1855--1859
In September, 1854, he was made Professor and Dean of the new Faculté
des Sciences at Lille. “I need not, Sir,” wrote the Minister of Public
Instruction, M. Fortoul, in a letter where private feelings were mixed
with official solemnity, “recall to your mind the importance which is
attached to the success of this new Faculty of Science, situated in a
town which is the richest centre of industrial activity in the north of
France. By giving you the direction of it, I show the entire confidence
which I have placed in you. I am convinced that you will fulfil the
hopes which I have founded upon your zeal.”
Built at the expense of the town, the Faculté was situated in the Rue
des Fleurs. In the opening speech which he pronounced on December 7,
1854, the young Dean expressed his enthusiasm for the Imperial decree of
August 22, which brought two happy innovations into the Faculties of
Science: (1) The pupils might, for a small annual sum, enter the
laboratory and practise the principal experiments carried out before
them at the classes; and (2) a new diploma was created. After two years
of practical and theoretical study the young men who wished to enter an
industrial career could obtain this special diploma and be chosen as
foremen or overseers. Pasteur was overjoyed at being able to do useful
work in that country of distilleries, and to attract large audiences to
the new Faculty. “Where in your families will you find,” he said, to
excite indolent minds--“where will you find a young man whose curiosity
and interest will not immediately be awakened when you put into his
hands a potato, when with that potato he may produce sugar, with that
sugar alcohol, with that alcohol æther and vinegar? Where is he that
will not be happy to tell his family in the evening that he has just
been working out an electric telegraph? And, gentlemen, be convinced of
this, such studies are seldom if ever forgotten. It is somewhat as if
geography were to be taught by travelling; such geography is remembered
because one has seen the places. In the same way your sons will not
forget what the air we breathe contains when they have once analysed it,
when in their hands and under their eyes the admirable properties of its
elements have been resolved.”
After stating his wish to be directly useful to these sons of
manufacturers and to put his laboratory at their disposal, he eloquently
upheld the rights of theory in teaching--
“Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can
bring forth and develop the spirit of invention. It is to you specially
that it will belong not to share the opinion of those narrow minds who
disdain everything in science which has not an immediate application.
You know Franklin’s charming saying? He was witnessing the first
demonstration of a purely scientific discovery, and people round him
said: ‘But what is the use of it?’ Franklin answered them: ‘What is the
use of a new-born child?’ Yes, gentlemen, what is the use of a new-born
child? And yet, perhaps, at that tender age, germs already existed in
you of the talents which distinguish you! In your baby boys, fragile
beings as they are, there are incipient magistrates, scientists, heroes
as valiant as those who are now covering themselves with glory under the
walls of Sebastopol. And thus, gentlemen, a theoretical discovery has
but the merit of its existence: it awakens hope, and that is all. But
let it be cultivated, let it grow, and you will see what it will become.
“Do you know when it first saw the light, this electric telegraph, one
of the most marvellous applications of modern science? It was in that
memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a
piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a
Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he
suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind
which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite
different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire
carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its
position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.
Franklin’s interlocutor might well have said when the needle moved: ‘But
what is the use of that?’ And yet that discovery was barely twenty years
old when it produced by its application the almost supernatural effects
of the electric telegraph!”
The small theatre where Pasteur gave his chemistry lessons soon became
celebrated in the students’ world.
The faults had disappeared with which Pasteur used to reproach himself
when he first taught at Dijon and later at Strasburg. He was sure of
himself, he was clear in his explanations; the chain of thought, the
fitness of words, all was perfect. He made few experiments, but those
were decisive. He endeavoured to bring out every observation or
comparison they might suggest. The pupil who went away delighted from
the class did not suspect the care each of those apparently easy lessons
had cost. When Pasteur had carefully prepared all his notes, he used to
make a summary of them; he had these summaries bound together
afterwards. We may thus sketch the outline of his work; but who will
paint the gesture of demonstration, the movement, the grave penetrating
voice, the life in short?
After a few months the Minister wrote to M. Guillemin, the rector, that
he was much pleased with the success of this Faculty of Sciences at
Lille, “which already owes it to the merit of the teaching--solid and
brilliant at the same time--of that clever Professor, that it is able to
rival the most flourishing Faculties.” The Minister felt he must add
some official advice: “But M. Pasteur must guard against being carried
away by his love for science, and he must not forget that the teaching
of the Faculties, whilst keeping up with scientific theory, should, in
order to produce useful and far-reaching results, appropriate to itself
the special applications suitable to the real wants of the surrounding
country.”
