We overnighted in small inns along the route in Nevers, Moulins, Le Puy and Avignon. Each evening upon arrival the coachman would uncouple the horses and feed them and put them in the stalls below the inn with hay and water. Such lovely horses – a team of four – all of them dark bay. There was a time when I would have helped the coachman to tend and groom them. Now I couldn’t even tend to myself. I needed help to get anywhere at the inns as there were too many stairs to use my wheelchair so it got left on board the coach. I hate that chair anyway. It is so slow and cumbersome! It cannot cope with rutted ground or grassy terrain. It is a useless thing.

But then I am a useless thing too. I can’t move without the chair. So we are two useless things together.

It was midday when I arrived at Flamants Roses. There was a sign at the gate, but all the same, once we drove up to the house I was in disbelief.

“Is this it?” I asked the coachman. “Really?”

The house was a simple square stone building with a grey slate roof. The stone must have been painted a pale pink at some point, but so much of it was now lost beneath the overgrowth of rambling roses that smothered the façade, it was hard to tell.

The gardens, too, were overgrown as if nobody lived here, and beyond them the rest of the farm seemed like nothing more than a few outlying sheds bordered by swamp waters. I was underwhelmed. I had expected a mansion to rival the grandeur of our family chateau in Fontainebleau. Aunt Mimi seemed to have got the short straw when it came to inheritance. So this was to be my new home?