But the moment Françoise herself was near me, some demon would urge me to try to make her angry, and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I regretted my aunt’s death because she had been a good woman in spite of her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that she might have been my aunt and yet have seemed to me so odious that her death would not have caused me a moment’s sorrow—statements which, in a book, would have struck me as inept.