A year after the inauguration of the new Faculty, Pasteur wrote to
Chappuis: “Our classes are very well attended; I have 250 to 300 people
at my most popular lectures, and we have twenty-one pupils entered for
laboratory experiments. I believe that this year, like last year, Lille
holds the first rank for that innovation, for I am told that at Lyons
there were but eight entries.” It was indeed a success to distance
Lyons. “The zeal of all is a pleasure to watch (January, 1856). It
reaches that point that four of the professors take the trouble to have
their manuscript lessons printed; there are already 120 subscribers for
the course of applied mechanics.
“Our building is fortunately completed; it is large and handsome, but
will soon become insufficient owing to the progress of practical
teaching.
“We are very comfortably settled on the first floor, and I have (on the
ground floor immediately below) what I have always wished for, a
laboratory where I can go at any time. This week, for instance, the gas
remains on, and operations follow their course whilst I am in bed. In
this way I try to make up a little of the time which I have to give to
the direction of all the rather numerous departments in our Faculties.
Add to this that I am a member of two very active societies, and that I
have been entrusted, at the suggestion of the Conseil-Général,[24] with
the testing of manures for the département of the Nord, a considerable
work in this rich agricultural land, but one which I have accepted
eagerly, so as to popularize and enlarge the influence of our young
Faculty.
“Do not fear lest all this should keep me from the studies I love. I
shall not give them up, and I trust that what is already accomplished
will grow without my help, with the growth that time gives to everything
that has within it the germ of life. Let us all work; that only is
enjoyable. I am quoting M. Biot, who certainly is an authority on that
subject. You saw the share he took the other day in a great discussion
at the Académie des Sciences; his presence of mind, high reasoning
powers, and youthfulness were magnificent, and he is eighty-four!”
In a mere study on Pasteur as a scientific man, the way in which he
understood his duties as Dean would only be a secondary detail. It is
not so here, the very object of this book being to paint what he was in
all the circumstances, all the trials of life. Besides his professional
obligations, his kindness in leaving his laboratory, however hard the
sacrifice, bears witness to an ever present devotion. For instance, he
took his pupils round factories and foundries at Aniche, Denain,
Valenciennes, St. Omer. In July, 1856, he organized for the same pupils
a tour in Belgium. He took them to visit factories, iron foundries,
steel and metal works, questioning the foremen with his insatiable
curiosity, pleased to induce in his tall students a desire to learn. All
returned from these trips with more pleasure in their work; some with
the fiery enthusiasm that Pasteur wished to see.
The sentence in his Lille speech, “in the fields of observation, chance
only favours the mind which is prepared,” was particularly applicable to
him. In the summer of 1856 a Lille manufacturer, M. Bigo, had, like many
others that same year, met with great disappointments in the manufacture
of beetroot alcohol. He came to the young Dean for advice. The prospect
of doing a kindness, of communicating the results of his observations to
the numerous hearers who crowded the small theatre of the Faculty, and
of closely studying the phenomena of fermentation which preoccupied him
to such a degree, caused Pasteur to consent to make some experiments. He
spent some time almost daily at the factory. On his return to his
laboratory--where he only had a student’s microscope and a most
primitive coke-fed stove--he examined the globules in the fermentation
juice, he compared filtered with non-filtered beetroot juice, and
conceived stimulating hypotheses often to be abandoned in face of a fact
in contradiction with them. Above some note made a few days previously,
where a suggested hypothesis had not been verified by fact, he would
write: “error,” “erroneous,” for he was implacable in his criticism of
himself.
M. Bigo’s son, who studied in Pasteur’s laboratory, has summed up in a
letter how these accidents of manufacture became a starting point to
Pasteur’s investigations on fermentation, particularly alcoholic
fermentation. “Pasteur had noticed through the microscope that the
globules were round when fermentation was healthy, that they lengthened
when alteration began, and were quite long when fermentation became
lactic. This very simple method allowed us to watch the process and to
avoid the failures in fermentation which we used so often to meet
with.... I had the good fortune to be many times the confidant of the
enthusiasms and disappointments of a great man of science.” Young Bigo
indeed remembered the series of experiments, the numerous observations
noted, and how Pasteur, whilst studying the causes of those failures in
the distillery, had wondered whether he was not confronted with a
general fact, common to all fermentations. Pasteur was on the road to a
discovery the consequences of which were to revolutionize chemistry.
During months and months he worked to assure himself that he was not a
prey to error.
