Louis Pasteur

26 LOUIS PASTEUR
Pasteur appeared designed to prepare him for the exciting role
which he was to play in science and society. His peaceful and
humble family, the gentle, comfortable and settled country in
which he was bom and raised, his teachers' disciplined accept-
ance of a limited environment all invited him to a quiet life,
adorned but not monopolized by study. Outwardly, he appears
as a sentimental, hard-working boy, serious-minded, dutiful, eager
to assimilate from the well integrated atmosphere of his environ-
ment the classical culture of France, the knowledge of the glorious
role that his country had played in the history of Western
civilization. When he left his native province for the great cen-
ters of learning in Paris,
it was not to find the answer to some
soul-searching query, not for the sake of intellectual adventure,
not with the ambition of the social conqueror. It was merely as
an earnest student, going where teaching was most enlightened in
order to prepare himself as best he could for a worth-while place
in his community. He had not yet dreamed that fate had selected
him for a historical role to be played beyond his native province
and even beyond France a legend in the annals of humanity.
At least, there is nothing to reveal that the magic wand had
yet tapped him when he entered the great Ecole Normale
Superieure in Paris. Only the fact that he had engaged in por-
trait painting between the ages of thirteen and eighteen differentiated
him slightly from the ordinary good student. However
skillful, these portraitures were no more than the conscientious
expression of his immediate surroundings his father, his mother,
the town officials and notables, a picturesque old nun and his
school friends all witnesses of the vigorous but settled life of
his town and school. 2 But who knows what strivings and urges
2 The Finnish artist Albert Edelfeldt, who painted a famous portrait of
Pasteur in his laboratory in 1887, expressed in a letter to one of his friends
the following judgment on Pasteur as a painter: "Outside of science, painting
is one of the few things that interest him. At the age of 16, he had intended
to become a painter and amused himself making pastel drawings of his
parents and of other citizens of Arbois; some of these pastels are in his home
at the Institute and I have looked at them very often. They are extremely
good and drawn with energy, full of character, a little dry in color, but far