The Life of Pasteur

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THE LIFE OF PASTEUR

BY

RENÉ VALLERY-RADOT

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 5

INTRODUCTION 6

I. 6

II. 8

III. 11

CHAPTER I—1822-1843 14

CHAPTER II—1844-1849 30

CHAPTER III—1850-1854 48

CHAPTER IV—1855-1859 63

CHAPTER V—1860-1864 71

CHAPTER VI—1865-1870 91

CHAPTER VII—1870-1872 94

CHAPTER VIII—1873-1877 94

CHAPTER IX—1877-1879 94

CHAPTER X—1880-1882 94

CHAPTER XI—1882-1884 94

CHAPTER XII—1884-1885 94

CHAPTER XIII—1885-1888 94

CHAPTER XIV—1889-1895 94

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 94

INTRODUCTION

L’homme en ce siècle a pria une connaissance toute nouvelle des ressource dès la nature et, par l’application de son intelligence il a commencé à les faire fructifier. Il a refait, par la géologie et la paléontologie, l’histoire de la terre, entrainée elle-même par la grande loi de l’évolution. Il connaît mieux, grâce à Pasteur surtout, les conditions d’existence de son propre organisme et peut entreprendre d’y combattre les causes de destruction.—Monod, L’Europe-Contemporaine.

WHETHER to admire more the man or his method, the life or the work, I leave for the readers of this well-told story to decide. Among the researches that have made the name of Pasteur a household word in the civilised world, three are of the first importance—a knowledge of the true nature of the processes in fermentation—a knowledge of the chief maladies which have scourged man and animals—a knowledge of the measures by which either the body may be protected against these diseases, or the poison neutralised when once within the body.

I.

Our knowledge of disease has advanced in a curiously uniform way. The objective features, the symptoms, naturally first attracted attention. The Greek physicians, Hippocrates, Galen, and Aretaeus, gave excellent accounts of many diseases; for example, the forms of malaria. They knew, too, very well, their modes of termination, and the art of prognosis was studied carefully. But of the actual causes of disease they knew little or nothing, and any glimmerings of truth were obscured in a cloud of theory. The treatment was haphazard, partly the outcome of experience, partly based upon false theories of the cause of the disease. This may be said to have been the sort of knowledge possessed by the profession until men began to study the seats and causes of disease, and to search out the changes inside the body, corresponding to the outward symptoms and the external appearances. Morbid anatomy began to be studied, and in the hundred years from 1750 to 1850 such colossal strides were made that we knew well the post-mortem appearances of the more common diseases; the recognition of which was greatly helped by a study of the relation of the pathological appearances with the signs and symptoms. The 19th century may be said to have given us an extraordinarily full knowledge of the changes which disease produces in the solids and fluids of the body. Great advances, too, were made in the treatment of disease. We learned to trust Nature more and drugs less; we got rid (in part) of treatment by theory, and we ceased to have a drug for every symptom. But much treatment was, and still is, irrational, not based on a knowledge of the cause of the disease. In a blundering way many important advances were made, and even specifics were discovered—cinchona, for example, had cured malaria for a hundred and fifty years before Laveran found the cause. At the middle of the last century we did not know much more of the actual causes of the great scourges of the race, the plagues, the fevers and the pestilences, than did the Greeks. Here comes in Pasteur’s great work. Before him Egyptian darkness; with his advent a light that brightens more and more as the years give us ever fuller knowledge. The facts that fevers were catching, that epidemics spread, that infection could remain attached to particles of clothing, etc., all gave support to the view that the actual cause was something alive, a contagium vivum. It was really a very old view, the germs of which may be found in the Fathers, but which was first clearly expressed—so far as I know—by Frascastorius, a Veronese physician in the 16th century, who spoke of the seeds of contagion passing from one person to another; and he first drew a parallel between the processes of contagion and the fermentation of wine. This was more than one hundred years before Kircher, Leeuwenhoek, and others, began to use the microscope and to see animalculæ, etc., in water, and so gave a basis for the infinitely little view of the nature of disease germs. And it was a study of the processes of fermentation that led Pasteur to the sure ground on which we now stand. Starting as a pure chemist, and becoming interested in the science of crystallography, it was not until his life at Lille, a town with important brewing industries, that Pasteur became interested in the biological side of chemical problems. Many years before it had been noted by Cagniard-Latour that yeast was composed of cells capable of reproducing themselves by a sort of budding, and he made the keen suggestion that it was possibly through some fleet of their vegetation that the sugar was transformed. But Liebig’s view everywhere prevailed that the ferment was an alterable, organic substance which exercised a catalytic force, transforming the sugar. It was in August, 1857, that Pasteur sent his famous paper on Lactic Acid Fermentation to the Lille Scientific Society; and in December of the same year he presented to the Academy of Sciences a paper on Alcoholic Fermentation, in which he concluded that the deduplication of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid is correlevant to a phenomena of life. These studies had the signal effect of diverting the man from the course of his previous more strictly chemical studies. It is interesting to note how slowly these views dislocated the dominant theories of Liebig. More than ten years after their announcement I remember that we had in our chemical lectures the catalytic theory very fully presented.

