‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay and help like everyone else.’

The Jouanels, the pig-killers, were twins, in their sixties, from Lepech Perdrissou. They were both tiny men of immense strength, with leathery skins criss-crossed by hundreds of lines and smiling dark brown eyes. They laughed and joked all the time, sometimes adding comments in the patois to Micheline and Henri on the performance of the gentry. The whole household made its way down to the winepress, where the Mr Jouanels took off their coats and wrapped themselves in their white aprons.

Suzie did not witness the moment of betrayal when Henri, Micheline, Florence and Little Mr Jouanel went into the sty to bind the victim, but she heard the roar of outrage, the squeals of fury, the breathless commands of Mr Jouanel and Henri as they struggled with Lou Moussou. She suffered with him, his terror and bewilderment, and felt the rough stones of the path scoring his skin as he was hauled down to the winepress. She only saw him at last when he was dragged in on his back, his trotters tied together across his belly.

The next stage was the most difficult moment of the day, for he had to be lifted onto the killing block and it took everyone, both Mr Jouanels, Henri, Micheline, Florence and Madame Ariane, to achieve it. Even Sabine, dancing round the group, pulled on one bound leg to bring him into position. Suzie shivered by the door, unable to bring herself to assist, unable to stop herself from looking.

The screaming of the prey and the shouts of his torturers died away. The extra assistants backed away, leaving the four guards on the four quarters. To Suzie the victim looked hideously human, a grotesquely fat baby, lying on his back, his trotters joined like beseeching hands, his ears flapped back and his snout in the air.

Big Mr Jouanel picked up one of the knives, testing its sharpness by laying the side of the blade against the ball of his thumb. Sabine picked up a large enamel basin and stood behind him. In their white aprons, moving in unison, the two of them looked like the priest and the altar boy who officiated at the services in the village church.

With a single, swift gesture, Mr Jouanel slit the side of Lou Moussou’s upturned throat. He stepped aside and Sabine moved forward with the basin, holding it so that it caught the fountain of blood that pulsed out of the wound. She was spattered by drops that showered upwards as the force of the blood hit the pool that had already run into the pan. Lou Moussou shrieked, his harsh scream ululating in time to the spurting of the blood. Everyone watched in silence for the long minutes until the flow reduced to a trickle and the cry to a sob, then to silence.

Suzie, who watched throughout the drawn-out agony and death of Lou Moussou, ran out of the winepress, up the path, into his sty. Here she crouched in the straw, still warm and redolent of his presence, putting her head on her bent knees.