Pasteur preferred Rigault to St. Marc Girardin. “And Rigault is only beginning!” But, under Rigault’s elegance and apparent ease, lurked perpetual constraint. One day that St. Marc Girardin was congratulating him, “Ah,” said Rigault, “you do not see the steel corsets that I wear when I am speaking!” That comparison suited his delicate, ingenious, slightly artificial mind, never unrestrained even in simple conversation, at the same time conscientious and self-conscious. He who had once written that “Life is a work of art to be fashioned by a skilful hand if the faculties of the mind are to be fully enjoyed,” made the mistake of forcing his nature. He died a few months after that lecture. Pasteur’s enthusiastic lines about Rigault show the joy he felt at the success of others. He did not understand envy, ill-will, or jealousy, and was more than astonished, indeed amazed, when he came across such feelings. One day that he had read an important paper at the Académie des Sciences, “Would you believe it,” he wrote to his father, “I met a Paris Professor of chemistry the very next day, whom I know to have been present, who had indeed come purposely to hear my reading, and he never said a word! I then remembered a saying of M. Biot’s: ‘When a colleague reads a paper and no one speaks to him about it afterwards, it is because it has been thought well of....’” The election was at hand. Pasteur wrote (March 11): “My dear father, I am certain to fail.” He thought he might count upon twenty votes; thirty were necessary. He resigned himself philosophically. His candidature would at any rate bring his works into greater prominence. In spite of a splendid report by Senarmont, enumerating the successive steps by which Pasteur had risen since his first discoveries concerning the connection between internal structure and external crystalline forms, Pasteur only obtained sixteen votes. On his return to Lille he set to work with renewed energy; he took up again his study of fermentations, and in particular that of sour milk, called lactic fermentation; he made notes of his experiments day by day; he drew in a notebook the little globules, the tiny bodies that he found in a grey substance sometimes arranged in a zone. Those globules, much smaller than those of yeast, had escaped the observation of chemists and naturalists because it was easy to confound them with other products of lactic fermentation. After isolating and then scattering in a liquid a trace of that grey substance, Pasteur saw some well-characterized lactic fermentation appear. That matter, that grey substance was indeed the ferment. Whilst all the writings of the chemists who followed in the train of Liebig and Berzelius united in rejecting the idea of an influence of life in the cause of fermentations, Pasteur recognized therein a phenomenon correlative to life. That special lactic yeast, Pasteur could see budding, multiplying, and offering the same phenomena of reproduction as beer yeast.