Jacques; I was never better!  I do not grow old at all, for fear of making you unhappy.  I want nothing, and I live like a lady.  I even had some money over this year, and as my drawers shut very badly, I put it into the savings’ bank, where I have opened an account in your name.  So, when you come back, you will find yourself with an income.  I have also furnished your chest with new linen, and I have knitted you three new sea-jackets.

“All your friends are well.  Your cousin is just dead, leaving his widow in difficulties.  I gave her your thirty francs’ remittance and said that you had sent it her; and the poor woman remembers you day and night in her prayers.  So, you see, I have put that money in another sort of savings’ bank; but there it is our hearts that get the interest.

   “Good-bye, dear Jacquot.  Write to me often, and always remember the
   good God, and your old mother,

“PHROSINE Millot.”

Good son, and worthy mother! how such examples bring us back to a love for the human race!  In a fit of fanciful misanthropy, we may envy the fate of the savage, and prefer that of the bird to such as he; but impartial observation soon does justice to such paradoxes.  We find, on examination, that in the mixed good and evil of human nature, the good so far abounds that we are not in the habit of noticing it, while the evil strikes us precisely on account of its being the exception.  If nothing is perfect, nothing is so bad as to be without its compensation or its remedy.  What spiritual riches are there in the midst of the evils of society! how much does the moral world redeem the material!

That which will ever distinguish man from the rest of creation, is his power of deliberate affection and of enduring self-sacrifice.  The mother who took care of her brood in the corner of my window devoted to them the necessary time for accomplishing the laws which insure the preservation of her kind; but she obeyed an instinct, and not a rational choice.  When she had accomplished the mission appointed her by Providence, she cast off the duty as we get rid of a burden, and she returned again to her selfish liberty.  The other mother, on the contrary, will go on with her task as long as God shall leave her here below:  the life of her son will still remain, so to speak, joined to her own; and when she disappears from the earth, she will leave there that part of herself.

Thus, the affections make for our species an existence separate from all the rest of creation.  Thanks to them, we enjoy a sort of terrestrial immortality; and if other beings succeed one another, man alone perpetuates himself.

CHAPTER IX

THE FAMILY OF MICHAEL AROUT

September 15th, Eight O’clock