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They rigged up a strange apparatus—it was a filter, shaped like a candle, only it was hollow, and made of fine porcelain that would let the soup through, but so tight-meshed that it would hold the tiniest bacilli back. With tongue-protruding care to keep themselves from being splashed with this deadly stuff, they poured the microbe-teeming broth around the candles held rigid in shiny glass cylinders. They fussed—maybe, or at least I hope so, with the blessed relief of profanity—but the broth wouldn't run through the porcelain. But at last they pushed it through with high air pressure—and finally they breathed easy, arranging little flasks full of a clear, amber-colored filtered fluid (it had never a germ in it) on their laboratory bench.

"This stuff should have the poison in it . . . the filter has held back all the microbes—but this stuff should kill our animals," muttered Roux. The laboratory buzzed with eager animal-boys getting ready the rabbits and guinea-pigs. Into the bellies of these beasts went the golden juice propelled from the syringe by Roux's deft hands. . . .

He became a murderer in his heart, this Émile Roux, and in his head as he came down to the laboratory each morning were half-mad wishes for the death of his beasts. "The stuff should be hitting them by now," you can hear him growling to Yersin, but they looked in vain for the ruffled hair, the dragging hind legs, the cold shivering bodies to tell them their wish was coming true.

It was beastly! All of this fussing with the delicate filter experiments—and the animals munched at the greens in their cages, they hopped about, males sniffed at females and engaged in those absurd scufflings with other males which guinea-pigs and rabbits hold to be necessary to the propagation of their kind. . . . Let these giants (who fed them well) inject more of this stuff into their veins, their bellies—poison? Imagination! It made them feel happy. . . .

Roux tried again. He shot bigger doses of his filtered soup into the animals, other animals, still more animals. It was no go, there was no poison.