Short answer. Article 894's stated division — one-third to the spouse, one-third to the illegitimate children, one-third freely disposable — reflects a 1950 classification of children that no longer controls. A later Family Code provision changed how illegitimate children's legitimes are computed, so your family's split must be worked out under that rule, not read off Article 894.
What the law says
If the testator leaves illegitimate children, the surviving spouse shall be entitled to one-third of the hereditary estate of the deceased and the illegitimate children to another third.
Civil Code, Article 894 — Spouse and Illegitimate Children. Read the full provision →
What Article 894 originally provided
Article 894 states that if the testator leaves illegitimate children, the surviving spouse shall be entitled to one-third of the hereditary estate of the deceased and the illegitimate children to another third, with the remaining third left to the testator's free disposal. That is still the literal text on the books, and it is worth knowing because it shows how the framework was structured: a share to the spouse, a share to the illegitimate children as a group, and a freely disposable portion. But the specific fractions were fixed in 1950, under a classification of children that no longer exists.
Why the fractions no longer control
This article's own annotation explains that its share was worked out on the classification of children used when the Civil Code took effect in 1950, and that a later Family Code provision changed the legitime of each illegitimate child to one-half of what a legitimate child receives, while leaving the rest of the Civil Code's succession rules in force. The Family Code also collapsed the older sub-classifications of illegitimate children into a single class. So Article 894's one-third figure for illegitimate children, calculated under a superseded scheme, cannot simply be applied as written today.
Why no single substitute fraction is offered here
The later rule measures an illegitimate child's legitime as one-half of a legitimate child's legitime. In a family with a spouse and illegitimate children but no legitimate children at all, there is no legitimate child's legitime to measure against in the way that comparison assumes, which is exactly why this composition resists a simple substitute number. Rather than state a fraction that risks being wrong for your facts, the honest answer is that the current division must be computed for your specific family, not taken from Article 894's original wording or guessed by analogy to it.
What to do with this
If you are working out an actual estate with this composition, treat Article 894's one-third/one-third/one-third split as the outdated starting point rather than the answer, and have the shares recalculated under the current rule before relying on any figure. Bring the exact family composition — the surviving spouse, and the number of illegitimate children involved — to whoever is handling the settlement, since the computation depends entirely on those specifics rather than on the article's original text.