At the end of the school year, 1843, he took at the Lycée St. Louis two “Accessits,”[8] and one first prize in physics, and at the “_Concours Général_”[9] a sixth “Accessit” in physics. He was admitted fourth on the list to the Ecole Normale. He then wrote from Arbois to M. Barbet, telling him that on his half-holidays he would give some lessons at the school of the Impasse des Feuillantines as a small token of his gratitude for past kindness. “My dear Pasteur,” answered M. Barbet, “I accept with pleasure the offer you have made me to give to my school some of the leisure that you will have during your stay at the Ecole Normale. It will indeed be a means of frequent and intimate intercourse between us, in which we shall both find much advantage.”
Pasteur was in such a hurry to enter the Ecole Normale that he arrived in Paris some days before the other students. He solicited permission to come in as another might have begged permission to come out. He was readily allowed to sleep in the empty dormitory. His first visit was to M. Barbet. The Thursday half-holiday, usually from one to seven, was now from one to eight. “There is nothing more simple,” he said, “than to come regularly at six o’clock on Thursdays and give the schoolboys a physical science class.”
“I am very pleased,” wrote his father, “that you are giving lessons at M. Barbet’s. He has been so kind to us that I was anxious that you should show him some gratitude; be therefore always most obliging towards him. You should do so, not only for your own sake, but for others; it will encourage him to show the same kindness to other studious young men, whose future might depend upon it.”
Generosity, self-sacrifice, kindliness even to unknown strangers, cost not the least effort to the father and son, but seemed to them the most natural thing possible. Just as their little house at Arbois was transformed by a ray of the ideal, the broken down walls of the old Ecole Normale--then a sort of annexe of the Louis Le Grand college, and looking, said Jules Simon, like an old hospital or barracks--reflected within them the ideas and sentiments which inspire useful lives. Joseph Pasteur wrote (Nov. 18, 1843): “The details you give me on the way your work is directed please me very much; everything seems organized so as to produce distinguished scholars. Honour be to those who founded this School.” Only one thing troubled him, he mentioned it in every letter. “You know how we worry about your health; you do work so immoderately. Are you not injuring your eyesight by so much night work? Your ambition ought to be satisfied now that you have reached your present position!” He also wrote to Chappuis: “Do tell Louis not to work so much; it is not good to strain one’s brain. That is not the way to succeed but to compromise one’s health.” And with some little irony as to the cogitations of Chappuis the philosopher: “Believe me, you are but poor philosophers if you do not know that one can be happy even as a poor professor in Arbois College.”