During the last term of the year 1865, he turned from his work for a time in order to study cholera. Coming from Egypt, the scourge had lighted on Marseilles, then on Paris, where it made in October more than two hundred victims per day; it was feared that the days of 1832 would be repeated, when the deaths reached twenty-three per 1,000. Claude Bernard, Pasteur, and Sainte Claire Deville went into the attics of the Lariboisière hospital, above a cholera ward.
“We had opened,” said Pasteur, “one of the ventilators communicating with the ward; we had adapted to the opening a glass tube surrounded by a refrigerating mixture, and we drew the air of the ward into our tube, so as to condense into it as many as we could of the products of the air in the ward.”
Claude Bernard and Pasteur afterwards tried blood taken from patients, and many other things; they were associated in those experiments, which gave no result. Henri Sainte Claire Deville once said to Pasteur, “Studies of that sort require much courage.” “What about duty?” said Pasteur simply, in a tone, said Deville afterwards, worth many sermons. The cholera did not last long; by the end of the autumn all danger had disappeared.
Napeoleon the Third loved science, and found in it a sense of assured stability which politics did not offer him. He desired Pasteur to come and spend a week at the Palace of Compiègne.
The very first evening a grand reception took place. The diplomatic world was represented by M. de Budberg, ambassador of Russia, and the Prussian ambassador, M. de Goltz. Among the guests were: Dr. Longet, celebrated for his researches and for his Treatise on Physiology, a most original physician, whose one desire was to avoid patients and so have more time for pure science; Jules Sandeau, the tender and delicate novelist, with his somewhat heavy aspect of a captain in the Garde Nationals; Paul Baudry, the painter, then in the flower of his youth and radiant success; Paul Dubois, the conscientious artist of the Chanteur Florentin exhibited that very year; the architect, Viollet le Duc, an habitué of the palace. The Emperor drew Pasteur aside towards the fireplace, and the scientist soon found himself instructing his Sovereign, talking about ferments and molecular dissymmetry.
Pasteur was congratulated by the courtiers on the favour shown by this immediate confidential talk, and the Empress sent him word that she wished him to talk with her also. Pasteur remembered this conversation, an animated one, a little disconnected, chiefly about animalculæ, infusories and ferments. When the guests returned to the immense corridor into which the rooms opened, each with the name of the guests on the door, Pasteur wrote to Paris for his microscope and for some samples of diseased wines.
The next morning a stag hunt was organized; riders in handsome costumes, open carriages drawn by six horses and containing guests, entered the forest; a stag was soon brought to bay by the hounds. In the evening, after dinner, there was a torchlight procession in the great courtyard. Amid a burst of trumpets, the footmen in state livery, standing in a circle, held aloft the flaming torches. In the centre, a huntsman held part of the carcase of the stag and waved it to and fro before the greedy eyes of the hounds, who, eager to hurl themselves upon it, and now restrained by a word, then let loose, and again called back all trembling at their discomfiture, were at length permitted to rush upon and devour their prey.
The next day offered another item on the programme, a visit to the castle of Pierrefonds, marvellously restored by Viollet le Duc at the expense of the Imperial purse. Pasteur, who, like the philosopher, might have said, “I am never bored but when I am being entertained,” made his arrangements so that the day should not be entirely wasted. He made an appointment for his return with the head butler, hoping to find a few diseased wines in the Imperial cellar. That department, however, was so well administered that he was only able to find seven or eight suspicious-looking bottles. The tall flunkeys, who scarcely realized the scientific interest offered by a basketful of wine bottles, watched Pasteur more or less ironically as he returned to his room, where he had the pleasure of finding his microscope and case of instruments sent from the Rue d’Ulm. He remained upstairs, absorbed as he would have been in his laboratory, in the contemplation of a drop of bitter wine revealing the tiny mycoderma which caused the bitterness.
In the meanwhile some of the other guests were gathered in the smoking room, smilingly awaiting the Empress’s five o’clock tea, whilst others were busy with the preparations for the performance of Racine’s Plaideurs, which Provost, Regnier, Got, Delaunay, Coquelin, and Mademoiselle Jouassain were going to act that very evening in the theatre of the palace.
On the Sunday, at 4 p.m., he was received privately by their Majesties, for their instruction and edification. He wrote in a letter to a friend: “I went to the Emperor with my microscope, my wine samples, and all my paraphernalia. When I was announced, the Emperor came up to meet me and asked me to come in. M. Conti, who was writing at a table, rose to leave the room, but was invited to stay. Then he fetched the Empress, and I began to show their Majesties various objects under the microscope and to explain them; it lasted a whole hour.”