ife of complete inertia which she led she
attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance,
endowed them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to
keep them secret, and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate
them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue
which was her sole form of activity. Unfortunately, having formed the
habit of thinking aloud, she did not always take care to see that there
was no one in the adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying
to herself: "I must not forget that I never slept a wink"--for "never
sleeping a wink" was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted
and respected in our household vocabulary; in the morning Francoise
would not 'call' her, but would simply 'come to' her; during the day,
when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that she wished
to 'be quiet' or to 'rest'; and when in conversation she so far forgot
herself as to say "what made me wake up," or "I dreamed that," she would
flush and at once correct herself.

After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Francoise would
be making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' she would ask
instead for her 'tisane,' and it would be my duty to shake out of
the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom
required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had
twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale
flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping
them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered
their own appearance, assumed those instead of the most incongruous
things imaginable, as though the transparent wings of flies or the blank
sides of labels or the petals of roses had been collected and pounded,
or interwoven as birds weave the material for their nests. A
thousand trifling little details--the charming prodigality of the
chemist--details which would have been eliminated from an artificial
preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished to read the
name of a person whom one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were
indeed real lime-blossoms, like those I had seen, when coming from the
train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered, but only because they were not
imitations but the very same blossoms, which had grown old. And as each
new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these
litt