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The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his telegram to the London Times and to the newspapers of the world: "The experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect, an unprecedented success."
The world received this news and waited, confusedly believing that Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going to lift from men the burden of all suffering. France went wild and called him her greatest son and conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Agricultural societies, horse doctors, poor farmers whose fields were cursed with the poisonous virus of anthrax—all these sent telegrams begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And Pasteur, with Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier, responded to them with a magnificent disregard of their own health—and of science. For Pasteur, poet that he was, had more faith than the wildest of his new converts in this experiment.
In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little laboratory in the Rue d'Ulm into a vaccine factory—huge kettles bubbled and simmered with the broth in which the tame, the life-saving, anthrax bacilli were to grow. Delicately—but so frantically that it was not quite delicate enough—Roux and Chamberland worked at weakening the murderous bacilli just enough to make the sheep of France a little sick, but not too sick from anthrax. Then all of them sweat at pouring numerous gallons of this bacillus-swarming soup which was the vaccine, into little bottles, a few ounces to each bottle, into clean bottles that had to be absolutely free from all other germs. And they had to do this subtle job without any proper apparatus whatever. I marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it; surely there never has been such blind confidence raised by one clear—but Lord! it might be simply a lucky—experiment.
In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier scurried up and down the land of France, and even to Hungary. They inoculated two hundred sheep in this place and five hundred and seventy-six in that—in less than a year hundreds of thousands of beasts had got