me, became quite
ill. Madeleine nursed her devotedly and treated us dreadfully badly.
She was particularly unkind to me, and when she saw me tired of sewing
she would say, trying to turn her nose up, "If mademoiselle objects to
sewing, she had better take a broom and sweep." One Sunday she hit
upon the idea of making me clean the stairs during mass. It was
January. A damp cold which came up from the passages climbed the steps
and got under my dress. I swept as hard as I could to keep warm. The
sound of the harmonium came from the chapel out to me. From time to
time I recognized Madeleine's thin piercing tones, and M. le Cure's
jerky notes. I could follow mass by the singing. All of a sudden
Colette's voice rose above all the others. It was strong and pure. It
broadened, drowned the sound of the harmonium, drowned everything else,
and then seemed to fly away over the linden trees, over the house, and
over the church spire itself. It made me tremble, and when the voice
came down to earth, trembling a little as it went back into the church
and was swept up by the sound of the harmonium again, I began to cry,
sobbing as though I were quite a little girl. Then Madeleine's sharp
voice pierced through the others once more, and I swept and swept hard
as though my broom could scratch out the voice which was so
disagreeable to me.

That was the day Sister Marie-Aimee called me to her. She had been up
in her room for two months. She was a little better, but I noticed
that her eyes did not shine at all. They made me think of a rainbow
which had almost melted away. She made me tell her funny little
stories about what had been going on, and she tried to smile while she
was listening to me, but her lips only smiled on one side of her mouth.
She asked me if I had heard her screaming. "Oh yes," I said, I had
heard her during her illness. She had screamed so dreadfully in the
middle of the night that the whole dormitory had been kept awake.
Madeleine was coming and going. We heard her splashing water about,
and when I asked her what was the matter with Sister Marie-Aimee, she
said, as she hurried past, that she had rheumatism. I remembered at
once that Bonne Justine used to have rheumatism too, but she had never
screamed like that, and I remember wondering whether poor Sister
Marie-Aimee's legs were swollen to three times their size, like those
of Bonne Justine. Her cries got worse and worse. One of them was