Pasteur’s health and work were indeed valuable to the whole world, and Signor Chiozza’s proposition seemed simple and rational. Pasteur was much divided in his mind: his first impulse was to renew his refusal. He thought but of his vanquished country, and did not wish to forsake it. But was it to his country’s real interests that he should remain a helpless spectator of so many disasters? Was it not better to carry French teaching abroad, to try and provoke in young Italian students enthusiasm for French scientists, French achievements? He might still serve his beloved country in that quiet retreat, amidst all those facilities for continuous work. He thought of writing to Raulin, who had relations in Italy, and who might follow his master. Finally, he was offered very great personal advantages, a high salary—and this determined his refusal, for, as he wrote to Signor Chiozza, “I should feel that I deserved a deserter’s penalty if I sought, away from my country in distress, a material situation better than it can offer me.”
“Nevertheless allow me to tell you, Sir (he wrote to Signor Toscanelli, refusing his offer), in all sincerity, that the memory of your offer will remain in the annals of my family as a title of nobility, as a proof of Italy’s sympathy for France, as a token of the esteem accorded to my work. And as far as you, M. le Député, are concerned it will remain in my eyes a brilliant proof of the way in which public men in Italy regard science and its grandeur.”
And now what was Pasteur to do—he who could not live away from a laboratory? In April, 1871, he could neither go back to Paris and the Commune nor to Arbois, now transformed into a Prussian dépôt. It seemed, indeed, from the letters he received that his fellow citizens were now destined but to feed and serve a victorious foe, whose exactions were all the more rigorous that the invasion of the town on January 25 had been preceded by an attempt at resistance on the part of the inhabitants. On that morning, a few French soldiers who were seeking their regiments and a handful of franc tireurs had posted themselves among the vines. About ten o’clock a first shot sounded in the distance; in a turn of the sinuous Besançon road, when the Prussian vanguard had appeared, a Zouave—who the day before was begging from door to door, shaking with ague, and who had taken refuge in the village of Montigny, two kilometres from Arbois—had in despair fired his last cartridge. A squad of Prussians left the road and rushed towards the smoke of the gun. The soldier was seized, shot down on the spot, and mutilated with bayonets. Whilst the main column continued their advance towards the town, detachments explored the vines on either side of the road, shooting here and there. An old man who, with a courageous indifference, was working in his vineyard was shot down at his work. A little pastrycook’s boy, nicknamed Biscuit by the Arboisians, who, led by curiosity; had come down from the upper town to the big poplar trees at the entrance of Arbois, suddenly staggered, struck by a Prussian bullet. He was just able to creep back to the first house, his eyes already dimmed by death.
Those were but the chances of war, but other crueller episodes thrilled Pasteur to the very depths of his soul. Such things are lost in history, just as a little blood spilt disappears in a river, but, for the witnesses and contemporaries of the facts, the trace of blood remains. An incident will help the reader to understand the lasting indignation the war excited in Pasteur.
One of the Prussian sergeants, who, after the shot fired at Montigny, were leading small detachments of soldiers, thought that a house on the outskirts of Arbois, in the faubourg of Verreux, looked as if it might shelter franc tireurs. He directed his men towards it and the house was soon reached.
It was now twelve o’clock, all fighting had ceased, and the first Prussians who had arrived were masters of the town. Others were arriving from various directions; a heavy silence reigned over the town. The mayor, M. Lefort, led by a Prussian officer who covered him with a revolver whenever he addressed him, was treated as a hostage responsible for absolute submission. Every door in the small Town Hall was opened in succession in order to see that there were no arms hidden. The mayor was each time made to pass first, so that he should receive the shot in case of a surprise. In the library, three flags, which General Delort had brought back from the Rhine campaign when he was a captain in the cavalry and given to his native town, were torn down and the general’s bust overturned.
The sergeant, violently entering the suspected house with his men, found a whole family peacefully sitting down to their dinner—the husband, wife, a son of nineteen, and two young daughters. The invaders made no search nor asked any questions of those poor people, who had probably done nothing worse than to offer a few glasses of wine to French soldiers as they passed. The sergeant did not even ask the name of the master of the house (Antoine Ducret, aged fifty-nine), but seized him by his coat and ordered his men to seize the son too. The woman, who rushed to the door in her endeavour to prevent her husband and her son from being thus taken from her, was violently flung to the end of the room, her trembling daughters crouching around her as they listened to the heavy Prussian boots going down the wooden stairs. There is a public drinking fountain not far from the house; Ducret was taken there and placed against a wall. He understood, and cried out, “Spare my son!!” “What do you say?” said the sergeant to the boy. “I will stay with my father,” he answered simply. The father, struck by two bullets at close range, fell at the feet of his son, who was shot down immediately afterwards. The two corpses, afterwards mutilated with bayonets, remained lying by the water side; the neighbours succeeded in preventing the mother and her two daughters from leaving their house until the bodies had been placed in a coffin. On the tombs of Antoine and Charles Ducret the equivocal inscription was placed “Fell at Arbois, January 25, 1871, under Prussian fire.” For the honour of humanity, a German officer, having heard these details, offered the life of the sergeant to Ducret’s widow; but she entertained no thoughts of revenge. “His death would not give them back to me,” she said.
Pasteur could not become resigned to the humiliation of France, and, tearing his thoughts from the nightmare of the war and the Commune, he dwelt continually on the efforts that would be necessary to carry out the great task of raising the country once again to its proper rank. In his mind it was the duty of every one to say, “In what way can I be useful?” Each man should strive not so much to play a great part as to give the best of his ability. He had no patience with those who doubt everything in order to have an excuse for doing nothing.
He had indeed known dark moments of doubt and misgivings, as even the greatest minds must do, but notwithstanding these periods of discouragement he was convinced that science and peace will ultimately triumph over ignorance and war. In spite of recent events, the bitter conditions of peace which tore unwilling Alsace and part of Lorraine away from France, the heavy tax of gold and of blood weighing down future generations, the sad visions of young men in their prime cut down on the battlefield or breathing their last in hospitals all to no apparent purpose; in spite of all these sad memories he was persuaded that thinkers would gradually awaken in the nations ideas of justice and of concord.
He had now for nine years been following with a passionate interest some work begun in his own laboratory by Raulin, his first curator. Some of the letters he wrote to Raulin during those nine years give us a faint idea of the master that Pasteur was. It had been with great regret that Raulin had left the laboratory in obedience to the then laws of the University in order to take up active work at the Brest college, and Pasteur’s letters (December, 1862) brought him joy and encouragement: “Keep up your courage, do not allow the idleness of provincial life to disturb you. Teach your pupils to the very best of your ability and give up your leisure to experiments; this was M. Biot’s advice to myself.” When in July, 1863, he began to fear that Raulin might allow imagination to lead him astray in his work, he repeatedly advised him to state nothing that could not be proved: “Be very strict in your deductions”; then, apparently, loth to damp the young man’s ardour: “I have the greatest confidence in your judgment; do not take too much heed of my observations.”