My aunt might say to her twenty times in a
minute: "The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!", twenty times Eulalie
would retort with: "Knowing your illness as you do, Mme. Octave, you will
live to be a hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only yesterday." For one
of Eulalie's most rooted beliefs, and one that the formidable list of
corrections which her experience must have compiled was powerless to
eradicate, was that Mme. Sazerat's name was really Mme. Sazerin.
"I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she preferred
to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.
And since, besides this, Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to
distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place
regularly every Sunday, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent
them, were for my aunt a pleasure the prospect of which kept her on those
days in a state of expectation, appetising enough to begin with, but at
once changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if Eulalie
were a minute late in coming. For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of
waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never cease from
looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of her symptoms
in turn.
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