In order to appreciate the importance of the ideas which from that
small laboratory were about to inundate the world, and in order to take
account of the effort necessitated to obtain the triumph of a theory
which was to become a doctrine, it is necessary to go back to the
teachings of that time upon the subject of fermentations. All was
darkness, pierced in 1836 by a momentary ray of light. The physicist
Cagniard-Latour, studying the ferment of beer called yeast, had observed
that that ferment was composed of cells “susceptible of reproduction by
a sort of budding, and probably acting on sugar through some effect of
their vegetation.” Almost at the same time the German doctor Schwann was
making analogous observations. However, as the fact seemed isolated,
nothing similar being met with elsewhere, Cagniard-Latour’s remark was
but a curious parenthesis in the history of fermentations.
When such men as J. B. Dumas said that perhaps there might be a sequel
to Cagniard-Latour’s statement, they emitted the idea so timidly that,
in a book _On Contagion_ published at Montpellier in 1853, Anglada, the
well known author, expressed himself thus--
“M. Dumas, who is an authority, looks upon the act of fermentation as
_strange and obscure_; he declares that it gives rise to phenomena the
knowledge of which is only tentative at present. Such a competent
affirmation is of a nature to discourage those who claim to unravel the
mysteries of contagion by the comparative study of fermentation. What is
the advantage of explaining one through the other since both are equally
mysterious!” This word, _obscure_, was to be found everywhere. Claude
Bernard used the same epithet at the Collège de France in March, 1850,
to qualify those phenomena.
Four months before the request of the Lille manufacturer, Pasteur
himself, preparing on a loose sheet of paper a lesson on fermentation,
had written these words: “What does fermentation consist of?--Mysterious
character of the phenomenon.--A word on lactic acid.” Did he speak in
that lesson of his ideas of future experiments? Did he insist upon the
mystery he intended to unveil? With his powers of concentration it is
probable that he restrained himself and decided to wait another year.
The theories of Berzelius and of Liebig then reigned supreme. To the
mind of Berzelius, the Swedish chemist, fermentation was due to contact.
It was said that there was a catalytic force. In his opinion, what
Cagniard-Latour believed he had seen, was but “an immediate vegetable
principle, which became precipitated during the fermentation of beer,
and which, in precipitating, presented forms analogous to the simpler
forms of vegetable life, but formation does not constitute life.”
In the view of the German chemist Liebig, chemical decomposition was
produced by influence: the ferment was an extremely alterable organic
substance which decomposed, and in decomposing set in motion, by the
rupture of its own elements, the molecules of the fermentative matter;
it was the dead portion of the yeast, that which had lived and was being
altered, which acted upon the sugar. These theories were adopted,
taught, and to be found in all treatises on chemistry.
* * * * *
A vacancy at the Académie des Sciences took Pasteur away from his
students for a time and obliged him to go to Paris. Biot, Dumas, Balard
and Senarmont had insisted upon his presenting himself in the section of
mineralogy. He felt himself unfit for the candidature. He was as
incapable of election manœuvres as he was full of his subject when he
had to convince an interlocutor or to interest an audience in his works
on crystallography. (These works had just procured the bestowal on him
of the great Rumford medal, conferred by the London Royal Society.)
During this detested canvassing campaign he had one happy day: he was
present on February 5, 1857, at the reception of Biot by the Académie
Française.
Biot, who had entered the Académie des Sciences fifty-four years
earlier, and was now the oldest member of the Institute, took advantage
of his great age to distribute, in the course of his speech, a good deal
of wise counsel, much applauded by Pasteur from the ranks of the
audience. Biot, with his calm irony, aimed this epigram at men of
science who disdained letters: “Their science was not the more apparent
through their want of literary culture.” He ended by remarks which
formed a continuation of his last letter to Pasteur’s father. Making an
appeal to those whose high ambition is to consecrate themselves to pure
science, he proudly said: “Perhaps your name, your existence will be
unknown to the crowd. But you will be known, esteemed, sought after by a
small number of eminent men scattered over the face of the earth, your
rivals, your peers in the intellectual Senate of minds; they alone have
the right to appreciate you and to assign to you your rank, a
well-merited rank, which no princely will, no popular caprice can give
or take away, and which will remain yours as long as you remain faithful
to Science, which bestows it upon you.”
