42 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



Biot did full justice to Pasteur; he even rendered him 

 homage, and— not only in his own name but also in that of his 

 three colleagues, Eegnault, Balard, and Dumas— he suggested 

 that the Academie should declare its highest approbation of 

 Pasteur's treatise. 



Pasteur did not conceive greater happiness than his laboratory 

 life, and yet the laboratories of that time were very unlike what 

 they are nowadays, as we should see if the laboratories of the 

 College de France, of the Sorbonne, of the Ecole Normale had 

 been preserved. They were all that Paris could offer Europe, 

 and Europe certainly had no cause to covet them. Nowadays 

 the most humble college, in the smallest provincial town, would 

 not accept such dens as the State offered (when it offered them 

 any) to the greatest French scientists. Claude Bernard, 

 Magendie's curator, worked at the College de France in a regu- 

 lar cellar. Wurtz only had a lumber-room in the attics of the 

 Dupuytren Museum. Henri Sainte Claire Deville, before he be- 

 came head of the Besancon Faculty, had not even as much ; he 

 was relegated to one of the most miserable corners of the Eue 

 Lafarge. J. B. Dumas did not care to occupy the unhealthy 

 room reserved for him at the Sorbonne ; his father-in-law, 

 Alexandre Brongniart, having given him a small house in the 

 Rue Cuvier, opposite the Jardin des Plantes, he had had it 

 transformed into a laboratory and was keeping it up at his own 

 expense. He was therefore comfortably situated, but he was 

 exceptionally fortunate. Every scientist who had no private 

 means to draw upon had to choose between the miserable 

 cellars and equally miserable garrets which were all that the 

 State could offer. And yet it was more tempting than a Pro- 

 fessor's chair in a College or even in a Faculty, for there one 

 could not give oneself up entirely to one's work. 



Nothing would have seemed more natural than to leave 

 Pasteur to his experiments. But his appointment to some 

 definite post could no longer be deferred, in spite of Balard's 

 tumultuous activity. The end of the summer vacation was 

 near, there was a vacancy : Pasteur was made a Professsor of 

 Physics at the Dijon Lycee. The Minister of Public Instruc- 

 tion consented to allow him to postpone his departure until the 

 beginning of November, in order to let him finish some work 

 begun under the eye of Biot, who thought and dreamt of 

 nothing but these new investigations. During thirty years 

 Biot had studied the phenomena of rotatory polarization. He 







