Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
In this beautiful widescreen black-and-white film (which uses no camera movement at all) Jeanne Moreau is "mademoiselle," a repressed and frustrated schoolteacher/psychopath. Her lust for an Italian woodcutter drives her to set fires just so she can watch him with his shirt off when he helps put out the fires. She spies on him in the forest where he cuts down trees until one day she engineers a "chance" meeting. As they talk she is curious to see a bulge under his shirt above his waist. He lifts his shirt and pulls out a snake he says he found in the sun. He tells her it's nice and then practically forces her to touch it, putting it in her hand. I don't think snake phallic symbolism could ever get more obvious than this.
I'm pretty sure that the snake is a Four-lined snake, Europe's largest nonvenomous snake, found in Italy but not France where the movie takes place and where it was filmed.