And God smiled because he knew in advance what their answer would be.
"Our happiness is service. This puts us close to God. Do you not serve your father and mother? Do they not serve Him who serves us?"
And suddenly he saw that the table had grown larger and that new guests were seated about it. They were the father and mother of his mother and father, and the generations that had gone before them.
Evening fell. The older of the people slumbered. Love held the poet and his sweetheart. But God to whom they had done honor, took up his way again like the poor on the great highways, those who have only a morsel of bread in their wallet, and whom the magistrates arrest at the town gates, and throw into prison, since they know not how to write their name.
CHARITY CHILDREN
One day the souls of the charity children cried out to God. It was on a stormy evening when their fevers and wounds made them suffer more than ever. They lay white with grief in their rows of beds, above which ignoble science had hung the placards of their maladies.
They were sad, very sad, for it was a day of festival. Their tiny arms were stretched out on the coverlets, and with their transparent hands they touched the meager toys that pious grand ladies had brought them. They did not even know what to do with these playthings. A President of the Republic had visited them, but they had not understood what it meant.
Their souls cried out toward God. They said:
"We are the daughters of misery, of scrofula, and of syphilis. We are the daughters of daughters of shame."
"I," said one, "was dragged out of a cesspool where in her distraction my mother, the servant of an inn, had thrown me." Another said: "I was born of a child with an enormous head that had a red gap in the forehead. My father killed my mother, and he killed himself."