PASTEUR AT HOME.
WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORK DONE AT THE PASTEUR INSTITUTE IN PARIS.
By Ida M. Tarbell.
“Institut Pasteur.” The coachman nodded. The cab door slammed. The vehicle rattled across the Seine, left the grand boulevards, passed the garden of the Luxembourg, and fell into a long, narrow street running off into the southwestern corner of Paris. The high, dignified house-fronts and the stately portals were soon passed; busy little shops took their place. We were in an industrial quarter whose commonplace was only varied here and there by a fine old hôtel, the country house of some rich proprietor, probably, in the days, not so very long ago, when all this portion of the city was without the walls, and when an industrial invasion was undreamed of.
The cab left the Rue Vaugirard, crossed a superb boulevard, entered the Rue Dutot, and stopped. Behind a long, high, black grille, and separated from it by a hedge of shrubbery, a grass plot, and a broad gravelled drive-way, rose a red-brick, stone-trimmed façade. Across the front, above the handsome doorway, one read Institut Pasteur; and, still higher, Subscription Publique, MDCCCLXXXVIII.
On the grass plot in front of the stately marble steps stood a small bronze statue mounted on a high granite pedestal. It represented a boy of twelve or fourteen years in a life-and-death struggle with a mad dog. He has succeeded in fastening about the neck of the furious animal the thong of a long whip. He is strangling him. Beside the boy, or the ground, is a wooden shoe. With it he will beat the beast to death. The statue tells the story of one of the earliest subjects treated by M. Pasteur for hydrophobia, Jean-Baptiste Jupille, a shepherd lad, who, seeing a group of children attacked by a mad dog, throttled the animal and beat it dead with his sabot. He carried away a dozen or more bites from the conflict, was sent to Paris, inoculated, and cured. A fitting subject to place before the doorway of the Pasteur Institute!
THE STATUE OF JUPILLE.
Statue, façade and lawn are new. The bricks have not yet lost their glare. One can almost see the dust still on the stone. The bronze has not lost its fresh lustre. Even the lawn has the unevenness of new sod, the horse-chestnut trees are small, the ivy has not had time to climb far up the walls.
Everything is still and sealed in front, but to the right, from the concierge’s 328 lodge back to a solid, practical, dark stone building in the rear of the main hall, is a throng of idle people, chatting in clusters, sunning themselves on the benches, walking up and down. It is a strikingly cosmopolitan company. There are Arabs in red, brown, blue, or white; Italian women in aprons and lace head-dresses; Spanish peasants in dark cloaks and broad-brimmed hats; Yankees, Zouaves, Russians. The low babel of a multitude of tongues fills the air.
One only brushes the edge of this crowd as he makes his way to the doorway in the end of the main building, the entrance to the private apartment of M. Pasteur.