We rise and go into the long hall. At the opposite end from the library two large doors open into the spacious vestibule which occupies the centre of the main building.
“You can go out by the main hall and directly into the laboratory, or down the private stairs.” I hesitated. No, I would not spoil my impression of M. Pasteur at home. I would keep laboratory and home separate. I descended to the private entrance, and, as I went down, two kindly faces looked over at me, and the gentle, hesitating voice of the great savant said:
“Take care, it is dark. Don’t slip. Take care.” On the last step I stopped and looked up. The two friendly faces were still looking down.
THE HOUSE AT DÔLE, WHERE M. PASTEUR WAS BORN.
I had come to see the destroyer of the theory of spontaneous generation, the demonstrator of the microbe origin of disease, the conqueror of hydrophobia. I had found something greater, perhaps, than them all—a perfectly gentle soul.
IN M. PASTEUR’S WORKSHOP.
I crossed the lawn and entered a large waiting-room occupying the middle of the building devoted to laboratory work. The room is flooded with light, seated with benches, and decorated with no other ornaments than a series of photographs of the Pasteur Institute at Rio Janeiro, two great maps on which are marked the cities where institutions similar to this at Paris are to be found, and cards containing certain rules applicable to patients coming for treatment against hydrophobia. Among these latter the important ones are that the treatment is gratuitous, that each patient must bathe before coming for inoculation, that board and lodging are not furnished, and that the grateful may, if they wish, leave a gift at the end of their term of treatment.
There were sixty or seventy persons in the room. They had come to be vaccinated against hydrophobia. They were of the greatest contrast in age, in condition, in culture. Beside a shrivelled, leather-brown Arab woman from the desert was a pink and white little miss from London. A young man with the refined face, correct dress and distinguished manners of a gentleman sat beside a huge and none-too-clean German laborer. As a rule, it was a friendly, cheerful company. It was only here and there that one saw a person who seemed conscious 332 that in his veins a hideous poison was at work. Most of them took it for granted that their cure was certain. Some of them scoffed at the nonsense of going to the trouble of being vaccinated.