Madame Pasteur

• A great woman whose gentle personality shone upon the life of a great scientist..

• She encouraged him and stood by him in his scientific discoveries, and denied herself..

• To her alone would Pasteur entrust the secrets of his researches before they were complete and presented to the public.

• But for the comfortable life she secured for him, the great scientist would never have attained such a measure of discoveries and glory...

Through the ample studies, the valuable works, and the splendid articles that have been written about the life of the famous French scientist (Pasteur), there emerges before us a great, silent personality who chose to serve humanity without clamor or noise: his good wife, who played in his splendid discoveries a role that no fair-minded person may ignore or undervalue.

It was humanity's good fortune that Pasteur should have such a devoted and faithful wife, who preferred a man of the common people — his father a mere tanner of hides — over many men of wealth, standing, and influence. It was also humanity's good fortune that this noble creature stood at the very summit of the pampered aristocratic class, from whose vanity and tyranny the great mass of the French people suffered so much in those days.

She was the daughter of Monsieur Laurent, rector of the University of Strasbourg, to which venerable university Pasteur had been transferred from his old post in teaching.

And if the name of this good woman is rarely mentioned, let alone appreciated, whenever Pasteur's name comes up, her name was often repeated in the tones of one acknowledging a debt by the very man to whom she consecrated her life, so that he in his turn might consecrate his life to the service of humanity.

He once said to himself: "I found in her all the qualities I sought when I was searching for a wife." And what he said was true — nor is that too much from a great man of sound judgment like Pasteur. From the first day of their blessed marriage she was not content merely to allow him to give his researches the first place in her married life; she encouraged him and supported him in following the course he wished, in the manner that would achieve what he aspired to in the service of all the sons of mankind. Besides this, she never ceased caring for him, watching over his comfort, and rendering him every service she found herself able to perform for him in the best way. And to her alone would her scientist husband confide the hidden contents and secrets of his researches before they were completed and presented to the public, that people might reap the fruits of this ideal married life. It is no exaggeration to say that Pasteur would never have offered the world of medicine, industry, and agriculture the researches and discoveries that he did offer, but for this tranquil married life which his wife provided for him at the cost of her health, her rest, and the innocent pleasures to which she had been accustomed before her marriage to him.

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to enumerate the deeds she accomplished, content and satisfied that hers should be the pride of sharing the life of a great man — sharing his despair and his hope, his triumph and his failure, in the depths of a world of experiments and research stripped utterly of sentiment and of the circumstances of the ordinary individual's life.

When her youngest daughter complained of an indisposition in her health, which afterward developed into an illness that carried off her life within a short span of time, she for her part avoided everything that might stir anxiety in the soul of her husband, absorbed as he was in his researches and experiments. She sent him letter after letter, all of them enforced disguise and contrived illusion as to the health of the child who was bitterly wrestling with death, to leave him free to press far ahead in the field of immortal glory — until she went so far as to conceal and suppress her overwhelming tenderness, the tenderness of a loving mother for her little girl who was hastening toward inevitable death; she hid from her husband the true state of her child, and did not let him see her until she lay a lifeless body on the bed of death.

And when Pasteur wished one day to read before the Academy of Sciences in Paris the text of an article written by an Italian scientist who had followed Pasteur's method in saving the natural-silk industry, the faithful wife pretended that she was obliged to go out to buy some household needs from the market, and so accompanied her husband — who was ill on that very day — side by side to the entrance of the Academy of Sciences. On her way back home she met his close colleague Balard and begged him to watch over her dear husband's safety after he had finished delivering the lecture. But her husband's illness grew worse after his return home, to the point that he became unable even to write; so she began drafting all his correspondence and letters for him — and how many they were for a brilliant figure such as he — and setting down for him all his observations on what she relayed to him from those who kept coming to visit him during his illness. In addition to this exhausting effort, she did everything in her power to let him enjoy the quiet life that would enable him to overcome his sudden illness, until his recovery was complete and he returned to pursuing his researches and experiments from where he had stopped before the illness struck him.

Hers, too, was the merit of preserving the balance between her husband's rare moral strength and the works he had to accomplish; and it was she alone who protected him from every kind of anxiety and from the obstacles that beset his rugged road, a road filled with fears, dangers, and the specters of defeat before a world proud of the discoveries and researches of one of its dutiful sons.

She was forever forthcoming in showing her sincere readiness to share in all his troubles. Thus, in the matter of his experiments to verify the claim of a fellow scientist that wine could be obtained without any artificial or natural yeast being added to the grapes — in that matter she undertook the task of guarding the cotton wrapped around the grapes on which he was to conduct his experiments, to keep the germs of the air from entering it. She kept at this throughout their long journey from the countryside to the capital, Paris, and sat wide awake the whole night through to discharge this grave duty; and she succeeded so well as to earn her husband's praise and his admiration for her self-sacrifice in his service.

And during the public experiment on the effective vaccine against mange in animals which her husband had discovered — when he was one of the two parties to this experiment, unique of its kind, before thousands of French citizens — she exerted every effort to steer the rudder of her husband's thoughts away from this grave matter when one of the sheep on which the vaccine had been tried came down with the mange and was on the point of death. At nine o'clock that day a telegram on the subject reached her; a moment passed in which her courage failed her and she could not open it; then she mastered her fears and opened the telegram, to read between its letters, amid every shade of confusion and general turmoil, that the sick sheep had recovered its health anew! And so she brought her husband the glad tidings of the success of the vaccine's effect upon all the sheep on which it had been tried, and he rejoiced at that happy news as a child rejoices when offered a gift he has been longing for.

And on the day her husband was invited to read a paper on methods of destroying and weakening germs at the international health congress convened in Geneva, she kept away everyone and everything that might hinder her husband — even those who wished to put questions to him. She likewise arranged for him, on the other hand, a short stroll every evening to be spent outside the house, and copied out for him every observation that occurred to him on the subject entrusted to him.

And when her husband made the trial of his famous vaccine against rabies for the first time on the sick boy (Joseph Meister), Pasteur was suffering a kind of anxiety accompanied by troubling dreams about the outcome of that trial. She did not abandon him in that period — true in this to her many noble stands of earlier days, of which we have recounted only a very small part — but lavished upon him moral strength and pure encouragement with a generosity beyond compare, until that trial was crowned with the success hoped for it.

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These are fleeting glimpses of the life of a great woman, all but unknown in our modern scientific age, whose gentle, pure personality shone upon the life of a great scientist and flooded with her gentleness, her tenderness, and her devotion the field of science in which he was immersed — a field empty of sentiment, imagination, and fancy. She lived and died like a drop of dew upon a beautiful flower, a drop that went on lending the flower a captivating splendor and radiance until the burning rays of the sun assailed it with their scorching heat, melted it, and removed it from existence. Yet even on her way to extinction she would not rest until she had washed from the face of the beautiful flower whatever dust had clung to it, so that onlookers might delight in the flower's captivating sight — forgetting, or pretending to forget, in the flood of their enjoyment, the thing that had polished and adorned for them the very beauty they were enjoying.

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