Clochette
They are strange things, these old memories that haunt our minds and will not be dismissed.
This is such an old one, so old that I cannot understand why it remains in my mind so vividly and so tenaciously. I have seen so many sinister things, so many moving and terrible things since, that it astonishes me to find that I cannot pass a day, one single day, without a vision of Mother Clochette appearing before me in her habit as I knew her once upon a time, so long ago, when I was ten or twelve years old.
She was an old dressmaker who came to my parents’ house once a week, every Tuesday, to do the mending. My parents lived in one of those country houses called châteaux, which are merely old houses with high pointed roofs, surrounded by four or five dependent farms.
The village, a large village, a small town, stood some few hundred yards away, huddled round the church, whose red bricks were blackened by time.
Every Tuesday, then, Mother Clochette arrived between half past six and seven o’clock in the morning, and went directly to the linen room to begin her work.
She was a tall thin woman, bearded—covered with hair, rather, her beard growing everywhere on her face. It was an amazing beard, an unexpected beard, bursting out into incredible bunches and curling tufts of hair that looked as if a madman had scattered them across a vast face like the face of a petticoated policeman. She had hair on her nose, under her nose, round her nose, on her chin, on her cheeks; and her eyebrows, extravagantly long and thick, bushy and bristling and quite grey, looked like nothing on earth but a pair of moustaches planted there in error.
She limped, not just an ordinary cripple’s limp, but like a ship riding at the anchor. When she rested the weight of her bony lopsided body on her one good leg, she seemed to be gathering herself to rise on a monstrous wave; then she plunged all at once on the verge of disappearing into an abyss: she buried herself in the earth. Added to which, she swayed so wildly that her gait irresistibly suggested the thought of a storm; and her head, always covered with an enormous white bonnet, with its ribbons floating down her back, appeared to cross the horizon from north to south, and south to north, with her every movement.
I adored this Mother Clochette. As soon as I got up, I climbed to the linen room, where I found her installed, sewing, a warming-pan under her feet. As soon as I arrived, she made me take this warming-pan and seat myself on it so that I should not catch cold in this great cold room, right under the roof.
“It draws the blood from the head,” she said.
She told me stories, while she stitched away at the linen with her long crooked fingers that moved so swiftly; the eyes behind her magnifying-spectacles—age had weakened her sight—seemed to me enormous, strangely deep, double the usual size.
She had, so much I can recall from the things she told me, things that stirred my child’s heart, the kindly soul of a humble woman. She saw life with a crude simplicity. She told me the happenings of the town, the story of a cow that ran away from the stable and was found one morning in front of Prosper Malet’s mill, watching the wooden sails go round, or the story of the hen’s egg discovered in the belfry of the church, no one ever being able to understand what sort of a fowl had gone there to lay it, or the story of Jean-Jean Pilar’s dog who had recaptured ten leagues from the village the breeches that a passerby had stolen from his master while they were drying before the door after a shower of rain. She told me these simple stories in such a way that they assumed in my mind the stature of unforgettable dramas, of sublime and mysterious poems; and the ingenious tales invented by poets that my mother told me in the evenings had not the savour, the breadth, the force of the peasant woman’s narratives.
But one Tuesday, as I had spent the whole morning listening to Mother Clochette, I took it into my head to go and see her again later in the day, after gathering walnuts with our manservant in Hallets Wood behind Noirpré farm. I remember it all as vividly as the happenings of yesterday.
But when I opened the door of the linen room I saw the old dressmaker stretched out on the floor beside her chair, face downwards, her arms flung out, one hand still holding a needle, the other one of my shirts. One of her legs, blue-stockinged, the long one I am sure, was lying under her chair; and her spectacles had rolled far away from her and were glittering beside the wall.
I ran away, screaming wildly. People came running up, and a few minutes later I was told that Mother Clochette was dead.
I could not tell you what profound grief, poignant dreadful grief, seized my childish heart. I crept downstairs to the drawing room and hid myself in a dark corner, in the depths of a vast old couch where I knelt and cried. I must have been there a long time, for it grew dark.
