ON THE ROAD TO FAME 57 



of actual life? He lived in his own thoughts, 

 without being a dreamer, for a dream which 

 reaches its goal and produces results ceases to 

 be a dream." 



But these delicate experiments and lofty 

 speculations did not make Pasteur forget that 

 he was Administrator of the Ecole Normale as 

 well as director of scientific studies. And never 

 did a man take his duties more seriously than 

 he, even when they were a burden and a con- 

 straint. He applied himself to everything that 

 he undertook with the same degree of attention 

 and conscientiousness, and nothing seemed to 

 him too trivial to be worthy of supervision and 

 painstaking. Accordingly he took every pains 

 to give a perfect administration to the great 

 school that he still loved as well as he had done 

 in boyhood, when it had appeared to him as 

 the far-off goal of his highest hopes. He con- 

 cerned himself about the health of the stu- 

 dents and the hygiene of the locality, and even 

 the smallest details were objects of his solici- 

 tude, such as airing a classroom or sanding a 



