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.