Landri was so desirous to believe the latter that he went to the trunk in which his books were already packed, and took out the work wherein the marquis's ideas were collected and marshalled: "The History and Genealogy of the House of Claviers-Grandchamp." The mere title made Landri tremble, but he remembered having read a note, which he must find at any price. When he had found it, he spelled out all the syllables, word by word, in a low voice. He longed to read therein an explanation of the attitude of the Feudalist, thwarted in one of his most firmly rooted convictions. It was a fragment of a discourse delivered by the eloquent Duveyrier before the Parliament of Paris, in 1783. M. de Claviers had cited the passage apropos of the severity of one of his ancestors toward a younger son, with enthusiastic approval and emphasizing the last lines as if to make them his own. In this argument Duveyrier was supporting a father's denunciation of his own daughter to the authorities. "Can we," he said, "can we, without distress, reflect upon the immense interval that separates us from those who handed our laws down to us? By what steps of progressive enfeeblement we have substituted for that mental energy, for the power of genuine virtue, a factitious sensibility which takes fright at the slightest effort; not the healthy sensibility, inseparable from kindness of heart, which has compassion for the criminal while punishing the crime, but that flexibility of character, that flabbiness of heart which leads us to purchase the indulgence of others by our own indulgence, and which we call sensibility in order to legitimize our weakness, to ennoble it, indeed, if that were possible! In the last days of the Republic, when discord was ushering in depravity, Aulus Fulvius deserted Rome to follow Catiline. His father called him back. That citizen, a rebel against his country, was still a dutiful son. He obeyed. He submitted to the sentence of death pronounced by his father. Our ancestors admired this example of sublime virtue. We deem it harsh. Our grandsons will call it barbarous. _We are beginning to be surprised that a father should exercise the right that the law gives him, to avenge his betrayed honor, his contemned authority. We shall end by depriving him of that right. From the impossibility of punishing the children will result contempt for the father, insubordination rebellion, and universal anarchy_."