Out of these researches arose a famous battle winch kept Pasteur hard at work for four or five years—the struggle over spontaneous generation. It was an old warfare, but the microscope tad revealed a new world, and the experiments on fermentation had lent great weight to the omne vivum ex ovo doctrine. The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the way in their experiments, and the latter had reached the conclusion that there is no vegetable and no animal that has not its own germ. But heterogenesis became the burning question, and Pouchet in France, and Bastian in England, led the opposition to Pasteur. The many famous experiments carried, conviction to the minds of scientific men, and, destroyed forever the old belief in spontaneous generation. All along the analogy between disease and fermentation must have been in Pasteur’s mind; and then came the suggestion: What would be most desirable would be to push those studies far enough to prepare the road for a serious research into the origin of various diseases. If the changes in lactic, alcohol and butyric fermentations are due to minute living organisms, why should not the same tiny creatures make the changes which occur in the body in the putrid and suppurative diseases. With an accurate training as a chemist, having been diverted in his studies upon fermentation into the realm of biology, and nourishing a strong conviction of the identity between putrefactive changes of the body and fermentation, Pasteur was well prepared to undertake investigations, which had hitherto been confined to physicians alone.

The first outcome of the researches of Pasteur upon fermentation and spontaneous generation represents a transformation in the practice of surgery, which, it is not too much to say, has been one of the greatest boons ever conferred upon humanity. It had long been recognised that now and again a wound healed without the formation of pus, that is without suppuration, but both spontaneous and operative wounds were almost invariably associated with that change; and, moreover, they frequently became putrid, as it was then called—infected, as we should say; the general system became involved, and the patient died of blood poisoning. So common was this, particularly in old, ill-equipped hospitals, that many surgeons feared to operate, and the general mortality in all surgical cases was very high. Believing that from outside the germs came which caused the decomposition of wounds, just as from the atmosphere the sugar solution got the germs which caused the fermentation, a young surgeon at Glasgow. Joseph Lister, applied the principles of Pasteur’s experiments to their treatment. It may be well here to quote from Lister’s original paper in the Lancet, 1807:—Turning now to the question how the atmosphere produces decomposition of organic substances, we find that a flood of light has been thrown upon this most important subject by the philosophic researches of M. Pasteur, who has demonstrated by thoroughly convincing evidence that it is not to its oxygen or to any of its gaseous constituents that the air owes this property, but to minute particles suspended in it, which are the germs of various low forms of life, long since revealed by the microscope, and regarded as merely accidental concomitants of putrescence, but now shown by Pasteur to be its essential cause, resolving the complex organic compounds into substances of simpler chemical constitution, just as the yeast plant converts sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid. From these beginnings modern surgery took its rise, and the whole subject of wound infection, not only in relation to surgical diseases, but to child-bed fever, forms now one of the most brilliant chapters in the history of Preventive Medicine.

II.

Pasteur was early impressed with the analogies between fermentation and putrefaction and the infectious diseases, and in 1863 he assured the French Emperor that his ambition was to arrive at the knowledge of the causes of putrid and contagious diseases. After a study upon the diseases of wines, which has had most important practical bearings, an opportunity came of the very first importance, which not only changed the whole course of his career, but had great influence in the development of medical science. A disease of the silk-worm had, for some years, ruined one of the most important industries of France, and in 1805 the Government asked Pasteur to give up the laboratory work and teaching, and to devote his whole energies to the task of investigating it. The story of the brilliant success which followed years of application to the problem will be read with deep interest by every student of science. It was the first of his victories in the application of the experimental methods of a trained chemist to the problems of biology, and it placed his name high in the group of the most illustrious benefactors of practical industries.

The national tragedy of 1870-2 nearly killed Pasteur. He had a terrible pilgrimage to make in search of his son, a sergeant in Bourbaki’s force. The retreat from Moscow cannot have been worse than this, said the savant. In October, 1868, he had had a stroke of paralysis, from which he recovered in a most exceptional way, as it seemed to have diminished neither his enthusiasm nor his energy. In a series of studies on the diseases of beer, and on the mode of production of vinegar, he became more and more convinced that these studies on fermentation had given him the key to the nature of the infectious diseases. It is a remarkable fact that the distinguished English philosopher of the seventeenth century, the man who more than any one else of his century appreciated the importance of the experimental method, Robert Boyle, had said that he who could discover the nature of ferments and fermentation, would be more capable than anyone else of explaining the nature of certain diseases. The studies on spontaneous generation, and Lister’s application of the germ theory to the treatment of wounds, had aroused the greatest interest in the medical world, and Villemin, in a series of most brilliant experiments, had demonstrated the infectivity of tuberculosis. An extraordinary opportunity now offered for the study of a widespread epidemic disease, known as anthrax, which in many parts of France killed from 25 to 30 per cent, of the sheep and cattle, and which in parts of Europe had been pandemic, attacking both mail and beast. As far back as 1838 minute rods had been noted in the blood of animals which had died from the disease; and in 1863 Devaine thought that these little bodies, which he called bacteridia, were the cause of the disease. In 1876 a young German district physician. Robert Koch, began a career, which in interest and importance rivals that of the subject of this memoir. Koch confirmed in every point the old researches of Devaine; but he did much more, and for the first time isolated the organism in pure culture outside the body, grew successive generations, showed the remarkable spore formation, and produced the disease artificially in animals by inoculating with the cultures. Pasteur confirmed these results, and in the face of extraordinary opposition succeeded in convincing his opponents. Out of this study came a still more important discovery, namely, that it was possible so to attenuate or weaken the virus or poison that the animal could be inoculated, and have a slight attack, recover, and be protected against the disease. More than eighty years had passed since, on May 14th, 1796, Jenner, with a small bit of virus taken from a cow-pox on the hand of the milkmaid, Sarah Newlme, had vaccinated a child, and thus proved that a slight attack of one disease would protect the body from disease of a similar character. It was an occasion famous in the history of medicine, when, in the spring of 1881, at Melun, at the farmyard of Pouilly le Fort, the final test, case was determined, and the flock of vaccinated sheep remained well, while every one of the unvaccinated, inoculated from the same material, had died. It was indeed a great triumph.

