Finally he argued with Bernard by beautiful experiments--a thing most other men would have done without making unseemly remarks. Like an American about to build a skyscraper in six weeks he rushed to carpenters and hardware stores and bought huge pieces of expensive glass and with this glass he had the carpenters build ingenious portable hothouses. His assistants worked dinnerless and sleepless, preparing flasks and microscopes and wads of heated cotton; and in an unbelievably short time Pasteur gathered up all this ponderous paraphernalia and hastened to catch a train for his old home in the Jura mountains. Like the so typical misplaced American that he really was, he threw every consideration and all other work to the winds and went directly to the point of settling: “Does my theory of fermentation hold?” Coming to his own little vineyard in Arbois, he hastily put up his hothouses around a part of his grape-vines. They were admirable close-fitting hothouses that sealed the grape-vines from the outside air. “It’s midsummer, now, the grapes are far from ripe,” he pondered, “and I know that at this time there are never any yeasts to be found on the grapes.” Then, to make doubly sure that no yeasts from the air could fall on the grapes, he carefully wrapped wads of cotton--which his assistants had heated to kill all living beings--around some of the bunches under the glass of the hothouses. He hurried back to Paris and waited nervously for the grapes to ripen. He went back to Arbois too soon in his frantic eagerness to prove that Bernard was wrong--but at last he got there to find them ripe. He examined the hothouse grapes with his microscope; there was not a yeast to be found on their skins. Feverishly he crushed some of them up in carefully heated bottles--not a single bubble of fermentation rose in these flasks--and when he did the same thing to the exposed grapes from the vines outside the hothouse, these bubbled quickly into wine! At last he gathered up Madame Pasteur and some of the vines with their cotton-wrapped bunches of grapes--he was going to take these back to the Academy, where he would offer a bunch to each member that wanted one, and he was going to challenge everybody to try to make wine from these protected bunches.... He knew they couldn’t do it without putting yeasts into them.... He would show them all Bernard was wrong! Madame Pasteur sat stiffly in the train all the way back to Paris, carefully holding the twigs straight up in front of her so that the cotton wrappings wouldn’t come undone. It was a whole day’s trip to Paris....