Her Name is Fifi, Fifi Mercier, but she says she is called La Grande Fifi; and that is what we call her among ourselves. If you met her on the hill, on the street, out shopping, you see in the distance a stout active little lady, in her middle fifties, with a broad pretty face, untidy white hair, dark eyes, a ready smile. She wears an old blue dress, with a peep of petticoat behind, cotton stockings and canvas shoes.

This is what she looks like; but you don’t know her. She is a romantic figure. She runs a students’ boarding-house on the stiff Lausanne slopes, in a decent middle-class house, where there are some quiet families. But on the ground floor is a retired postman in poor health, who thinks everyone is a German; and on the top floor is a woman who causes traffic congestion on the stairs, especially on market days. She is a witch-doctor, who cures farm animals at a distance, if the farmers bring her a knot of hair or bit of hide; she cures and protects from sickness and evil by swinging a watch. She makes good money and the farmers swear by her: ‘If we did not have her, all the animals would die of foot-rot.’ The witch makes better money than La Grande Fifi, who is so worried about taxes and rent that she has bad dreams. She dreams that her lodgers are sick and go to the kitchen to heat some milk and barley sugar (a cure for coughs). She dreams she sees them there and says, ‘You must pack, I have to go, I am turned out for not paying the rent; I am sorry for you when you are so sick.’ This is her worry. She has four students, and a married couple who do their own cooking on a picnic stove in the handsome large washroom. The students eat with her in the dining-room; their payments are irregular but they do their best.