He had both first and second year pupils; these two classes took up all his time and all his strength. He liked the second class; it was not a very large one. “They all work,” Pasteur wrote, “some very intelligently.” As to the first year class, what could he do with eighty pupils? The good ones were kept back by the bad. “Don’t you think,” he wrote, “that it is a mistake not to limit classes to fifty boys at the most? It is with great difficulty that I can secure the attention of all towards the end of the lesson. I have only found one means, which is to multiply experiments at the last moment.” Whilst he was eagerly and conscientiously giving himself up to his new functions--not without some bitterness, for he really was entitled to an appointment in a Faculty, and he could not pursue his favourite studies--his masters were agitating on his behalf. Balard was clamouring to have him as an assistant at the Ecole Normale. Biot was appealing to Baron Thenard. This scientist was then Chairman of the Grand Council of the Université.[19] He had been a pupil of Vauquelin, a friend of Laplace, and a collaborator of Gay-Lussac; he had lectured during thirty years at the Sorbonne, at the Collège de France, and at the Ecole Polytechnique; he could truthfully boast that he had had 40,000 pupils. He was, like J. B. Dumas, a born professor. But, whilst Dumas was always self possessed and dignified in his demeanour, his very smile serious, Thenard, a native of Burgundy, threw his whole personality into his work, a broad smile on his beaming face. He was now (1848) seventy years old, and the memory of his teaching, the services rendered to industry by his discoveries, the _éclat_ of his name and titles contrasted with his humble origin, all combined to render him more than a Chancellor of the University; he was in fact a sort of Field Marshal of science, and all powerful. Three years previously he had much scandalized certain red-tape officials by choosing three very young men--Puiseux, Delesse, and H. Sainte Claire Deville--as professors for the new Faculty of Science at Besançon. He had accentuated this authoritative measure by making Sainte Claire Deville Dean of the Faculty. In the unknown professor of twenty-six, he had divined the future celebrated scientist.