At length my mother would say to me: "Now, don't stay here all day; you
can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little fresh
air first; don't start reading immediately after your food."
And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, ornamented
here and there, like a gothic font, with a salamander, which modelled upon
a background of crumbling stone the quick relief of its slender,
allegorical body; on the bench without a back, in the shade of a
lilac-tree, in that little corner of the garden which communicated, by a
service door, with the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected soil
rose, in two stages, an outcrop from the house itself and apparently a
separate building, my aunt's back-kitchen. One could see its red-tiled
floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the cave of
Francoise as a little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing with the
offerings of the milkman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come sometimes
from distant villages to dedicate here the first-fruits of their fields.
And its roof was always surmounted by the cooing of a dove.
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