Louis’ pastel drawings soon formed a portrait gallery of friends. An old cooper of seventy, Father Gaidot, born at Dôle, but now living at Arbois, had his turn. Gaidot appears in a festive costume, a blue coat and a yellow waistcoat, very picturesque with his wrinkled forehead and close-shaven cheeks. Then there are all the members of a family named Roch. The father and the son are drawn carefully, portraits such as are often seen in country villages; but the two daughters Lydia and Sophia are more delicately pencilled; they live again in the youthful grace of their twenty summers. Then we have a notary, the wide collar of a frock coat framing his rubicund face; a young woman in white; an old nun of eighty-two in a fluted cap, wearing a white hood and an ivory cross; a little boy of ten in a velvet suit, a melancholy-looking child, not destined to grow to manhood. Pasteur obligingly drew any one who wished to have a portrait. Among all these pastels, two are really remarkable. The first represents, in his official garb, a M. Blondeau, registrar of mortgages, whose gentle and refined features are perfectly delineated. The other is the portrait of a mayor of Arbois, M. Pareau; he wears his silver-embroidered uniform, with a white stock. The cross of the Legion of Honour and the tricolour scarf are discreetly indicated. The whole interest is centred in the smiling face, with hair brushed up à la Louis Philippe, and blue eyes harmonizing with a blue ground.
The compliments of this local dignitary and Romanet’s renewed counsels at the end of the year—when Pasteur took more school prizes than he could carry—reawakened within him the ambition for the Ecole Normale.
There was no “philosophy”[5] class in the college of Arbois, and a return to Paris seemed formidable. Pasteur resolved to go to the college at Besançon, where he could go on with his studies, pass his baccalauréat and then prepare for the examinations of the Ecole Normale. Besançon is only forty kilometres from Arbois, and Joseph Pasteur was in the habit of going there several times a year to sell some of his prepared skins. This was by far the wisest solution of the problem.
On his arrival at the Royal College of Franche Comté Pasteur found himself under a philosophy master, M. Daunas, who had been a student at the Ecole Normale and was a graduate of the University; he was young, full of eloquence, proud of his pupils, of awakening their faculties and directing their minds. The science master, M. Darlay, did not inspire the same enthusiasm; he was an elderly man and regretted the good old times when pupils were less inquisitive. Pasteur’s questions often embarrassed him. Louis’ reputation as a painter satisfied him no longer, though the portrait he drew of one of his comrades was exhibited. “All this does not lead to the Ecole Normale,” he wrote to his parents in January, 1840. “I prefer a first place at college to 10,000 praises in the course of conversation.... We shall meet on Sunday, dear father, for I believe there is a fair on Monday. If we see M. Daunas, we will speak to him of the Ecole Normale. Dear sisters, let me tell you again, work hard, love each other. When one is accustomed to work it is impossible to do without it; besides, everything in this world depends on that. Armed with science, one can rise above all one’s fellows.... But I hope all this good advice to you is superfluous, and I am sure you spend many moments every day learning your grammar. Love each other as I love you, while awaiting the happy day when I shall be received at the Ecole Normale.” Thus was his whole life filled with tenderness as well as with work. He took the degree of “bachelier ès lettres” on August 29, 1840. The three examiners, doctors “ès lettres,” put down his answers as “good in Greek on Plutarch and in Latin on Virgil, good also in rhetoric, medicine, history and geography, good in philosophy, very good in elementary science, good in French composition.”
At the end of the summer holidays the headmaster of the Royal College of Besançon, M. Répécaud, sent for him and offered him the post of preparation master. Certain administrative changes and an increased number of pupils were the reason of this offer, which proved the master’s esteem for Pasteur’s moral qualities, his first degree not having been obtained with any particular brilliancy.
The youthful master was to be remunerated from the month of January, 1841. A student in the class of special mathematics, he was his comrades’ mentor during preparation time. They obeyed him without difficulty; simple and yet serious-minded, his sense of individual dignity made authority easy to him. Ever thoughtful of his distant home, he strengthened the influence of the father and mother in the education of his sisters, who had not so great a love of industry as he had. On November 1, 1840—he was not eighteen yet—pleased to hear that they were making some progress, he wrote the following, which, though slightly pedantic, reveals the warmth of his feelings—“My dear parents, my sisters, when I received at the same time the two letters that you sent me I thought that something extraordinary had happened, but such was not the case. The second letter you wrote me gave me much pleasure; it tells me that—perhaps for the first time—my sisters have willed. To will is a great thing, dear sisters, for Action and Work usually follow Will, and almost always Work is accompanied by success. These three things, Will, Work, Success, fill human existence. Will opens the door to success both brilliant and happy; Work passes these doors, and at the end of the journey Success comes to crown one’s efforts. And so, my dear sisters, if your resolution is firm, your task, be it what it may, is already begun; you have but to walk forward, it will achieve itself. If perchance you should falter during the journey, a hand would be there to support you. If that should be wanting, God, who alone could take that hand from you, would Himself accomplish its work.... May my words be felt and understood by you, dearest sisters. I impress them on your hearts. May they be your guide. Farewell. Your brother.”
The letters he wrote, the books he loved, the friends he chose, bear witness to the character of Pasteur in those days of early youth. As he now felt, after the discouraging trial he had gone through in Paris, that the development of the will should hold the first place in education, he applied all his efforts to the bringing out of this leading force. He was already grave and exceptionally matured; he saw in the perfecting of self the great law of man, and nothing that could assist in that improvement seemed to him without importance. Books read in early life appeared to him to have an almost decisive influence. In his eyes a good book was a good action constantly renewed, a bad one an incessant and irreparable fault.
There lived at that time in Franche Comté an elderly writer, whom Sainte Beuve considered as the ideal of the upright man and of the man of letters. His name was Joseph Droz, and his moral doctrine was that vanity is the cause of many wrecked and aimless lives, that moderation is a form of wisdom and an element of happiness, and that most men sadden and trouble their lives by causeless worry and agitation. His own life was an example of his precepts of kindliness and patience, and was filled to the utmost with all the good that a pure literary conscience can bestow; he was all benevolence and cordiality. It seemed natural that he should publish one after another numberless editions of his Essay on the Art of being Happy.
“I have still,” wrote Pasteur to his parents, “that little volume of M. Droz which he was kind enough to lend me. I have never read anything wiser, more moral or more virtuous. I have also another of his works; nothing was ever better written. At the end of the year I shall bring you back these books. One feels in reading them an irresistible charm which penetrates the soul and fills it with the most exalted and generous feelings. There is not a word of exaggeration in what I am writing. Indeed I take his books with me to the services on Sundays to read them, and I believe that in so acting, in spite of all that thoughtless bigotry might say, I am conforming to the very highest religious ideas.”
Those ideas Droz might have summarized simply by Christ’s words, “Love ye one another.” But this was a time of circumlocution. Young people demanded of books, of discourses, of poetry, a sonorous echo of their own secret feelings. In the writings of the Besançon moralist, Pasteur saw a religion such as he himself dreamed of, a religion free from all controversy and all intolerance, a religion of peace, love and devotion.