"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 _hotel_, 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 facade. 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!
[Illustration: THE STATUE OF JUPILLE.]
Statue, facade 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_ 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.
Narrow winding stairs lead up to a suite of lofty rooms, furnished
with solid, dignified woods, carpeted with soft, dark rugs, windows
and doors hung with heavy stuffs. The immediate impression is one of
comfort, warmth and quiet. The impression deepens as one enters the
library, where, before a desk, sits the great French savant, Madame
Pasteur near by. There is something home-like here. This might be the
sitting-room of some well-to-do New England squire or judge.
Involuntarily one searches in the face of the eminent savant, eying
him so keenly and so kindly, for traces of relationship with the
Puritan type. There is the same square determination, the same
obstinacy of purpose, the same direct sincerity; but it is mellowed by
Latin tenderness, kindled by French brilliancy.
This is a great man, one feels instinctively--a man so great that he
despises notoriety--and a journalist. It is reassuring.
[Illustration: THE PASTEUR INSTITUTE.]
The great master does not look to be seventy years of age as he sits
behind his desk, his elbow on the table, his hand supporting his head.
His hair and beard are still iron-gray; the hair is concealed largely
by the silk skullcap he always wears, but the beard is abundant. The
eyes are as penetrating, as full of ardor, as ever. It is only when he
speaks or moves that one sees the ravages of the paralysis which
overtook him twenty-five years ago, after his terrible three years of
labor in the little house at Alais, investigating the disease of the
silk-worm. The whole left side has been since then nearly useless. His
speech is hesitating, his motion difficult, but in spite of his
feebleness he spares no pains to interest his guest. One talks with M.
Pasteur with the ease and naturalness of the fireside.
"Look at my birthplace," he says, rising, and taking from the mantel
a photograph of the humble home at Dole, Jura, where he was born. "My
village gave it to me at my _fete_."
I happen to know the story of the picture, and examine it with
pleasure. There was, indeed, no more touching feature in the great
Pasteur jubilee of last December than the presentation of this
photograph by the Mayor of Dole.
The little village has always had a loyal pride in the fact that M.
Pasteur was born there. Ten years ago it celebrated the French Fourth
of July (July 14) by placing a plaque on the facade of the house,
bearing the inscription:
ICI EST NE LOUIS PASTEUR,
LE 22 DEC., 1822.
M. Pasteur was present and made a speech. In the course of it he
referred to his parents, their ambition for him, their self-sacrifice,
their faith in him. He recalled his father's words: "Louis, if I see
you one day a professor in the college of Arbois I shall be the
happiest man on earth." Overpowered by his recollections, he broke
down, sobbing.
The villagers of Dole have never forgotten the scene. When the great
Pasteur jubilee was celebrated they sent up their mayor, commissioned
to present the picture of the early home, together with a facsimile of
the register of M. Pasteur's birth. That they were not mistaken in
thinking that he would be pleased, it is easy to see as he stands
before me, eying the humble house with tender pride.
[Illustration: THE LODGE.]
"Have you no picture of yourself taken in your boyhood at Dole?"
"No," he answered. "The earliest picture I have is much later. Let me
see, I must have been decorated then. Where is the old album?"
The album is brought, a small square book, looking as if it had just
come off the table in the best room of a New England farm-house. There
is the same high-relief decoration, the same gilt lines edging the
photograph apertures. And these people? Verily, they might have lived
in New England forty years ago!
M. Pasteur turns the leaves. Madame Pasteur leans over his shoulder.
They stop now and then and exchange a smile as they come upon an old
friend. At last the sought-for photograph is found. M. Pasteur at
thirty--a great man already, for already he has made discoveries in
crystallography which have won him a name among scientists.
The plans for investigation which filled the head of the young man who
sits up so straight in the old photograph were never completed. The
enthusiastic student of crystallography was forced to change the
subject of his studies. Even now the great savant laments the change.
"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 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.
[Illustration: 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 Besancon, 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 _tete-a-tete_ 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.