VI But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four immune sheep scampered about among the carcasses of the same number of pitiful dead ones, here stood this man, I say, in a gruesomely gorgeous stage-setting of an immortal drama, and all the world was there to see and to record and to be converted to his own faith in his passionate fight against needless death. Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival. Doctor Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of the most sarcastic of the Pasteur-baiters, rushed up to him as the last of the not-vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried: “Inoculate me with your vaccines, Mr. Pasteur--just as you have done to those sheep you have saved so wonderfully----Then I will submit to the injection of the murderous virus! All men must be convinced of this marvelous discovery!” “It is true,” said another humbled enemy, “that I have made jokes about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner!” “Well, allow me to remind you of the words of the Gospel,” Pasteur answered him. “Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.” The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his telegram to the London _Times_ and to the newspapers of the world: “The experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect, an unprecedented success.” The world received this news and waited, confusedly believing that Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going to lift from men the burden of all suffering. France went wild and called him her greatest son and conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Agricultural societies, horse doctors, poor farmers whose fields were cursed with the poisonous virus of anthrax--all these sent telegrams begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And Pasteur, with Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier, responded to them with a magnificent disregard of their own health--and of science. For Pasteur, poet that he was, had more faith than the wildest of his new converts in this experiment.