1870—1872 183 



^ents the city of Strasburg was covered with flowers and flags, 

 and seemed to incarnate the idea of the Patrie itself. 



Articles and letters came to Arbois in that early Septem- 

 ber, bringing an echo of the sorrows of Paris. Pasteur was 

 then reading the works of General Foy, wherein he found 

 thoughts in accordance with his own, occasionally copying out 

 such passages as the following: ''Right and Might struggle 

 for the world; Right, which constitutes and preserves Society; 

 Might, which overcomes nations and bleeds them to death/* 



General Foy fought for France during twenty-five years, 

 and, writing in 1820, recalled with a patriotic shudder the 

 horrors of foreign invasions. Long after peace was signed, by 

 a chance meeting in a street in Paris, General Foy found 

 himself face to face with Wellington. The sight was so odious 

 to him that he spoke of this meeting in the Chamhre with an 

 accent of sorrowful humiliation which breathed the sadness of 

 Waterloo over the whole assembly. Pasteur could well under- 

 stand the long continued vibration of that suffering chord, he, 

 who never afterwards could speak without a thrill of sorrow of 

 that war which Germany, in defiance of humanity, was inexcus- 

 ably pursuing. 



It was the fourth time in less than a hundred years that a 

 Prussian invasion overflowed into France. But instead of 

 42,000 Prussians, scattered in 1792 over the sacred soil of the 

 Patrie — Pasteur pronounced the word with the faith and ten- 

 derness of a true son of France — there were now 518,000 men 

 to fight 285,000 French. 



The thought that they had been armed in secret for the 

 conquest of neighbouring lands, the memory of France's 

 optimism until that diplomatic incident, invented so that 

 France might stumble over it, and the inaction of Europe, 

 inspired Pasteur with reflections which he confided to his 

 pupil Raulin. ''What folly, what blindness,*' he wrote 

 (September 17), "there are in the inertia of Austria, Russia, 

 England! What ignorance in our army leaders of the 

 respective forces of the two nations ! We savants were in- 

 deed right when we deplored the poverty of the department of 

 Public Instruction! The real cause of our misfortunes lies 

 there. It is not with impunity — as it will one day be recognized, 

 too late — that a great nation is allowed to lose its intellectual 

 standard. But, as you say, if we rise again from those disas- 

 ters, we shall again see our statesmen lose themselves in endless 



