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He was forty-five. He wallowed in this glory for a moment, and then—having saved the silkworm industry, with the help of God and Gernez—he raised his eyes toward one of those bright, impossible, but always partly true visions that it was his poet's gift to see. He raised his artist's eyes from the sicknesses of silkworms to the sorrows of men, he sounded a trumpet call of hope to suffering mankind.

"It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the face of the globe, if the doctrine of spontaneous generation is wrong, as I am sure it is."

The siege of Paris in the bitter winter of 1870 had driven him from his work to his old home in the Jura hills. He wandered pitifully around battlefields looking for his son who was a sergeant. Here he worked himself up into a tremendous hate, a hate that never left him, of all things German; he became a professional patriot. "Every one of my works will bear on its title page, 'Hatred to Prussia. Revenge! Revenge!'" he shrieked, good loyal Frenchman that he was. Then with a magnificent silliness he proceeded to make his next research a revenge research. Even he had to admit that French beer was much inferior to the beer of the Germans. Well—he would make the beer of France better than the beer of Germany—he must make the French beer the peer of beers, no, the emperor of all beers of the world!

He embarked on vast voyages to the great breweries of France and here he questioned everybody from the brewmaster in his studio to the lowest workman that cleaned out the vats. He journeyed to England and gave advice to those red-faced artists who made English porter and to the brewers of the divine ale of Bass and Burton. He trained his microscope on the must of a thousand beer vats to watch the yeast globules at their work of budding and making alcohol. Sometimes he discovered the same kind of miserable sub-visible beings that he had found in sick wines years before, and he told the brew-