rike out their right to be fed, and you compel children to murder
their parents."

As to adoption:

"You regard this as law-makers and not as statesmen. It is not a civil
contract nor a judicial contract. The analysis (of the jurist) leads
to vicious results. Man is governed by imagination only; without
imagination he is a brute. It is not for five cents a day, simply to
distinguish himself, that a man consents to be killed; if you want to
electrify him touch his heart. A notary, who is paid a fee of twelve
francs for his services, cannot do that. It requires some other process,
a legislative act. Adoption, what is that? An imitation by which society
tries to counterfeit nature. It is a new kind of sacrament.... Society
ordains that the bones and blood of one being shall be changed into the
bones and blood of another. It is the greatest of all legal acts.
It gives the sentiments of a son to one who never had them, and
reciprocally those of a parent. Where ought this to originate? From on
high, like a clap of thunder!"

All his expressions are bright flashes one after another.[1164] Nobody,
since Voltaire and Galiani, has launched forth such a profusion of them;
on society, laws, government, France and the French, some penetrate and
explain, like those of Montesquieu, as if with a flash of lightening.
He does not hammer them out laboriously, but they burst forth, the
outpourings of his intellect, its natural, involuntary, constant action.
And what adds to their value is that, outside of councils and private
conversations, he abstains from them, employing them only in the service
of thought; at other times he subordinates them to the end he has in
view, which is always their practical effect. Ordinarily, he writes and
speaks in a different language, in a language suited to his audience;
he dispenses with the oddities, the irregular improvisations and
imagination, the outbursts of genius and inspiration. He retains and
uses merely those which are intended to impress the personage whom he
wishes to dazzle with a great idea of himself, such as Pius VII., or the
Emperor Alexander. In this case, his conversational tone is that of
a caressing, expansive, amiable familiarity; he is then before the
footlights, and when he acts he can play all parts, tragedy or comedy,
with the same life and spirit whether he fulminates, insinuates, or
even affects simplicity. When he is with his generals, ministers, and
principal performers, h