The two faces, one after the other, had come unstuck from the wall and had fallen to the ground. One of them had shattered into a thousand fragments on the asphalt; the other, following a different trajectory, had hurtled into the dense vegetation of the dahlias, which had broken its fall. We had recovered it at dusk and carried it home. Henceforward, during our long summer evenings on the balcony this stone face, with its faded smile and its tender eyes, 'would gaze at us from among the pots of flowers and seem to listen to Charlotte 's stories.

On the other side of the courtyard, overhung with the foliage of lime and poplar trees, stood a large two-story wooden house, quite black with age, with little dark, suspicious windows. It was this and its fellows that the governor had wanted to replace with the graceful lightness of the modern style. In this structure, two centuries old, lived the most picturesque of the babushkas, straight out of fairy tales with their thick shawls, their deathly pale faces, their bony, almost blue hands resting on their knees. When we had occasion to enter this dark dwelling, the bitter, heavy, but not totally unpleasant smell that hung in the cluttered corridors always caught in my throat. It was that of the old life, dark and very primitive in the way it welcomed death, birth, love, and grief. A kind of oppressive climate, but filled with a strange vitality, and in any case the only one that would have suited the inhabitants of this enormous izba. The breath of Russia…

Inside it we were astonished by the number and the asymmetry of the doors that opened onto rooms plunged in smoky shadow. I sensed, almost physically, the carnal density of the lives that intermingled here.