In towns, it seemed women had the right to join their spouses in rest billets, even if only for a few hours, but there was no question of country folk doing the same. There would have been too many papers to fill out and it was too far to travel. Besides, in the village, women didn’t have a second to themselves, between the farmyard and the fields, the kids and the old people, the kitchen and the laundry – how could they waste hours and hours to go and hold their husbands in their arms, travel for days just for a kiss? It would have made no sense. It was proof that the towns were a whole different world, another version of humanity. Here, for love, as for everything else, you had to make do without men.

But knowing that the world kept turning in the men’s absence was no small matter. The women worried that it was sacrilege to be able to live without them, and some, instead of being proud of their work, felt a terrible guilt. So much so that when they learnt that the ewes were disappearing from the pasture above, that every week there were two or three fewer, instead of immediately blaming wolves or the wild cats, the women thought it might be their punishment, retribution for their new-found emancipation. Discovering the disappearance of the sheep, their first intuition was to tell themselves that, had the men been there, nothing so calamitous could have happened. The men would have known what to do to stop the loss of the sheep.

The number of missing ewes rose quite quickly. First there were five, then ten, then, tragically the week after, nearly twenty had gone missing. Everyone in the village started to panic, and because everything tends to get worse when panic sets in, at that rate there would be no sheep left at all when it was time to bring them down again.

It was thanks to Joséphine that everyone knew of the disaster. Every week when she took Le Simple his bread and terrines she always inspected the animals one by one, checking their hooves. Every time she did the count there were two or three fewer.