"She was, in fact, one of those people of exalted principles, one
of those opinionated puritans of whom England produces so many,
one of those good and insupportable old women who haunt the
tables d'hote of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison
Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean
uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their
petrified vestal manners, their indescribable toilettes, and a
certain odor of india-rubber, which makes one believe that at
night they slip themselves into a case of that material. When I
meet one of these people in a hotel, I act like birds which see a
manikin in a field.

"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, I know not how, but a phrase assuredly
contemptuous, which had sprung to her lips, invented probably by
some confused and mysterious travail of soul. She said: 'That
woman is a demoniac.' This phrase, as uttered by that austere and
sentimental creature, seemed to me irresistibly comic. I, myself,
never called her now anything else but 'the demoniac.' feeling a
singular pleasure in pronouncing this word on seeing her.

"I would ask Mother Lecacheur: 'Well, what is our demoniac about
to-day?' To which my rustic friend would respond, with an air of
having been scandalized: