"Would you blame me for making an angel out of an idiot?"

Monsieur's philosophy was too subtile for me. GUILTY seemed a coarse
word to apply to so fine a nature.

He denied having attempted to injure his wife in any way.

"Women are all fools," he said; "they are all alike,--go just as
they are led, and do just as they are taught. They cannot think
for themselves. They have no ideas of justice but just what the law
furnishes them with. It was silly to complain; it argued a narrow mind
to condemn merely because the laws condemn. In that case all should
be acquitted whom the laws acquit,--did we ever do this? Would his
darling Jacques, happy, angelic, condemn his parent for releasing him
from the drudgery of life? Was it not better to play on a golden harp
than to be a confectioner? Were not all men, in fact, more or less
slayers of their brothers? Was I not myself guilty in attributing
to Madame a deed in my eyes worthy of death, and of which she was
innocent? It was only those whose courage induced them to venture a
little farther who received condemnation. In some way or other,
every soul is wearing out and overtasking somebody else's soul, and
shortening somebody's days. A man who should throw his child into the
water, in order to save him from being burned to death, would not
be arraigned for the fierce choice. Little Jacques, if he had lived,
would have lingered in misery and imbecility. Was a lingering death of
torture to be preferred by a tenderhearted woman to one more rapid and
less painful, where the certainty of death left only such preference?
Ah, well! it was consolation that his little son was safe from all
vicissitude, whatever might befall his devoted father!" and Monsieur
wiped his eyes, and drew out a little miniature he always carried in
his bosom. It was the portrait of little Jacques.

Well, as I have said, Monsieur was a philosopher, and I was a
philosopher; and yet I must have been a woman incapable of reason,
incapable of comprehending an argument; for the thought of this thing,
and of being in the presence of a man capable of such a deed, made me
uneasy, restless, unhappy, as though I were in some sort a partaker of
the crime. I could not sleep; I was haunted with horrific dreams; and
when, in few days, among the "accidents" the death of an unknown woman
was recorded, whose body had drifted ashore at night, and I recognized
by the description poor, unknown, uncared-for Madame C----, a wil