WHEN SISTER CLAVEL lays out her tidy uniform, Madeleine slips it neatly over her head, and then, with exuberance, her bulky fists burst through the careful seams, like twin whale snouts breaking the surface. So it is decided that she must have special dresses made for her, with long and liquid sleeves like those of an Oriental concubine. The diminutive tailor clangs the convent bell and Sister Clavel ushers him up the back stairwell and into a sunlit room, where Madeleine awaits him, perched on a tiny embroidered stool, wearing nothing but her stockings. Crouching, the tailor spreads out his tools, and with an irritating air of indifference, goes about measuring Madeleine's dimensions. She wonders if she can be seen from outside. She pictures the next-door neighbor trodding home, miserable, and then, by chance, he looks up. His smile spreads: from across the square, the schoolboys let out a blissful, unanimous sigh in the middle of their verb conjugations. The nursemaids who perambulate the park peer coyly from beneath their bonnets, squeezing each other's fingers and giggling naughtily. And the degenerate man, the one who waits by the rhododendron bushes, swivels his eyes up to her window, his neck supple as an owl's, and his cock rises triumphantly out of his breeches. Meanwhile her bare buttocks warm in a sunbeam and the tailor's deft fingers slip and alight upon her skin. Madeleine feels, this is divine.
But when the dresses arrive, cocooned in crisp tissue paper, they are not the gossamer confections that she has imagined; indeed, they make her appear even more uncanny: half-child, half-beast. The bodice and skirt are indistinguishable from the convent uniform, austere and shapeless and busy with buttons, but the arms: they droop like two flaccid elephant ears.