“The heavy fountain pen, the greyish-white cartridge paper and the black ink were the only visible reminders of her former daily life. Everything else, her delicatessen luxuries, her clothes, had their special places out of sight. Her study at the bergerie, with its views westwards down the valley towards St Privat, was five times the size of this room and could barely accommodate her books and her papers; beyond, the huge kitchen with its jambons de montagne hung on the beams, demijohns of olive oil on the stone floor, and scorpions sometimes nestling in the cupboards; the living room which took up all of the old barn where a hundred locals once gathered at the end of the boar hunt; her bedroom with the four-poster bed and french windows of stained glass, and the guest rooms through all of which, over the years, her possessions flowed and spread; the room where she pressed her flowers; the hut with gardening tools in the orchard of almond and olives, and near that, the henhouse that looked like a miniature dovecote – all this boiled down, stripped away, to one free-standing bookcase, a tallboy of clothes she never wore, a steamer trunk no one was allowed to look inside, and a tiny fridge.”
Zeer aan te bevelen!!