“I tried to awaken his master’s sympathy, so that he should look after him, offering to pay him for doing so.  The innkeeper, finally surprised, said, very wisely:  ’All that you do for him, monsieur, will only help to destroy him.  He must be kept like a prisoner.  As soon as he has any spare time, or any comfort, he becomes wicked.  If you wish to do good, there is no lack of abandoned children, but select one who will appreciate your attention.’

“What could I say?

“If I allowed the slightest suspicion of the doubts that tortured me to escape, this idiot would assuredly become cunning, in order to blackmail me, to compromise me and ruin me.  He would call out ‘papa,’ as in my dream.

“And I said to myself that I had killed the mother and lost this atrophied creature, this larva of the stable, born and raised amid the manure, this man who, if brought up like others, would have been like others.

“And you cannot imagine what a strange, embarrassed and intolerable feeling comes over me when he stands before me and I reflect that he came from myself, that he belongs to me through the intimate bond that links father and son, that, thanks to the terrible law of heredity, he is my own self in a thousand ways, in his blood and his flesh, and that he has even the same germs of disease, the same leaven of emotions.

“I have an incessant restless, distressing longing to see him, and the sight of him causes me intense suffering, as I look down from my window and watch him for hours removing and carting the horse manure, saying to myself:  ‘That is my son.’

“And I sometimes feel an irresistible longing to embrace him.  I have never even touched his dirty hand.”

The academician was silent.  His companion, a tactful man, murmured:  “Yes, indeed, we ought to take a closer interest in children who have no father.”

A gust of wind passing through the tree shook its yellow clusters, enveloping in a fragrant and delicate mist the two old men, who inhaled in the fragrance with deep breaths.

The senator added:  “It is good to be twenty-five and even to have children like that.”

THAT PIG OF A MORIN

“Here, my friend,” I said to Labarbe, “you have just repeated those five words, that pig of a Morin.  Why on earth do I never hear Morin’s name mentioned without his being called a pig?”

Labarbe, who is a deputy, looked at me with his owl-like eyes and said:  “Do you mean to say that you do not know Morin’s story and you come from La Rochelle?” I was obliged to declare that I did not know Morin’s story, so Labarbe rubbed his hands and began his recital.

“You knew Morin, did you not, and you remember his large linen-draper’s shop on the Quai de la Rochelle?”

“Yes, perfectly.”