In 1885, Louis Pasteur used his knowledge of innoculation to save the life of a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog. When the Nazis captured Paris fifty-five years later (in 1940), Meister, working as the gatekeeper of the Pasteur Institute, was ordered by a Nazi officer to open Pasteur's crypt. Rather than do so, he killed himself.

["Louis Pasteur's theory of germs," a French professor of physiology declared in 1872, "is ridiculous fiction."]