George Sand said that people could be classified according to whether they aspired to live in a cottage or in a palace. But the question is more complex than that. When we live in a manor house we dream of a cottage, and when we live in a cottage we dream of a palace. Better still, we all have our cottage moments and our palace moments. We descend to living close to the ground, on the floor of a cottage, then would like to dominate the entire horizon from a castle in Spain. And when reading has given us countless inhabited places, we know how to let the dialectics of cottage and manor sound
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