Is everything fine? Can I tell you my dreams and nightmares from this morning? From very early this morning? If I tell you what time it is you’ll go nuts.

You remember my mission, my contract, Natale’s kiss on the cheek on condition that I persuade my grandfather Cassanu? I didn’t back out, I arranged a meeting, a business meeting and Papé accepted. At Arcanu, that didn’t surprise me, but at five in the morning!

When my parents never usually see me out of bed before midday.

Five in the morning? Well, Papé, I went there, not knowing what to expect.

I must tell you, my discreet and patient reader, that I have experienced some extraordinary feelings during this holiday, as if everything were oscillating each day between the worst, these pages I’ve blackened with spiders’ webs woven from the lies of grown-ups, and the best, like swimming with dolphins, and what I’m experiencing today, feeling free and light, so free and light that I could catch the clouds and pull the tails of the golden eagles.

Shall I tell you everything?

So, at five in the morning, long before dawn, Papé was waiting for me in the yard at Arcanu, by the foot of the oak tree, walking stick in hand, binoculars around his neck, which he then placed around mine.

‘Look.’

He made me look along the line of the crest, towards the south, in the direction of Asco, above Notre Dame de la Serra, and higher again.

A cross. Or what remained of it.

‘We’re going to sit and talk beneath that cross, Clotilde. Are you ready?’

And he looked with amusement at my Guns ’n’ Roses sweatshirt and my trainers.

I pretended to sprint off.

‘Shall I wait for you up there?’

It didn’t take me long to slow down.

Seven hundred and three metres! And you might say that we were starting at sea level.

A four-hour climb, gentle at first, then steeper and steeper and, right at the end, a sheer slope for the last two hundred metres, with me ending up on all fours like a mountain goat. Papé barely said a word the whole way up. Just a pause for a snack, some goat’s cheese and coppa, half-way up, just as the sun rose behind Cap Corse. It looked like a set from one of Tolkien’s books. A big iron ring rising above a long limestone finger.

While I’m writing to you, I’ve calmed down. My heart has returned to a normal rhythm, my thighs are starting to obey me again, my feet aren’t trembling any more and my head isn’t spinning.