which should be held by all the celibate, proving as it does that
paternity is a sentiment nourished artificially by woman, custom, and
the law.

Poor Henri de Marsay knew no other father than that one of the two who
was not compelled to be one. The paternity of M. de Marsay was
naturally most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few
fleeting instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay
imitated nature. The worthy man would not have sold his name had he
been free from vices. Thus he squandered without remorse in gambling
hells, and drank elsewhere, the few dividends which the National
Treasury paid to its bondholders. Then he handed over the child to an
aged sister, a Demoiselle de Marsay, who took much care of him, and
provided him, out of the meagre sum allowed by her brother, with a
tutor, an abbe without a farthing, who took the measure of the youth's
future, and determined to pay himself out of the hundred thousand
livres for the care given to his pupil, for whom he conceived an
affection. As chance had it, this tutor was a true priest, one of
those ecclesiastics cut out to become cardinals in France, or Borgias
beneath the tiara. He taught the child in three years what he might
have learned at college in ten. Then the great man, by name the Abbe
de Maronis, completed the education of his pupil by making him study
civilization under all its aspects: he nourished him on his
experience, led him little into churches, which at that time were
closed; introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of theatres, more
often into the houses of courtesans; he exhibited human emotions to
him one by one; taught him politics in the drawing-rooms, where they
simmered at the time, explained to him the machinery of government,
and endeavored out of attraction towards a fine nature, deserted, yet
rich in promise, virilely to replace a mother: is not the Church the