The studies on chicken cholera, yellow fever, and on swine plague helped to further the general acceptance of the germ theory. I well remember at the great meeting of the International Congress in 1881, the splendid reception accorded to the distinguished Frenchman, who divided with Virchow the honours of the meeting. Finally came the work upon one of the most dreaded of all diseases—hydrophobia, an infection of a most remarkable character, the germ of which remains undiscovered. The practical results of Pasteur’s researches have given us a prophylactic treatment of great efficacy. Before its introduction the only means of preventing the development of the disease was a thorough cauterisation of the disease wound within half an hour after its infliction. Pasteur showed that animals could be made immune to the poison, and devised a method by which the infection conveyed by the bite could be neutralised. Pasteur Institutes for the treatment of hydrophobia have been established in different countries, and where the disease is widely prevalent have been of the greatest benefit. Except at the London Congress, the only occasion on which I saw the great master was in 1891 or 1892, when he demonstrated at the Institute to a group of us the technique of the procedure, and then superintended the inoculations of the day. A large number of persons are treated in the course of the year; a good many, of course, have not been bitten by mad dogs; but a very careful classification is made:—

(a) Includes persons bitten by dogs proved experimentally to have been mad.

(b) Persons bitten by dogs declared to be mad by competent veterinary surgeons.

(c) All other cases.

The mortality even in Class A is very slight, though many patients are not brought until late. Incidentally it may be remarked the lesson of this country in its treatment of hydrophobia is one of the most important ever presented in connection with an infectious disease. There are no Pasteur Institutes; there are no cases. Why? The simple muzzling order has prevented the transmission of the disease from dog to dog, and once exterminated in the dog, the possibility of the infection in man had gone. In 1888 the crowning work of Pasteur’s life was the establishment of an Institute to serve as a centre of study on contagious disease, and a dispensary for the treatment of hydrophobia, which is today the most important single centre of research in the world. The closing years of his life were full of interest in the work of his colleagues and assistants, and he had the great satisfaction of participating, with his assistant Roux, in another great victory over the dread scourge, diphtheria. Before his death in 1895 he had seen his work prosper in a way never before granted to any great discoverer. To no one man has it ever been given to accomplish work of such great importance for the well-being of humanity. As Paul Bert expressed it in the report to the French Government, Pasteur’s work constitutes three great discoveries, which may be thus formulated.

1. Each fermentation is produced by the development of a special microbe.

2. Each infectious disease is produced by the development within the organism of a special microbe.

3. The microbe of an infectious disease culture, under certain detrimental condition is attenuated in its pathogenic activity; from a virus it has become a vaccine.

In an address delivered in Edinburgh by Sir James Simpson in 1853, in which he extolled the recent advancement of physic, occur these words:—I do not believe, that, at the present moment, any individual in the profession, who, in surgery or in midwifery, could point out some means of curing—or some prophylactic means of averting by antecedent treatment—the liability to these analogous or identical diseases—viz., surgical or puerperal fever—such a fortunate individual would, I say, make, in relation to surgery and midwifery, a greater and more important discovery than could possibly be attained by any other subject of investigation. Nor does such a result seem hopelessly unattainable. Little did he think that the fulfilment of these words was in the possession of a young Englishman who had just gone to Edinburgh as an assistant to his colleague, Professor Syme. Lister’s recognition of the importance of Pasteur’s studies led to the fulfilment within this generation of the pious hope expressed fry Simpson. In Institutions and Hospitals surgical infection and puerperal fevers are things of the past, and for this achievement if for nothing else, the names of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister will go down to posterity among those of the greatest benefactors of humanity.

III.

In his growth the man kept pace with the scientist—heart and head held even sway in his life. To many whose estimate of French character is gained from yellow literature this story will reveal the true side of a great people, in whom filial piety, brotherly solicitude, generosity, and self-sacrifice are combined with a rare devotion to country. Was there ever a more charming picture than that of the family at Dôle! Napoleon’s old sergeant, Joseph Pasteur, is almost as interesting a character as his illustrious son; and we follow the joys and sorrows of the home with unflagging attention. Rarely has a great man been able to pay such a, tribute to his lather as that paid by Pasteur:—For thirty years I have been his constant care. I owe everything to him.

This is a biography for young men of science, and for others who wish to learn what science has done, and may do, for humanity. From it may be gleaned three lessons.

The value of method, of technique, in the hands of a great master has never been better illustrated. Just as Harvey, searching out Nature by way of experiment, opened the way for a study of the functions of the body in health, so did Pasteur, bringing to the problems of biology the same great organon, shed a light upon processes the nature of which had defied the analysis of the keenest minds. From Dumas’s letter to Pasteur, quoted in Chapter VI., a paragraph may be given in illustration:—The art of observation and that of experiment are very distinct. In the first case, the, fact may either proceed from logical reasons or be more good fortune; it is sufficient to have some penetration and the sense of truth in order to profit by it. But the art of experimentation leads from the first to the last link of the chain, without hesitation and without a blank, making successive use of Reason, which suggests an alternative, and of Experience, which decides on it, until, starting from a faint glimmer, the full blaze of light is reached. Pasteur had the good fortune to begin with chemistry, and with the science of crystallography, which demanded extraordinary accuracy, and developed that patient persistence so characteristic of all his researches.

