1880—1882 325 



sensation; the whole of France burst out in an explosion of 

 enthusiasm. Pasteur now knew fame under its rarest and 

 purest form; the loving veneration, the almost worship with 

 which he inspired those who lived near him or worked with him, 

 had become the feeling of a whole nation. 



On June 13, at the Academic des Sciences, he was able to 

 state as follows his results and their practical consequences: 

 ''We now possess virus vaccines of charbon, capable of pre- 

 serving from the deadly disease, without ever being themselves 

 deadly — living vaccines, to be cultivated at will, transportable 

 anywhere without alteration, and prepared by a method which 

 we may believe susceptible of being generalized, since it has 

 been the means of discovering the vaccine of chicken-cholera. 

 By the character of the conditions I am now enumerating, and 

 from a purely scientific point of ^new, the discovery of the 

 vaccine of anthrax constitutes a marked step in advance of that 

 of Jenner's vaccine, since the latter has never been experi- 

 mentally obtained." 



On all sides, it was felt that something very great, very 

 unexpected, justifying every sort of hope, had been brought 

 forth. Ideas of research were coming up. On tne very morrow 

 of the results obtained at Pouilly le Fort, Pasteur was asked to 

 go to the Cape to study a contagious disease raging among goats. 



''Your father would like to take that long journey," wrote 

 Mme. Pasteur to her daughter, "passing on his way through 

 Senegal to gather some good germs of pernicious fever ; but I 

 am trying to moderate his ardour. I consider that the study 

 of hydrophobia should suffice him for the present." 



He was at that time "at boiling point," as he put it — going 

 from his laboratory work to the Academies of Sciences and 

 Medicine to read some notes; then to read reports at the Agri- 

 cultural Society; to Versailles, to give a lecture to an Agronomic 

 Congress, and to Alfort to lecture to the professors and students. 

 His clear and well-arranged words, the connection between 

 ideas and the facts supporting them, the methodical recital of 

 experiments, allied to an enthusiastic view of the future and 

 its prospects — especially when addressing a youthful audience — 

 deeply impressed his hearers. Those who saw and heard him 

 for the first time were the more surprised that, in certain 

 circles, a legend had formed round Pasteur's name. He had 

 been described as of an irritable, intolerant temper, domineering 

 and authoritative, almost despotic; and people now saw a man 



