As she studied the view, she wondered whether the trees had been there back then, the walnut and oaks in particular, whether the hills had looked the same and which crops had been grown here. The worn patterns of leaves and grapes carved in the stone door lintels suggested that there had been grapevines once, probably before the phylloxera outbreak, but what happened after that? Who lived there in the thirties, or the fifties, or even before? She didn’t have the faintest idea, but it was important that she know. She was trying to soak up the atmosphere of the place. When you stay in a hotel room – the coldest, most impersonal type of accommodation – you never think about who occupied it before you; in fact, you really don’t want to know. But when you’re renting a house, especially an old, isolated one, and you’re trying to paint it, you delve into time without realising. It’s an intimate process that takes you back to the forgotten existences that once filled the house with life. Lise wanted to know everything about the people who had lived in the house before them, the bodies that had slept there and loved there. She was sure that she was the first to paint and daydream about it so vividly, that nobody else had ever chosen to depict that landscape, asking themselves questions about the spirit of the place but also about everybody who had lived there … The paint on her brush had dried.