Statues

     There, too, not affixed to the stone like the little angels, but detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her pedestal as upon a footstool that had been placed there to save her feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full cheeks, the firm breasts swelling out her draperies like clusters of ripe grapes inside a sack, the narrow forehead, short and impudent nose, deep-set eyes, and hardy, stolid, fearless demeanour of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which imparted to the statue a kindliness that I had not looked to find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose presence there—like the leaves of a climbing plant that have grown up beside some sculpted foliage—seemed deliberately intended to enable us, by confronting us with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of art.

It was Françoise, motionless and erect, framed in the small doorway of the corridor like the statue of a saint in its niche. When we had grown more accustomed to this religious darkness we could discern in her features the disinterested love of humanity, the tender respect for the gentry, which the hope of receiving New Year bounty intensified in the nobler regions of her heart.