Guizot, to whom it fell to welcome Biot to the Académie, rendered homage
to his independence, to his worship of disinterested research, to his
ready counsels. “The events which have overturned everything around
you,” he said, “have never turned the course of your free and firm
judgment, or of your peaceful labours.” On that occasion the decline of
Biot’s life seemed like a beautiful summer evening in the north, before
nightfall, when a soft light still envelops all things. No disciple ever
felt more emotion than Pasteur when participating in that last joy of
his aged master. In Regnault’s laboratory, a photograph had been taken
of Biot seated with bent head and a weary attitude, but with the old
sparkle in his eyes. Biot offered it to Pasteur, saying: “If you place
this proof near a portrait of your father, you will unite the pictures
of two men who have loved you very much in the same way.”
Pasteur, between two canvassing visits, gave himself the pleasure of
going to hear a young professor that every one was then speaking of. “I
have just been to a lecture by Rigault, at the Collège de France,” he
wrote on March 6, 1857. “The room is too small, it is a struggle to get
in. I have come away delighted; it is a splendid success for the
Université, there is nothing to add, nothing to retrench. Fancy a
professor in one of the Paris _lycées_ making such a début at the
Collège de France!”
Pasteur preferred Rigault to St. Marc Girardin. “And Rigault is only
beginning!” But, under Rigault’s elegance and apparent ease, lurked
perpetual constraint. One day that St. Marc Girardin was congratulating
him, “Ah,” said Rigault, “you do not see the steel corsets that I wear
when I am speaking!” That comparison suited his delicate, ingenious,
slightly artificial mind, never unrestrained even in simple
conversation, at the same time conscientious and self-conscious. He who
had once written that “Life is a work of art to be fashioned by a
skilful hand if the faculties of the mind are to be fully enjoyed,” made
the mistake of forcing his nature. He died a few months after that
lecture.
Pasteur’s enthusiastic lines about Rigault show the joy he felt at the
success of others. He did not understand envy, ill-will, or jealousy,
and was more than astonished, indeed amazed, when he came across such
feelings. One day that he had read an important paper at the Académie
des Sciences, “Would you believe it,” he wrote to his father, “I met a
Paris Professor of chemistry the very next day, whom I know to have been
present, who had indeed come purposely to hear my reading, and he never
said a word! I then remembered a saying of M. Biot’s: ‘When a colleague
reads a paper and no one speaks to him about it afterwards, it is
because it has been thought well of....’”
The election was at hand. Pasteur wrote (March 11): “My dear father, I
am certain to fail.” He thought he might count upon twenty votes; thirty
were necessary. He resigned himself philosophically. His candidature
would at any rate bring his works into greater prominence. In spite of a
splendid report by Senarmont, enumerating the successive steps by which
Pasteur had risen since his first discoveries concerning the connection
between internal structure and external crystalline forms, Pasteur only
obtained sixteen votes.
On his return to Lille he set to work with renewed energy; he took up
again his study of fermentations, and in particular that of sour milk,
called lactic fermentation; he made notes of his experiments day by day;
he drew in a notebook the little globules, the tiny bodies that he found
in a grey substance sometimes arranged in a zone. Those globules, much
smaller than those of yeast, had escaped the observation of chemists and
naturalists because it was easy to confound them with other products of
lactic fermentation. After isolating and then scattering in a liquid a
trace of that grey substance, Pasteur saw some well-characterized lactic
fermentation appear. That matter, that grey substance was indeed the
ferment.
Whilst all the writings of the chemists who followed in the train of
Liebig and Berzelius united in rejecting the idea of an influence of
life in the cause of fermentations, Pasteur recognized therein a
phenomenon correlative to life. That special lactic yeast, Pasteur could
see budding, multiplying, and offering the same phenomena of
reproduction as beer yeast.
It was not to the Académie des Sciences, as is generally believed, that
Pasteur sent the paper on lactic fermentation, the fifteen pages of
which contained such curious and unexpected facts. With much delicacy of
feeling, Pasteur made to the Lille Scientific Society this communication
(August, 1857) which the Académie des Sciences only saw three months
later.
How was it that he desired to leave this Faculty at Lille to which he
had rendered such valuable service? The Ecole Normale was going through
difficult times. “In my opinion,” wrote Pasteur with a sadness that
betrayed his attachment to the great school, “of all the objects of care
to the authorities, the Ecole Normale should be the first; it is now but
the shadow of its former self.” He who so often said, “Do not dwell upon
things already acquired!” thought that the Lille Faculty was henceforth
sure of its future and needed him no longer. Was it not better to come
to the assistance of the threatened weak point? At the Ministry of
Public Instruction his wish was understood and approved of. Nisard had
just been made Director of the Ecole Normale with high and supreme
powers; his sub-director of literary studies was M. Jacquinet. The
administration was reserved for Pasteur, who was also entrusted with the
direction of the scientific studies. To that task were added “the
surveillance of the economic and hygienic management, the care of
general discipline, intercourse with the families of the pupils and the
literary or scientific establishments frequented by them.”
