Thus visions of death amongst soldiers in their prime and children in their infancy hung over the Academy meeting hall. It was at one of those mournful sittings, on a dark autumn afternoon, that Chevreul, an octogenarian member of the Institute, who, like Pasteur, had believed in civilization and in the binding together of nations through science, art and letters, looking at the sacks of earth piled outside the windows to save the library from the bursting shells, exclaimed in loud desolate tones-- “And yet we are in the nineteenth century, and a few months ago the French did not even think of a war which has put their capital into a state of siege and traced around its walls a desert zone where he who sowed does not reap! And there are public universities where they teach the Beautiful, the True, and the Right.” “Might goes before Right,” Bismarck said. A German journalist invented another phrase which went the round of Europe: “the psychological moment for bombardment.” On January 5, one of the first Prussian shells sank into the garden of the Ecole Normale; another burst in the very ambulance of the Ecole. Bertin, the sub-director, rushed through the suffocating smoke and ascertained that none of the patients was hurt; he found the breech between two beds. The miserable patients dragged themselves downstairs to the lecture rooms on the ground floor, not a much safer refuge. From the heights of Châtillon the enemy’s batteries were bombarding all the left bank of the Seine, the Prussians, regardless of the white flags bearing the red cross of Geneva, were aiming at the Val-de-Grâce and the Panthéon. “Where is the Germany of our dreams?” wrote Paul de St. Victor on January 9, “the Germany of the poets? Between her and France an abyss of hatred has opened, a Rhine of blood and tears that no peace can ever bridge over.” On that same date, Chevreul read the following declaration to the Academy of Science-- The Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in Paris by an edict of King Louis XIII, dated January, 1826, Converted into the Museum of Natural History by a decree of the Convention on June 10, 1793, was Bombarded, under the reign of Wilhelm I King of Prussia, Count von Bismarck, Chancellor, by the Prussian army, during the night of January 8-9, 1871. It had until then been respected by all parties and all powers, national or foreign.