My comparative longevity is not due to family heredity (my father died in his 68th year, my mother in her 66th, my sister also, my eldest brother at 45, my second brother at 50, the third in his 57th year; my grandparents I have not known). It is to my hygiene that I give the credit for having attained my 70 years in a satisfactory condition. I have taken no raw food for eighteen years and I introduce as many lactic bacilli as possible into my intestines. But it is but a first step; in spite of all, I am being poisoned by the bacteria of butyric fermentation. However, I have practically reached the normal term of life and I must be satisfied. I have, so to speak, accomplished the programme of a "reduced orthobiosis." When macrobiotics become more perfect, when people have learnt how to cultivate a suitable flora in the intestines of children as soon as they are weaned from their mother's breast, the normal limit of life will be put much further back and may extend to twice my 70 years. Then, also, satiety with existence will appear much later than it has done in my case. To-day they celebrated my jubilee at the Pasteur Institute, which touched me very much, in spite of my distrust of sentimental manifestations, for I realised their sincerity. I should have liked to set out a programme of the researches which should be accomplished by the Pasteur Institute, but I feared to detain my audience too long. I believe that Science will solve all the principal problems of Life and Death and that she will enable human beings to accomplish their vital cycle by real orthobiosis, not by a reduced caricature of it as in my case. Nevertheless, I consider the experiment practised upon myself as having already given some result and that is to me a real satisfaction. [32] _Annales de l'Institut Pasteur_, 1915. We spent that summer a few weeks at Norka, where Metchnikoff completed his researches concerning the death of the silk-worm moth. We went for delicious walks; we spent all the afternoon by the lake or under the pines in the heather, reading and working. Once only, during a walk, he had a strong cardiac intermittence, but as a rule he felt well. I could see, however, that he was obsessed by a grave preoccupation which he did not express. Later, during his last illness, he confessed to me that during the whole of that stay at St. Léger he had feared to die suddenly during one of our walks. The thought of my isolation weighed on his mind and he hid his anxiety so as not to alarm me.... With a view to the work which he had planned on the sexual question, he interested himself in the influence that their sentimental life had had on the activity of great men, and we read together the biographies of Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner. Elie was more than ever desirous of making our holidays as pleasant as possible, as if he already felt that they were our last. Here are more extracts from his note-book: