Since she was in no hurry to travel, Georgiana stopped when she passed Alfort National Veterinary School. Back in Normandy, she had already been thinking about rebuilding it.
She did not care what people thought. Cattle certainly did not want to die of plague. Rinderpest had spread widely in the eighteenth century, alarming even Pope Clement XI.
One of the Ten Plagues of Egypt had been a plague upon livestock, but this time the Pope did not ask God for guidance. Instead, he consulted his personal physician, whose advice was to halt migration, slaughter infected animals, and bury the carcasses of those already infected deep underground.
Rinderpest differed from bovine tuberculosis. It could be called the Black Death of animals: it spread quickly and had a high mortality rate, but it was not transmissible between animals and humans. Still, veterinary staff needed protection during prevention and treatment, or they could spread it to other animals.
Though she had prepared herself mentally, Georgiana was still startled by the dilapidated state of this school on the outskirts of Paris. There was not even a rabbit here, let alone cattle. The weeds had grown tall, and it looked as though the place had been abandoned for many years.
There was a large stable here. Horses needed hospitalization too, but it was just as empty inside, and desolation hung everywhere.
The veterinary school had once been directly under the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, but as Georgiana saw it, veterinarians were not meant to serve agriculture alone.
She hated war and had no wish to become someone like Bonaparte, with war constantly on her mind. She had an estate near Versailles that had been turned into a hospital. The doctors working there were almost all those who did not need to join the army