La Rapet, old was an old washerwoman, watched the dead and the dying of
the neighborhood, and then, as soon as she had sewn her customers into
that linen cloth from which they would emerge no more, she went and took
up her iron to smooth out the linen of the living. Wrinkled like a last
year's apple, spiteful, envious, avaricious with a phenomenal avarice,
bent double, as if she had been broken in half across the loins by the
constant motion of passing the iron over the linen, one might have said
that she had a kind of abnormal and cynical love of a death struggle. She
never spoke of anything but of the people she had seen die, of the
various kinds of deaths at which she had been present, and she related
with the greatest minuteness details which were always similar, just as a
sportsman recounts his luck.

When Honore Bontemps entered her cottage, he found her preparing the
starch for the collars of the women villagers, and he said:
"Good-evening; I hope you are pretty well, Mother Rapet?"

She turned her head round to look at him, and said: "As usual, as usual,
and you?" "Oh! as for me, I am as well as I could wish, but my mother is
not well." "Your mother?" "Yes, my mother!" "What is the matter with
her?" "She is going to turn up her toes, that's what's the matter with
her!"

The old woman took her hands out of the water and asked with sudden
sympathy: "Is she as bad as all that?" "The doctor says she will not last
till morning." "Then she certainly is very bad!" Honore hesitated, for he
wanted to make a few preparatory remarks before coming to his
proposition; but as he could hit upon nothing, he made up his mind
suddenly.