Two days after their arrival Napoleon compelled Ferdinand to appear before his parents: he himself was also present. The interview[54] commenced by King Charles ordering his son to sign a complete and absolute renunciation of the Spanish throne. Bonaparte then threw in a few threatening words: but Ferdinand, still unmoved, made a steady refusal. At this the old king rose from his chair--he was half-crippled with rheumatism--and tried to strike his son with his cane, while the Queen burst in with a stream of abuse worthy of a fishwife. Napoleon, horrified at the odious scene, according to his own narrative of it, hurried Ferdinand, ‘who looked scared,’ out of the room. [54] Of this interview we have the version of Napoleon himself in a dispatch to Murat, dated May 1; another by Cevallos, Ferdinand’s minister; a third by De Pradt (afterwards Archbishop of Mechlin), then present at Bayonne. The same night [May 1], Ferdinand’s advisers bethought them of a new and ingenious move--we need not ascribe it to his own brains, which were surely incapable of the device. He wrote to King Charles to the effect that he had always regarded the abdication at Aranjuez as free and unconstrained, but that if it had not been so, he was ready to lay down his crown again and hand it back to his father. But the ceremony must be done in an open and honourable way at Madrid, before the Cortes. If his parent personally resumed the reins of power, he bowed to his authority: but if his age and infirmities induced him to name a regent, that regent should be his eldest son. This proposal did not suit the Emperor at all, so he dictated to the old king a long letter, in which the Napoleonesque phraseology peeps out in a score of places. Charles refuses all terms, says that his son’s conduct had ‘placed a barrier of bronze between him and the Spanish throne,’ and concludes that ‘only the Emperor can save Spain, and he himself would do nothing that might stir up the fire of discord among his loved vassals or bring misery on them’ [May 2]. Ferdinand replied with an equally long letter justifying at large all his conduct of the past year [May 4]. When things stood at this point there arrived from Madrid the news of the bloody events of the second of May, which we have to relate in the next chapter. This brought Napoleon up to striking point, and once more he intervened in his own person. He sent for Ferdinand, and in the presence of his parents accused him of having stirred up the riot in the capital, and informed him that if he did not sign an abdication and an acknowledgement of his father as the only true king by twelve that night ‘he should be dealt with as a traitor and rebel.’ This is Napoleon’s own version[55], but Spanish witnesses say that the words used were that ‘he must choose between abdication and death[56].’ [55] Dispatch to Murat of May 5. [56] ‘Prince, il faut opter entre la cession et la mort’ (Cevallos, p. 60).