“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.

“Well, then, my friend, among this number can you be sure that you have not had children by at least one of them, and that you have not in the streets, or in the bagnio, some blackguard of a son who steals from and murders decent people, i.e., ourselves; or else a daughter in some disreputable place, or, if she has the good fortune to be deserted by her mother, as cook in some family?

“Consider, also, that almost all those whom we call ‘prostitutes’ have one or two children of whose paternal parentage they are ignorant, generated by chance at the price of ten or twenty francs.  In every business there is profit and loss.  These wildings constitute the ‘loss’ in their profession.  Who generated them?  You—­I—­we all did, the men called ‘gentlemen’!  They are the consequences of our jovial little dinners, of our gay evenings, of those hours when our comfortable physical being impels us to chance liaisons.

“Thieves, marauders, all these wretches, in fact, are our children.  And that is better for us than if we were their children, for those scoundrels generate also!

“I have in my mind a very horrible story that I will relate to you.  It has caused me incessant remorse, and, further than that, a continual doubt, a disquieting uncertainty, that, at times, torments me frightfully.

“When I was twenty-five I undertook a walking tour through Brittany with one of my friends, now a member of the cabinet.

“After walking steadily for fifteen or twenty days and visiting the Cotes-du-Nord and part of Finistere we reached Douarnenez.  From there we went without halting to the wild promontory of Raz by the bay of Les Trepaases, and passed the night in a village whose name ends in ‘of.’  The next morning a strange lassitude kept my friend in bed; I say bed from habit, for our couch consisted simply of two bundles of straw.

“It would never do to be ill in this place.  So I made him get up, and we reached Andierne about four or five o’clock in the evening.

“The following day he felt a little better, and we set out again.  But on the road he was seized with intolerable pain, and we could scarcely get as far as Pont Labbe.