The article endeavors to bring back to life Pasteur's years as a teenage boy, based on his correspondence with his parents and on the philosophy homework he undertook during his school days. These materials reveal an authoritarian, moralizing young man who bore the strong mark of his education and his father's personality but who was also endowed with a spirit of curiosity, already imbued with the rational faith that would characterize the entirety of his scientific works.
Louis Pasteur; Jean Joseph Pasteur; psychology of the researcher; education of the scholarly