126 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



Sainte Beuve was probably not astonished at Pasteur's some- 

 what hasty epithet applied to Auguste Comte, whom he had 

 himself denned as " an obscure, abstruse, often diseased brain." 

 After Kobin's election he wrote to his "dear and learned col- 

 league " 



" I have not allowed myself to thank you for the letter, so 

 beautiful, if I may say so, so deep and so exalted in thought, 

 which you did me the honour of writing in answer to mine. 

 Nothing now forbids me to tell you how deeply I am struck 

 with your way of thinking and with your action in this 

 scientific matter.*' 



That "something in the depths of our souls" of which 

 Pasteur spoke in his letter to Sainte Beuve, was often per- 

 ceived in his conversation ; absorbed as he was in his 

 daily task, he yet carried in himself a constant aspiration 

 towards the Ideal, a deep conviction of the reality of the 

 Infinite and a trustful acquiescence in the Mystery of the 

 universe. 



During the last term of the year 1865, he turned from his 

 work for a time in order to study cholera. Coming from Egypt, 

 the scourge had lighted on Marseilles, then on Paris, where it 

 made in October more than two hundred victims per day ; it 

 was feared that the days of 1832 would be repeated, when the 

 deaths reached twenty-three per 1,000. Claude Bernard, 

 Pasteur, and Sainte Claire Deville went into the attics of the 

 Lariboisiere hospital, above a cholera ward. 



"We had opened," said Pasteur, "one of the ventilators 

 communicating with the ward ; we had adapted to the opening 

 a glass tube surrounded by a refrigerating mixture, and we 

 drew the air of the ward into our tube, so as to condense 

 into it as many as we could of the products of the air in the 

 ward." 



Claude Bernard and Pasteur afterwards tried blood taken 

 from patients, and many other things; they were associated in 

 those experiments, which gave no result. Henri Sainte Claire 

 Deville once said to Pasteur, " Studies of that sort require 

 much courage." "What about duty?" said Pasteur simply, 

 in a tone, said Deville afterwards, worth many sermons. The 

 cholera did not last long ; by the end of the autumn all danger 

 had disappeared. 



Napeoleon the Third loved science, and found in it a sense 

 of assured stability which politics did not offer him. He de- 



