.
On his return to Paris, Pasteur found himself obliged to hasten the organization of a “service” for the preventive treatment of hydrophobia after a bite. The Mayors of Villers-Farlay, in the Jura, wrote to him that, on October 14, a shepherd had been cruelly bitten by a rabid dog.
Six little shepherd boys were watching over their sheep in a meadow; suddenly they saw a large dog passing along the road, with hanging, foaming jaws.
“A mad dog!” they exclaimed. The dog, seeing the children, left the road and charged them; they ran away shrieking, but the eldest of them, J. B. Jupille, fourteen years of age, bravely turned back in order to protect the flight of his comrades. Armed with his whip, he confronted the infuriated animal, who flew at him and seized his left hand. Jupille, wrestling with the dog, succeeded in kneeling on him, and forcing its jaws open in order to disengage his left hand; in so doing, his right hand was seriously bitten in its turn; finally, having been able to get hold of the animal by the neck, Jupille called to his little brother to pick up his whip, which had fallen during the struggle, and securely fastened the dog’s jaws with the lash. He then took his wooden sabot, with which he battered the dog’s head, after which, in order to be sure that it could do no further harm, he dragged the body down to a little stream in the meadow, and held the head under water for several minutes. Death being now certain, and all danger removed from his comrades, Jupille returned to Villers-Farlay.
Whilst the boy’s wounds were being bandaged, the dog’s carcase was fetched, and a necropsy took place the next day. The two veterinary surgeons who examined the body had not the slightest hesitation in declaring that the dog was rabid.