Chapter III · PASTEUR MICROBES ARE A MENACE! (continued 2)

Pasteur could not believe his eyes. Bernard had done this, the great Bernard who had been his seatmate in the Academy and had always praised his work; Bernard who had exchanged sly sarcastic remarks with him at the Academy of Medicine about those blue-coated pompous brass-buttoned doctors whose talk was keeping real experiment out of medicine. “It’s bad enough for these doctors and these half-witted naturalists to contradict me—but truly great men have always appreciated my work—and now Bernard ...” you can hear him muttering.

Pasteur was overwhelmed, but only for a moment. He demanded Bernard’s original manuscript. They gave it to him. He studied it with all the close attention in his power. He found Bernard’s experiments were only beginnings, rough sketches; gleefully he found that Bernard’s friends who had published it had made some discreet changes to make it read better. Then he rose one day, to the scandal of the entire Academy and the shocked horror of all the great men of France, and bitterly scolded Bernard’s friends for publishing a research that had dared to question his own theories. Vulgarly he shouted objections at Bernard—who, after all, could not answer Pasteur from his grave. Then he published a pamphlet against his old dead friend’s last researches. It was a pamphlet in the worst of taste, accusing Bernard of having lost his memory. That pamphlet even claimed that Bernard, who was to his finger tips a hard man of science, had become tainted with mystical ideas by associating too much with literary lights of the French Academy. It even proved that in his last researches Bernard couldn’t see well any more—“I’ll wager he had become farsighted and could not see the yeasts!” cried Pasteur. Vulgarly, by all this criticism, he left people to conclude that Bernard had been in his dotage when he did his last work—without any sense of the fitness of things this passionate Pasteur jumped up and down on Bernard’s grave.

Finally he argued with Bernard by beautiful experiments—a thing most other men would have done without making unseemly remarks. Like an American about to build a skyscraper in six weeks he rushed to carpenters and hardware stores and bought huge pieces of expensive glass and with this glass he had the carpenters build ingenious portable hothouses. His assistants worked dinnerless and sleepless, preparing flasks and microscopes and wads of heated cotton; and in an unbelievably short time Pasteur gathered up all this ponderous paraphernalia and hastened to catch a train for his old home in the Jura mountains. Like the so typical misplaced American that he really was, he threw every consideration and all other work to the winds and went directly to the point of settling: “Does my theory of fermentation hold?”

Coming to his own little vineyard in Arbois, he hastily put up his hothouses around a part of his grape-vines. They were admirable close-fitting hothouses that sealed the grape-vines from the outside air. “It’s midsummer, now, the grapes are far from ripe,” he pondered, “and I know that at this time there are never any yeasts to be found on the grapes.” Then, to make doubly sure that no yeasts from the air could fall on the grapes, he carefully wrapped wads of cotton—which his assistants had heated to kill all living beings—around some of the bunches under the glass of the hothouses. He hurried back to Paris and waited nervously for the grapes to ripen. He went back to Arbois too soon in his frantic eagerness to prove that Bernard was wrong—but at last he got there to find them ripe. He examined the hothouse grapes with his microscope; there was not a yeast to be found on their skins. Feverishly he crushed some of them up in carefully heated bottles—not a single bubble of fermentation rose in these flasks—and when he did the same thing to the exposed grapes from the vines outside the hothouse, these bubbled quickly into wine! At last he gathered up Madame Pasteur and some of the vines with their cotton-wrapped bunches of grapes—he was going to take these back to the Academy, where he would offer a bunch to each member that wanted one, and he was going to challenge everybody to try to make wine from these protected bunches.... He knew they couldn’t do it without putting yeasts into them.... He would show them all Bernard was wrong! Madame Pasteur sat stiffly in the train all the way back to Paris, carefully holding the twigs straight up in front of her so that the cotton wrappings wouldn’t come undone. It was a whole day’s trip to Paris....

Then at the next meeting Pasteur told the Academy of how he had quarantined his grape-vines against yeasts: “Is it not worthy of attention,” he shouted, “that in this vineyard of Arbois, and this would be true of millions of acres of vineyards all over the world, there was at the moment I made these experiments, not a speck of soil which was not capable of fermenting grapes into wine; and is it not remarkable that, on the contrary, the soil of my hothouses could not do this? And why? Because at a definite moment, I covered this soil with some glass....”

Then he jumped to marvelous predictions, prophecies that have since his time come true, he leaped to poetry, I say, that makes you forget his vulgar wrangling with his dead friend Bernard. “Must we not believe, as well, that a day will come when preventive measures that are easy to apply, will arrest those plagues ...” and he painted them a lurid picture of the terrible yellow fever that just then had changed the gay streets of New Orleans into a desolation. He made them shiver to hear of the black plague on the far banks of the Volga. Finally he made them hope....

Meanwhile in a little village in Eastern Germany a young stubborn round-headed Prussian doctor was starting on his road to those very miracles that Pasteur was prophesying—this young doctor was doing strange experiments with mice in time stolen from his practice. He was devising ingenious ways to handle microbes so that he could be dead sure he was handling only one kind—he was learning to do a thing that Pasteur with all his brilliant skill had never succeeded in doing. Let us leave Pasteur for a while—even though he is on the threshold of his most exciting experiments and funniest arguments—let us leave him for a chapter and go with Robert Koch, while he is learning to do fantastic, and marvelously important things with those microbes which had been subjects of Pasteur’s kingdom for so many years.