Pasteur, the great benefactor, whose discoveries did so much for all
classes of society, should have been popular, but he was, on the
contrary, extremely unpopular. The leading publicists of the day were
influenced by some inexplicable sentiment and they made constant war on
him. When, after several years of prodigious labor, Pasteur ventured to
assert himself, they took advantage of his following the dictates of
humanity in accepting all sorts of cases, curable or not, to spread a
report that his treatment did not cure, but instead gave the disease
which it was supposed to cure. Popular fury was aroused to such a
height, that a monster mass meeting was held _against_ Pasteur. Louise
Michel addressed this meeting with her customary vigor of speech and
amidst frantic applause shouted this unqualified remark, "_Scientific
questions should be settled by the people._"
By this time everybody was talking about microbes, and a shop on the
boulevards announced an exhibition of them. They used what is known as a
solar microscope and threw on a screen, suitably enlarged, the
animalculae which grow in impure water, the larvae of mosquitoes, and
other insects, which bear about the same relation to microbes that an
elephant does to a flea.
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