MARRIAGE 107 



Strasbourg, M. Laurent, had already gained the 

 respect and the affection of the professoriate. He and 

 his family were the centre of the intellectual life of the 

 town. Within a few weeks of his arrival Pasteur 

 addressed to the Rector a letter, setting forth in 

 simple detail his worldly position, and asking the 

 hand of his daughter Marie in marriage. The wedding 

 took place on May 29, 1850, and there is a tradition 

 that Pasteur, immersed in some chemical experiment, 

 had to be fetched from the laboratory to take his part 

 in the ceremony at the church. Never was a union 

 more happy. From the first Madame Pasteur, ani- 

 mated by the spirit of the Academy of Science, which 

 always prints ' Science ' with a capital letter, not only 

 admitted, but approved the principle that nothing 

 should interfere with the laboratory ; whilst, on his 

 side, Pasteur always flew to his wife to confide in her 

 first of all any new discovery, any new advance he had 

 made in his researches. During the five years passed 

 at Strasbourg Pasteur continued to work on the border- 

 line between chemistry and physics. His work on 

 the polarization of light of the tartaric acid crystals 

 led him into the question of the arrangement of the 

 atoms within the molecule. ' II eclaire tout ce qu'il 

 touche !' exclaimed the once sceptical but now con- 

 vinced Biot ; and it is hardly too much to say that his 

 researches were the starting-point of the new depart- 

 ment of physics which, under the name of stereo- 

 chemistry, has attained vast developments during the 

 last quarter of the past century. These researches 

 were rewarded by the French Government, which in 

 1853 conferred on him the ribbon of the Legion of 

 Honour, and received the recognition of our own 

 Royal Society, which rewarded him in 1856 the 

 Rumford medal. 



It was whilst working at his beloved tartrates that 

 he made an observation which first directed his atten- 



