great number, and examine their advice. Are we
attacked by any of those lingering diseases, which incessantly place
around us the shades and horrors of death? We seek physicians, compare
their opinions, read physical books, we ourselves become little
physicians. Such is the conduct prompted by a warm interest. With
respect to the education of children, if you are not influenced in the
same manner, it is because you do not love your son as well as
yourself. 'But,' adds the mother, 'what then should be the motive of my
tenderness?' Among fathers and mothers, I reply, some are influenced by
the desire of perpetuating their name in their children; they properly
love only their names; others are fond of command, and see in their
children their slaves. The animal leaves its young when their
weakness no longer keeps them in dependence; and paternal love becomes
extinguished in almost all hearts, when children have, by their age or
station, attained to independence. 'Then,' said the poet Saadi, 'the
father sees nothing in them but greedy heirs,' and this is the cause,
adds some poet, of the extraordinary love of the grandfather for his
grandchildren; he considers them as the enemies of his enemies. There
are, in short, fathers and mothers, who make their children their
playthings and their pastime. The loss of this plaything would be
insupportable to them; but would their affliction prove that they loved
the child for itself? Everybody knows this passage in the life of
M. de Lauzun: he was in the Bastile; there, without books, without
employment, a prey to lassitude and the horrors of a prison, he took it
in his head to tame a spider. This was the only consolation he had
left in his misfortune. The governor of the Bastile, from an inhumanity
common to men accustomed to see the unhappy, crushed the spider. The
prisoner felt the most cutting grief, and no mother could be affected
by the death of a son with a more violent sorrow. Now whence is derived
this conformity of sentiments for such different objects? It is because,
in the loss of a child, or in the loss of the spider, people frequently
weep for nothing but for the lassitude and want of employment into which
they fall. If mothers appear in general more afflicted at the death of
a child than fathers employed in business, or given up to the pursuit
of ambition, it is not because the mother loves her child more tenderly,
but because she suffers a loss more difficult to be suppli