He soon got beyond the powers of his drawing master, M. Pointurier, a good man who does not seem to have seen any scientific possibilities in the art of drawing.
Louis’ pastel drawings soon formed a portrait gallery of friends. An old cooper of seventy, Father Gaidot, born at Dôle, but now living at Arbois, had his turn. Gaidot appears in a festive costume, a blue coat and a yellow waistcoat, very picturesque with his wrinkled forehead and close-shaven cheeks. Then there are all the members of a family named Roch. The father and the son are drawn carefully, portraits such as are often seen in country villages; but the two daughters Lydia and Sophia are more delicately pencilled; they live again in the youthful grace of their twenty summers. Then we have a notary, the wide collar of a frock coat framing his rubicund face; a young woman in white; an old nun of eighty-two in a fluted cap, wearing a white hood and an ivory cross; a little boy of ten in a velvet suit, a melancholy-looking child, not destined to grow to manhood. Pasteur obligingly drew any one who wished to have a portrait. Among all these pastels, two are really remarkable. The first represents, in his official garb, a M. Blondeau, registrar of mortgages, whose gentle and refined features are perfectly delineated. The other is the portrait of a mayor of Arbois, M. Pareau; he wears his silver-embroidered uniform, with a white stock. The cross of the Legion of Honour and the tricolour scarf are discreetly indicated. The whole interest is centred in the smiling face, with hair brushed up _à la_ Louis Philippe, and blue eyes harmonizing with a blue ground.
The compliments of this local dignitary and Romanet’s renewed counsels at the end of the year--when Pasteur took more school prizes than he could carry--reawakened within him the ambition for the Ecole Normale.
There was no “philosophy”[5] class in the college of Arbois, and a return to Paris seemed formidable. Pasteur resolved to go to the college at Besançon, where he could go on with his studies, pass his baccalauréat and then prepare for the examinations of the Ecole Normale. Besançon is only forty kilometres from Arbois, and Joseph Pasteur was in the habit of going there several times a year to sell some of his prepared skins. This was by far the wisest solution of the problem.