A little later, Silvio Pellico’s Miei Prigioni developed in him an emotion which answered to his instinctive sympathy for the sorrows of others. He wrote advising his sisters to read “that interesting work, where you breathe with every page a religious perfume which exalts and ennobles the soul.” In reading Miei Prigioni his sisters would light upon a passage on fraternal love and all the deep feelings which it represents.
“For my sisters,” he wrote in another letter, “I bought, a few days ago, a very pretty book; I mean by very pretty something very interesting. It is a little volume which took the Montyon[6] prize a few years ago, and it is called, Picciola. How could it have deserved the Montyon prize,” he added, with an edifying respect for the decisions of the Academy, “if the reading of it were not of great value?”
“You know,” he announced to his parents when his appointment was definitely settled, “that a supplementary master has board and lodging and 300 francs a year!” This sum appeared to him enormous. He added, on January 20: “At the end of this month money will already be owing to me; and yet I assure you I am not really worth it.”
Pleased with this situation, though such a modest one, full of eagerness to work, he wrote in the same letter: “I find it an excellent thing to have a room of my own; I have more time to myself, and I am not interrupted by those endless little things that the boys have to do, and which take up a good deal of time. Indeed I am already noticing a change in my work; difficulties are getting smoothed away because I have more time to give to overcoming them; in fact I am beginning to hope that by working as I do and shall continue to do I may be received with a good rank at the Ecole. But do not think that I am overworking myself at all; I take every recreation necessary to my health.”
Besides his ordinary work, he had been entrusted with the duty of giving some help in mathematics and physical science to the youths who were reading for their baccalauréat.
As if reproaching himself with being the only member of the family who enjoyed the opportunity of learning, he offered to pay for the schooling of his youngest sister Josephine in a girls’ college at Lons-le-Saulnier. He wrote, “I could easily do it by giving private lessons. I have already refused to give some to several boys at 20 or 25 fr. a month. I refused because I have not too much time to give to my work.” But he was quite disposed to waive this motive in deference to superior judgment. His parents promised to think over this fraternal wish, without however accepting his generous suggestion, offering even to supplement his small salary of 24 francs a month by a little allowance, in case he wished for a few private lessons to prepare himself more thoroughly for the Ecole Normale. They quite recognized his right to advise; and—as he thought that his sister should prepare herself beforehand for the class she was to enter—he wrote to his mother with filial authority, “Josephine should work a good deal until the end of the year, and I would recommend to Mother that she should not continually be sent out on errands; she must have time to work.”
Michelet, in his recollections, tells of his hours of intimacy with a college friend named Poinsat, and thus expresses himself: “It was an immense, an insatiable longing for confidences, for mutual revelations.” Pasteur felt something of the sort for Charles Chappuis, a philosophie student at Besançon college. He was the son of a notary at St. Vit, one of those old-fashioned provincial notaries, who, by the dignity of their lives, their spirit of wisdom, the perpetual preoccupation of their duty, inspired their children with a sense of responsibility. His son had even surpassed his father’s hopes. Of this generous, gentle-faced youth there exists a lithograph signed “Louis Pasteur.” A book entitled Les Graveurs du XIXᵐᵉ Siècle mentions this portrait, giving Pasteur an unexpected form of celebrity. Before the Graveurs, the Guide de l’Amateur des Œuvres d’Art had already spoken of a pastel drawing discovered in the United States near Boston. It represents another schoolfellow of Pasteur’s, who, far from his native land, carefully preserved the portrait of Chappuis as well as his own. Everything that friendship can give in strength and disinterestedness, everything that, according to Montaigne—who knew more about it even that Michelet—“makes souls merge into each other so that the seam which originally joined them disappears,” was experienced by Pasteur and Chappuis. Filial piety, brotherly solicitude, friendly confidences—Pasteur knew the sweetness of all these early human joys; the whole of his life was permeated with them. The books he loved added to this flow of generous emotions. Chappuis watched and admired this original nature, which, with a rigid mind made for scientific research and always seeking the proof of everything, yet read Lamartine’s Meditations with enthusiasm. Differing in this from many science students, who are indifferent to literature—just as some literature students affect to disdain science—Pasteur kept for literature a place apart. He looked upon it as a guide for general ideas. Sometimes he would praise to excess some writer or orator merely because he had found in one page or in one sentence the expression of an exalted sentiment. It was with Chappuis that he exchanged his thoughts, and together they mapped out a life in common. When Chappuis went to Paris, the better to prepare himself for the Ecole Normale, Pasteur felt an ardent desire to go with him. Chappuis wrote to him with that open spontaneity which is such a charm in youth, “I shall feel as if I had all my Franche Comté with me when you are here.” Pasteur’s father feared a crisis like that of 1838, and, after hesitating, refused his consent to an immediate departure. “Next year,” he said.
In October, 1841, though still combining the functions of master and student, Pasteur resumed his attendance of the classes for special mathematics. But he was constantly thinking of Paris, “Paris, where study is deeper.” One of Chappuis’ comrades, Bertin, whom Pasteur had met during the holidays, had just entered the Ecole Normale at the head of the list after attending in Paris a class of special mathematics.
“If I do not pass this year,” Pasteur wrote to his father on November 7, “I think I should do well to go to Paris for a year. But there is time to think of that and of the means of doing so without spending too much, if the occasion should arise. I see now what great advantage there is in giving two years to mathematics; everything becomes clearer and easier. Of all our class students who tried this year for the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale, not a single one has passed, not even the best of them, a student who had already done one year’s mathematics at Lyons. The master we have now is very good. I feel sure I shall do a great deal this year.”
He was twice second in his class; once he was first in physics. “That gives me hope for later on,” he said. He wrote about another mathematical competition, “If I get a good place it will be well deserved, for this work has given me a pretty bad headache; I always do get one, though, whenever we have a competition.” Then, fearful of alarming his parents, he hastily adds, “But those headaches never last long, and it is only an hour and a half since we left off.”