Suddenly a lamp was brought in, but no one saw me and I heard my father and mother talking to the doctor, whose voice I recognised.
They had sent to fetch him at once and he was explaining the cause of the accident. I could not understand more of it than that. Then he sat down, and accepted a glass of wine and a biscuit.
He went on talking, and what he said then remains and will remain graven on my heart till I die. I believe that I can reproduce almost exactly the phrases he used.
“Poor woman,” he said. “She was my first patient in this place. She broke her leg the day I arrived, and I hadn’t had time to wash my hands after getting out of the coach when I was sent for in great haste, for it was serious, very serious.
“She was seventeen years old, and she was a beautiful girl, very beautiful, very beautiful indeed. It’s almost incredible, isn’t it? As for the story, I’ve never told it, and no one has ever known it except me—and one other person who is no longer living in the district. Now that she is dead, there’s no need for discretion.
“At that time a young assistant schoolmaster had just come to the town; he was a handsome fellow, with the figure of a sergeant-major. All the girls were running after him, and he looked down his nose at them; besides, he was afraid of his superior, old Grabu, the head master, who often got out of bed the wrong side.
“Old Grabu was even then employing as dressmaker the fair Hortense, who has just died in your house: she was nicknamed Clochette later, after her accident. The young assistant was pleased to notice the beautiful child, who was doubtless flattered at being chosen out by this superb scorner of women: she loved him at once and he arranged a first meeting in the school loft, after dark, at the end of one of her sewing days.
“So she made a show of going home, but instead of going downstairs and leaving Grabu’s house, she went up the stairs and hid herself in the hay to wait for her love. He was very soon with her and had begun to tell her how much he loved her when the door of this loft opened and the head master appeared and asked:
“ ‘What are you doing up here, Sigisbert?’
“The young assistant felt that he was caught: at his wit’s end, he made the stupid answer:
“ ‘I came up here for a little rest in the hay, Monsieur Grabu.’
“The loft was very high, very big and completely dark; and Sigisbert thrust the frightened young girl as far back as possible, repeating: ‘Get back, hide yourself. I shall lose my job, do you hear? Hide yourself, can’t you?’
“The head master heard him murmuring and added: ‘So you’re not here alone?’
“ ‘Of course I am, Monsieur Grabu.’
“ ‘Of course you’re not: you’re speaking to someone.’
“ ‘I swear I am, Monsieur Grabu.’
“ ‘I’ll soon find out,’ answered the old man; he shut and locked the door and went down to get a candle.
“Then the young man turned coward, as often happens in these affairs, and lost his head. It seems that he flew into a rage at once and repeated: ‘Hide yourself so that he can’t find you. You’ll have me starving all the rest of my life. You’ll ruin my career. … Hide yourself, I tell you.’
“They heard the key turning in the lock again.
“Hortense ran to the loft door that gave on to the street, opened it quickly and said in a low resolute voice:
“ ‘Come and pick me up when he’s gone.’
“And jumped.
“Old Grabu found no one and went down again, a very surprised man.
“A quarter of an hour later, M. Sigisbert came to my house and related the adventure. The young girl was still at the foot of the wall, unable to lift herself, having fallen two stories. I went with him to see her. He wept copiously, and I carried the unfortunate girl to my house: her right leg was broken in three places and the bone had pierced the flesh. She made no complaint, only saying with heroic patience: ‘I’m being punished, well punished.’
“I sent for the sewing girl’s parents to come and help, and told them a tale of a runaway carriage which had knocked her down and maimed her before my door.
“The tale was believed, and for a whole month the police sought vainly for the author of the accident.
“There you are! And I consider that this woman was a heroine, of the company of women whose noble deeds are recorded in history.
“This was her only love affair. She died a virgin. She is a martyr, a great soul, a sublime Vestal. And if I did not honour her above anyone I would not have told you this story, which I would never have told anyone while she lived, for reasons you can understand.”
The doctor was silent. Mamma wept. Papa uttered some words that I could not catch; then they went away.
I remained kneeling on my couch sobbing, while I listened to strange sounds on the staircase—heavy footsteps and muffled thumps.
They were carrying away the body of Clochette.