Then for a short time he worked quietly in his laboratory in Paris--there was nothing for him to save just then--until one day in 1865 Fate came to his door and knocked. Fate in the guise of his old professor, Dumas, called on him and asked him to change himself from a man of science into a silkworm doctor. “What’s wrong with silkworms? I did not know that they ever had diseases--I know nothing at all about silkworms--what’s more, I have never even seen one!” protested Pasteur. VI “The silk country of the South is my native country,” answered Dumas. “I’ve just come back from there--it is terrible--I cannot sleep nights for thinking of it, my poor country, my village of Alais.... This country that used to be rich, that used to be gay with mulberry trees which my people used to call the Golden Tree--this country is desolate now. The lovely terraces are going to ruin--the people, they are my people, they are starving....” Tears were in his voice. Anything but a respecter of persons, Pasteur who loved and respected himself above all men, had always kept a touching reverence for Dumas. He must help his sad old professor! But how? It is doubtful at this time if Pasteur could have told a silkworm from an angle worm! Indeed, a little later, when he was first given a cocoon to examine, he held it up to his ear, shook it, and cried: “Why, there is something inside it!” Pasteur hated to go South to try to find out what ailed silkworms, he knew he risked a horrid failure by going and he detested failure above everything. But it is one of the charming things about him that in the midst of all his arrogance, his vulgar sureness of himself, he had kept that boyish love and reverence for his old master--so he said to Dumas: “I am in your hands, I’m at your disposal, do with me as you wish--I will go!” So he went. He packed up the never complaining Madame Pasteur and the children and a microscope and three energetic and worshiping young assistants and he went into the epidemic that was slaughtering millions of silkworms and ruining the South of France. Knowing less of silkworms and their sicknesses than a babe in swaddling clothes he arrived in Alais; he got there and he learned that a silkworm spins a cocoon round itself and turns into a chrysalid inside the cocoon; he found out that the chrysalid changes into a moth that climbs out and lays eggs--which hatch out the next spring into new broods of young silkworms. The silkworm growers--disgusted at his great ignorance--told him that the disease which was killing their worms was called _pébrine_, because the sick worms were covered with little black spots that looked like pepper. Pasteur found out that there were a thousand or so theories about the sickness, but that the little pepper spots--and the curious little globules inside the sick worms, wee globules that you could only see with a microscope--were the only facts that were known about it.