This woman, however, appeared so singular that she did not displease me.

Madame Lecacheur, hostile by instinct to everything that was not rustic,
felt in her narrow soul a kind of hatred for the ecstatic extravagances
of the old girl. She had found a phrase by which to describe her, a
phrase assuredly contemptible, which she had got, I know not whence,
upon her lips, invented by I know not what confused and mysterious
travail of soul. She said: "That woman is a demoniac." This phrase,
culled by that austere and sentimental creature, seemed to me
irresistibly comic. I myself, never called her now anything else, but
"the demoniac," exercising a singular pleasure in pronouncing aloud this
word on perceiving her.

I would ask Mother Lecacheur: "Well, what is our demoniac about to-day?"

To which my rustic friend responded, with an air of having been
scandalized:

"What do you think, sir, she has picked up a toad which has had its paw
battered, and carried it to her room, and has put it in her wash-stand,
and dressed it up like a man. If that is not profanation, I should like
to know what is!"

On another occasion, when walking along the Falaise, she had bought a
large fish which had just been caught, simply to throw it back into the
sea again. The sailor, from whom she had bought it, though paid
handsomely, was greatly provoked at this act, more exasperated, indeed,
than if she had put her hand into his pocket and taken his money. For a
whole month he could not speak of the circumstance without getting into
a fury and denouncing it as an outrage. Oh yes! She was indeed a
demoniac, this Miss Harriet, and Mother Lecacheur must have had an
inspiration of genius in thus christening her.

The stable-boy, who was called Sapeur, because he had served in Africa
in his youth, entertained other aversions. He said, with a roguish air:
"She is an old hag who has lived her days."

If the poor woman had but known!

The little, kind-hearted Celeste, did not wait upon her willingly, but I
was never able to understand why. Probably, her only reason was that she
was a stranger, of another race, of a different tongue, and of another
religion. She was, in good truth, a demoniac!

She passed her time wandering about the country, adoring and searching
for God in nature. I found her one evening on her knees in a cluster of
bushes. Having discovered something red through the leaves, I brushed
aside the branches and Miss Harriet at once