Short Stories, vol 8 | Page 4

ORPHAN THE BEGGAR
THE RABBIT HIS AVENGER MY UNCLE JULES THE MODEL A
VAGABOND THE FISHING HOLE THE SPASM IN THE WOOD
MARTINE ALL OVER THE PARROT A PIECE OF STRING

CLOCHETTE
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, which are merely old houses with
gable roofs, to which are attached three or four farms lying around
them.
The village, a large village, almost a market town, was a few hundred
yards away, closely circling the church, a red brick church, black with
age.
Well, every Thursday Mother Clochette 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 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
breadth or vigor of the peasant woman's narratives.
Well, one Tuesday, when I had spent all the morning in listening to
Mother Clochette, I wanted to go upstairs to her again during the day
after picking hazelnuts with the manservant in the wood behind the
farm. I remember it all as clearly as what happened only yesterday.
On opening the door of the linen-room, I saw the old seamstress lying
on the ground by the side of her chair, with her face to the ground and
her arms stretched out, but still