In Alsace, on 6th July 1885, a rabid
dog knocked down the nine-year-old
Joseph Meister and bit him
fourteen times.
Meister was the first patient saved
by Pasteur with his vaccine, in
thirteen progressive doses of the
attenuated virus.
Pasteur died of ictus ten years
later. The janitor Meister fifty-five
years later committed suicide when
the Germans occupied his Pasteur
Institute with all those poor dogs.
Only the virus remained above it all.
After his third operation, his heart riddled like an old
fairground target, he woke up on his bed and said: Now
I'll be fine, fit as a fiddle. And have you ever seen horses
coupling?
He died that night.
And another dragged on through eight insipid years like
a river weed in an acid stream, as if pushing up his pallid
skewered face over the cemetery wall.
Until that face eventually vanished.
Both here and there the angel of death quite simply
stamped his hobnailed boot on their medulla oblongata.
I know they died the same way. But I don't believe that
they are dead the same way.