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.

She told me stories, whilst mending the linen with her long crooked
nimble fingers; her eyes behind her magnifying spectacles, for age had
impaired her sight, appeared enormous to me, strangely profound, double.

She had, as far as I can remember the things which she told me and by
which my childish heart was moved, the large heart of a poor woman. She
told me what had happened in the village, how a cow had escaped from
the cow-house and had been found the next morning in front of Prosper
Malet's windmill, looking at the sails turning, or about a hen's egg
which had been found in the church belfry without any one being able
to understand what creature had been there to lay it, or the story
of Jean-Jean Pila's dog, who had been ten leagues to bring back his
master's breeches which a tramp had stolen whilst they were hanging up
to dry out of doors, after he had been in the rain. She told me these
simple adventures in such a manner, that in my mind they assumed the
proportions of never-to-be-forgotten dramas, of grand and mysterious
poems; and the ingenious stories invented by the poets which my mother
told me in the evening, had none of the flavor, none of the