"Why should we be obliged to submit to my aunt's caprices and ill-humour?" Louis would sometimes exclaim in a fit of uncontrollable indignation. "Why should we be obliged to live with our relations at all?" asked Madame Delong one day in reply. "Why should we be obliged to keep up any ties of kindred? Why should not brothers and sisters, fathers and children, go each their own way, without troubling themselves about each other? If I were to become peevish, morose, and difficult to please, tell me, Louis, would you be obliged to retain any regard for me?"
"Oh! my dear mother!" cried Louis, wounded at such a supposition.
"My child," replied his mother, "when we once believe that we may quarrel with our duties, because they are difficult, there is none of them that may not be brought into question, for there is none of them, the fulfilment of which may not at some period or other occasion us some inconvenience. Do you not think a nephew owes to his aunt, and an aged aunt, respect and complaisance?"
"Undoubtedly, but—"
"But you would prefer that your aunt should be careful to render this duty more agreeable to you:—this I can conceive; yet a duty is not the less a duty because it is painful."
"I should think my aunt has duties also," said Louis, with a little asperity.
"My son," returned his mother, very seriously, "when you have found out a suitable manner of representing them to her, you will be quite justified in thinking of them."
"What is to be done, then?" Louis would sometimes exclaim, quite out of patience at seeing no means of avoiding what he knew not how to endure. One day, when the heat was extreme, and he was continually wiping his face during a discussion of this kind, his mother said to him, "Six or seven years ago, my dear, you would not have been able to bear such heat as this without repeating every moment, Oh, how hot it is! but now you scarcely pay any attention to it, because you know that it is unbecoming in a man not to show himself superior to petty inconveniences."
Louis was quite old enough to understand his mother's arguments, but he had not yet acquired sufficient resolution to submit to them. When his aunt was out of humour with him, he became angry in his turn; if she wished to subject him to some caprice of hers, he was the more obstinately bent on a contrary whim; and to make him feel it a matter of great importance that his hat should remain on the table, it was only necessary that Madame Ballier should take it into her head to throw it upon a chair.