Anxious to stifle by hard work his growing regrets at not having followed Chappuis to Paris, Pasteur imagined that he might prepare himself for the Ecole Polytechnique as well as for the Ecole Normale. One of his masters, M. Bouché, had led him to hope that he might be successful. “I shall try this year for both schools,” Pasteur wrote to his friend (January 22, 1842). “I do not know whether I am right in deciding to do so. One thing tells me that I am wrong: it is the idea that we might thus be parted; and when I think of that, I firmly believe that I cannot possibly be admitted this year into the Ecole Polytechnique. I feel quite superstitious about it. I have but one pleasure, your letters and those from my family. Oh! do write often, very long letters!”
Chappuis, concerned at this sudden resolve, answered in terms that did credit to his heart and youthful wisdom. “Consult your tastes, think of the present, of the future. You must think of yourself; it is your own fate that you have to direct. There is more glitter on the one side; on the other the gentle quiet life of a professor, a trifle monotonous perhaps, but full of charm for him who knows how to enjoy it. You too appreciated it formerly, and I learned to do so when we thought we should both go the same way. Anyhow, go where you think you will be happy, and think of me sometimes. I hope your father will not blame me. I believe he looks upon me as your evil genius. These last holidays I wanted you to come to me, then I advised you to go to Paris; each time your father created some obstacle! But do what he wishes, and never forget that it is perhaps because he loves you too much that he never does what you ask him.”
Pasteur soon thought no more of his Polytechnic fancy, and gave himself up altogether to his preparation for the Ecole Normale. But the study of mathematics seemed to him dry and exhausting. He wrote in April, “One ends by having nothing but figures, formulas and geometrical forms before one’s eyes.... On Thursday I went out and I read a charming story, which, much to my astonishment, made me weep. I had not done such a thing for years. Such is life.”
On August 13, 1842, he went up for his examination (baccalauréat ès sciences) before the Dijon Faculty. He passed less brilliantly even than he had done for the baccalauréat ès lettres. In chemistry he was only put down as “médiocre.” On August 26 he was declared admissible to the examinations for the Ecole Normale. But he was only fifteenth out of twenty-two candidates. He considered this too low a place, and resolved to try again the following year. In October, 1842, he started for Paris with Chappuis. On the eve of his departure Louis drew a last pastel, a portrait of his father. It is a powerful face, with observation and meditation apparent in the eyes, strength and caution in the mouth and chin.
Pasteur arrived at the Barbet Boarding School, no longer a forlorn lad, but a tall student capable of teaching and engaged for that purpose. He only paid one-third of the pupil’s fees, and in return had to give to the younger pupils some instruction in mathematics every morning from six to seven. His room was not in the school, but in the same Impasse des Feuillantines; two pupils shared it with him.
“Do not be anxious about my health and work,” he wrote to his friends a few days after his arrival. “I need hardly get up till 5.45; you see it is not so very early.” He went on outlining the programme of his time. “I shall spend my Thursdays in a neighbouring library with Chappuis, who has four hours to himself on that day. On Sundays we shall walk and work a little together; we hope to do some Philosophy on Sundays, perhaps too on Thursdays; I shall also read some literary works. Surely you must see that I am not homesick this time.”
Besides attending the classes of the Lycée St. Louis, he also went to the Sorbonne[7] to hear the Professor, who, after taking Gay-Lussac’s place in 1832, had for the last ten years delighted his audience by an eloquence and talent which opened boundless horizons before every mind.
In a letter dated December 9, 1842, Pasteur wrote, “I attend at the Sorbonne the lectures of M. Dumas, a celebrated chemist. You cannot imagine what a crowd of people come to these lectures. The room is immense, and always quite full. We have to be there half an hour before the time to get a good place, as you would in a theatre; there is also a great deal of applause; there are always six or seven hundred people.” Under this rostrum, Pasteur became, in his own words, a “disciple” full of the enthusiasm inspired by Dumas.
Happy in this industrious life, he wrote in response to an expression of his parents’ provincial uneasiness as to the temptations of the Latin Quarter. “When one wishes to keep straight, one can do so in this place as well as in any other; it is those who have no strength of will that succumb.”
He made himself so useful at Barbet’s that he was soon kept free of all expense. But the expenses of his Parisian life are set out in a small list made about that time. His father wished him to dine at the Palais Royal on Thursdays and Sundays with Chappuis, and the price of each of those dinners came to a little less than two francs. He had, still with the inseparable Chappuis, gone four times to the theatre and once to the opera. He had also hired a stove for his stone-floored room; for eight francs he had bought some firewood, and also a two-franc cloth for his table, which he said had holes in it, and was not convenient to write on.