When, after several years of prodigious labor, Pasteur ventured to assert himself, they took advantage of his following the dictates of humanity in accepting all sorts of cases, curable or not, to spread a report that his treatment did not cure, but instead gave the disease which it was supposed to cure.

Popular fury was aroused to such a height, that a monster mass meeting was held _against_ Pasteur.

Louise Michel addressed this meeting with her customary vigor of speech and amidst frantic applause shouted this unqualified remark, "_Scientific questions should be settled by the people._" By this time everybody was talking about microbes, and a shop on the boulevards announced an exhibition of them.

They used what is known as a solar microscope and threw on a screen, suitably enlarged, the animalculae which grow in impure water, the larvae of mosquitoes, and other insects, which bear about the same relation to microbes that an elephant does to a flea.

I went into this establishment, and saw the plain people with their wives looking at the exhibition very seriously and really believing that they saw the famous microbes.