102 PASTEUR 



Claude-Etienne, was the great-grandfather of Louis 

 Pasteur. The inhabitants of Franche-Comte were, 

 in large part, serfs 'gens de mainmorte,' as they 

 termed them then. Claude-Etienne, being a serf, at 

 the age of thirty wished to enfranchise himself; and 

 this he did in 1763, by the special grace of ' Messire 

 Philippe-Marie-Francois, Comte d'Udressier, Seigneur 

 d'Ecleux, Cramans, Lemuy, et autres lieux,' and on 

 the payment of four louis-dor. He subsequently 

 married and had children. His third son, Jean-Henri, 

 who for a time carried on his father's trade of tanner 

 at Besancon, seems to have disappeared at the age 

 of twenty- seven, leaving a small boy, Jean- Joseph 

 Pasteur, born in 1791, who was brought up by his 

 grandmother and his father's sister. 



Caught in the close meshes of Napoleon's conscrip- 

 tion, Jean-Joseph served in the Spanish campaign of 

 1812-1813 as a private in the third regiment of infantry, 

 called ' le brave parmi les braves.' In course of time 

 he was promoted to be sergeant-major, and in March, 

 1814, received the Cross of the Legion of Honour. 

 Two months later the abdication had taken place ; and 

 the regiment was at Douai, re-organizing under the 

 name of ' Regiment Dauphin.' Here was no place for 

 Jean-Joseph, devoted to the Imperial Eagle and un- 

 moved by the Fleur-de-lys. He received his dis- 

 charge, and made his way across country to his 

 father's town, Besangon. At Besancon he took up 

 his father's trade and became a tanner ; and, after one 

 feverish flush during the Hundred Days, and one 

 contest, in which he came off victor, with the Royalist 

 authorities, who would take his sword to arm the 

 town police, he settled down into a quiet, law-abiding 

 citizen, more occupied with domestic anxieties than 

 with the fate of empires. 



Hard by the tannery ran a stream, called La 

 Furieuse, though it rarely justified its name. Across 



