32 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



of fourteen candidates only four passed and Pasteur was the 

 third. His lessons on physics and chemistry caused the jury 

 to say, *'He will make an excellent professor/' 



]\Iany Normaliens of that time fancied themselves called to 

 a destiny infinitely superior to his. Some of them, in later 

 times, used to complacently allude to this momentary 

 superiority when speaking to their pupils. Of all Pasteur's 

 acquaintances Chappuis was the only one who divined the 

 future. "You will see what Pasteur will be,'* he used to say, 

 with an assurance generally attributed to friendly partiality. 

 Chappuis — Pasteur's confidant — ^was well aware of his friend's 

 powers of concentration. 



Balard also realised this ; he had the happy idea of taking the 

 young agrege into his laboratory, and intervened vehemently 

 when the Minister of Public Instruction desired — a few months 

 later — that Pasteur should teach physics in the Tournon Lycee. 

 It would be rank folly, Balard declared, to send 500 kilometres 

 away from Paris a youth who only asked for the modest title ot 

 curator, and had no ambition but to work from morning till 

 night, preparing for his doctor's degree. There would be time 

 to send him away later on. It was impossible to resist this 

 torrent of words founded on solid sense. Balard prevailed. 



Pasteur was profoundly grateful to him for preserving him 

 from exile to the little town in Ardeche ; and, as he added to his 

 Franc-Comtois patience and reflective mind a childlike heart 

 and deep enthusiasm, he was delighted to remain with a master 

 like Balard, who had become celebrated, at the age of twenty- 

 four, as the discoverer of bromin. 



At the end of 1846, a newcomer entered Balard 's laboratory, 

 a strange delicate-looking man, whose ardent eyes were at 

 the same time proud and yet anxious. This man, a scientist 

 and a poet, was a professor of the Bordeaux Faculty, named 

 Auguste Laurent. Perhaps he had had some friction with his 

 Bordeaux chiefs, possibly he merely wished for a change; at 

 all events, he now desired to live in Paris. Laurent was 

 already known in the scientific world, and had recently been 

 made a correspondent of the Academic des Sciences. He had 

 foreseen and confirmed the theory of substitutions, formulated 

 by Dumas as early as 1834 before the Academic. Dumas had 



faculties and secondary schools or lycees. A candidate for the lyc6e% 

 agregation must have passed Lis licence examination. [Trans.] 