In the life of a young man the most essential thing for happiness is the gift of friendship. And here is the second great lesson. As a Frenchman, Pasteur had the devotion that marks the students of that nation to their masters, living and dead. Not the least interesting parts of this work are the glimpses we get of the great teachers with whom he came in contact. What a model of a scientific man is shown in the character of Biot, so keenly alive to the interests of his young friend, whose brilliant career he followed with the devotion of a second father. One of the most touching incidents recorded in the book relates to Pasteur’s election to the Academy of Sciences:—The next morning when the gated of the Montparnasse cemetery were opened, a woman walked towards Biot’s grave with her hands full of flowers. It was Mme. Pasteur who was bringing them to him...who had loved Pasteur with so deep an affection. Pasteur looked upon the cult of great men as a great principle in national education. As he said to the students of the University of Edinburgh:—Worship great men;{1} and this reverence for the illustrious dead was a dominant element in his character, though the doctrines of Positivism seemed never to have had any attraction for him. A dark shadow in the scientific life is often thrown by a spirit of jealousy, and the habit of suspicious, carping criticism. The hall-mark of a small mind, this spirit should never be allowed to influence our judgment of a man’s work, and to young men a splendid example is here offered of a man devoted to his friends, just and generous to his rivals, and patient under many trying contradictions and vexatious oppositions.

And the last great lesson is humility before the unsolved problems of the Universe. Any convictions that might be a comfort in the sufferings of human life had his respectful sympathy. His own creed was beautifully expressed in his eulogy upon Littré:—He who proclaims the existence of the Infinite, and none can avoid it—accumulates in that affirmation more of the supernatural than is to be found in all the miracles of all the religions; for the notion of the Infinite presents that double character that it forces itself upon us and yet is incomprehensible. When this notion seizes upon our understanding, we can but kneel....I see everywhere the inevitable expression of the Infinite in the world; through it, the supernatural is at the bottom of every heart. The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite. As long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs on human thought, temples will be erected for the worship of the Infinite, whether God is called Brahma, Allah. Jehovah, or Jesus; and on the pavement of those temples, men will be seen kneeling, prostrated, annihilated in the thought of the Infinite. And modern Pantheism has never had a greater disciple, whose life and work set forth the devotion to an ideal—that service to humanity is service to God:—Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein he the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.

The future belongs to Science. More and more she will control the destinies of the nations. Already she has them in her crucible and on her balances. In her new mission to humanity she preaches a new gospel. In the nineteenth century renaissance she has had great apostles, Darwin, for example, whose gifts of heart and head were in equal measure, but after rereading for the third or fourth time the Life of Louis Pasteur, I am of the opinion, expressed recently by the anonymous writer of a beautiful tribute in the Spectator, that he was the most perfect man who has ever entered the Kingdom of Science.

WILLIAM OSLER.

CHAPTER I—1822-1843

THE origin of oven the humblest families can be traced back by persevering search through the ancient parochial registers. Thus the name of Pasteur is to be found written at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the old registers of the Priory of Mouthe, in the province of Franche-Comté. The Pasteurs were tillers of the soil, and originally formed a sort of tribe in the small village of Reculfoz, dependent on the Priory, but they gradually dispersed over the country.

The registers of Mièges, near Nozeroy, contain an entry of the marriage of Denis Pasteur and Jeanne David, dated February 9, 1682. This Denis, after whom the line of Pasteur’s ancestors follows in an unbroken record, lived in the village of Plénisette, where his eldest son Claude was born in 1683. Denis afterward sojourned for some time in the village of Douay, and ultimately forsaking the valley of Mièges came to Lemuy, where he worked as a miller for Claude François Count of Udressier, a noble descendant of a secretary of the Emperor Charles V.

Lemuy is surrounded by wide plains affording pasture for herds of oxen. In the distance the pine trees of the forest of Joux stand close together, like the ranks of an immense army, their dark masses deepening the azure of the horizon. It was in those widespreading open lands that Pasteur’s ancestors lived. Near the church, overshadowed by old beech and lime trees, a tombstone is to be found overgrown with grass. Some members of the family he under that slab naïvely inscribed: Here lie, each by the side of the others...

In 1716, in the mill at Lemuy, ruins of which still exist, the marriage contract of Claude Pasteur was drawn up and signed in the presence of Henry Girod, Royal notary of Salins. The father and mother declared themselves unable to write, but we have the signatures of the affianced couple. Claude Pasteur and Jeanne Belle, affixed to the record of the quaint betrothal oath of the time. This Claude was in his turn a miller at Lemuy, though at his death in 1746 he is only mentioned as a labourer in the parish register. He had eight children, the youngest, whose name was Claude Etienne, and who was born in the village of Supt, a few kilometres from Lemuy, being Louis Pasteur’s great-grandfather.

What ambition, what love of adventures induced him to leave the Jura plains to come down to Salins? A desire for independence in the literal sense of the word. According to the custom then still in force in Franche-Comté (in contradiction to the name of that province, as Voltaire truly remarks), there were yet some serfs, that is to say, people legally incapable of disposing of their goods or of their persons. They were part of the possessions of a nobleman or of the lands of a convent or monastery. Denis Pasteur and his son had been serfs of the Counts of Udressier. Claude Etienne desired to be freed and succeeded in achieving this at the age of thirty, as is proved by a deed, dated March 20. 1763, drawn up in the presence of the Royal notary, Claude Jarry. Messire Philippe-Marie-François, Count of Udressier, Lord of Ecleux, Cramans, Lemuy and other places, consented by special grace to free Claude Etienne Pasteur, a tanner, of Salins, his serf. The deed stipulated that Claude Etienne and his unborn posterity should henceforth be enfranchised from the stain of mortmain. Four gold pieces of twenty-four livres were paid then and there in the mansion of the Count of Udressier by the said Pasteur.

