What ambition, what love of adventures induced him to leave the Jura plains to come down to Salins? A desire for independence in the literal sense of the word. According to the custom then still in force in Franche Comté (in contradiction to the name of that province, as Voltaire truly remarks), there were yet some serfs, that is to say, people legally incapable of disposing of their goods or of their persons. They were part of the possessions of a nobleman or of the lands of a convent or monastery. Denis Pasteur and his son had been serfs of the Counts of Udressier. Claude Etienne desired to be freed and succeeded in achieving this at the age of thirty, as is proved by a deed, dated March 20, 1763, drawn up in the presence of the Royal notary, Claude Jarry. Messire Philippe-Marie-François, Count of Udressier, Lord of Ecleux, Cramans, Lemuy and other places, consented “by special grace” to free Claude Etienne Pasteur, a tanner, of Salins, his serf. The deed stipulated that Claude Etienne and his unborn posterity should henceforth be enfranchised from the stain of mortmain. Four gold pieces of twenty-four livres were paid then and there in the mansion of the Count of Udressier by the said Pasteur. The following year, he married Françoise Lambert. After setting up together a small tannery in the Faubourg Champtave they enjoyed the fairy tale ideal of happiness: they had ten children. The third, Jean Henri, through whom this genealogy continues, was born in 1769. On June 25, 1779, letters giving Claude Etienne Pasteur the freedom of the city of Salins were delivered to him by the Town Council. Jean Henri Pasteur, in his twentieth year, went to Besançon to seek his fortune as a tanner, but was not successful. His wife, Gabrielle Jourdan, died at the age of twenty, and he married again, but himself died at twenty-seven, leaving one little son by his first marriage, Jean Joseph Pasteur, born March 16, 1791. This child, who was to be Louis Pasteur’s father, was taken charge of by his grandmother at Salins; later on, his father’s sisters, one married to a wood merchant named Chamecin, and the other to Philibert Bourgeois, Chamecin’s partner, adopted the orphan. He was carefully brought up, but without much learning; it was considered sufficient in those days to be able to read the Emperor’s bulletins; the rest did not seem to matter very much. Besides, Jean Joseph had to earn his living at the tanner’s trade, which had been his father’s and his grandfather’s before him.