18 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



and — as lie thouglit that Lis sister should prepare herself 

 beforehand for the class she was to enter — ^he wrote to his 

 mother with filial authority, ** Josephine should work a good 

 deal until the end of the year, and I would recommend ta 

 Mother that she should not continually be sent out on errands; 

 she must have time to work." 



Michelet, in his recollections, tells of his hours of intimacy 

 with a college friend named Poinsat, and thus expresses him* 

 self: *'It was an immense, an insatiable longing for con- 

 fidences, for mutual revelations." Pasteur felt something of 

 the sort for Charles Chappuis, a philosophie student at 

 Besancon college. He was the son of a notary at St. Vit, one 

 of those old-fashioned provincial notaries, who, by the dignity 

 of their lives, their spirit of wisdom, the perpetual preoccupa- 

 tion of their duty, inspired their children with a sense of 

 responsibility. His son had even surpassed his father's hopes. 

 Of this generous, gentle-faced youth there exists a lithograph 

 signed ** Louis Pasteur." A book entitled Les Graveurs du 

 XIX^^ Steele mentions this portrait, giving Pasteur an un- 

 expected form of celebrity. Before the Graveurs, the Guide 

 de V Amateur des (Euvres d'Ari had already spoken of a 

 pastel drawing discovered in the United States near Boston. 

 It represents another schoolfellow of Pasteur's, who, far from 

 his native land, carefully preserved the portrait of Chappuis 

 as well as his own. Everything that friendship can give in 

 strength and disinterestedness, everything that, according to 

 Montaigne — ^who knew more about it even than Michelet — 

 ** makes souls merge into each other so that the seam which 

 originally joined them disappears," was experienced by Pasteur 

 and Chappuis. Filial piety, brotherly solicitude, friendly 

 confidences — ^Pasteur knew the sweetness of all these early 

 human joys; the whole of his life was permeated with them. 

 The books he loved added to this flow of generous emotions. 

 Chappuis watched and admired this original nature, which, 

 with a rigid mind made for scientific research and always 

 seeking the proof of everything, yet read Lamartine's 

 Meditations with enthusiasm. Differing in this from many 

 science students, who are indifferent to literature — ^just as some 

 literature students affect to disdain science — Pasteur kept for 

 literature a place apart. He looked upon it as a guide for 

 general ideas. Sometimes he would praise to excess some 

 writer or orator merely because he had found in one pa^e or 



