Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when romantic microbe hunting began to turn into a regular profession, recruited from good steady law-abiding young doctors who were not prophets or reckless searchers--in those days Metchnikoff’s bitter trials with people who didn’t believe him began to be less terrible. He received medals and prizes of money, and even the Germans clapped their hands and were respectful when he walked majestically into some congress. A thousand searchers had spied phagocytes in the act of gobbling harmful germs--and although that did not explain at all why one man dies from an attack of pneumonia microbes, while another breaks into a sweat and gets better--just the same there is no doubt that pneumonia germs are sometimes eaten and so got rid of by phagocytes. So Metchnikoff, after you discount his amazing illogic, his intolerance, his bullheadedness, really did discover a fact which may make life easier for suffering mankind. Because, some day, a dreamer, an experimenting genius like the absent-minded Bordet may come along--and he may solve the riddle of why phagocytes sometimes gobble germs and sometimes do not--he might even teach phagocytes always to eat them.... VII At last Metchnikoff began really to be happy. His opponents were partly convinced, and partly they stopped arguing with him because they found it was no use--he could always experiment more tirelessly than they, he could talk longer, he could expostulate more loudly. So Metchnikoff, at the beginning of the twentieth century, sat down to write a great book on all that he had found out about why we are immune. It was an enormous treatise you would think it would take a lifetime to write. It was written in a style Flaubert might have envied. He made every one of the ten thousand facts in it vivid, and every one of them was twisted prettily to prove his point. It is a strange novel with a myriad of heroes--the wandering cells, the phagocytes of all the animals of the earth. His fame made him take a real delight in being alive. Twenty years before, detesting the human race, sorry for himself, and hating life, he had told Olga: “It is a crime to have children--no human being should consciously reproduce himself.” But now that he had begun to take delight in existence, the children of Sèvres, the suburb where he lived, called him “Grandpa Christmas” as he patted their heads and gave them candy. “Life is good!” he told himself. But how to hang onto it, now that it was slipping away so fast? In only one way, of course--by science!