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pered his hopes and fears to Madame Pasteur—she couldn't advise him but she comforted him. She understood everything but couldn't explain away his worries. She was his perfect assistant. . . .
He was back in his attic next morning not knowing how he had got up the stairs, not remembering his breakfast—he might have floated from his bed directly to the rickety dusty incubator that held his flask—that fatal flask. He opened the bottle and put a tiny cloudy drop from it between two thin bits of glass and slid the specimen under the lens of his microscope—and knew the world was his.
"Here they are," he cried, "lovely budding growing young yeasts, hundreds of thousands of them—yes, and here are some of the old ones, the parent yeasts I sowed in the bottle yesterday." He wanted to rush out and tell some one, but he held himself—he must find out something more—he got some of the soup from the fatal bottle into a retort, to find out whether his budding beings had made alcohol. "Liebig is wrong—albumen isn’t necessary—it is yeasts, the growth of yeasts that ferments sugar." And he watched trickling tears of alcohol run down the neck of the retort. He spent the next weeks in doing the experiment over and over, to be sure that the yeasts would keep on living, to be certain that they would keep on making alcohol. He transferred them monotonously, from one bottle to another—he put them through countless flasks of this same simple soup of ammonia salt and sugar in water and always the yeasts budded lustily and filled the bottles with a foamy collar of carbonic acid gas. Always they made alcohol! This checking-up of his discoveries was dull work. There was not the excitement, the sleepless waiting for a result he hoped for passionately or feared terribly would not come.
His new fact was old stuff by now but still he kept on, he cared for his yeasts like some tender father, he fed them and loved them and was proud of their miraculous work of turning great quantities of sugar into alcohol. He ruined his