Women everywhere. Women like he had never seen before: tall, thin, their dark hair cut level with the nape of their neck, their faces etched by the sun. They all wore the same black outfit, like the women he had seen on Corsica, except that these women wore their skirts to just below their knee. As the more elderly among them scattered to the four corners of the island in endless black lines, the younger ones flocked around this moustachioed man with his flame-red hair who had just miraculously appeared in the centre of their village. They were all openly smiling at him, their gestures and glances imbued with the knowing experience of the most brazen prostitutes. Apart from a few old men and young children, there was not a single man to be seen. It was a garden of Eden populated entirely by beautiful, flirtatious, strong-smelling farmgirls, their hair ill-kempt under their little white bonnets.

It had been a rough crossing, but Jules de Brassac had landed in paradise.

Unable to believe his luck, he allowed himself to be led off by a flock of merry young women to a bar called Le Kastel, which already had a virile, guardhouse atmosphere. Mothers, young women and the elderly were all downing glasses of alcohol, cheerfully exchanging insults and curses from one table to another in an incomprehensible dialect. The matron behind the counter greeted him like a long-lost friend and served him a glass of some corrosive liquid that he had the unfortunate idea of tossing back in one go. She refilled it immediately, clapping him vigorously on the shoulder to encourage it down: ‘Drink up, handsome traveller, in these parts you can’t leave your glass full for long,’ she said to him in French.

All eyes in the place were fixed upon him.

The older women were nudging the younger ones with their elbows, bawling in their drunken, rasping voices . . . Krog pa gavi ... Krogpa gavi ... Whereupon everybody howled with laughter, their faces buried in their glasses.

He had barely finished his second pot when an enormous man who looked to have stepped straight out of some local legend, made a thunderous entrance. Jules recognised him as the local priest from the robes he was wearing. The man castigated Jules’ young female companion in furious Breton dialect, grabbing Jules authoritatively to haul him from the bar and back to the presbytery.

‘An unaccompanied man should not be loitering here, it’s not suitable,’ he growled darkly.

‘What a place, upon my word! Never have I seen the likes of such a place and God knows I’ve seen my fair share,’ said Jules, a radiant smile on his lips. ‘They’re all saying the same thing . . . Krogpagavi . . . Is that the name they’ve given me?’