ake away a scrap of your life, contract
the circle of interests and pleasures in which you live; your mind by
degrees will lose its vigor, and ask for rest, and as you live less and
less by the mind, you will live more and more by the heart. The affection
of others which was only a pleasant whet will become a necessary food,
and whatever you may have been, statesmen or artists, soldiers or
bankers, when your heads are white, you will no longer be anything but
fathers.

But filial love is not born all at once, nor is it necessary it should
be. The voice of nature is a voice rather poetical than truthful. The
affection of children is earned and deserved; it is a consequence, not a
cause, and gratitude is its commencement. At any cost, therefore, your
baby must be made grateful. Do not reckon that he will be grateful to you
for your solicitude, your dreams for his future, the cost of his nursing,
and the splendid dowry that you are amassing for him; such gratitude
would require from his little brain too complicated a calculation,
besides social ideas as yet unknown to him. He will not be thankful to
you for the extreme fondness you have for him; do not be astonished at
it, and do not cry out at his ingratitude. You must first make him
understand your affection; he must appreciate and judge it before
responding to it; he must know his notes before he can play tunes.

The little man's gratitude will at first be nothing but a simple,
egotistical and natural calculation. If you have made him laugh, if you
have amused him, he will want you to begin again, he will hold out his
little arms to you, crying: "Do it again." And the recollection of the
pleasure you have given him becoming impressed upon his mind, he will
soon say to himself: "No one amuses me so well as papa; it is he who
tosses me into the air, plays at hide-and-seek with me and tells me
tales." So, by degrees, gratitude will be born in him, as thanks spring
to the lips of him who is made happy.

Therefore, learn the art of amusing your child, imitate the crowing of
the cock, and gambol on the carpet, answer his thousand impossible
questions, which are the echo of his endless dreams, and let yourself be
pulled by the beard to imitate a horse. All this is kindness, but also
cleverness, and good King Henry IV did not belie his skilful policy by
walking on all fours on his carpet with his children on his back.

In this way, no doubt, your paternal authority will lose