d, said:

"Why did you not invite me to see it?"

BELLFLOWER[17]

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_, and which are merely old houses with
pointed roofs, which are surrounded by three or four farms.

The village, a large village, almost a small market town, was a few
hundred yards off, and lay closely round the church, a red brick church,
which had become black with age.

Well, every Thursday Mother Bellflower 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 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
moustaches stuck on there by mistake.

She limped, but not like 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 balanced herself
at the same time, 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 of her movements.

I adored Mother Bellflower. 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