In a month he was praised by gray-haired chemists and became the companion of learned men three times his age. He was made professor at Strasbourg and in the off moments of researches he determined to marry the daughter of the dean. He didn’t know if she cared for him but he sat down and wrote her a letter that he knew must make her love him: “There is nothing in me to attract a young girl’s fancy,” he wrote, “but my recollections tell me that those who have known me very well have loved me very much.” So she married him and became one of the most famous and long-suffering and in many ways one of the happiest wives in history--and this story will have more to tell about her. Now the head of a house, Pasteur threw himself more furiously into his work; forgetting the duties and chivalries of a bridegroom, he turned his nights into days. “I am on the verge of mysteries,” he wrote, “and the veil is getting thinner and thinner. The nights seem to me too long. I am often scolded by Madame Pasteur, but I tell her I shall lead her to fame.” He continued his work on crystals; he ran into blind alleys, he did strange and foolish and impossible experiments, the kind a crazy man might devise--and the kind that turn a crazy man into a genius when they come off. He tried to change the chemistry of living things by putting them between huge magnets. He devised weird clockworks that swung plants back and forward, hoping so to change the mysterious molecules that formed these plants into mirror images of themselves.... He tried to imitate God: he tried to change species! Madame Pasteur waited up nights for him and marveled at him and believed in him, and she wrote to his father: “You know that the experiments he is undertaking this year will give us, if they succeed, a Newton or a Galileo!” It is not clear whether good Madame Pasteur formed this so high opinion of her young husband by herself.... At any rate, truth, that will o’ the wisp, failed him this time--his experiments didn’t come off.