The following year, he married Françoise Lambert. After setting up together a small tannery in the Faubourg Champtave they enjoyed the fairy tale ideal of happiness: they had ten children. The third, Jean Henri, through whom this genealogy continues, was born in 1769. On June 25, 1779, letters giving Claude Etienne Pasteur the freedom of the city of Salins were delivered to him by the Town Council.

Jean Henri Pasteur, in his twentieth year, went to Besançon to seek his fortune as a tanner, but was not successful. His wife, Gabrielle Jourdan, died at the age of twenty, and he married again, but himself died at twenty-seven, leaving one little son by his first marriage, Jean Joseph Pasteur, born March 16, 1791. This child, who was to be Louis Pasteur’s father, was taken charge of by his grandmother at Salins; later on, his father’s sisters, one married to a wood merchant named Chamecin, and the other to Philibert Bourgeois, Chamecin’s partner, adopted the orphan. He was carefully brought up, but without much learning; it was considered sufficient in those days to be able to read the Emperor’s bulletins; the rest did not seem to matter very much. Besides, Jean Joseph had to earn his living at the tanner’s trade, which had been his father’s and his grandfather’s before him.

Jean Joseph was drawn as a conscript in 1811, and went through the Peninsular War in 1812 and 1813. He belonged to the 3rd Regiment of the Line, whose mission was to pursue in the northern Spanish provinces the guerrillas of the famous Espoz y Mina. A legend grew round this wonderful man; he was said to make his own gunpowder in the bleak mountain passes; his innumerable partisans were supplied with arms and ammunition by the English cruisers. He dragged women and old men after him, and little children acted as his scouts. Once or twice however, in May, 1812, the terrible Mina was very nearly caught; but in July he was again as powerful as ever. The French had to organize mobile columns to again occupy the coast and establish communications with France. There was some serious fighting. Mina and his followers were incessantly harassing the small French contingent of the 3rd and 4th Regiments, which were almost alone. How many traits of bravery, writes Tissot, will remain unknown which on a larger field would have been rewarded and honoured!

The records of the 3rd Regiment allow us to follow step by step this valiant little troop, and among the rank and file, doing his duty steadily through terrible hardships, that private soldier (a corporal in July, 1812, and a sergeant in October, 1813) whose name was Pasteur. The battalion returned to France at the end of January, 1814. It formed a part of that Leval division which, numbering barely 8,000 men, had to fight at Bar-sur-Aube against an army of 40,000 enemies. The 3rd Regiment was called brave amongst the brave. If Napoleon had had none but such soldiers, writes Thiers in his History of the Consulate and the Empire, the result of that great struggle would certainly have been different. The Emperor, touched by so much courage, distributed crosses among the men. Pasteur was made a sergeant major on March 10, 1814, and received, two days later, the cross of the Legion of Honour.

At the battle of Arcis-sur-Aube (March 21) the Leval division had again to stand against 50,000 men—Russians, Austrians, Bavarians, and Württembergers. Pasteur’s battalion, the 1st of the 3rd Regiment, came back to St. Dizier and went on by forced marches to Fontainebleau, where Napoleon had concentrated all his forces, arriving on April 4. The battalion was now reduced to eight officers and 276 men. The next day, at twelve o’clock, the Leval division and the remnant of the 7th corps were gathered in the yard of the Cheval Blanc Inn and were reviewed by Napoleon. The attitude of these soldiers, who had heroically fought in Spain and in France, and who were still offering their passionate devotion, gave him a few moments’ illusion. Their enthusiasm and acclamations contrasted with the coldness, the reserve, the almost insubordinations of Generals like Ney, Lefèbvre, Oudinot and MacDonald, who had just declared that to march on Paris would be folly.

Marmont’s defection hastened events; the Emperor, seeing himself forsaken, abdicated. Jean Joseph Pasteur had not, like Captain Coignet, the sad privilege of witnessing the Emperor’s farewell, his battalion having been sent into the department of Eure on April 9. On April 23 the white cockade replaced the tricolour.

On May 12, 1814, a royal order gave to the 3rd line Regiment the name of Régiment Dauphin; it was reorganized at Douai, where Sergeant-major Pasteur received his discharge from the service. He returned to Besançon with grief and anger in his heart: for him, as for many others risen from the people, Napoleon was a demi-god. Lists of victories, principles of equality, new ideas scattered throughout the nations, had followed each other in dazzling visions. It was a cruel trial for half-pay officers, old sergeants, grenadiers, peasant soldiers, to come down from this imperial epic to every-day monotony, police supervision, and the anxieties of poverty; their wounded patriotism was embittered by feelings of personal humiliation. Jean Joseph resigned himself to his fate and went back to his former trade. The return from Elba was a ray of joy and hope in his obscure life, only to be followed by renewed darkness.

He was living in the Faubourg Champtave a solitary life in accordance with his tastes and character when this solitude was interrupted for an instant. The Mayor of Salins, a knight of Malta and an ardent royalist, ordered all the late soldiers of Napoleon, the "brigands de la Loire" as they were now called, to bring their sabres to the Maine. Joseph Pasteur reluctantly obeyed; but when he heard that these glorious weapons were destined to police service, and would be used by police agents, further submission seemed to him intolerable. He recognized his own sergeant-major’s sabre, which had just been given to an agent, and, springing upon the man, wrested the sword from him. Great excitement ensued—a mixture of indignation, irritation and repressed enthusiasm: the numerous Bonapartists in town began to gather together. An Austrian regiment was at that time still garrisoned in the town. The Mayor appealed to the colonel, asking him to repress this disobedience; but the Austrian officer refused to interfere, declaring that he both understood and approved the military feelings which actuated the ex-sergeant-major. Pasteur was allowed to keep his sword, and returned home accompanied by sympathizers who were perhaps more noisily enthusiastic than he could have wished.

