Some notes and letters enable us to follow him there, in the daily detail of his life, amongst his books, his plans of future work, and now and then his outbursts of passionate grief. He tried to return to the books he loved, to feel over again the attraction of “all that is great and beautiful” to quote a favourite phrase. He read at that time Laplace’s _Exposition du Système du Monde_, and even copied out some fragments, general ideas, concurring with his own. The vision of a Galileo or a Newton rising through a series of inductions from “particular phenomena to others more far-reaching, and from those to the general laws of Nature,” on this earth, “itself so small a part of the solar system, and disappearing entirely in the immensity of the heavens, of which that system is but an unimportant corner,”--that vision enveloped Pasteur with the twofold feeling with which every man must be imbued: humility before the Great Mystery, and admiration for those who, raising a corner of the veil, prove that genius is divinely inspired. Such reading helped Pasteur through the sad time of anxious waiting, and he would repeat as in brighter days, “_Laboremus_.” But sometimes, when he was sitting quietly with his wife and daughter, the trumpet call would sound, with which the Arbois crier preceded the proclaiming of news. Then everything was forgotten, the universal order of things of no account, and Pasteur’s anguished soul would concentrate itself on that imperceptible comer of the universe, France, his suffering country. He would go downstairs, mix with groups standing on the little bridge across the Cuisance, listen breathlessly to the official communication, and sadly go back to the room where the memories of his father only emphasized the painful contrast with the present time. In the most prominent place hung a large medallion of General Bonaparte, by the Franc-Comtois Huguenin, the habit of authority visible in the thin energetic face; then a larger effigy in bronzed plaster of Napoleon in profile, in a very simple uniform; by the mantelpiece a lithograph of the little King of Rome with his curly head; on the bookshelves, well within reach, books on the Great Epoch, read over and over again by the old soldier who had died in the humble room which still reflected some of the Imperial glory.