The rector of the Lille Faculty announced in these terms the departure
of the Dean: “Our Faculty loses a professor and a scientist of the very
first order. You have yourselves, gentlemen, been able to appreciate
more than once all the vigour and clearness of that mind at once so
powerful and so capable.”
At the Ecole Normale, Pasteur’s labours were not at first seconded by
material convenience. The only laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm building was
occupied by Henri Sainte Claire Deville who, in 1851, had taken the
place of Balard, the latter leaving the Ecole Normale for the Collège de
France. Dark rooms, a very few instruments, and a credit of 1,800 francs
a year, that was all Sainte Claire Deville had been able to obtain. It
would have seemed like a dream to Pasteur. He had to organize his
scientific installation in two attics under the roof of the Ecole
Normale; he had no assistance of any kind, not even that of an ordinary
laboratory attendant. But his courage was not of the kind which
evaporates at the first obstacle, and no difficulty could have kept him
from work: he climbed the stairs leading to his pseudo-laboratory with
all the cheerfulness of a soldier’s son. Biot--who had been grieved to
see the chemist Laurent working in a sort of cellar, where that
scientist’s health suffered (he died at forty-three)--was angry that
Pasteur should be relegated to an uninhabitable garret. Neither did he
understand the “economic and hygienic surveillance” attributed to
Pasteur. He hoped Pasteur would reduce to their just proportions those
secondary duties. “They have made him an administrator,” he said with
mock pomposity; “let them believe that he will administrate.” Biot was
mistaken. The _de minimis non curat_ did not exist for Pasteur.
On one of his agenda leaves, besides subjects for lectures, we find
notes such as these: “Catering; ascertain what weight of meat per pupil
is given out at the Ecole Polytechnique. Courtyard to be strewn with
sand. Ventilation of classroom. Dining hall door to be repaired.” Each
detail was of importance in his eyes, when the health of the students
was in question.
He inaugurated his garret by some work almost as celebrated as that on
lactic fermentation. In December, 1857, he presented to the Académie des
Sciences a paper on alcoholic fermentation. “I have submitted,” he said,
“alcoholic fermentation to the method of experimentation indicated in
the notes which I recently had the honour of presenting to the Académie.
The results of those labours should be put on the same lines, for they
explain and complete each other.” And in conclusion: “The deduplication
of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid is correlative to a phenomenon
of life, an organization of globules....”
The reports of the Académie des Sciences for 1858 show how Pasteur
recognized complex phenomena in alcoholic fermentation. Whilst chemists
were content to say: “So much sugar gives so much alcohol and so much
carbonic acid,” Pasteur went further. He wrote to Chappuis in June: “I
find that alcoholic fermentation is constantly accompanied by the
production of glycerine; it is a very curious fact. For instance, in one
litre of wine there are several grammes of that product which had not
been suspected.” Shortly before that he had also recognized the normal
presence in alcoholic fermentation of succinic acid. “I should be
pursuing the consequences of these facts,” he added, “if a temperature
of 36° C. did not keep me from my laboratory. I regret to see the
longest days in the year lost to me. Yet I have grown accustomed to my
attic, and I should be sorry to leave it. Next holidays I hope to
enlarge it. You too are struggling against material hindrances in your
work; let it stimulate us, my dear fellow, and not discourage us. Our
discoveries will have the greater merit.”
The year 1859 was given up to examining further facts concerning
fermentation. Whence came those ferments, those microscopic bodies,
those transforming agents, so weak in appearance, so powerful in
reality? Great problems were working in his mind; but he was careful not
to propound them hastily, for he was the most timid, the most hesitating
of men until he held proofs in his hands. “In experimental science,” he
wrote, “it is always a mistake not to doubt when facts do not compel you
to affirm.”
In September he lost his eldest daughter. She died of typhoid fever at
Arbois, where she was staying with her grandfather. On December 30
Pasteur wrote to his father: “I cannot keep my thoughts from my poor
little girl, so good, so happy in her little life, whom this fatal year
now ending has taken away from us. She was growing to be such a
companion to her mother and to me, to us all.... But forgive me, dearest
father, for recalling these sad memories. She is happy; let us think of
those who remain and try as much as lies in our power to keep from them
the bitterness of this life.”