hypertrophy."

A doctor she had consulted ten years before because she suffered from
palpitations, had hinted at hypertrophy. Since then she had constantly
used this word, though she did not in the least understand what it
meant, and she was always making the baron, and Jeanne, and Rosalie put
their hands on her heart, though its beatings could not be felt, so
buried was it under her bosom. She obstinately refused to be examined by
any other doctor in case he should say she had another malady, and she
spoke of "her hypertrophy" so often that it seemed as though this
affection of the heart were peculiar to her, and belonged to her, like
something unique, to which no one else had any right. The baron and
Jeanne said "my wife's" or "mamma's hypertrophy" in the same way as they
would have spoken of her dress or her umbrella.

She had been very pretty when she was young, and as slender as a reed.
After flirting with the officers of all the regiments of the Empire, she
had read _Corinne_, which had made her cry, and, in a certain measure,
altered her character.

As her waist got bigger her mind became more and more poetical, and
when, through her size, she had to remain nearly all day in her
armchair, she dreamed of love adventures, of which she was always the
heroine; always thinking of the sort she liked best, like a hand-organ
continually repeating the same air. The languishing romances, where they
talk about captives and swallows, always made her cry; and she even
liked some of Beranger's coarse verses, because of the grief they
expressed. She would sit motionless for hours, lost in thought, and she
was very fond of Les Peuples, because it served as a scene for her
dreams, the surrounding woods, the sea, and the waste land reminding her
of Sir Walter Scott's books, which she had lately been reading.

On rainy days she stayed in her room looking over what she called her
"relics." They were all her old letters; those from her father and
mother, the baron's when she was engaged to him, and some others
besides. She kept them in a mahogany escritoire with copper sphinxes at
the corners, and she always used a particular tone when she said:
"Rosalie, bring me my souvenir-drawer."

The maid would open the escritoire, take out the drawer, and place it on
a chair beside her mistress, who slowly read the letters one by one,
occasionally letting fall a tear.

Jeanne sometimes took Rosalie's place and accompanied her mother's
w