y, and then lets
them go without a pang and troubles himself no more about them."

"We do the same, my friend," said the academician.

"Yes, I do not deny it; we let them go sometimes," resumed the senator,
"but we are aware that we do, and that constitutes our superiority."

"No, that is not what I mean," said the other, shaking his head. "You
see, my friend, that there is scarcely a man who has not some children
that he does not know, children--'father unknown'--whom he has
generated almost unconsciously, just as this tree reproduces.

"If we had to keep account of our amours, we should be just as
embarrassed as this cytisus which you apostrophized would be in counting
up his descendants, should we not?

"From eighteen to forty years, in fact, counting in every chance cursory
acquaintanceship, we may well say that we have been intimate with two or
three hundred women.

"Well, then, my friend, among this number can you be sure that you have
not had children by at least one of them, and that you have not in the
streets, or in the bagnio, some blackguard of a son who steals from and
murders decent people, i.e., ourselves; or else a daughter in some
disreputable place, or, if she has the good fortune to be deserted by her
mother, as cook in some family?

"Consider, also, that almost all those whom we call 'prostitutes' have
one or two children of whose paternal parentage they are ignorant,
generated by chance at the price of ten or twenty francs. In every
business there is profit and loss. These wildings constitute the 'loss'
in their profession. Who generated them? You--I--we all did,
the men called 'gentlemen'! They are the consequences of our jovial
little dinners, of our gay evenings, of those hours when our comfortable
physical being impels us to chance liaisons.

"Thieves, marauders, all these wretches, in fact, are our children. And
that is better for us than if we were their children, for those
scoundrels generate also!

"I have in my mind a very horrible story that I will relate to you. It
has caused me incessant remorse, and, further than that, a continual
doubt, a disquieting uncertainty, that, at times, torments me
frightfully.

"When I was twenty-five I undertook a walking tour through Brittany with
one of my friends, now a member of the cabinet.

"After walking steadily for fifteen or twenty days and visiting the
Cotes-du-Nord and part of Finistere we reached Douarnenez. From there we
went with