How strange those old recollections are which haunt us, without our being able to get rid
of them.
This one is so very old that I cannot understand how it has clung so vividly and
tenaciously to my memory. Since then I have seen so many sinister things, which were
either affecting or terrible, that I am astonished at not being able to pass a single day
without the face of Mother Bellflower recurring to my mind's eye, just as I knew her
formerly, now so long ago, when I was ten or twelve years old.
She was an old seamstress who came to my parents' house once a week, every Thursday,
to mend the linen. My parents lived in one of those country houses called chateaux,
which are merely old houses with gable roofs, to which are attached three or four farms
lying around them.
The village, a large village, almost a market town, was a few hundred yards away, closely
circling the church, a red brick church, black with age.
Well, every Thursday Mother Clochette came between half-past six and seven in the
morning, and went immediately into the linen-room and began to work. She was a tall,
thin, bearded or rather hairy woman, for she had a beard all over her face, a surprising, an
unexpected beard, growing in improbable tufts, in curly bunches which looked as if they
had been sown by a madman over that great face of a gendarme in petticoats. She had
them on her nose, under her nose, round her nose, on her chin, on her cheeks; and her
eyebrows, which were extraordinarily thick and long, and quite gray, bushy and bristling,
looked exactly like a pair of mustaches stuck on there by mistake.
She limped, not as lame people generally do, but like a ship at anchor. When she planted
her great, bony, swerving body on her sound leg, she seemed to be preparing to mount
some enormous wave, and then suddenly she dipped as if to disappear in an abyss, and
buried herself in the ground. Her walk reminded one of a storm, as she swayed about, and
her head, which was always covered with an enormous white cap, whose ribbons
fluttered down her back, seemed to traverse the horizon from north to south and from
south to north, at each step.
I adored Mother Clochette. As soon as I was up I went into the linen- room where I found
her installed at work, with a foot-warmer under her feet. As soon as I arrived, she made
me take the foot-warmer and sit upon it, so that I might not catch cold in that large, chilly
room under the roof.
"That draws the blood from your throat," she said to me.
