Couderc had read enough books not to give too much credence to those beliefs, and if it is said that travel educates children, reading is even more important because it teaches you to see the world from lots of different points of view. Couderc understood that the animals up above frightened the villagers and he did his utmost to counteract their beliefs and superstitions. People always used to listen to Couderc, but once they realised that he couldn’t say whether the war would end soon or go on, they understood that all his knowledge had no power to change things. Their instinct told them that power came from a higher source than man.

The mountain had been damned long before the lion tamer settled there, but obviously the fact that this false Noah had come to live there was no coincidence. It was proof that he was damned too. And the fact was that, since his arrival, everything had gone wrong. And they missed what they had had – plentiful food, farm animals. And most of all they missed the voices of the absent men. Since the German had been there, fatigue and privation combined to poison everything. Even if it was unfair to hold him responsible, they needed a scapegoat. As their troubles mounted and they saw there was nothing they could do about it, the German provided an outlet for their feelings of powerlessness. They genuinely believed he was responsible for the shadow cast over them until midday, and the shadow was a worse punishment than damnation. When they raised their fists, they weren’t aiming at the the heavens but at the black summit to curse the Hun. He had chosen that spot, which showed he was the emissary of the curse from the east, and since all war was a conflagration, this Hun and his lions had brought conflagration to their door. He and his beasts had not come by chance; they had come to spread hell.

August 2017

August 2017

By the end of the second day, they had established a routine. Franck woke up at seven in the morning like the day before. He got up to adjust the blinds to stop the dazzling daylight from flooding the room. The bedroom was bathed in soft light as the sun slipped between the slats of the old wooden shutters, giving the impression of a beautiful summer’s morning, soothing and cool. He went back to bed but didn’t really fall asleep again and, as on the first day, got up at nine.

When he went downstairs he was appalled to think he had once more slept in a house that was wide open to the four winds, without an alarm or any protection. In the city, he would never have dreamed of going to sleep without even locking the door. And it wasn’t certain that there was more to fear at home than here amongst the hills.