Free The Alchemy of Murder by Carol McCleary

floated by, a doll-like creature, with tiny hands and legs. Roth saw it for only a second before it disappeared in the dark waters. It was the body of a newborn, or a prematurely born child, thrown into the sewers no doubt because the mother couldn’t afford a burial. Roth glanced at Pasteur and knew immediately that he had seen the child. Nothing escaped his attention. If the killer was here, Pasteur would find it.
    “The frogs, were they here before the recent storm?” Pasteur asked Michel.
    “They’re always here, they like this area. Been here as long as I’ve worked the tunnels. And before storm waters swept them away, there were dead rats lying about.”
    “And how long have you worked in the sewers?”
    “Since my father brought me down when I was fourteen.”
    “Have you ever become sick from the fumes?”
    “Never, and the same for the men who work with me. You can ask my work mate, Henrí. He’s been working the sewers for over ten years and has never been sick.”
    The air rising from the sewers, miasmic vapors, was the reason that brought them to this place.
    An influenza pandemic called the Russian flu had rolled off the steppes of Asia and across Europe. The contagion stalled in Paris as a deadly strain called Black Fever erupted. Sewer fumes were suspected as the source of the disease.
    Hardest hit by the Black Fever were neighborhoods of the poor and downtrodden areas that could spawn food riots even in better times. The black flag of the anarchists had been raised amidst an outcry that the poor of the city were dying as a result of a plot by the rich to rid the world of poor mouths to feed.

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    Coming behind them, Dr. Brouardel overheard the sewer worker say that he and his coworker, Henrí, had not been sick after years of working in the sewers.
    “It’s understood that sewer workers are not affected by the miasma.” The medical director’s irritation bounced off their backs as they continued treading the narrow walkway next to the stream of sewer. His remark carried both a note of authority and vexation because he had determined the cause of the epidemic to be sewer fumes. The basis for the director’s conclusion was propinquity: the sewers below were emitting fumes, people above were dying, a fortiori, the sewers were the cause.
    The theory that disease was spread by miasmic fumes had become quite popular since the new age of the microscope demonstrated that sewers were a rich soup of microbes. But Pasteur never accepted or rejected a theory until it was tested in a laboratory, and no one had scientifically demonstrated that sewer vapors carried deadly microbes. To the contrary, the smells had been around for thousands of years, since man had built cities.
    The fact that Pasteur had not acquiesced to the causation Brouardel opined to the city’s newspapers infuriated the director even more than his customary intolerance toward Pasteur. But it wasn’t just Brouardel who held ill will toward Pasteur—medical practitioners resented the fact that people believed Pasteur was a medical doctor. In fact, he was a chemist. They were also infuriated at Pasteur’s accusation that doctors spread infection from one patient to another by their failure to sanitize their hands and instruments.
    “Just as immunity can be acquired to smallpox by exposure to it,” the director went on, “the sewer workers are able to resist the miasma.”
    “There’s no proof,” Pasteur muttered.
    “My clinical examinations are proof!” the director snapped.
    Voilá! There it was—the essence of the dispute between the scientist and the medical profession. Doctors believed that causation and treatment were to be determined by their examination and questioning of a patient. The idea that one could place blood or tissue samples under a microscope and determine the course of treatment was alien to them. They did not want Pasteur’s microscope getting between them and their patients.
    More of the director’s