“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: