On one of his agenda leaves, besides subjects for lectures, we find notes such as these: “Catering; ascertain what weight of meat per pupil is given out at the Ecole Polytechnique. Courtyard to be strewn with sand. Ventilation of classroom. Dining hall door to be repaired.” Each detail was of importance in his eyes, when the health of the students was in question.
He inaugurated his garret by some work almost as celebrated as that on lactic fermentation. In December, 1857, he presented to the Académie des Sciences a paper on alcoholic fermentation. “I have submitted,” he said, “alcoholic fermentation to the method of experimentation indicated in the notes which I recently had the honour of presenting to the Académie. The results of those labours should be put on the same lines, for they explain and complete each other.” And in conclusion: “The deduplication of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid is correlative to a phenomenon of life, an organization of globules....”
The reports of the Académie des Sciences for 1858 show how Pasteur recognized complex phenomena in alcoholic fermentation. Whilst chemists were content to say: “So much sugar gives so much alcohol and so much carbonic acid,” Pasteur went further. He wrote to Chappuis in June: “I find that alcoholic fermentation is constantly accompanied by the production of glycerine; it is a very curious fact. For instance, in one litre of wine there are several grammes of that product which had not been suspected.” Shortly before that he had also recognized the normal presence in alcoholic fermentation of succinic acid. “I should be pursuing the consequences of these facts,” he added, “if a temperature of 36° C. did not keep me from my laboratory. I regret to see the longest days in the year lost to me. Yet I have grown accustomed to my attic, and I should be sorry to leave it. Next holidays I hope to enlarge it. You too are struggling against material hindrances in your work; let it stimulate us, my dear fellow, and not discourage us. Our discoveries will have the greater merit.”
The year 1859 was given up to examining further facts concerning fermentation. Whence came those ferments, those microscopic bodies, those transforming agents, so weak in appearance, so powerful in reality? Great problems were working in his mind; but he was careful not to propound them hastily, for he was the most timid, the most hesitating of men until he held proofs in his hands. “In experimental science,” he wrote, “it is always a mistake not to doubt when facts do not compel you to affirm.”
In September he lost his eldest daughter. She died of typhoid fever at Arbois, where she was staying with her grandfather. On December 30 Pasteur wrote to his father: “I cannot keep my thoughts from my poor little girl, so good, so happy in her little life, whom this fatal year now ending has taken away from us. She was growing to be such a companion to her mother and to me, to us all.... But forgive me, dearest father, for recalling these sad memories. She is happy; let us think of those who remain and try as much as lies in our power to keep from them the bitterness of this life.”
CHAPTER V
1860—1864
On January 30, 1860, the Académie des Sciences conferred on Pasteur the Prize for Experimental Physiology. Claude Bernard, who drew up the report, recalled how much Pasteur’s experiments in alcoholic fermentation, lactic fermentation, the fermentation of tartaric acid, had been appreciated by the Académie. He dwelt upon the great physiological interest of the results obtained. “It is,” he concluded, “by reason of that physiological tendency in Pasteur’s researches, that the Commission has unanimously selected him for the 1859 Prize for Experimental Physiology.”
That same January, Pasteur wrote to Chappuis: “I am pursuing as best I can these studies on fermentation which are of great interest, connected as they are with the impenetrable mystery of Life and Death. I am hoping to mark a decisive step very soon by solving, without the least confusion, the celebrated question of spontaneous generation. Already I could speak, but I want to push my experiments yet further. There is so much obscurity, together with so much passion, on both sides, that I shall require the accuracy of an arithmetical problem to convince my opponents by my conclusions. I intend to attain even that.”
This progress was depicted to his father in the following letter, dated February 7, 1860—
“I think I told you that I should read a second and last lecture on my old researches on Friday, at the Chemical Society, before several members of the Institute—amongst others, Messrs. Dumas and Claude Bernard. That lecture has had the same success as the first. M. Biot heard about it the next day through some distinguished persons who were in the audience, and sent for me in order to kindly express his great satisfaction.