Clochette
the kiss
the Legion of honor
the Test
found on A drowned man
the orphan
the beggar
the rabbit
his avenger
my uncle Jules
the model
A vagabond
the fishing hole
the spasm
in the wood
Martine
all over
the parrot
A piece of string
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.
