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this life-saving stuff. These wandering vaccinators would drag themselves back into the laboratory from their hard trips, they would get back to Paris probably wanting to get a few drinks or spend an evening with a pretty girl or loaf over a pipe—but Pasteur could not stand the smell of tobacco smoke, and as for wine and women, were not the sheep of France literally baa-ing to be saved? So these young men who were slaves of this battler whose one insane thought was "find-the-microbe-kill-the-microbe"—these faithful fellows took off their coats and peered at anthrax bacilli through the microscopes until their eye rims got red and their eyelashes fell out. In the middle of this work—with the farmers of France yelling for more vaccine—they began to have strange troubles: contaminating germs that had no business there began to pop up among the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vaccine that should have just killed a mouse began to knock off large rabbits. . . . Then, just as the scientific desperadoes got these messes straightened out, Pasteur would come in, nagging at them, fuming, fussing because they took so long at their experiments.
He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydrophobia. And now at night the chittering of the guinea-pigs and the scurrying fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages were drowned by the eerie noise of mad dogs howling—sinister howls that kept Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier from sleep. . . . What would Pasteur ever have done—he surely would never have got far in his fight with the messengers of death—without those fellows Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier?
Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle of Pouilly-le-Fort, it began to be evident that Pasteur, though a most original microbe hunter, was not an infallible God. Disturbing letters began to pile up on his desk; complaints from Montpothier and a dozen towns of France, and from Packisch and Kapuvar in Hungary. Sheep were dying from anthrax—not natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous fields, but