Once when we were at Houlgate, in Normandy--where we had a summer villa by the seashore--I decided to run away from home because I had been prevented from playing with children on the beach. After dark, when no one could see me, I set out, without knowing where I should go, all alone, determined never to come back. I had no plan. I did not even understand that food and lodgings had to be paid for and worked for in the world. I walked along the country road in the dark, quite happy because I was walking, but puzzled because when I began to tire I did not know where to stop. So when I came to the farm of an old woman from whom we had bought apples, I turned in, naturally, to get an apple, without telling her that I had run away. I was overtaken there. The lady-in-waiting--who was very shrewd--as soon as she missed me, found out from my sister that I had threatened to run away, and she guessed that I would go to the apple-woman’s farm, since it was the only place near by where I had ever been. They brought me back home, but they had all been frightened, and I began to get my own way. For example, there was always a maid sleeping in our room at night, and I did not wish it--as much, perhaps, because she snored as because I wanted our bedroom for ourselves. When they insisted that the maid must be there, I dragged my bed into the corridor every night, until they gave me a room to myself in which I could at least sleep without being guarded. I would not wear tight clothes, and I put my hands down inside my waist-band when they were dressing me, so that they could not fasten tight things on me; and in this way I avoided many tiresome affairs of ceremony, which I disliked. These are very trivial matters to recall, but consider that it is one of the chief pleasures of most royal persons to dress themselves in costume and play the parts of resplendent figure-heads that have never been allowed to think, or see, or know anything for themselves. The small restraints against which a healthy body made me struggle in infancy were the attempted beginnings of those impassable walls of isolation and ignorance and inexperience from which, in later years, I should never have escaped.