I was well up in abdications. Had I not been obliged to study in my history book those of the sluggard kings, whose hair they cut off before immuring them in a cloister?--and in spite of myself I gazed at grandfather’s slightly curling white hair. Above all I had heard my brother Bernard reciting the story of Charles V, by which I had been strongly impressed. That master of the world, laying aside his grandeur, had retired to a monastery of Estramadura, where he mended clocks, and to give himself a foretaste of death had had his funeral celebrated while he was still alive. Historians that dote upon truth have since then assured me that these details are fabulous. I am sorry, for I have not forgotten them, whereas an innumerable number of demonstrated facts have dropped out of my memory. But at that time I believed with iron conviction in the retirement of Charles V, the false obsequies and the clocks. Grandfather also knew how to mend clocks, and I at once established relations between the two sovereigns. Aunt Deen, punctual for once, and our mother, who was not far behind us, shared our astonishment. Then all eyes were fixed upon our father, who was just then entering the room. At a glance he took in the situation, and with him decision was never slow to follow. He came forward with rapid steps. “No, no,” he said, “I will not have this. Nothing should be changed here. Father, take your own place, I beg.” Assuredly not one of us would have resisted an entreaty which was also a command. But our father’s energetic regulating force had before our very faces come in contact with another force the power of which I had never dreamed of, that of immovability. Grandfather did not stir. He had resolved not to stir. Father, receiving no reply, repeated his request more gently,--I can not say more humbly, for at all times, in spite of himself, he wore an air of pride. He received in the face an outburst of that eternal little laugh, with the added accompaniment of the words: “Oho! what a fuss about nothing.” “Father, give me this proof of your affection!” “One place or another, what’s the odds? I am very comfortable here, and here I stay,” he said, adding in a tone of superb disdain, “if you only knew, my poor Michel, how little I care!” He cared for nothing: Tem Bossette had told me so; everything was all one to him; one seat or another, one house or another. Such words as these, uttered before us children, were enough to exasperate our father, but he controlled himself. “There must be a headship in the family,” he urged. “Bah! We live under a republic, and I believe in liberty.” Father saw that it was perfectly useless to insist, and he merely added: “Then you do really refuse to come back to your own place?” “I shall not move.”