been otherwise enriched by it, attempts to recover the debt by action, he can be repelled by the plea of fraud. If on the other hand he has squandered the money or had it stolen from him, the plea of fraud will not avail the debtor, who will be condemned to pay again, as a penalty for having carelessly paid without the guardian's authority, and not in accordance with our regulation. Pupils of either sex cannot validly satisfy a debt without their guardian's authority, because the money paid does not become the creditor's property; the principle being that no pupil is capable of alienation without his guardian's sanction. TITLE IX. OF PERSONS THROUGH WHOM WE ACQUIRE We acquire property not only by our own acts, but also by the acts of persons in our power, of slaves in whom we have a usufruct, and of freemen and slaves belonging to another but whom we possess in good faith. Let us now examine these cases in detail. 1 Formerly, whatever was received by a child in power of either sex, with the exception of military peculium, was acquired for the parent without any distinction; and the parent was entitled to give away or sell to one child, or to a stranger, what had been acquired through another, or dispose of it in any other way that he pleased. This, however, seemed to us to be a cruel rule, and consequently by a general constitution which we have issued we have improved the children's position, and yet reserved to parents all that was their due. This enacts that whatever a child gains by and through property, of which his father allows him the control, is acquired, according to the old practice, for the father alone; for what unfairness is there in property derived from the father returning to him? But of anything which the child derives from any source other than his father, though his father will have a usufruct therein, the ownership is to belong to the child, that he may not have the mortification of seeing the gains which he has made by his own toil or good fortune transferred to another. 2 We have also made a new rule relating to the right which a father had under earlier constitutions, when he emancipated a child, of retaining absolutely, if he pleased, a third part of such property of the child as he himself had no ownership in, as a kind of consideration for emancipating him. The harsh result of this was that a son was by emancipation deprived of the ownership of a third of his property; and thus the honour which he got by being emancipated and made independent was balanced by the diminution of his fortune. We have therefore enacted that the parent, in such a case, shall no longer retain the ownership of a third of the child's property, but, in lieu thereof, the usufruct of one half; and thus the son will remain absolute owner of the whole of his fortune, while the father will reap a greater benefit than before, by being entitled to the enjoyment of a half instead of a third.