"Why torment yourself so much about the future of your children? You will always have enough to settle them all in life; and besides, I myself, who have but cousins in I do not know what remote degree of affinity, I find it but just that these my nephews should inherit my property before them."
And then the count became silent, for he found the baron's answer quite natural, and such as he himself should have made, had their positions been reversed. Between these two men, so closely united by affection and so similar in heart and understanding, there was but one subject on which their point of view was diametrically opposed, and that was the one with which they were engaged at the opening of this chapter. Count Shrann, who had been brought up by a loving and pious mother, was a Catholic both in heart and soul; whilst the Baron Frederic had, on the contrary, lost both his parents at a very early age, and had been brought up by his uncle, who boasted of being the friend and the protector of the Encyclopedists; so that Frederic had been educated in that cold and barren school of materialism which Voltaire has the doubtful honor of having founded. Baron Frederic believed in nothing spiritual, a circumstance which caused great chagrin to his friend, whence it happened that on this, as on so many former occasions, the two friends, after the dinner-hour, had passed long hours in smoking and drinking huge tankards of beer, whilst making the same questions and the same answers on this, the one great subject of their difference in opinion and faith.
"So you believe that the soul lives for ever?" said the baron.
"Certainly I do," replied the count.
"It is very strange," answered the baron; and then both recommenced to smoke yet more vigorously than before. After a lapse of time during which two less serious men would have discussed three or four such subjects of conversation, the count recommenced: "What do you see so strange in my remark?"
"It is to see a mind such as yours give way to similar ideas and tales fit only, to say the best of it, to frighten children with."
"I, for my part, am yet more astonished to see a man so logical as yourself refuse to believe it; and how dare you treat as springing from weakness of mind that belief which you cannot deny fortifies the soul and places it above the blows of adversity?"
"The soul, the soul," replied the baron, "what is the soul? A name without a substance, and I do not know what of indefinable and vague. A something that we can neither see nor touch, and which eludes both the senses and the understanding. I, for my part, believe in nothing but that which I can see or touch."
"I would remind you, my dear friend, that there are a crowd of things in which you believe, without ever having seen them."