Are they dead?  Are they wandering among modern streets like hopeless exiles?  Are they dancing—­grotesque spectres—­a fantastic minuet in the moonlight, amid the cypresses of a cemetery, along the pathways bordered by graves?

Their memory haunts me, obsesses me, torments me, remains with me like a wound.  Why?  I do not know.

No doubt you think that very absurd?

THE SON

The two old friends were walking in the garden in bloom, where spring was bringing everything to life.

One was a senator, the other a member of the French Academy, both serious men, full of very logical but solemn arguments, men of note and reputation.

They talked first of politics, exchanging opinions; not on ideas, but on men, personalities in this regard taking the predominance over ability.  Then they recalled some memories.  Then they walked along in silence, enervated by the warmth of the air.

A large bed of wallflowers breathed out a delicate sweetness.  A mass of flowers of all species and color flung their fragrance to the breeze, while a cytisus covered with yellow clusters scattered its fine pollen abroad, a golden cloud, with an odor of honey that bore its balmy seed across space, similar to the sachet-powders of perfumers.

The senator stopped, breathed in the cloud of floating pollen, looked at the fertile shrub, yellow as the sun, whose seed was floating in the air, and said: 

“When one considers that these imperceptible fragrant atoms will create existences at a hundred leagues from here, will send a thrill through the fibres and sap of female trees and produce beings with roots, growing from a germ, just as we do, mortal like ourselves, and who will be replaced by other beings of the same order, like ourselves again!”

And, standing in front of the brilliant cytisus, whose live pollen was shaken off by each breath of air, the senator added: 

“Ah, old fellow, if you had to keep count of all your children you would be mightily embarrassed.  Here is one who generates freely, and then lets them go without a pang and troubles himself no more about them.”

“We do the same, my friend,” said the academician.

“Yes, I do not deny it; we let them go sometimes,” resumed the senator, “but we are aware that we do, and that constitutes our superiority.”

“No, that is not what I mean,” said the other, shaking his head.  “You see, my friend, that there is scarcely a man who has not some children that he does not know, children—­’father unknown’—­whom he has generated almost unconsciously, just as this tree reproduces.

“If we had to keep account of our amours, we should be just as embarrassed as this cytisus which you apostrophized would be in counting up his descendants, should we not?

“From eighteen to forty years, in fact, counting in every chance cursory acquaintanceship, we may well say that we have been intimate with two or three hundred women.