He was born at Dôle, but the family a few years later settled at Arbois. For three generations the Pasteurs had been tanners in the Jura, and they naturally adhered to that portion of the population which hailed the Revolution as a deliverance. The great-grandfather was the first freeman of Pasteur's forbears, having purchased with money his emancipation from serfdom. The father in 1811, at the age of twenty, was one of Napoleon's conscripts, and in 1814 received from the Emperor, for valor and fidelity, the Cross of the Legion of Honor. The directness and endurance of the influence of this trained veteran on his gifted son a hundred fine incidents attest. In 1848--year of revolt in the monarchies of Europe--the young scientist enrolled himself in the National Guard, and, seeing one day in the Place du Panthéon a structure inscribed with the words _autel de la patrie_, he placed upon it all the humble means--one hundred and fifty francs--then at his disposal. It was in that same year that Pasteur put on record his discovery of the nature of racemic acid, his first great service to science, from which all his other services were to proceed. As a boy he had attended the _collège_ at Arbois where his teacher had inspired him with an ambition to enter the great Ecole Normale. Before reaching that goal he took his bachelor's degree in science as well as in arts at the Besançon college. At Paris he came in contact with the leaders of the scientific world--Claude Bernard, Balard, Dumas, Biot.