CHAPTER I
1822—1843
The origin of even the humblest families can be traced back by persevering search through the ancient parochial registers. Thus the name of Pasteur is to be found written at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the old registers of the Priory of Mouthe, in the province of Franche Comté. The Pasteurs were tillers of the soil, and originally formed a sort of tribe in the small village of Reculfoz, dependent on the Priory, but they gradually dispersed over the country.
The registers of Mièges, near Nozeroy, contain an entry of the marriage of Denis Pasteur and Jeanne David, dated February 9, 1682. This Denis, after whom the line of Pasteur’s ancestors follows in an unbroken record, lived in the village of Plénisette, where his eldest son Claude was born in 1683. Denis afterward sojourned for some time in the village of Douay, and ultimately forsaking the valley of Mièges came to Lemuy, where he worked as a miller for Claude François Count of Udressier, a noble descendant of a secretary of the Emperor Charles V.
Lemuy is surrounded by wide plains affording pasture for herds of oxen. In the distance the pine trees of the forest of Joux stand close together, like the ranks of an immense army, their dark masses deepening the azure of the horizon. It was in those widespreading open lands that Pasteur’s ancestors lived. Near the church, overshadowed by old beech and lime trees, a tombstone is to be found overgrown with grass. Some members of the family lie under that slab naïvely inscribed: “Here lie, each by the side of the others....”
In 1716, in the mill at Lemuy, ruins of which still exist, the marriage contract of Claude Pasteur was drawn up and signed in the presence of Henry Girod, Royal notary of Salins. The father and mother declared themselves unable to write, but we have the signatures of the affianced couple, Claude Pasteur and Jeanne Belle, affixed to the record of the quaint betrothal oath of the time. This Claude was in his turn a miller at Lemuy, though at his death in 1746 he is only mentioned as a labourer in the parish register. He had eight children, the youngest, whose name was Claude Etienne, and who was born in the village of Supt, a few kilometres from Lemuy, being Louis Pasteur’s great-grandfather.
What ambition, what love of adventures induced him to leave the Jura plains to come down to Salins? A desire for independence in the literal sense of the word. According to the custom then still in force in Franche Comté (in contradiction to the name of that province, as Voltaire truly remarks), there were yet some serfs, that is to say, people legally incapable of disposing of their goods or of their persons. They were part of the possessions of a nobleman or of the lands of a convent or monastery. Denis Pasteur and his son had been serfs of the Counts of Udressier. Claude Etienne desired to be freed and succeeded in achieving this at the age of thirty, as is proved by a deed, dated March 20, 1763, drawn up in the presence of the Royal notary, Claude Jarry. Messire Philippe-Marie-François, Count of Udressier, Lord of Ecleux, Cramans, Lemuy and other places, consented “by special grace” to free Claude Etienne Pasteur, a tanner, of Salins, his serf. The deed stipulated that Claude Etienne and his unborn posterity should henceforth be enfranchised from the stain of mortmain. Four gold pieces of twenty-four livres were paid then and there in the mansion of the Count of Udressier by the said Pasteur.
The following year, he married Françoise Lambert. After setting up together a small tannery in the Faubourg Champtave they enjoyed the fairy tale ideal of happiness: they had ten children. The third, Jean Henri, through whom this genealogy continues, was born in 1769. On June 25, 1779, letters giving Claude Etienne Pasteur the freedom of the city of Salins were delivered to him by the Town Council.
Jean Henri Pasteur, in his twentieth year, went to Besançon to seek his fortune as a tanner, but was not successful. His wife, Gabrielle Jourdan, died at the age of twenty, and he married again, but himself died at twenty-seven, leaving one little son by his first marriage, Jean Joseph Pasteur, born March 16, 1791. This child, who was to be Louis Pasteur’s father, was taken charge of by his grandmother at Salins; later on, his father’s sisters, one married to a wood merchant named Chamecin, and the other to Philibert Bourgeois, Chamecin’s partner, adopted the orphan. He was carefully brought up, but without much learning; it was considered sufficient in those days to be able to read the Emperor’s bulletins; the rest did not seem to matter very much. Besides, Jean Joseph had to earn his living at the tanner’s trade, which had been his father’s and his grandfather’s before him.
Jean Joseph was drawn as a conscript in 1811, and went through the Peninsular War in 1812 and 1813. He belonged to the 3rd Regiment of the Line, whose mission was to pursue in the northern Spanish provinces the guerillas of the famous Espoz y Mina. A legend grew round this wonderful man; he was said to make his own gunpowder in the bleak mountain passes; his innumerable partisans were supplied with arms and ammunition by the English cruisers. He dragged women and old men after him, and little children acted as his scouts. Once or twice however, in May, 1812, the terrible Mina was very nearly caught; but in July he was again as powerful as ever. The French had to organize mobile columns to again occupy the coast and establish communications with France. There was some serious fighting. Mina and his followers were incessantly harassing the small French contingent of the 3rd and 4th Regiments, which were almost alone. “How many traits of bravery,” writes Tissot, “will remain unknown which on a larger field would have been rewarded and honoured!”