Chapter X · 1880—1882. (continued 2)

The London Congress marked a step on the road of progress. Besides the questions which were discussed and which were capable of precise solution, the scientific spirit showed itself susceptible of permeating other general subjects. Instead of remaining the impassive Sovereign we are wont to fancy her, Science—and this was proved by Pasteur’s discoveries and their consequences, as Paget, Tyndall, Lister, and Priestley loudly proclaimed—Science showed herself capable of associating with pure research and perpetual care for Truth a deep feeling of compassion for all suffering and an ever-growing thirst for self-sacrifice.

Pasteur’s speech at the London Medical Congress was printed at the request of an English M.P. and distributed to all the members of the House of Commons. Dr. H. Gueneau de Mussy, who had spent part of his life in England, having followed the Orleans family into exile, wrote to Pasteur on August 15, “I have been very happy in witnessing your triumph; you are raising us up again in the eyes of foreign nations.”

Applause was to Pasteur but a stimulus to further efforts. He was proud of his discoveries, but not vain of the effect they produced; he said in a private letter: “The Temps again refers, in a London letter, to my speech at the Congress. What an unexpected success!”

Having heard that yellow fever had just been brought into the Gironde, at the Pauillac lazaretto by the vessel Condé from Senegal, Pasteur immediately started for Bordeaux. He hoped to find the microbe in the blood of the sick or the dead, and to succeed in cultivating it. M. Roux hastened to join his master.

If people spoke to Pasteur of the danger of infection, “What does it matter?” he said. “Life in the midst of danger is the life, the real life, the life of sacrifice, of example, of fruitfulness.”

He was vexed to find his arrival notified in the newspapers; it worried him not to be able to work and to travel incognito.

On September 17, he wrote to Mme. Pasteur: “...We rowed out to a great transport ship which is lying in the Pauillac roads, having just arrived. From our boat, we were able to speak to the men of the crew. Their health is good, but they lost seven persons at St. Louis, two passengers and five men of the crew. Save the captain and one engineer, they are all Senegalese negroes on that ship. We have been near another large steamboat, and yet another; their health is equally good....

“The most afflicted ship is the Condé, which is in quarantine in the Pauillac roads, and near which we have not been able to go. She has lost eighteen persons, either at sea or at the lazaretto....”

No experiment could be attempted—the patients were convalescent. “But,” he wrote the next day, “the Richelieu will arrive between the 25th and 28th, I think with some passengers.... It is more than likely that there will have been deaths during the passage, and patients for the lazaretto. I am therefore awaiting the arrival of that ship with the hope—God forgive a scientist’s passion!!—that I may attempt some researches at the Pauillac lazaretto, where I will arrange things in consequence. You may be sure I shall take every precaution. In the meanwhile, what shall I do in Bordeaux?

“I have made the acquaintance of the young librarian of the town library, which is a few doors from the Hôtel Richelieu, in the Avenues of Tourny. The library is opened to me at all hours: I am there even now, alone and very comfortably seated, surrounded with more Littré than I can possibly get through.”

For some months, several members of the Académie Française—according to the traditions of the Society which has ever thought it an honour to number among its members scientists such as Cuvier, Flourens, Biot, Claude Bernard, J. B. Dumas—had been urging Pasteur to become a candidate to the place left vacant by Littré. Pasteur was anxious to know not only the works, but the life of him whose place he might be called upon to fill. It was with some emotion that he first came upon the following lines printed on the title-page of the translation of the works of Hippocrates; they are a dedication by Littré to the memory of his father, a sergeant-major in the Marines under the Revolution.

“...Prepared by his lessons and by his example, I have been sustained through this long work by his ever present memory. I wish to inscribe his name on the first page of this book, in the writing of which he has had so much share from his grave, so that the work of the father should not be forgotten in the work of the son, and that a pious and just gratitude should connect the work of the living with the heritage of the dead....”

Pasteur in 1876 had obeyed a similar filial feeling when he wrote on the first page of his Studies on Beer—

“To the memory of my father, a soldier under the first Empire, and a knight of the Legion of Honour. The more I have advanced in age, the better I have understood thy love and the superiority of thy reason. The efforts I have given to these Studies and those which have preceded them are the fruit of thy example and advice. Wishing to honour these pious recollections, I dedicate this work to thy memory.”

The two dedications are very similar. Those two soldiers’ sons had kept the virile imprint of the paternal virtues. A great tenderness was also in them both; Littré, when he lost his mother, had felt a terrible grief, comparable to Pasteur’s under the same circumstances.

In spite of Pasteur’s interest in studying Littré in the Bordeaux library, he did not cease thinking of yellow fever. He often saw M. Berchon, the sanitary director, and inquired of him whether there were any news of the Richelieu. A young physician, Dr. Talmy, had expressed a desire to join Pasteur at Bordeaux and to obtain permission, when the time came, to be shut up with the patients in the lazaretto. Pasteur wrote on December 25 to Mme. Pasteur: “There is nothing new save the Minister’s authorization to Dr. Talmy to enter the lazaretto; I have just telegraphed to him that he might start. The owners of the Richelieu still suppose that she will reach Pauillac on Tuesday. M. Berchon, who is the first to be informed of what takes place in the roads, will send me a telegram as soon as the Richelieu is signalled, and we shall then go—M. Talmy, Roux and I—to ascertain the state of the ship, of course without going on board, which we should not be allowed to do if it has a suspicious bill of health.”

And, as Mme. Pasteur had asked what happened when a ship arrived, he continued in the same letter: “From his boat to windward, M. Berchon receives the ship’s papers, giving the sanitary state of the ship day by day. Before passing from the hands of the captain of the vessel to those of the sanitary director, the papers are sprinkled over with chloride of lime.

“If there are cases of illness, all the passengers are taken to the lazaretto; only a few men are left on board the ship, which is henceforth in quarantine, no one being allowed to leave or enter it.

“God permit that, in the body of one of those unfortunate victims of medical ignorance, I may discover some specific microscopic being. And after that? Afterwards, it would be really beautiful to make that agent of disease and death become its own vaccine. Yellow fever is one of the three great scourges of the East—bubonic plague, cholera, and yellow fever. Do you know that it is already a fine thing to be able to put the problem in those words!”

The Richelieu arrived, but she was free from fever. The last passenger had died during the crossing and his body had been thrown into the sea.

Pasteur left Bordeaux and returned to his laboratory.