162 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



before having thoroughly settled the question of silkworm 

 diseases. ''One night that I was alone with him/' relates M. 

 Gernez, who hardly left his bedside during that terrible week, 

 "after endeavouring in vain to distract his thoughts, I despair- 

 ingly gave up the attempt and allowed him to express the ideas 

 which were on his mind ; finding, to my surprise, that they had 

 his accustomed clearness and conciseness, I wrote what he dic- 

 tated without altering a word, and the next day I brought to 

 his illustrious colleague, Dumas — who hardly credited his 

 senses — the memorandum which appeared in the report of the 

 Academic on October 26, 1868, a week after the stroke which 

 nearly killed him! It was a note on a very ingenious process 

 for discovering in the earlier tests those eggs which are pre- 

 disposed to flachery. 



The members of the Academy were much cheered by the 

 reading of this note, which seemed to bring Pasteur back into 

 their midst. 



The building of the laboratory had been begun, and hoard- 

 ings erected around the site. Pasteur, from his bed, asked 

 day by day, "How are they getting on?" But his wife and 

 daughter, going to the window of the dining-room which over- 

 looked the Ecole Normale garden, only brought him back 

 vague answers, for, as a matter of fact, the workmen had dis- 

 appeared from the very first day of Pasteur's illness. All that 

 could be seen was a solitary labourer wheeling a barrow aim- 

 lessly about, probably under the orders of some official who 

 feared to alarm the patient. 



As Pasteur was not expected to recover, the trouble and 

 expense were deemed unnecessary. Pasteur soon became 

 aware of this, and one day that General Fave had come to see 

 him he gave vent to some bitter feelings as to this cautious 

 interruption of the building works, saying that it would have 

 been simpler and more straightforward to state from the begin- 

 ning that the work was suspended in the expectation of a 

 probable demise. 



Napoleon was informed of this excess of zeal, not only by 

 General Fave, but by Sainte Claire Deville, who was a guest 

 at Compiegne at the beginning of November, 1868. He wrote 

 to the ^Minister of Public Instruction — 



"My dear M. Duruy, — I have heard that — unknown to you 

 probablj^ — the men who were working at M. Pasteur's labora- 

 tory were kept away from the very day he became ill ; he has 



