se little unforeseen
facts, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never
afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it
the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the
logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time
to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imagining other, minor
catastrophes, which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile
herself with a sudden suspicion that Francoise had been robbing her,
that she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer
red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards by
herself, of playing her own and her adversary's hands at once, she would
first stammer out Francoise's awkward apologies, and then reply to them
with such a fiery indignation that any of us who happened to intrude
upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration,
her eyes blazing, her false hair pushed awry and exposing the baldness
of her brows. Francoise must often, from the next room, have heard these
mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words
would not have relieved my aunt's feelings sufficiently, had they been
allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree
of substance and reality which she added to them by murmuring them
half-aloud. Sometimes, however, even these counterpane dramas would not
satisfy my aunt; she must see her work staged. And so, on a Sunday,
with all the doors mysteriously closed, she would confide in Eulalie her
doubts of Francoise's integrity and her determination to be rid of her,
and on another day she would confide in Francoise her suspicions of the
disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would very soon be closed
for good. A few days more, and, disgusted with her latest confidant, she
would again be 'as thick as thieves' with the traitor, while, before the
next performance, the two would once more have changed their parts. But
the suspicions which Eulalie might occasionally breed in her were no
more than a fire of straw, which must soon subside for lack of fuel,
since Eulalie was not living with her in the house. It was a very
different matter when the suspect was Francoise, of whose presence under
the same roof as herself my aunt was perpetually conscious, while for
fear of catching cold, were she to leave her bed, she would never dare
go downstairs to the kitchen to see for herse