“Do not be anxious about my health and work,” he wrote to his friends a few days after his arrival. “I need hardly get up till 5.45; you see it is not so very early.” He went on outlining the programme of his time. “I shall spend my Thursdays in a neighbouring library with Chappuis, who has four hours to himself on that day. On Sundays we shall walk and work a little together; we hope to do some Philosophy on Sundays, perhaps too on Thursdays; I shall also read some literary works. Surely you must see that I am not homesick this time.”
Besides attending the classes of the Lycée St. Louis, he also went to the Sorbonne[7] to hear the Professor, who, after taking Gay-Lussac’s place in 1832, had for the last ten years delighted his audience by an eloquence and talent which opened boundless horizons before every mind.
In a letter dated December 9, 1842, Pasteur wrote, “I attend at the Sorbonne the lectures of M. Dumas, a celebrated chemist. You cannot imagine what a crowd of people come to these lectures. The room is immense, and always quite full. We have to be there half an hour before the time to get a good place, as you would in a theatre; there is also a great deal of applause; there are always six or seven hundred people.” Under this rostrum, Pasteur became, in his own words, a “disciple” full of the enthusiasm inspired by Dumas.
Happy in this industrious life, he wrote in response to an expression of his parents’ provincial uneasiness as to the temptations of the Latin Quarter. “When one wishes to keep straight, one can do so in this place as well as in any other; it is those who have no strength of will that succumb.”
He made himself so useful at Barbet’s that he was soon kept free of all expense. But the expenses of his Parisian life are set out in a small list made about that time. His father wished him to dine at the Palais Royal on Thursdays and Sundays with Chappuis, and the price of each of those dinners came to a little less than two francs. He had, still with the inseparable Chappuis, gone four times to the theatre and once to the opera. He had also hired a stove for his stone-floored room; for eight francs he had bought some firewood, and also a two-franc cloth for his table, which he said had holes in it, and was not convenient to write on.