Perhaps the nurse did not try the remedies. At any rate, the puny infant disappointed the expectations of his relatives, and lived. Zozo they called him, or, from the wilfulness of his baby temper, “le petit volontaire.” Châteauneuf’s interest in him increased daily. He must have detected an extraordinarily precocious intelligence in the small creature, since, when he was but three years old, the abbé had begun to perform his godfatherly duties as he understood them, and to teach the child a certain ribald deistical poem by J. B. Rousseau called “Le Moïsade.” It is not too much to say that at this period, and for about a hundred years afterwards, the name of abbé was synonymous with that of scoundrel. Free liver and free thinker, gay, base, and witty--“qui n’était d’église que pour les bénéfices,” as that little godson said of him hereafter--Châteauneuf was not worse than most of his kind, and perhaps, if anything, was rather better. He accepted, indeed, the emoluments of a religion in which he did not only not believe but at which he openly scoffed, in order to live at his ease a life quite profligate and disreputable. It is said, or he said, that he had the honour of being Ninon de l’Enclos’ last lover. But he was both goodnatured and kindhearted, and after his fashion was really fond of the little godson and doing his best to lead his baby mind away from a superstition which he himself had found, to be sure, tolerably profitable. What a strange picture it is! This child lisped scoffings as other children lisp prayers. He had very big brown eyes, bright with intelligence, in his little, wizened, old man’s face. The precocity greatly entertained Châteauneuf. Père Arouet may have been amused too, in private, at this infant unbeliever--the state of the Church making it hard then for any man, at once honest and reasonable, to put faith in her teachings. The society of her three abbés and her Ninon must have made delicate Madame pretty used to free thought. So the little boy learnt his “Moïsade” by heart and was taught to read out of the “Fables” of La Fontaine. He was but seven when his mother died. Sister Catherine of sixteen was already thinking of a _dot_ and a husband, as a prudent French girl should. Brother Armand of seventeen--“my Jansenist of a brother”--had imbibed extreme religious opinions at the seminary of Saint Magloire and was an austere youthful bigot. So Zozo scrambled up as best he might among mortgages, bonds, and shares; designed from the first by his father to be _avocat_ (wherein the family influence would be powerful to help him), a lonely and precocious little creature, and still the infant _protégé_ of Châteauneuf.