At the request of the emperor, Pasteur went to the Villa Vicentia, in Austria, belonging to the prince imperial. For ten years the silk harvest there had not paid the cost of the eggs. Although he was just recovering from an attack of paralysis brought on by overwork, Pasteur travelled to Austria, introduced his methods and the sale of the cocoons gave the villa a net profit of 26,000,000 francs. No wonder it was said of him that his discoveries alone exceeded in money value to the French people the war indemnity paid by them to the Germans. Splenic fever, called _charbon_ in France, had for years decimated the flocks in France, Italy, Russia, Egypt, Hungary, and Brazil. It attacked the horse and cow as well as the sheep, and human beings died of it when they developed malignant pustule. Many scientific men had studied it, but Dr. Davaine, in 1850, was the first to find in the blood of a sheep that had died of the disease, "little thread-like bodies about twice the length of a blood-corpuscle. These little bodies exhibit no spontaneous motion." Pasteur began the examination of splenic fever by securing some of the blood from an animal dying from it. In the work before him he associated with himself M. Joubert, one of his former pupils. A drop of the blood sown in the water of yeast--the medium used for cultures by Pasteur at that time--produced myriads of the rods, the bacilli or microbes. A drop of this taken at the end of twenty-four hours, and placed in a fresh flask of the medium, again produced thousands of the bacilli. Pasteur found that guinea-pigs inoculated from the first flask developed the fever, and the same result followed when the inoculation was from the twentieth. He had proved, then, that splenic fever was produced by the bacilli, by living organisms only to be seen with a powerful microscope.