He worked alone for he had no assistant, not even a boy to wash his bottles for him; how then, you will ask, did he find time to cram his days with such a bewildering jumble of events? Partly because he was an energetic man, and partly it was thanks to Madame Pasteur, who in the words of Roux, “loved him even to the point of understanding his work.” On those evenings when she wasn’t waiting up lonely for him--when she had finished putting to bed those children whose absent-minded father he was--this brave lady sat primly on a straight-backed chair at a little table and wrote scientific papers at his dictation. Again, while he was below brooding over his tubes and bottles she would translate the cramped scrawls of his notebooks into a clear beautiful handwriting. Pasteur was her life and since Pasteur thought only of work her own life melted more and more into his work.... III Then one day in the midst of all this--they were just nicely settled in Lille--he came to her and said: “We are going to Paris, I have just been made Administrator and Director of Scientific Studies in the Normal School. This is my great chance.” They moved there, and Pasteur found there was absolutely no place for him to work in; there were a few dirty laboratories for the students but none for the professors; what was worse, the Minister of Instruction told him there was not one cent in the budget for those bottles and ovens and microscopes without which he could not live. But Pasteur snooped round in every cranny of the dirty old building and at last climbed tricky stairs to a tiny room where rats played, to an attic under the roof. He chased the rats out and proclaimed this den his laboratory; he got money--in some mysterious way that is still not clear--for his microscopes and tubes and flasks. The world must know how important ferments are in its life. The world soon knew! His experiment with the little rods that made the acid of sour milk convinced him--why, no one can tell--that other kinds of small beings did a thousand other gigantic and useful and perhaps dangerous things in the world. “It is those yeasts that my microscope showed me in the healthy beet vats, it is those yeasts that turn sugar into alcohol--it is undoubtedly yeasts that make beer from barley and it is certainly yeasts that ferment grapes into wine--I haven’t proved it yet, but I know it.” Energetically he wiped his fogged spectacles and cheerfully he climbed to his attic. Experiments would tell him; he must make experiments; he must prove to himself he was right--more especially he must prove to the world he was right. But the world of science was against him.