We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given us, almost in spite of himself.  His crime like most others was the result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed selfishness of the moment.  He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern, where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will allow them to do.  “I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here, one may as well follow it.  So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a citizen in Plato’s Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the high principles which fame requires.  People do not turn citizens of Plato’s Republic “cheerfully and without the least scruple,” and if a man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to drag Plato and his Republic into the matter.  Another turn again was given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious mania.  Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and finally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting enemies.[142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives which led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act to himself at the time, with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled him to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plotting against him, nor did he suppose that he had.  As for his wife’s family, he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealing resolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and he might therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in the case of his children.  He was more right when in 1770, in his important letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, the honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust his children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept him from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties.  “In this, far from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I did what I ought to have