“If I have a regret,” he says, “it is that I did not follow that route, less rude, it seems to me, and which would have led, I am convinced, to wonderful discoveries. A sudden turn threw me into the study of fermentations, fermentations set me at diseases, but I am still inconsolable to think that I have never had time to go back to my old subject.”
Beside the hero of the studies in crystallography M. Pasteur places his latest picture. It lacks in youthfulness, but it has gained in ripeness. This photograph has much of the vigor and the alertness one sees in the splendid bust by Paul Dubois displayed 330 in the Salon of 1880, and now in a gallery at Copenhagen. This bust is the most satisfactory portrait of M. Pasteur ever made, unless it be the painting by Edelfelt displayed in the Salon of 1886. In the same Salon appeared Bonnat’s portrait of M. Pasteur and his granddaughter.
M. PASTEUR IN HIS SALON.
As I look at M. Pasteur in his library, however, I see only the old model of Bonnat. I have difficulty in believing, indeed, as I watch him bending smilingly over the old album, now and then laughing aloud at the discovery of some forgotten picture, that this man, over fifty years ago, for the sake of an education, made himself a jack-of-all-trades in the college of Besançon, and was aroused every morning at four o’clock with the night-watchman’s cry: “Come, Pasteur, chase the demon of laziness.” It is difficult to picture him in the intoxication of scientific enthusiasm and discovery, sacrificing health, leisure, pleasure, to the passion of learning which had taken possession of him.
He is so gentle, it seems incredible that he has had to meet coldness, contempt, opposition of every species, in his life; that, when he asked the most modest of appropriations from the government, he met the contemptuous reply that “there was no rubric in the budget for allowing three hundred dollars a year for experiments;” that for every step in his discoveries he has had literally to fight, contending with Pouchet and Joly on the subject of spontaneous generation, with Liebig on fermentations, with the Germans and Italians on the attenuation of virus, with the popular opinion of his own compatriots when he dared vaccinate for hydrophobia, and when his supporters dared erect the present Institute to facilitate his work.
One cannot picture him tête-à-tête with mad dogs. It is hard to believe him capable of that astonishing self-mastery which made him withhold for months, and sometimes even years, the results of incomplete investigations, and of the equal hardihood which, when he was convinced of a truth, led him to accept the most severe and most public tests of its exactness.
I make an attempt to find the scientist and venture a question.
“Oh,” says M. Pasteur, “if you want to know that, you must go and 331 see M. Roux. You will find him in the laboratory.”