To raise the problem more fairly, let us suppose the circumstances somewhat less tragic than those which M. Ménard has chosen, and let us ask how, in general, the child must be spoken to about death. When the child is capable of following a more or less complex bit of exposition, toward the age of ten or twelve for example, I confess that I see no reason why its questions should not be answered exactly as if they were those of a grown person. At that age it will no longer believe in fairies, it will no longer need to believe in legends, not even in those of Christianity. The scientific and philosophic spirit will have begun to develop and must not be either checked or distorted. If its intelligence leads it toward philosophical problems, so much the better; one must meet its need as simply as if the problems in question were historical. I have seen a child much tormented by a desire to know whether such and such an historical personage died a natural death or was poisoned. The child was told that the thing was doubtful, but that the probability was so and so. The same method should be pursued in reference to more important problems. [Sidenote: No difficulty in making the child understand.] But how, it may be asked, is one to form replies, that the child can understand, to questions which relate to the life beyond the grave? Is not the sole language that it understands that of Christianity, which deals with men raised to heaven, with happy souls seated among the angels and the seraphim, etc.? We reply that people in general seem to have a strange conception of the child’s intelligence; they expect it to understand the most refined subtleties of grammar, the most unexpected turns and shifts of theology, and are afraid to say a word to it of philosophy. A little girl of twelve years, of my acquaintance, replied with much ingenuity to this unexpected question: What is the difference between a perfect and an imperfect Christian? It was evident that she would not have experienced greater difficulty in replying to a metaphysical question. I recollect having myself followed, at the age of eight, a discussion on the immortality of the soul; nay, I even pronounced an interior judgment in favour of him who was maintaining the cause of immortality. Our system of education is full of contradictions, which consist at once in mechanically burdening the child’s memory with things it cannot understand, and in depriving its intelligence of subjects in which it might take an interest. “But,” M. Ménard will object, “a child must not be put into a position of being able to oppose its father’s belief to that of its mother or of its grand-mother.” Why not? It happens, necessarily, every day. There are, on all subjects, incessantly going on in the bosom of the family a series of discussions, of small disagreements which in nowise fundamentally disturb the harmony of the household; why should it be otherwise when more important and uncertain questions simply