It happened that one night after ten hours’ walking, I came across a lonely little dwelling at the bottom of a narrow valley two or three miles inland. The two steep sides of the mountain, covered as they were with bush, fallen rocks and tall trees, enclosed this sombre, lugubrious ravine like two dark walls. Around the cottage were a few vines, a little garden and, further off, a few chestnut trees – more than enough to live on in this impoverished land. The elderly woman who received me looked somewhat severe, but unusually clean. The man who had been sitting in a rush-bottomed chair got up to greet me, then sat down again in silence. His companion said to me: “Do excuse him. He’s deaf now, I’m afraid. He’s eighty-two.” She spoke proper French, which surprised me.

“You’re not from Corsica, then, I gather?”

“No, we’re from the Continent originally. But we’ve lived here for fifty years.”

A feeling of fear and anguish gripped me at the thought of fifty years spent in this dark hole so far from towns and people. An old shepherd came to join us and we sat down to a single course – a thick soup of cabbage, potato and bacon.

When this brief meal was over I went to sit outside the front door. I was in low spirits as I contemplated the bleak landscape and was saddened as travellers sometimes are on certain evenings in a desolate place. You get the feeling that everything – human existence and the universe itself – is about to come to an end. You’re suddenly struck by the misery of life, the isolation in which we all live, the nothingness of it all and the desperate loneliness in hearts deluded by dreams until death.

The old woman joined me. Even in the pessimistic mood I was in I could feel keen curiosity stirring within me.

“So you’re from France, are you?” she said.

“Yes, I’m here for pleasure.”

“Are you from Paris, by any chance?”

“No, from Nancy.”

This news seemed to have an extraordinary effect on her. It wasn’t anything you could put your finger on, just an impression I got.

She continued, speaking very slowly: “From Nancy, did you say?”

The man appeared at the door, impassive as the deaf inevitably are.

She went on: “Never mind. He can’t hear.” Then, after a few moments: “So, do you know many people in Nancy?”

“Oh yes. Practically everybody.”

“The Saint-Allaizes?”

“Very well. They were friends of my father.”

“What’s your name, did you say?”

I gave it. She stared at me, then, in the low voice with which we speak our memories, she said: “I know that name very well. Very well indeed. What about the Brisemares, what’s become of them, then?”

“All dead now, I’m afraid.”

“Ah! And the Sirmonts, do you know them?”

“Yes. The latest Sirmont’s now a general.”