Before electricity reached the French countryside, every household had a piece like this. Found in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, it's a 19th-century hand-built candle holder, the wooden block hollowed out and ringed in iron, the candle dropped into the hole at the top and the whole thing carried from room to room like a small portable lamp. Imagine the hours it spent in a hand, carried up a stone staircase to bed, set down on a kitchen table at dinner, lit again at dawn - a hundred years of evenings before a switch on the wall replaced it. Sylvie sets it on a side table with a fresh pillar candle inside, lit at dusk and burned down through the evening.
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