We spent the following days on mopeds going from village to village, each with a name like Truth, Contemplation, Certainty, Courage or Solitude, and asking every French person we met if they knew a Pierre who hadn’t been home since the place was set up. It didn’t take us long to track him down, seeing as the French adult community numbered only 350 Aurovillians, a handful of whom had been pioneers and were still alive. We were told that he no longer went by that name because Mother had given him another, and that he was living in a place called Dream in the Green Belt. That he was a taciturn man, that he lived in a house tucked away in the trees and that he never saw anybody.

When we arrived at his place on our putt-putting scooters, he was busy repairing a chainsaw that was on its last legs. He was skeleton-thin, with a face like sundried leather, but he was in great shape, barefoot, dressed only in an old pair of grease-stained shorts, his long, grey hair pulled back in a ponytail.

He watched us in silence as we got off our mopeds.

With the aging-Christ look he had going on, he exuded an air of majestic detachment, like a metaphysical emanation, which I found a little unsettling, but all good, I didn’t allow myself to be thrown off but instead got straight to it. I introduced myself, summarised my findings and described in minute detail the misfortunes that had befallen his family. I spoke for a long time while he remained silent, scrutinising my face with that wary look which told me within two minutes that even if he hadn’t confirmed his identity, I had found the right person, such was the resemblance to his late sister, despite his considerably fewer kilos and his fifty years of living in India.

In the meantime, Juliette, who incidentally had sworn she would chain herself to a tree if we tried to take her back to France, had started patting a creature three times her own size outside the house, a creature with a ridge of sorts that I ended up identifying with a great deal of difficulty as a domesticated Indian boar. Hildegarde, for her part, had gone off to take a good look around the property with her usual brazenness.

At one point, when I had finished telling my story and he still hadn’t opened his mouth, I finally lost my patience.

‘Don’t you have anything to say? Nothing you want to ask me? Like how’s Mum?’ I asked him, ironically.

‘How’s Mum?’ he repeated, his face fixed in a grimace.

‘She’s on the way out, but she’s hanging in there.’

‘Super.’

‘Is that it?’