Louis Pasteur

LOUIS PASTEUR
Patrice Debré
translated by Elborg Forster
Chapter 1
My Father is a Hero

"Once one is used to working, one can no longer live without it. And of course, everything in the world depends on it; in science, one is happy; in science one rises above all others." Work, science, ambition--the outline of an entire life is already drawn in these words, even though the person who penned them was only a lad of seventeen, a studious young man who regularly wrote to his family: it was Louis Pasteur, a student in his last year at the secondary school of Besançon in 1840.

At the time, this model son was still an anonymous and obscure figure among his classmates. Only a few months earlier he had left his family circle to attend the collège royal of Franche-Comté. Collège royal: these two words convey an idea of the heavy atmosphere that weighed down secondary education at the time; the government had wanted to banish the word lycée, fearing that it brought back too many memories of the Revolution and the Empire. Yet at Besançon, the buildings of the collège royal were not exactly a credit to the monarchy. Decaying, almost dilapidated, the classrooms were lit by a few dim lamps; all there was in the dormitories were some perpetually sputtering candles. Yet it did not occur to the pupils to complain, let alone revolt. They were there to learn, especially to learn to obey.

Pasteur thus gives the lie to Rimbaud (who was not yet born) and proves that one can indeed be serious at seventeen. Day after day he devoted all his energy to studying, for he was determined to pass his two baccalauréat examinations, so that he could subsequently study for the competitive entrance examinations to the Ecole normale supérieure.

To be sure, this seriousness of purpose was not just a personal trait; it was the attribute of a whole generation, that of Renan and Fromentin, Edmond de Goncourt and César Franck. Nor were there any real exceptions to confirm the rule, for Courbet, Baudelaire, and Flaubert were diligent if not always docile pupils before they became artists who scandalized their contemporaries.

Those who were born in the provinces around 1820 and grew up there would perceive no more than a faint echo of what was happening in Paris. There was a succession of kings -- Charles X replaced Louis XVIII, the three Glorious Days placed Louis-Philippe on the throne -- but small towns were stuck with the same quarrels among notables, the same questions of money, the same concern for law and order. It is true that there were, especially at Besançon, some opposition newspapers, clubs of intellectuals, and even more or less secret societies, but such things were for the select few, as were the creations of the avant-garde. The plays of the Romantic school, the paintings of Delacroix, the Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz reached the provinces only much later. For the children of Besançon who learned to read around 1830, the great man of their town was of course not Victor Hugo, born in 1802; it was not even Charles Nodier, who was Hugo's senior by twenty-two years; it was Joseph Droz, member of the French Academy since 1824 and the immortal author of the Essai sur l'art d'être heureux, a work that swept young Pasteur off his feet with enthusiasm: "I have never read anything wiser, more moral and more virtuous. In reading it, one feels one's soul taken over by an irresistible charm and inflamed by the most sublime and the most generous feelings." Here we are very far indeed from the romantic passions and the political debates that rocked public life and people's mentalities throughout Europe. The child Louis Pasteur very likely knew nothing of the battle over Hernani or the massacre in the rue Transnonain; but he did read Roman history in Livy or Sallust, and his father did raise him with the cult of the Napoleonic legend. But did anyone tell him about the independence of Belgium or about the Zollverein, which prepared the way for the unification of Germany under the aegis of Prussia? It is most unlikely. The word adolescence was not yet used in its modern sense; it was still, as it had been in Chénier or in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a synonym of candor and inexperience. In fact, at the time when a young man's judgment is being formed and his senses come alive, Louis Pasteur did not show a consuming curiosity for the outside world: his horizon was his school work; his universe was his family.

Ajouté: June 30th 2001
Auteur de la chronique: Patrice Debré
Score:
Lien en relation: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Lectures: 10989
french: english