I groped my way down through the dim house. The light in the studio from the unshuttered roundel windows had been almost brilliant in comparison to the gloom below. I felt like a sightless man, and made for the front door, which had swung to, leaving only a thread of bright sunlight which streaked across the tiled floor of the sitting-room, like a laser beam.

The sun was warm, a chaffinch was chittering away. I felt a strange sense of … what was it? I tried to analyse it then even: a sort of release. Odd. I wandered round the house. It was completely surrounded by a wall, perhaps two metres high: rough stone blocks mixed with old brick … perhaps debris filched from the château ruins across the field?

There was a patch of coarse grass at the back crossed by a sagging clothes-line, pinched by one or two forgotten clothes pegs, stretched loosely between two cherry trees heavy with blossom.

Against the far wall, a low brick shed with a tin roof and a hen run. The door closed, the wire rusted, leaves stuck in the mesh like bits of cloth, relics of a winter storm. An enamel bowl, chipped and bashed, stood neatly on its end beside the door. The run, like the rest of the house, was swept clean, apart from a drift of leaves curled in a corner.

Beyond the wall an orchard, a small paddock through the trees which gradually gave up its tussocky grass to scattered clumps of thorn and scrub, marking the base of the great cliffs which rose high above the place.

Juniper, broom, myrtle, I guessed, studding the scree, climbing as high as they could over the craggy outcrops, until the sheer face of the cliff became too smooth and provided nothing more than narrow ledges on which ravens nested.

But here there was a curious, awe-inspiring sight, almost right behind the house itself. This great mass was split asunder, as if by some giant celestial axe, and a huge ravine tore the mountain open, wide at the top, narrow and dark at the base, tumbled with boulders and piles of shale, stunted pines and greening willow, through which a small stream wound lazily, spilling down in little falls as it swirled out from the throat of the ravine through the fields behind the house and, presumably, east towards the village.

Doubtless the Yves pulsing from the very bowels of the earth.