Success Quote by Charles Jules Henry Nicolle

Failure is doing double duty here: it is both a lab result and a rhetorical instrument. Nicolle’s line reads like a calm postmortem delivered with the confidence of someone who has crossed the river and is now explaining how the current works. The key move is temporal: “had failed” stacked twice, then the pivot to “reasons which I can easily supply today.” He isn’t just narrating trial-and-error; he’s staging the distance between ignorance and knowledge as the real drama of science.

The understated flex is in “including the smaller species of monkeys.” It signals seriousness (he tried the models you try when you’re not messing around), while also quietly acknowledging the period’s utilitarian relationship to animal life. The mention of “my predecessors” is equally strategic. Nicolle folds himself into a lineage, which is both generous and self-serving: their failure becomes the baseline that makes his later insight look not like luck, but like a conceptual breakthrough.

Subtext: the earlier experiments didn’t fail because the disease was mystical or capricious, but because the experimental frame was wrong. Typhus wasn’t simply a pathogen you could will into transmission by proximity; it required an intermediary - the vector - which Nicolle helped establish (famously tied to body lice). That’s why the final clause lands with a certain coolness. “Easily” suggests that once you see the hidden mechanism, the whole history of bafflement becomes legible, almost embarrassing. It’s the scientist’s version of revisionist clarity: not rewriting the past, but showing how the past was blinded by its own assumptions.