unexpected beard,
growing in improbable tufts, in curly bunches which looked as if they
had been sown by a madman over that great face, the 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, but not like lame people generally do, but like a ship
pitching. When she planted her great, bony, vibrant 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 ship in a storm, 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 limp.

I adored Mother Bellflower. As soon as I was up I used to go 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 head," she would say to me.

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

As far as I can remember from the things which she told me and by which
my childish heart was moved, she had the large heart of a poor woman.
She told me what had happened in the village, how a cow had escaped
from the cowhouse and had been found the next morning in front of
Prosper Malet's mill, looking at the sails turning, or about a hen's
egg which had been found in the church belfry without anyone being able
to understand what creature had been there to lay it, or the queer
story of Jean Pila's dog, who had gone ten leagues to bring back his
master's breeches which a tramp had stolen while they were hanging up
to dry out of doors, after he had been caught 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 th