Having peacefully resumed his work Le made the acquaintance of a neighbouring family of gardeners, whose garden faced his tannery on the other bank of the Furieuse, a river rarely deserving its name. From the steps leading to the water Jean Joseph Pasteur often used to watch a young girl working in the garden at early dawn. She soon perceived that the old soldier—very young still; he was but twenty-five years old—was interested in her every movement. Her name was Jeanne Etiennette Roqui.

Her parents, natives of Marnoz, a village about four kilometres from Salins, belonged to one of the most ancient plebeian families of the country. The Salins archives mention a Roqui working in vineyards as far back as 1555, and in 1659 there were Roqui lampmakers and plumbers. The members of this family were in general so much attached to each other that to love like the Roqui had become proverbial; their wills and testaments mentioned legacies or gifts from brother to brother, uncle to nephew. In 1815 the father and mother of Jeanne Etiennette were living very quietly in the old Salins faubourg. Their daughter was modest, intelligent and kind; Jean Joseph Pasteur asked for her hand in marriage. They seemed made for each other; the difference in their natures only strengthened their mutual affection: he was reserved, almost secretive, with a slow and careful mind apparently absorbed in his own inner life; she was very active, full of imagination, and ready enthusiasm.

The young couple migrated to Dôle and settled down in the Rue des Tanneurs. Their first child only lived a few months; in 1818 a little daughter came. Four years later in a small room of their humble home, on Friday, December 27, 1822, at 2 a.m., Louis Pasteur was born.

Two daughters were born later—one at Dôle and the other at Marnoz, in the house of the Roqui. Jean Joseph Pasteur’s mother-in-law, now a widow, considering that her great age no longer allowed her to administer her fortune, had divided all she possessed between her son Jean Claude Roqui, a landed proprietor at Marnoz, and Jeanne Etiennette her daughter.

Thus called away from Dôle by family interests. Jean Joseph Pasteur came to live at Marnoz. The place was not very favourable to his trade, though a neighbouring brook rendered the establishment of a tannery possible. The house, though many times altered, still bears the name of Maison Pasteur. On one of the inner doors the veteran, who had a taste for painting, had depicted a soldier in an old uniform now become a peasant and tilling the soil. This figure stands against a background of grey sky and distant hills; leaning on his spade the man suspends his labours and dreams of past glories. It is easy to criticize the faults in the painting, but the sentimental allegory is full of feeling.

Louis Pasteur’s earliest recollections dated from that time; he could remember running joyously along the Aiglepierre road. The Pasteur family did not remain long at Marnoz. A tannery was to let in the neighbourhood by the town of Arbois, near the, bridge which crosses the Cuisance, and only a few kilometres from the source of the river. The house, behind its modest frontage, presented the advantage of a yard where pits had been dug for the preparation of the skins. Joseph Pasteur took this little house end settled there with his wife and children.

Louis Pasteur was sent at first to the École Primaire attached to the college of Arbois. Mutual teaching was then the fashion; scholars were divided into groups: one child taught the rudiments of reading to others, who then spelt aloud in a sort of sing-song. The master, M. Renaud, went from group to group designating the monitors. Louis soon desired to possess this title, perhaps all the more so because he was the smallest scholar. But those who would decorate the early years of Louis Pasteur with wonderful legends would be disappointed: when a little later he attended the daily classes at the Arbois college he belonged merely to the category of good average pupils. He took several prizes without much difficulty; he rather liked buying new lesson books, on the first page of which he proudly wrote his name. His father, who wished to instruct himself as well as to help his son, helped him with his home preparation. During holidays, the boy enjoyed his liberty. Some of his schoolfellows—Vercel, Charrière, Guillemin, Coulon—called for him to come out with them and he followed them with pleasure. He delighted in fishing parties on the Cuisance, and much admired the net throwing of his comrade Jules Vercel. But he avoided bird trapping; the sight of a wounded lark was painful to him.

The doors of Louis Pasteur’s home were not usually open except to his schoolboy friends, who, when they did not fetch him away, used to come and play in the tannery yard with remnants of bark, stray bits of iron, etc. Joseph Pasteur, though not considered a proud man, did not easily make friends. His langrage and manners were not those of a retired sergeant; he never spoke of his campaigns and never entered a café. On Sundays, wearing a military-looking frock coat, spotlessly clean and adorned with the showy ribbon of the Legion of Honour (worn very large at that time), he invariably walked out towards the road from Arbois to Besançon. This road passes between vine-planted hills. On the left, on a wooded height above the wide plain towards Dôle, the ruins of the Vadans tower invest the whole landscape with a lingering glamour of heroic times. In these solitary meditations, he dwelt more anxiously on the future thon on present difficulties, the latter being of little account in this hard-working family. What would become of this son of his, conscientious and studious, but, though already thirteen years old, with no apparent preference for anything but drawing? The epithet of artist given to Louis Pasteur by his Arboisian friends only half pleased the paternal vanity. And yet it is impossible not to be struck by the realism of his first original effort, a very bold pastel drawing. This pastel represents Louis’ mother, one morning that she was going to market, with a white cap and a blue and green tartan shawl. Her son insisted on painting her just as she was. The portrait is full of sincerity and not unlike the work of a conscientious pre-Raphaelite. The powerful face is illumined by a pair of clear straightforward eyes.

