The word “tradition” covered it all, as it covered so many things, some useful, some foolish.
Traditions are not killed by facts.
They won’t listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don’t want the truth; they want their traditions.
The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.