‘What sort of a question is that to ask me at six in the morning? Yes, I knew him, but I was very young. When my sister used to come to the washhouse carrying him on her back, she would wedge him between two piles of linen so he wouldn’t fall over. But because I was only knee high to a grasshopper and couldn’t stop staring at the hole in his face, because his face was at exactly the same height as mine, they scolded me – and how that made him laugh . . . laugh and laugh . . . and believe me, that was terrifying!’

‘You’ve already told me about that, but what I want to know is where he came from.’

‘What do you mean where he came from? He came from here, of course!’

‘Granny, de Rigny is not a name from around here!’

‘Your grandfather was a bastard. The baby of a single mother, a Malgorn girl, which she had in Paris, where she’d gone to look for work. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916. His mother looked after him for years, but when it became too difficult she came back here to find him a wife who could take over the reins. He was already an old man and it was my sister he married. But she truly loved your grandfather Renan; apparently he was a very funny man.’

‘I haven’t ever seen Corentine’s tomb. Will you show me?’

And after a visit to the bakery, the minimart and the newsagency, we found ourselves at the cemetery. The tomb, or rather the funerary chapel, of my great-grandmother, was right there at the entrance, a sort of small house to shelter her from the rain.

‘Is that it?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘It’s unbelievable!’

What I didn’t add was that in that very mausoleum, away from prying looks, I had smoked my first fags and sniffed ether with my mates. Thank you, Corentine Malgorn, born 1850, for providing the youth of the day with shelter from the rain and refuge from their parents’ gaze since 1924!

I ventured into the structure I knew so well.

Despite the fact that the memorial porcelain portrait had borne witness to all my youthful shenanigans, I’d never made the connection with anybody in my family. Corentine was not portrayed in the traditional white headdress and black outfit featured on all the other old gravestones, but instead was dressed as a chic, bourgeois woman.

‘Looks like she clearly had means, then, if she could afford to have something like this built. But why did she have herself buried all alone and not with the other Malgorns in the cemetery?’

‘Because they’d quarrelled, I think; ask your father, it’s his grandmother, after all.’