“And what is all this?” said Gabriel, warming.  “You yourself do not know.  ‘Honour is honour.’  Well, I say, children are children.  You, man of prejudices, you do not wait to consider that those beings are the continuation of our own existence.  Your religion makes you think children are a fruit from God, nevertheless you think yourself better and more perfect when you reject and curse those gifts of Heaven if they cause you any trouble.  No, Esteban, the love of children and pity for their faults ought to come before all prejudices.  This eternal life of the soul, that lying promise of religion, is only true through our children.  The soul dies with the body; it is no more than a manifestation of our own thoughts, and thought is a cerebral function, but children perpetuate our own being throughout the generations and the centuries; it is they who make us immortal, and that preserve and transmit something of our personality, even as we have inherited something from our ancestors.  He who forgets those beings who are his own creation is more worthy of execration than he who leaves life by suicide.  The disappointments of life, the laws and customs invented by men, what are they before the instinctive affection we feel for beings that have proceeded from ourselves, and who perpetuate the infinite variety of our habits and thoughts?  I abhor those wretches who, in order not to disturb the commonplace peace of matrimony, abandon the children they have outside the house.  Paternity is the most noble of all animal functions, but the animals have more courage and dignity than man in fulfilling it.  No animal of the higher sort abandons or disowns its cub, and yet there are many men who turn their backs on their children for fear of what people will say.  If I, having a son, were enamoured of the most beautiful woman in the world, and she required me to forget that son, I would stifle my passion sooner than abandon the little one.  If my son sinned against every human law, and was sent to prison, even there would I follow him, defying the execration of the world, sooner than deny that he is my work.  We are united for ever to the creatures to whom we give life, it is a compromise of solidarity that we make with the species when we work for its continuance.  He who breaks the chain and flies is a coward.”

“You will not convince me, Gabriel,” screamed Esteban.  “I will not!—­I will not!”

“I repeat it is cowardly on your part.  This honour that weighs so heavily on you is a cruel and antiquated honour that settles all the conflicts of life by shedding blood.  Why do you not seek the man who stole your daughter?  Why do you not kill him like a father in an old play?  Is it because you are a fearful man and have not learnt the art of murder, and that arms are his profession?  If you had taken lawless vengeance, relying only on what you think your right, his powerful family would have retaliated on you; but you have not revenged yourself through an instinct of self-preservation, through fear of prison and all the punishments invented by society; you have been afraid in spite of your anger, and this fear you indulge at the expense of cruelty to the weaker creature.  Your anger only falls on your daughter.  Come, Esteban, this is not worthy of a man.”