Attached to the text was a photograph of Valentine with a helmet on, strapped into a harness, perched with a group of teenagers above a spectacular waterfall. There was no reason to worry, there were trained instructors in charge of the canyoning activity, and Valentine was a sporty type. Yet Clotilde couldn’t quite rid herself of the feeling of unease. She put it down to the mysteries that seemed to be piling up around her; the strange, sly pressure they exerted. Franck, who had gone off diving in Galéria for the day, was right on one point at least. She mustn’t brood. She needed to move on.

She walked along the pink gravel path that led to mobile home A31, reputedly the best looked-after in the campsite. The owner had even installed solar panels on the roof, a water-butt and a small wind generator perched on top of a pole, right next to the German flag.

Jakob Schreiber was the oldest resident of the Euproctes campsite. He had first come here with his wife in the early 1960s, a rucksack each and a motorbike between them. Then he had come back in the ’70s, with an Audi 100 and a Canadian tent for three. Their son Hermann had been less than three months old. Then they came back every year, renting mobile home A31 for the first time in 1977 and buying it in 1981. Those were the best years, the ones during which Jakob personalised his plot, cultivated his garden, set up a veranda. From the 1990s onwards, history began to go backwards. First of all Jakob and Anke spent their holidays on their own again, when Hermann turned nineteen and chose to stay on in their flat in Germany, working for a chemical company over the summer months. Then from 2009, when Anke closed her eyes for the last time, Jakob continued to come back to the Euproctes alone, for more than three months a year.

Just as villages always have a knowledgeable old man who preserves their history, and companies have a document-keeper who looks after the archives, in the campsite there was an old tourist who conserved all the pictures.

Almost sixty summers, since 1961.

Jakob had given the most beautiful pictures to the camp managers; they were hung on the walls of the reception, in the bar, under the pergola; pictures in black and white, photographs of women in bikinis from the old days, people dancing on the beach in flares, Franco-German football matches from 1962 until 2014, smiling children, giant barbecues … Jakob Schreiber was a passionate photographer. Inclining towards manic and obsessive. Over time, he had become an almost mute witness.

Jakob Schreiber invited Clotilde in with a slightly old-fashioned courtesy. Most of the walls of his mobile home were covered in large picture-boards displaying hundreds of photographs in no apparent order. Clotilde’s first impulse was to look around at random for the years that interested her, but she refrained out of politeness.