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world. He told Mr. Bigo it was the little rods that made his fermentations sick: "Keep the little rods out of your vats and you'll always get alcohol, Mr. Bigo." He told his classes about his great discovery that such infinitely tiny beasts could make acid of sour milk from sugar—a thing no mere man had ever done or could do. He wrote the news to his old Professor Dumas and to all his friends and he read papers about it to the Lille Scientific Society and sent a learned treatise to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. It is not clear whether Mr. Bigo found it possible to keep the little rods out of his vats—for they were like bad weeds that get into gardens. But to Pasteur that didn't matter so much. Here was the one important fact:

It is living things, sub-visible living beings, that are the real cause of fermentations!

Innocently he told every one that his discovery was remarkable—he was too much of a child to be modest—and from now on and for years these little ferments filled his sky; he ate and slept and dreamed and loved—after his absent-minded fashion—with his ferments by him. They were his life.

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. . . .