188 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



children, and already many little coffins were daily to be seen 

 on the road to the cemetery. 



Thus visions of death amongst soldiers in their prime and 

 children in their infancy hung over the Academy meeting hall. 

 It was at one of those mournful sittings, on a dark autumn 

 afternoon, that Chevreul, an octogenarian member of the Insti- 

 tute, who, like Pasteur, had believed in civilization and in the 

 binding together of nations through science, art and letters, 

 looking at the sacks of earth piled outside the windows to save 

 the library from the bursting shells, exclaimed in loud desolate 

 tones 



' ' And yet we are in the nineteenth century , and a few 

 months ago the French did not even think of a war which 

 has put their capital into a state of siege and traced around its 

 walls a desert zone where he who sowed does not reap ! And 

 there are public universities where they teach the Beautiful, 

 the True, and the Eight." 



" Might goes before Eight/' Bismarck said. A German 

 journalist invented another phrase which went the round of 

 Europe : "the psychological moment for bombardment." On 

 January 5, one of the first Prussian shells sank into the garden 

 of the Ecole Normale ; another burst in the very ambulance 

 of the Ecole. Bertin, the sub-director, rushed through the 

 suffocating smoke and ascertained that none of the patients was 

 hurt ; he found the breech between two beds. The miserable 

 patients dragged themselves downstairs to the lecture rooms 

 on the ground floor, not a much safer refuge. 



From the heights of Chatillon the enemy's batteries were 

 bombarding all the left bank of the Seine, the Prussians, re- 

 gardless of the white flags bearing the red cross of Geneva, were 

 aiming at the Val-de-Grace and the Pantheon. "Where is 

 the Germany of our dreams?" wrote Paul de St. Victor on 

 January 9 , " the Germany of the poets ? Between her and 

 France an abyss of hatred has opened, a Ehine of blood and 

 tears that no peace can ever bridge over." 



On that same date, Chevreul read the following declaration 

 to the Academy of Science 



The Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in Paris 

 by an edict of King Louis XIII, 



dated January, 1826, 

 Converted into the; Museum of Natural History 



