And I have no doubt that then--just as a desire to have her
potatoes served with bechamel sauce, for a change, would be formed,
ultimately, from the pleasure she found in the daily reappearance of those
mashed potatoes of which she was never 'tired'--she would extract from the
accumulation of those monotonous days (on which she so much depended) a
keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, instantaneous in its
happening, but violent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for
all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to her
health, but to which she could never make up her mind without some such
stimulus. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long
luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she
felt 'well' and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was
being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already
perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone
standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty
of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from
her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined
with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of her
affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal
stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our
obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and
priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to be
lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer at
her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall.
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