Though they did not entertain in mere acquaintances, the husband and wife were happy to receive those who seemed to them worthy of affection or esteem by reason of some superiority of the mind or of the heart. In this way they formed a friendship with an old army doctor then practising in the Arbois hospital, Dr. Dumont, a man who studied for the sake of learning and who did a great deal of good while avoiding popularity.

Another familiar friend was a philosopher named Bousson de Mairet. An indefatigable reader, he never went out without a book or pamphlet in his pocket. He spent his life in compiling from isolated facts annals in which the characteristics of the Francs-Comtois, and especially the Arboisians, were reproduced in detail, with labour worthy of a Benedictine monk. He often came to spend a quiet evening with the Pasteur family, who used to question him and to listen to his interesting records of that strange Arboisian race, difficult to understand, presenting as it does a mixture of heroic courage and that slightly ironical good humour which Parisians and Southerners mistake for naïveness. Arboisians never distrust themselves, but are sceptical where others are concerned. They are proud of their local history, and even of their rodomontades.

For instance, on August 4, 1830, they sent an address to the Parisians to express their indignation against the Ordonnances{2} and to assure them that all the available population of Arbois was ready to fly to the assistance of Paris. In April, 1831, a lawyer’s clerk, passing one evening through Arbois by the coach, announced to a few gardes nationaux who were standing about that the Republic was proclaimed at Lyons. Arbois immediately rose in arms; the insurgents armed themselves with guns from the Hôtel de Ville. Louis Pasteur watched the arrival from Besançon of 200 grenadiers, four squadrons of light cavalry, and a small battery of artillery sent to reduce the rebels. The sous-préfet of Poligny having asked the rioters who were their leaders, they answered with one voice, We are all leaders. A few days later the great, the good news was published in all the newspapers: Arbois, Lyons, and Paris are pacified. The Arboisians called their neighbours the Braggarts of Salins, probably with the ingenious intention of turning such a well-deserved accusation from themselves.

Louis Pasteur, whose mind already had a serious bent, preferred to these recent anecdotes such historical records as that of the siege of Arbois under Henry IV, when the Arboisians held out for three whole days against a besieging army of 25,000 men. His childish imagination, after being worked upon by these stories of local patriotism, eagerly seized upon ideals of a higher patriotism, and fed upon the glory of the French people as represented by the conquests of the Empire.

He watched his parents, day by day working under dire necessity and ennobling their weary task by considering their children’s education almost as essential as their daily bread; and, as in all things the father and mother took an interest in noble motives and principles, their material life was lightened and illumined by their moral life.

One more friend, the headmaster of Arbois college, M. Romanet, exerted a decisive influence on Louis Pasteur’s career. This master, who was constantly trying to elevate the mind and heart of his pupils, inspired Louis with great admiration as well as with respect and gratitude. Romanet considered that whilst instruction doubled a man’s value, education, in the highest sense of the word, increased it tenfold. He was the first to discover in Louis Pasteur the hidden spark that had not yet revealed itself by any brilliant success in the hardworking schoolboy. Louis’ mind worked so carefully that he was considered slow; he never affirmed anything of which he was not absolutely sure; but with all his strength and caution he also had vivid imaginative faculties.

Romanet, during their strolls round the college playground, took pleasure in awakening with an educator’s interest the leading qualities of this young nature—circumspection and enthusiasm. The boy, who had been sitting over his desk with all-absorbing attention, now listened with sparkling eyes to the kind teacher talking to him of his future and opening to him the prospect of the great École Normale.{3}

An officer of the Paris municipal guard, Captain Barbier, who always came to Arbois when on leave, offered to look after Louis Pasteur if he were sent to Paris. But Joseph Pasteur—in spite of all—hesitated to send his son, not yet sixteen years old, a hundred leagues away from home. Would it not be wiser to let him go to Besançon college and come back to Arbois college as professor? What could be more desirable than such a position? Surely Paris and the École Normale were quite unnecessary! The question of money also had to be considered.

That need not trouble you, said Captain Barbier. In the Latin Quarter, Impasse des Feuillantines, there is a preparatory school, of which the headmaster, M. Barbet, is a Franc-Comtois. He will do for your son what he has done for many boys from his own country—that is, take him at reduced school fees.

Joseph Pasteur at last allowed himself to be persuaded, and Louis’ departure was fixed for the end of October, 1838. He was not going alone: Jules Vercel, his dear school friend, was also going to Paris to work for his baccalauréat.{4} This youth had a most happy temperament: unambitious, satisfied with each day’s work as it came, he took pride and pleasure in the success of others, and especially in that of Louis, as he then and always fraternally called his friend. The two boys’ friendship went some way to alleviate the natural anxieties felt by both families. The slowness and difficulty of travelling in those days gave to farewells a sort of solemn sadness; they were repeated twenty times whilst the horses were being harnessed and the luggage hoisted on to the coach in the large courtyard of the Hôtel de la Poste. On that bleak October morning, amidst a shower of rain and sleet, the two lads had to sit under the tarpaulin behind the driver; there were no seats left inside or under the hood. In spite of Vercel’s habit of seeing the right side of things and his joy in thinking that in forty-eight hours he, the country boy, would see the wonders of Paris—in spite of Pasteur’s brave resolve to make the most of his unexpected opportunities of study, of the now possible entrance into the École Normale—both looked with heavy hearts at the familiar scene they were leaving behind them—their homes, the square tower of Arbois church, the heights of the Ermitage in the grey distance.

