The French nation, even the great men of the nation, patriotically refused to believe that Koch had demoted their hero from the rank of God of Science--what could you expect from a German anyway?--and they promptly elected Pasteur to the _Académie Française_, the ultimate honor to bestow on a Frenchman. And on the day of Pasteur’s admission this fiery yes-man was welcomed to his place among the Immortal Forty by the skeptical genius, Ernest Renan, the author who had changed Jesus from a God into a good human being, a man who could forgive everything because he understood everything. Renan knew that even if Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth, he was still sufficiently marvelous. Renan was not a scientist but he was wise enough to know that Pasteur had done a wonderful thing when he showed that weak bugs may protect living beings against virulent ones--even if they would not do it one hundred times out of one hundred. Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing each other on this solemn day. Pasteur the go-getter, an energetic fighter full of a mixture of faiths that interfered, sometimes, with ultimate--and maybe ugly--truth. And talking to him loftily sits the untroubled Renan with the massiveness of Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic that he probably was never quite convinced that he was himself alive, so firmly doubting the value of doing anything that he had become one of the fattest men in France. Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him to some of the greatest men that ever lived and then gave the excited, paralyzed, gray-haired, microbe hunter this mild admonition: “Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with too much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference. She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervor.” Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely words would ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlong untruthful hunter after truth that he was. But just the same, these words sum up the fundamental sadness of Pasteur’s life, they tell of the crown of thorns that madmen wear whose dream it is to change a world in the little seventy years they are allowed to live. VII