16 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



wisdom and an element of happiness, and that most men 

 sadden and trouble their lives by causeless worry and agitation. 

 His own life was an example of his precepts of kindliness and 

 patience, and was filled to the utmost with all the good that a 

 pure literary conscience can bestow ; he was all benevolence 

 and cordiality. It seemed natural that he should publish one 

 after another numberless editions of his Essay on the Art of 

 being Happy. 



"I have still," wrote Pasteur to his parents, "that little 

 volume of M. Droz which he was kind enough to lend me. 

 I have never read anything wiser, more moral or more virtuous. 

 I have also another of his works ; nothing was ever better 

 written. At the end of the year I shall bring you back these 

 books. One feels in reading them an irresistible charm which 

 penetrates the soul and fills it with the most exalted and 

 generous feelings. There is not a word of exaggeration in 

 what I am writing. Indeed I take his books with me to the 

 services on Sundays to read them, and I believe that in so 

 acting, in spite of all that thoughtless bigotry might say, I am 

 conforming to the very highest religious ideas." 



Those ideas Droz might have summarized simply by 

 Christ's words, "Love ye one another." But this was a 

 time of circumlocution. Young people demanded of books, 

 of discourses, of poetry, a sonorous echo of their own secret 

 feelings. In the writings of the Besancon moralist, Pasteur 

 saw a religion such as he himself dreamed of, a religion free 

 from all controversy and all intolerance, a religion of peace, 

 love and devotion. 



A little later, Silvio Pellico's Miei Prigioni developed in him 

 an emotion which answered to his instinctive sympathy for 

 the sorrows of others. He wrote advising his sisters to read 

 1 ' that interesting work , where you breathe with every page a 

 religious perfume which exalts and ennobles the soul." In 

 read Miei Prigioni his sisters would light upon a passage on 

 fraternal love and all the deep feelings which it represents. 



" For my sisters," he wrote in another letter, " I bought, 

 a few days ago, a very pretty book; I mean by very pretty 

 something very interesting. It is a little volume which took 

 the Montyon l prize a few years ago, and it is called, Picciola. 



1 Prix Montyon : a series of prizes founded at the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century by Baron de Montyon, a distinguished philanthropist, 

 and conferred on literary works for their moral worth, and on individuals 



