Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outlandish--any wise man would say their impossible--adventure of taming this vicious virus that they could not see. There were little interruptions; Roux went with Thuillier to fight the cholera in Egypt and there, you will remember, Thuillier died; and Pasteur went out into the rural pig-sties of France to discover the microbe and find a vaccine against a disease that was just then murdering French swine. But Pasteur stopped getting entangled in those vulgar arguments which were so often to his discredit, and the three of them locked themselves in their laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm with their poor paralyzed and dangerous animals. They sweat through endless experiments. Pasteur mounted guard over his young men and kept their backs bent over their benches as if they were some higher kind of galley slave. He watched their perilous experiments with one eye and kept the other on the glass door of the workroom, and when he saw some of Roux’s and Chamberland’s friends approaching, to ask them maybe to come out for a glass of beer on the terrace of a near-by café, the master would hurry out and tell the interlopers: “No. No! Not now! Cannot you see? They are busy--it is a most important experiment they are doing!” Months--gray months went by during which it seemed to all of them that there was no possible way of weakening the invisible virus of rabies.... One hundred animals, alas, out of every hundred that they injected--died. You would think that Roux and Chamberland, still youngsters, would have been the indomitable ones, the never-say-die men of this desperate crew. But on the contrary! “It’s no go, master,” said they, making limp waves of their hands toward the cages with their paralyzed beasts--toward the tangled jungles of useless tubes and bottles.... Then Pasteur’s eyebrows cocked at them, and his thinning gray hair seemed to stiffen: “Do the same experiment over again--no matter if it failed last time--it may look foolish to you, but the important thing is not to leave the subject!” Pasteur shouted, in a fury. So it was that this man scolded his monkish disciples and prodded them to do useless tests over and over and over--with no reasons, with complete lack of logic. With every fact against him Pasteur searched and tried and failed and tried again with that insane neglect of common sense that sometimes turns hopeless causes into victories.