The life of Pasteur

by René Vallery-Radot

The town was full of soldiers, some crouching round fires in the street, others stepping across their dead horses and begging for a little straw to lie on. Many had taken refuge in the church and were lying on the steps of the altar; a few were attempting to bandage their frozen feet, threatened with gangrene.

Suddenly the news spread that the general-in-chief, Bourbaki, had shot himself through the brain. This did not excite much surprise. He had telegraphed two days before to the Minister of War: “You cannot have an idea of the sufferings that the army has endured since the beginning of December. It is martyrdom to be in command at such a time,” he added despairingly.

“The retreat from Moscow cannot have been worse than this,” said Pasteur to a staff officer, Commandant Bourboulon, a nephew of Sainte Claire Deville, whom he met in the midst of those horrors and who could give him no information as to his son’s battalion of Chasseurs. “All that I can tell you,” said a soldier anxiously questioned by Mme. Pasteur, “is that out of the 1,200 men of that battalion there are but 300 left.” As she was questioning another, a soldier who was passing stopped: “Sergeant Pasteur? Yes, he is alive; I slept by him last night at Chaffois. He has remained behind; he is ill. You might meet him on the road towards Chaffois.”

The Pasteurs started again on the road followed the day before. They had barely passed the Pontarlier gate when a rough cart came by. A soldier muffled in his great coat, his hands resting on the edge of the cart, started with surprise. He hurried down, and the family embraced without a word, so great was their emotion.

The capitulation of starving Paris and the proposed armistice are historical events still present in the memory of men who were then beginning to learn the meaning of defeat. The armistice, which Jules Favre thought would be applied without restriction to all the army corps, was interpreted by Bismarck in a peculiar way. He and Jules Favre between them had drawn up a protocol in general terms; it had been understood in those preliminary confabulations that, before drawing up the limits of the neutral zone applicable to the Eastern Army Corps, some missing information would be awaited, the respective positions of the belligerents being unknown. The information did not come, and Jules Favre in his imprudent trustfulness supposed that the delimitation would be done on the spot by the officers in command. When he heard that the Prussian troops were continuing their march eastwards, he complained to Bismarck, who answered that “the incident cannot have compromised the Eastern Army Corps, as it already was completely routed when the armistice was signed.” This calculated reserve on Bismarck’s part was eminently characteristic of his moral physiognomy, and this encounter between the two Ministers proved once again the inferiority—when great interests are at stake—of emotional men to hard-hearted business men; however it must be acknowledged that Bismarck’s statement was founded on fact. The Eastern Corps could have fought no more; its way was blocked. Without food, without clothes, in many cases without arms, nothing remained to the unfortunate soldiers but the refuge offered by Switzerland.

Pasteur went to Geneva with his son, who, after recovering from the illness caused by fatigue and privation, succeeded in getting back to France to rejoin his regiment in the early days of February. Pasteur then went on to Lyons and stayed there with his brother-in-law, M. Loir, Dean of the Lyons Faculty of Science. He intended to go back to Paris, but a letter from Bertin dated February 18 advised him to wait. “This is the present state of the Ecole: south wing: pulled down; will be built up again; workmen expected. Third year dormitory: ambulance occupied by eight students. Science dormitory and drawing classroom: ambulance again, forty patients. Ground floor classroom: 120 artillery-men. Pasteur laboratory: 210 gardes nationaux, refugees from Issy. You had better wait.” Bertin added, with his indomitable good humour, speaking of the bombardment: “The first day I did not go out, but I took my bearings and found the formula: in leaving the school, walk close along the houses on my left; on coming back, keep close to them on my right; with that I went out as usual. The population of Paris has shown magnificent resignation and patience.... In order to have our revenge, everything will have to be rebuilt from the top to the bottom, the top especially.”

Pasteur also thought that reforms should begin from the top. He prepared a paper dated from Lyons, and entitled “Why France found no superior men in the hours of peril.” Amongst the mistakes committed, one in particular had been before his mind for twenty years, ever since he left the Ecole Normale: “The forgetfulness, disdain even, that France had had for great intellectual men, especially in the realm of exact science.” This seemed the more sad to him that things had been very different at the end of the eighteenth century. Pasteur enumerated the services rendered by science to his threatened country. If in 1792 France was able to face danger on all sides, it was because Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Chaptal, Berthollet, etc., discovered new means of extracting saltpetre and manufacturing gunpowder; because Monge found a method of founding cannon with great rapidity; and because the chemist Clouet invented a quick system of manufacturing steel. Science, in the service of patriotism, made a victorious army of a perturbed nation. If Marat, with his slanderous and injurious insinuations, had not turned from their course the feelings of the mob, Lavoisier never would have perished on the scaffold. The day after his execution, Lagrange said: “One moment was enough for his head to fall, and 200 years may not suffice to produce such another.” Monge and Berthollet, also denounced by Marat, nearly shared the same fate: “In a week’s time we shall be arrested, tried, condemned and executed,” said Berthollet placidly to Monge, who answered with equal composure, thinking only of the country’s defence, “All I know is that my gun factories are working admirably.”

Bonaparte, from the first, made of science what he would have made of everything—a means of reigning. When he started for Egypt, he desired to have with him a staff of scientists, and Monge and Berthollet undertook to organize that distinguished company. Later, when Bonaparte became Napoleon I, he showed, in the intervals between his wars, so much respect for the place due to science as to proclaim the effacement of national rivalry when scientific discoveries were in question. Pasteur, when studying this side of the Imperial character, found in some pages by Arago on Monge that, after Waterloo, Napoleon, in a conversation he had with Monge at the Elysée, said, “Condemned now to command armies no longer, I can see but Science with which to occupy my mind and my soul....”

Alluding to the scientific supremacy of France during the early part of the nineteenth century, Pasteur wrote: “All the other nations acknowledged our superiority, though each could take pride in some great men: Berzelius in Sweden, Davy in England, Volta in Italy, other eminent men in Germany and Switzerland; but in no country were they as numerous as in France....” He added these regretful lines: “A victim of her political instability, France has done nothing to keep up, to propagate and to develop the progress of science in our country; she has merely obeyed a given impulse; she has lived on her past, thinking herself great by the scientific discoveries to which she owed her material prosperity, but not perceiving that she was imprudently allowing the sources of those discoveries to become dry, whilst neighbouring nations, stimulated by her past example, were diverting for their own benefit the course of those springs, rendering them fruitful by their works, their efforts and their sacrifices.

“Whilst Germany was multiplying her universities, establishing between them the most salutary emulation, bestowing honours and consideration on the masters and doctors, creating vast laboratories amply supplied with the most perfect instruments, France, enervated by revolutions, ever vainly seeking for the best form of government, was giving but careless attention to her establishments for higher education....