Every native of Jura, though he affects to feel nothing of the kind, has, at the bottom of his heart, a strong feeling of attachment for the corner of the world where he has spent his childhood; as soon as he forsakes his native soil his thoughts return to it with a painful and persistent charm. The two boys did not take much interest in the towns where the coach stopped to change horses, Dôle, Dijon, Auxerre, Joigny, Sens, Fontainebleau, etc.

When Louis Pasteur reached Paris he did not feel like Balzac’s student hero, confidently defying the great city. In spite of the strong will already visible in his pensive features, his grief was too deep to be reasoned away. No one at first suspected this; he was a reserved youth, with none of the desire to talk which leads weak natures to ease their sorrows by pouring them out; but, when all was quiet in the Impasse des Feuillantines and his sleeping comrades could not break in upon his regrets, he would lie awake for hours thinking of his home and repeating the mournful line—

How endless unto watchful anguish

Night doth seem.

The students of the Barbet school attended the classes of the Lycée St. Louis. In spite of his willingness and his passionate love of study, Louis was overcome with despair at being away from home. Never was homesickness more acute. If I could only get a whiff of the tannery yard, he would say to Jules Vercel, I feel I should be cured. M. Barbet endeavoured in vain to amuse and turn the thoughts of this lad of fifteen so absorbed in his sorrow. At last he thought it his duty to warn the parents of this state of mind, which threatened to become morbid.

One morning in November Louis Pasteur was told with an air of mystery that he was wanted. They are waiting for you close by, sail the messenger, indicating a small café at the corner of the street. Louis entered and found a man sitting at a small table at the back of the shop, his face in his hands. It was his father. I have come to fetch you, he said simply. No explanations were necessary; the father and son understood each other’s longings.

What took place in Pasteur’s mind when he found himself again at Arbois? After the first few days of relief and joy, did he feel, when he went back to Arbois college, any regret, not to say remorse, at not having overcome his homesickness? Was he discouraged by the prospect of a restricted career in that small town? Little is known of that period when his will had been mastered by his feelings; but from the indecision of his daily life we may hazard a guess at the disquieted state of his mind at this time. At the beginning of that year (1839) he returned for a time to his early tastes; he went back to his coloured chalks, left aside for the last eighteen months, ever since one holiday time when he had drawn Captain Barbier, proudly wearing his uniform, and with the high colour of excellent health.

He soon got beyond the powers of his drawing master, M. Pointurier, a good man who does not seem to have seen any scientific possibilities in the art of drawing.

Louis’ pastel drawings soon formed a portrait gallery of friends. An old cooper of seventy, Father Gaidot, born at Dôle, but now living at Arbois, had his turn. Gaidot appears in a festive costume, a blue coat and a yellow waistcoat, very picturesque with his wrinkled forehead and close-shaven cheeks. Then there are all the members of a family named Koch. The father and the son are drawn carefully, portraits such as are often seen in country villages; but the two daughters Lydia and Sophia are more delicately pencilled; they live again in the youthful grace of their twenty summers. Then we have a notary, the wide collar of a frock coat framing his rubicund face; a young woman in white; an old nun of eighty-two in a fluted cap, wearing a white hood and an ivory cross: a little boy of ten in a velvet suit, a melancholy-looking child, not destined to grow to manhood. Pasteur obligingly drew any one who wished to have a portrait. Among all these pastels, two are really remarkable. The first represents, in his official garb, a M. Blondeau, registrar of mortgages, whose gentle and refined features are perfectly delineated. The other is the portrait of a mayor of Arbois, M. Pareau; he wears his silver-embroidered uniform, with a white stock. The cross of the Legion of Honour and the tricolour scarf are discreetly indicated. The whole interest is centred in the smiling fact, with hair brushed up à la Louis Philippe, and blue eyes harmonizing with a blue ground.

The compliments of this local dignitary and Romanet’s renewed counsels at the end of the year—when Pasteur took more school prizes than he could carry—reawakened within him the ambition for the École Normale.

There was no philosophy{5} class in the college of Arbois, and a return to Paris seemed formidable. Pasteur resolved to go to the college at Besançon, where he could go on with his studies, pass his baccalauréat and then prepare for the examinations of the École Normale. Besançon is only forty kilometres from Arbois, and Joseph Pasteur was in the habit of going there several times a year to sell some of his prepared skins. This was by far the wisest solution of the problem.

On his arrival at the Royal College of Franche-Comté Pasteur found himself under a philosophy master, M. Daunas, who had been a student at the École Normale and was a graduate of the University; he was young, full of eloquence, proud of his pupils, of awakening their faculties and directing their minds. The science master, M. Darlay, did not inspire the same enthusiasm; he was an elderly man and regretted the good old times when pupils were less inquisitive. Pasteur’s questions often embarrassed him. Louis’ reputation as a painter satisfied him no longer, though the portrait he drew of one of his comrades was exhibited. All this does not lead to the École Normale, he wrote to his parents in January, 1840. "I prefer a first place at college to 10.000 praises in the course of conversation....We shall meet on Sunday, dear father, for I believe there is a fair on Monday. If we see M. Daunas, we will speak to him of the École Normale. Dear sisters, let me tell you again, work hard, love each other. When one is accustomed to work it is impossible to do without it; besides, everything in this world depends on that. Armed with science, one can rise above all one’s fellows....But I hope all this good advice to you is superfluous, and I am sure you spend many moments every day learning your grammar. Love each other as I love you, while awaiting the happy day when I shall be received at the