‘Suzie, Suzie,’ Micheline was calling her. ‘We need you and Sabine to carry the water.’

By the time she returned, Lou Moussou had been lowered to the ground, the trough righted, hollow-side up, and he had been placed within it, like a baby in its bath. The water was simmering in the boiler and Sabine and Suzie were employed carrying the buckets to douse him. When he was submerged, the Jouanels, Henri and Florence scrubbed furiously to lift off the bristles, which were gathered up by Micheline and put aside for use as brushes. While this was going on, Madame Ariane slowly, cautiously, carried the great basin of blood up to Micheline’s kitchen. The girls pumped up more water.

The aunts were seated in the kitchen in front of the fire ready to prepare the lunch. Suzie gratefully undertook the task of setting the table, and stirring the soup, while Madame de Cazalle fried the boudin and the apples. Then the men, and Sabine who had remained outside with them, were called in to eat. They did not linger over the meal, although the Jouanels ate and praised heartily. Micheline smiled a little. The worst was over and she liked knowledgeable appreciation of her cooking better than anything.

Lunch finished, the working party returned to the winepress. Madame Ariane climbed the ladder into the loft and released the rope of the pulley from its anchorage. Lou Moussou, white, naked and hairless, more human than ever, was tipped out of his bath by Henri and Little Mr Jouanel and dragged by his back legs to the pulley. The metal hook on the end of the rope was inserted under the ligatures around his hind legs, and Big Mr Jouanel and Florence hauled him to the vertical until his snout just touched the ground.

Sabine and Madame Ariane spread out a cloth in front of him and Big Mr Jouanel took up another knife from the battery, a long one this time. They all stood back, respectfully, while he made a cut, not swift and slashing as before but with deliberation, down the whole length of Lou Moussou’s belly, so that his entrails tumbled out, steaming, writhing, onto the cloth, which Micheline gathered up by its corners. With Florence’s help, she carried it to a trestle table set up in one corner, where she distributed yards of viscera to the children. She instructed Suzie how to take her pail of intestines and rinse them carefully, turning them inside out without piercing them, so that the chitterlings would form perfectly clean, unbroken containers for the sausages she would make.

Suzie had settled into a routine of horror. Lou Moussou’s shrieks of agony and the sound of the pulsing of his blood still echoed in her ears as she worked, her fingers blue with cold and corrugated by the water, as she rolled and turned, rolled and turned.

The Jouanels were butchering as rapidly as they could, with Henri their assistant. Micheline and Florence supervised their amateur workers and took on the skilled tasks themselves. The pluck was handled by Micheline, who, with her tiny knife, cut the heart from the lungs, put the liver aside for pates and piled up the web-like membrane from the lungs that she used to wrap her stuffings and faggots. By five o’clock when darkness fell, Lou Moussou had been divided into his component parts. The Jouanels departed, each with a sizeable joint of pork rolled up in his apron. They joked about an identity check on the way home.