450 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



President of the Students' Association, who said to Pasteur, 

 "You have been very great and very good; you have given 

 a beautiful example to students." 



Pasteur's voice, made weaker than usual by his emotion, 

 could not have been heard all over the large theatre ; his 

 thanks were read out by his son 



" Monsieur le President de la Ke'publique, your presence 

 transforms an intimate fete into a great ceremony, and makes 

 of the simple birthday of a savant a special date for French 

 science. 



" M. le Ministre, Gentlemen In the midst of all this mag- 

 nificence, my first thought takes me back to the melancholy 

 memory of so many men of science who have known but trials. 

 In the past, they had to struggle, against the prejudices which 

 hampered their ideas. After those prejudices were vanquished , 

 they encountered obstacles and difficulties of all kinds. 



' ' Very few years ago , before the public authorities and 

 the town councils had endowed science with splendid dwell- 

 ings, a man whom I loved and admired, Claude Bernard, had, 

 for a laboratory, a wretched cellar not far from here, low and 

 damp. Perhaps it was there that he contracted the disease of 

 which he died. When I heard what you were preparing for 

 me here, the thought of him arose in my mind ; I hail his 

 great memory. 



" Gentlemen, by an ingenious and delicate thought, you seem 

 to make the whole of my life pass before my eyes. One of my 

 Jura compatriots, the Mayor of Dole, has brought me a photo- 

 graph of the very humble home where my father and mother 

 lived such a hard life. The presence of the students of the 

 Ecole Normale brings back to me the glamour of my first 

 scientific enthusiasms. The representatives of the Lille 

 Faculty evoke memories of my first studies on crystallography 

 and fermentation, which opened to me a new world. What 

 hopes seized upon me when I realized that there must be 

 laws behind so many obscure phenomena! You, my dear 

 colleagues, have witnessed by what series of deductions it was 

 given to me, a disciple of the experimental method, to reach 

 physiological studies. If I have sometimes disturbed the calm 

 of our Academies by somewhat violent discussions, it was 

 because I was passionately defending truth. 



"And you, delegates from foreign nations, who have come 

 from so far to give to France a proof of sympathy, you bring 



