ly in the matter; I have sought in your case your affection
rather than your obedience or your respect. I have never taught you
economy, it is true, but then I did not know anything about that
myself; and besides, I had not a business and a business name to leave
you. To have everything in common between us, one heart and one purse,
to be able to give each other everything and say everything to each
other,--that has been our motto. The puritans will think that they
have a right to blame this intimacy as too close: let them say so if
they choose. We have lost, it seems, some hundreds of thousands of
francs; but we have gained this,--that we can always count upon each
other, you upon me and I upon you. Either of us will be ready at any
moment to kill himself for the other, and that is the most important
matter between a father and a son; all the rest is not worth the
trouble that one takes to reason about it. Don't you think I am right?

_Andre_--All that is true, my dear father! and I am just as much
attached to you as you are to me. Far be it from me to reproach you;
but now in my turn I want to make a confession to you. You are an
exception in our society; your fettered youth, your precocious
widowerhood, are your excuses, if you need any. You were born at a
time when all France was in a fever, and when the individual, as well
as the great mass of people, seemed to be striving to spend by every
possible means a superabundance of vitality. Urged toward active life
by nature, by curiosity, by temperament, you have cared for things
that were worth caring for,--for them only; for entertaining yourself,
for hunting, for fine horses, for the artist world, for people of rank
and distinction. In such an environment as this you have paid your
tribute to your country, you have paid the debt of your rank in life
and of your name. But I, on the other hand, like almost all my
generation, brought in contact with a fashionable world from the time
that I began life,--I, born in an epoch of lassitude and
transition,--I led for a while this life by mere imitation in
laziness.... It is a kind of existence that no longer amuses me; and
moreover, I can tell you that it never did amuse me. To sit up all
night turning over cards; to get up at two o'clock in the afternoon,
to have horses put to the carriage and go for the drive around the
Lake, or to ride horseback; to live by day with idlers and to pass my
evenings with such parasites as you