Nevertheless, fathers and mothers owe alimony. Alimony is due to bastards, though they be adulterous or incestuous, by the mother and her ascendants. Children born out of marriage, except those who are born from an incestuous or adulterous connexion, may be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their father and mother, whenever the latter have legally acknowledged them for their children, either before the marriage or by the contract of marriage itself. Every other mode of legitimating children is abolished. Legitimation may even be extended to deceased children who have left issue, and in that ease, it enures to the benefit of that issue.
Children legitimated by a subsequent marriage, have the same rights as if born during the marriage.
By the old English law, when a man had a bastard son and he afterwards married the mother and by her had a legitimate son, the first was called a bastard eigne, or as it is now spelled, aine, and the second son was called puisne, or since born, or sometimes he was called mulier puisne. The offence of begetting a bastard child. The state or condition of a bastard. The law presumes every child legitimate, when born of a woman in a state of wedlock, and casts the onus probandi on the party who affirms the bastardy.