The rector of the Lille Faculty announced in these terms the departure of the Dean: “Our Faculty loses a professor and a scientist of the very first order. You have yourselves, gentlemen, been able to appreciate more than once all the vigour and clearness of that mind at once so powerful and so capable.”
At the Ecole Normale, Pasteur’s labours were not at first seconded by material convenience. The only laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm building was occupied by Henri Sainte Claire Deville who, in 1851, had taken the place of Balard, the latter leaving the Ecole Normale for the Collège de France. Dark rooms, a very few instruments, and a credit of 1,800 francs a year, that was all Sainte Claire Deville had been able to obtain. It would have seemed like a dream to Pasteur. He had to organize his scientific installation in two attics under the roof of the Ecole Normale; he had no assistance of any kind, not even that of an ordinary laboratory attendant. But his courage was not of the kind which evaporates at the first obstacle, and no difficulty could have kept him from work: he climbed the stairs leading to his pseudo-laboratory with all the cheerfulness of a soldier’s son. Biot--who had been grieved to see the chemist Laurent working in a sort of cellar, where that scientist’s health suffered (he died at forty-three)--was angry that Pasteur should be relegated to an uninhabitable garret. Neither did he understand the “economic and hygienic surveillance” attributed to Pasteur. He hoped Pasteur would reduce to their just proportions those secondary duties. “They have made him an administrator,” he said with mock pomposity; “let them believe that he will administrate.” Biot was mistaken. The _de minimis non curat_ did not exist for Pasteur.
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....”