In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm into a vaccine factory--huge kettles bubbled and simmered with the broth in which the tame, the life-saving, anthrax bacilli were to grow. Delicately--but so frantically that it was not quite delicate enough--Roux and Chamberland worked at weakening the murderous bacilli just enough to make the sheep of France a little sick, but not too sick from anthrax. Then all of them sweat at pouring numerous gallons of this bacillus-swarming soup which was the vaccine, into little bottles, a few ounces to each bottle, into clean bottles that had to be absolutely free from all other germs. And they had to do this subtle job without any proper apparatus whatever. I marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it; surely there never has been such blind confidence raised by one clear--but Lord! it might be simply a lucky--experiment. In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier scurried up and down the land of France, and even to Hungary. They inoculated two hundred sheep in this place and five hundred and seventy-six in that--in less than a year hundreds of thousands of beasts had got this life-saving stuff. These wandering vaccinators would drag themselves back into the laboratory from their hard trips, they would get back to Paris probably wanting to get a few drinks or spend an evening with a pretty girl or loaf over a pipe--but Pasteur could not stand the smell of tobacco smoke, and as for wine and women, were not the sheep of France literally baa-ing to be saved? So these young men who were slaves of this battler whose one insane thought was “find-the-microbe-kill-the-microbe”--these faithful fellows took off their coats and peered at anthrax bacilli through the microscopes until their eye rims got red and their eyelashes fell out. In the middle of this work--with the farmers of France yelling for more vaccine--they began to have strange troubles: contaminating germs that had no business there began to pop up among the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vaccine that should have just killed a mouse began to knock off large rabbits.... Then, just as the scientific desperadoes got these messes straightened out, Pasteur would come in, nagging at them, fuming, fussing because they took so long at their experiments. He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydrophobia. And now at night the chittering of the guinea-pigs and the scurrying fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages were drowned by the eerie noise of mad dogs howling--sinister howls that kept Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier from sleep.... What would Pasteur ever have done--he surely would never have got far in his fight with the messengers of death--without those fellows Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier?