My maternal grandfather seems to have been (I met him only once, when i was less than 2) an entirely admirable and lovable man. (It's from him that i get my music genes [i still have much of his piano music, a volume of Beethoven Piano sonatas etc ect] and my bald X-chromosome) And a resolute feminist (in striking contrast to my paternal grandfather who was a prominent and vociferous anti-suffragist). Language buffs reading this page may know that, in French, one uses the feminine third person plural form `elles' only when every single one of the humans being denoted is female. My grandfather took the view that the rule should be that one would use the elles form as long as a simple majority of the humans being denoted consisted of females.

But never mind that! My mother married my father (he wasn't my father when she married him but etc etc) who was — if not then, but later — an anglican. No recorded reaction from my Grandfather, who was (i think) a ``Feuerbachian'' atheist (my mother's expression) like his father. So far so good. However, my mother's younger sister Suzanne then married a French Catholic and my grandfather went through the roof. My mother remonstrated with him — for once in her life, reasonably — on the grounds that she had married a believer and the sky had not fallen in, and besides: ``Tu es libre-penseur'' [in the suisse-romande one tutoye everyone to whom one acknowledges a blood relationship] so what should it matter what flavour of believer she married? My grandfather's reply has passed into legend

``Bien entendu je suis libre-penseur, mais je suis libre-penseur protestant!!''

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