"
But tante-gra'mere lifted her thin shout against every plea, and, if
pushed, would throw the little pillows at her grand-nephew's wife. What
were fetes and processions to her claims?
"I am the godmother of this child," she declared; "it is for me to say
what she shall do."
The patriarch of a French family was held in such veneration that it was
little less than a crime to cross her. The thralldom did not ruin
Angelique's health, though it grew heavier with her years; but it made
her old in patient endurance and sympathetic insight while she was a
child. She sat pitying and excusing her elder's whims when she should
have been playing. The oldest story in humanity is the story of the
house tyrant,--that usurper often so physically weak that we can carry
him in our arms, yet so strong that he can tumble down the pillars of
family peace many times a day.
There was something monkey-like in the tempers of tante-gra'mere. To see
her grasp her whip and beat her slaves with a good will, but poor
execution, was to smile self-reproachfully as at the antics of a sick
child.
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