186 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



vations, certain projected experiments resounded in his mind 

 like the hours that a clock strikes, unheeded but not unheard, 

 in a house visited by death. He could not put them away from 

 him, they were part of his very life. 



Any sort of laboratory work was difficult for him in the 

 tanner's house, which had remained the joint property of him- 

 self and his sister. His brother-in-law had continued Joseph 

 Pasteur's trade. Pasteur applied his spirit of observation to 

 everything around him, and took the opportunity of studying 

 the fermentation of tan. He would ask endless questions, 

 trying to discover the scientific reason of every process and 

 every routine. Whilst his sister was making bread he would 

 study the raising of the crust, the influence of air in the knead- 

 ing of the dough, and his imagination rising as usual from a 

 minor point to the greatest problems, he began to seek for a 

 means of increasing the nutritive powers of bread, and con- 

 sequently of lowering its price. 



The Salut Public of December 20 contained a notice on that 

 very subject, which Pasteur transcribed. The Central Com- 

 mission of Hygiene which included among its members Salnte 

 Claire Deville, Wurtz, Bouchardat and Trelat, had tried, when 

 dealing with this question of bread (a vital one during the 

 siege), to prove to the Parisians that bread is the more whole- 

 some for containing a little bran. " With what emotion," 

 wrote Pasteur, "I have just read all those names dear to 

 science, greater now before their fellow-citizens and before 

 posterity. Why could I not share their sufferings and 

 their dangers ! ' ' He would have added ' ' and their work ' ' 

 if some of the Academic des Sciences reports had reached him. 



The history of the Academy during the war is worthy of 

 brief mention. Moreover it was too deeply interesting to 

 Pasteur, too constantly in his thoughts, not to be considered 

 as forming part of his biography. 



During the first period, the Academy, imagining, like the 

 rest of France, that there was no doubt of a favourable issue 

 of the war, continued its purely scientific task. When the 

 first defeats were announced, the habitual communications 

 ceased, and the Academy, unable to think of anything but the 

 war, held sittings of three-quarters of an hour or even less. 



One of the correspondents of the Institute, the surgeon 

 Sedillot, who was in Alsace at the head of an ambulance corps, 

 and who himself performed as many as fifteen amputations in 



