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wolves are eight out of ten: out of these nineteen Russians, fifteen were sure to die. . . .
"Maybe," said every one, "they will all die—it is more than two weeks since they were attacked, poor fellows; the malady must have a terrible start, they have no chance. . . ." Such was the gabble of the Boulevards.
Perhaps, indeed, it was too late. Pasteur could not eat nor did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morning and night, twice as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen injections—twice a day to make up for lost time—he and his men shot the vaccine into the arms of the Russians.
And at last a great shout of pride went up for this man Pasteur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the world raised a pæan of thanks to him—for the vaccine marvelously saved all but three of the doomed peasants. The moujiks returned to Russia and were welcomed with the kind of awe that greets the return of hopeless sick ones who have been healed at some miraculous shrine. And the Tsar of All the Russias sent Pasteur the diamond cross of Ste. Anne, and a hundred thousand francs to start the building of that house of microbe hunters in the Rue Dutot in Paris—that laboratory now called the Institut Pasteur. From all over the world—it was the kind of burst of generosity that only great disasters usually call out—from every country in the earth came money, piling up into millions of francs for the building of a laboratory in which Pasteur might have everything needed to track down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons against them. . . .
The laboratory was built, but Pasteur's own work was done; his triumph was too much for him; it was a kind of trigger, perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of never before heard-of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895 in a little house near the kennels where they now kept his rabid dogs, at Villeneuve l'Etang, just outside of Paris. His end was that of the devout Catholic, the mystic he had always been. In one hand he held a crucifix and in the other lay the hand of the most