How was it that my relatives were mad enough to talk politics every time they met? My grandmother was a governmental Orléanist, my grandfather a most passionate Imperialist, and it was amusing to hear him say with his lisping accent: “The emperor!” My father declared himself a Jacobite.
No one can imagine the scenes which took place between them. I can well remember my fright at the first I witnessed; I screamed and sobbed, but none of them heard me. One day (I was about four or five years old) I climbed upon the table and put one foot in a dish and with the other I rattled the glasses and plates. The discussion, or rather the quarrel, ceased immediately as by a miracle, my grandfather, grandmother, and father being convulsed with laughter.
My mother alone, of whom I stood greatly in awe, snatched me off the table roughly and was going to whip me, but in an instant I was taken from her by three people, and from that day I concluded I was very foolish to be afraid of her, as the others would always protect me from her severity.
The years went by without bringing any great changes in our habits. I had become used to the “family dramas” all the more easily because, by common accord, I was not included in their sulks, and had no part in their quarrels.
I was about six years old when my grandfather, my grandmother, and my father each tried in turn to convert me to his or her own ideas. I am not exaggerating. It is true that when six and a half years old I was in the second division of the second class of my school, that I knew many things of the kind one can accumulate in the memory, which was in my case an exceptional gift. Added to this, my grandmother and my father crammed me with everything with which it is possible to fill an unhappy child’s mind.
I remember that often of an evening, after dinner, while my grandfather and grandmother were playing their game of “Imperiale,” which they always did before my grandfather went to his club, I would prepare my books and papers as grandmother desired, for since my flight to Caumenchon she had never given me an order. As soon as grandfather had gone I would work with her until I fell asleep over my books.
Seeing this preparation, grandfather would always say: “Now, phenomenon, walk to your execution, pile up your instruments of torture, and don’t forget a single one!” And, going away, he would add: “They will kill the child, they will kill her!”
When by chance grandfather blamed any act of grandmother’s he never addressed himself directly to her. The pronouns they or one allowed him to appear unattacked if she cut him with one of her words, sharp as a whip-lash, and to reply without answering her personally.
Whenever my grandparents were angry with each other these pronouns, they or one, were of the greatest use. They spoke at, not to, each other, and so avoided an open quarrel. They would say, for instance, during one of their sulks, which would sometimes last for several days:
Grandmother: “Will one be at home at such an hour?”