Guido Reni Baptism of Christ painting

Guido Reni Baptism of Christ paintingGuido Reni reni Aurora paintingFrancois Boucher Madame de Pompadour painting
officials and military were in farmhouses like his own on the outskirts, but he daily frequented the little park and public gardens. These had been charmingly laid out sixty years before and were, surprisingly, still kept in order by two old gardeners who had stayed on quietly weeding and pruning while the streets were in flames and noisy with machine-gun fire. There were winding paths and specimen trees, statuary, a bandstand, a pond with carp and exotic ducks, and the ornamental cages of what had once been a little zoo. The gardeners kept rabbits in one of these, fowls in another, a red squirrel in a third. The partisans had shown a peculiar solicitude for these gardens; they had cut a bed in the centre of the principal lawn in the shape of the Soviet star and had shot a man whom they caught chopping a rustic seat for firewood. Above the s lay a slope wooded with chestnut and full of paths carefully graded for the convalescent with kiosks every kilometre, where once postcards and and medicinal water had been on sale. Here for an hour a day in the soft autumn sunshine