’That shows the necessity of consideration, my son, to avoid the risk of forming unreasonable wishes, to put them in practice, perhaps, when you grow up.  You will probably never have a forest to burn, but you may have men to conduct:  just think what might be the consequence of your forgetting that a district, a town, a community, is composed of individuals, as you just now forgot that a forest is composed of trees.’

‘Ah, papa, in such a case I could not forget myself.’

‘I knew some years ago,’ said Monsieur D’Ambly, ’a very good, but rather obstinate man, of the name of De Marne.  He had a quarrel with the director of a hospital established in a small town on one of his estates.  The greater part of the property of the hospital was situated on this estate, and dependent on it, as was then the custom—­that is to say, the hospital only held these lands on condition of paying certain rents to Monsieur de Marne, and of receiving two patients at his option.  This right he held in consequence of his ancestors having given these lands to the hospital, and it descended to all the proprietors of the estate.  The director began to dispute with Monsieur de Marne about the payment of the rent, and maintained that he bad no right to send more than one patient to the hospital.  Monsieur de Marne was exceedingly angry, and a lawsuit was the consequence; and it so happened that the person employed by Monsieur de Marne, in searching the papers which had been sent to him to prove his right, discovered, or thought he had discovered, that the ground which had occasioned the lawsuit belonged to Monsieur de Marne, and not to the hospital, because, said he, the ancestors of Monsieur de Marne only gave it for a certain time, and on certain conditions which had not been fulfilled; so that Monsieur de Marne ought to take possession of it.  This would be the ruin of the hospital.  The day Monsieur de Marne received this intelligence he was delighted; and the more so, as he had just learned that one of the patients whom he had sent to the hospital had died, in consequence of a relapse from having been discharged too soon.  His widow, who was left destitute, travelled on foot to Paris, with her youngest child on her back, to implore the assistance of Monsieur de Marne.  She cried bitterly as she related the last words of her husband, who said, when he was dying, “If Monsieur de Marne had been here, he would have had me kept in the hospital, and I should have recovered.”

’As Monsieur de Marne listened, with tears in his eyes, to this recital, he exclaimed:  “That villain of a director, I will be the ruin of him!” He forgot that it was the hospital he would ruin, and that he would thus put out perhaps a hundred patients, all as poor and as sick as poor Jacques, and whose condition, had he recollected it, would be equally grievous.