Pasteur, between two canvassing visits, gave himself the pleasure of going to hear a young professor that every one was then speaking of. “I have just been to a lecture by Rigault, at the Collège de France,” he wrote on March 6, 1857. “The room is too small, it is a struggle to get in. I have come away delighted; it is a splendid success for the Université, there is nothing to add, nothing to retrench. Fancy a professor in one of the Paris lycées making such a début at the Collège de France!”
Pasteur preferred Rigault to St. Marc Girardin. “And Rigault is only beginning!” But, under Rigault’s elegance and apparent ease, lurked perpetual constraint. One day that St. Marc Girardin was congratulating him, “Ah,” said Rigault, “you do not see the steel corsets that I wear when I am speaking!” That comparison suited his delicate, ingenious, slightly artificial mind, never unrestrained even in simple conversation, at the same time conscientious and self-conscious. He who had once written that “Life is a work of art to be fashioned by a skilful hand if the faculties of the mind are to be fully enjoyed,” made the mistake of forcing his nature. He died a few months after that lecture.
Pasteur’s enthusiastic lines about Rigault show the joy he felt at the success of others. He did not understand envy, ill-will, or jealousy, and was more than astonished, indeed amazed, when he came across such feelings. One day that he had read an important paper at the Académie des Sciences, “Would you believe it,” he wrote to his father, “I met a Paris Professor of chemistry the very next day, whom I know to have been present, who had indeed come purposely to hear my reading, and he never said a word! I then remembered a saying of M. Biot’s: ‘When a colleague reads a paper and no one speaks to him about it afterwards, it is because it has been thought well of....’”
The election was at hand. Pasteur wrote (March 11): “My dear father, I am certain to fail.” He thought he might count upon twenty votes; thirty were necessary. He resigned himself philosophically. His candidature would at any rate bring his works into greater prominence. In spite of a splendid report by Senarmont, enumerating the successive steps by which Pasteur had risen since his first discoveries concerning the connection between internal structure and external crystalline forms, Pasteur only obtained sixteen votes.
On his return to Lille he set to work with renewed energy; he took up again his study of fermentations, and in particular that of sour milk, called lactic fermentation; he made notes of his experiments day by day; he drew in a notebook the little globules, the tiny bodies that he found in a grey substance sometimes arranged in a zone. Those globules, much smaller than those of yeast, had escaped the observation of chemists and naturalists because it was easy to confound them with other products of lactic fermentation. After isolating and then scattering in a liquid a trace of that grey substance, Pasteur saw some well-characterized lactic fermentation appear. That matter, that grey substance was indeed the ferment.
Whilst all the writings of the chemists who followed in the train of Liebig and Berzelius united in rejecting the idea of an influence of life in the cause of fermentations, Pasteur recognized therein a phenomenon correlative to life. That special lactic yeast, Pasteur could see budding, multiplying, and offering the same phenomena of reproduction as beer yeast.
It was not to the Académie des Sciences, as is generally believed, that Pasteur sent the paper on lactic fermentation, the fifteen pages of which contained such curious and unexpected facts. With much delicacy of feeling, Pasteur made to the Lille Scientific Society this communication (August, 1857) which the Académie des Sciences only saw three months later.
How was it that he desired to leave this Faculty at Lille to which he had rendered such valuable service? The Ecole Normale was going through difficult times. “In my opinion,” wrote Pasteur with a sadness that betrayed his attachment to the great school, “of all the objects of care to the authorities, the Ecole Normale should be the first; it is now but the shadow of its former self.” He who so often said, “Do not dwell upon things already acquired!” thought that the Lille Faculty was henceforth sure of its future and needed him no longer. Was it not better to come to the assistance of the threatened weak point? At the Ministry of Public Instruction his wish was understood and approved of. Nisard had just been made Director of the Ecole Normale with high and supreme powers; his sub-director of literary studies was M. Jacquinet. The administration was reserved for Pasteur, who was also entrusted with the direction of the scientific studies. To that task were added “the surveillance of the economic and hygienic management, the care of general discipline, intercourse with the families of the pupils and the literary or scientific establishments frequented by them.”
The rector of the Lille Faculty announced in these terms the departure of the Dean: “Our Faculty loses a professor and a scientist of the very first order. You have yourselves, gentlemen, been able to appreciate more than once all the vigour and clearness of that mind at once so powerful and so capable.”
At the Ecole Normale, Pasteur’s labours were not at first seconded by material convenience. The only laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm building was occupied by Henri Sainte Claire Deville who, in 1851, had taken the place of Balard, the latter leaving the Ecole Normale for the Collège de France. Dark rooms, a very few instruments, and a credit of 1,800 francs a year, that was all Sainte Claire Deville had been able to obtain. It would have seemed like a dream to Pasteur. He had to organize his scientific installation in two attics under the roof of the Ecole Normale; he had no assistance of any kind, not even that of an ordinary laboratory attendant. But his courage was not of the kind which evaporates at the first obstacle, and no difficulty could have kept him from work: he climbed the stairs leading to his pseudo-laboratory with all the cheerfulness of a soldier’s son. Biot—who had been grieved to see the chemist Laurent working in a sort of cellar, where that scientist’s health suffered (he died at forty-three)—was angry that Pasteur should be relegated to an uninhabitable garret. Neither did he understand the “economic and hygienic surveillance” attributed to Pasteur. He hoped Pasteur would reduce to their just proportions those secondary duties. “They have made him an administrator,” he said with mock pomposity; “let them believe that he will administrate.” Biot was mistaken. The de minimis non curat did not exist for Pasteur.