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Now the fight was on. Pasteur became publicly sarcastic about the experiments of Pouchet, Joly and Musset; he made criticisms that to-day we know are quibbles. Pouchet came back with the remark that Pasteur "had presented his own flasks as an ultimatum to science to astonish everybody." Pasteur was furious, denounced Pouchet as a liar and bawled for a public apology. It seemed, alas, as if the truth were going to be decided by the spilling of blood, instead of by calm experiment. Then Pouchet and Joly and Musset challenged Pasteur to a public experiment before the Academy of Sciences, and they said that if one single flask would fail to grow microbes after it had been opened for an instant, they would admit they were wrong. The fatal day for the tests dawned at last—what an interesting day it would have been—but at the last moment Pasteur's enemies backed down. Pasteur did his experiments before the Commission—he did them confidently with ironical remarks—and a little while later the Commission announced: "The facts observed by Mr. Pasteur and contested by Messrs. Pouchet, Joly and Musset, are of the most perfect exactitude."

Luckily for Pasteur, but alas for Truth, both sides happened to be right. Pouchet and his friends had used hay instead of yeast soup, and a great Englishman, Tyndall, found out years later that hay holds wee stubborn seeds of microbes that will stand boiling for hours! It was really Tyndall that finally settled this great quarrel; it was Tyndall that proved Pasteur was right.

Pasteur was now presented to the Emperor Napoleon III. He told that dreamy gentleman that his whole ambition was to find the microbes that he was sure must be the cause of disease. He was invited to an imperial house party at Compiègne, The guests were commanded to get ready to go hunting, but Pasteur begged to be excused; he had had a dray load of apparatus sent up from Paris—though he was only staying at the palace for a week!—and he impressed their Imperial Majes-