McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, September 1893Various
General
McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, September 1893
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
"Institut Pasteur." The coachman nodded. The cab door slammed. The
vehicle rattled across the Seine, left the grand boulevards, passed
the garden of the Luxembourg, and fell into a long, narrow street
running off into the southwestern corner of Paris. The high, dignified
house-fronts and the stately portals were soon passed; busy little
shops took their place. We were in an industrial quarter whose
commonplace was only varied here and there by a fine old _hotel_, the
country house of some rich proprietor, probably, in the days, not so
very long ago, when all this portion of the city was without the
walls, and when an industrial invasion was undreamed of.
The cab left the Rue Vaugirard, crossed a superb boulevard, entered
the Rue Dutot, and stopped. Behind a long, high, black _grille_, and
separated from it by a hedge of shrubbery, a grass plot, and a broad
gravelled drive-way, rose a red-brick, stone-trimmed facade. Across
the front, above the handsome doorway, one read _Institut Pasteur_;
and, still higher, _Subscription Publique, MDCCCLXXXVIII_.
On the grass plot in front of the stately marble steps stood a small
bronze statue mounted on a high granite pedestal. It represented a boy
of twelve or fourteen years in a life-and-death struggle with a mad
dog. He has succeeded in fastening about the neck of the furious
animal the thong of a long whip. He is strangling him. Beside the boy,
or the ground, is a wooden shoe. With it he will beat the beast to
death. The statue tells the story of one of the earliest subjects
treated by M. Pasteur for hydrophobia, Jean-Baptiste Jupille, a
shepherd lad, who, seeing a group of children attacked by a mad dog,
throttled the animal and beat it dead with his _sabot_. He carried
away a dozen or more bites from the conflict, was sent to Paris,
inoculated, and cured. A fitting subject to place before the doorway
of the Pasteur Institute!
[Illustration: THE STATUE OF JUPILLE.]
Statue, facade and lawn are new. The bricks have not yet lost their
glare. One can almost see the dust still on the stone. The bronze has
not lost its fresh lustre. Even the lawn has the unevenness of new
sod, the horse-chestnut trees are small, the ivy has not had time to
climb far up the walls.
Everything is still and sealed in front, but to the right, from the
_concierge's_ lodge back to a solid, practical, dark stone building
in the rear of the main hall, is a throng of idle people, chatting in
clusters, sunning themselves on the benches, walking up and down. It
is a strikingly cosmopolitan company. There are Arabs in red, brown,
blue, or white; Italian women in aprons and lace head-dresses; Spanish
peasants in dark cloaks and broad-brimmed hats; Yankees, Zouaves,
Russians. The low babel of a multitude of tongues fills the air.
One only brushes the edge of this crowd as he makes his way to the
doorway in the end of the main building, the entrance to the private
apartment of M. Pasteur.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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