To be loved all your life by a being you love—­that is the problem to be solved, and toward the solution of which all your efforts should be directed.  To make yourself loved, is to store up treasures of happiness for the winter.  Each year will take away a scrap of your life, contract the circle of interests and pleasures in which you live; your mind by degrees will lose its vigor, and ask for rest, and as you live less and less by the mind, you will live more and more by the heart.  The affection of others which was only a pleasant whet will become a necessary food, and whatever you may have been, statesmen or artists, soldiers or bankers, when your heads are white, you will no longer be anything but fathers.

But filial love is not born all at once, nor is it necessary it should be.  The voice of nature is a voice rather poetical than truthful.  The affection of children is earned and deserved; it is a consequence, not a cause, and gratitude is its commencement.  At any cost, therefore, your baby must be made grateful.  Do not reckon that he will be grateful to you for your solicitude, your dreams for his future, the cost of his nursing, and the splendid dowry that you are amassing for him; such gratitude would require from his little brain too complicated a calculation, besides social ideas as yet unknown to him.  He will not be thankful to you for the extreme fondness you have for him; do not be astonished at it, and do not cry out at his ingratitude.  You must first make him understand your affection; he must appreciate and judge it before responding to it; he must know his notes before he can play tunes.

The little man’s gratitude will at first be nothing but a simple, egotistical and natural calculation.  If you have made him laugh, if you have amused him, he will want you to begin again, he will hold out his little arms to you, crying:  “Do it again.”  And the recollection of the pleasure you have given him becoming impressed upon his mind, he will soon say to himself:  “No one amuses me so well as papa; it is he who tosses me into the air, plays at hide-and-seek with me and tells me tales.”  So, by degrees, gratitude will be born in him, as thanks spring to the lips of him who is made happy.

Therefore, learn the art of amusing your child, imitate the crowing of the cock, and gambol on the carpet, answer his thousand impossible questions, which are the echo of his endless dreams, and let yourself be pulled by the beard to imitate a horse.  All this is kindness, but also cleverness, and good King Henry IV did not belie his skilful policy by walking on all fours on his carpet with his children on his back.

In this way, no doubt, your paternal authority will lose something of its austere prestige, but will gain the deep and lasting influence that affection gives.  Your baby will fear you less but will love you more.  Where is the harm.