The barking started again, louder this time, but coming from even further away. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t give in to fear, or worry about anything ever again, nor would she allow herself to be affected by life’s various disappointments and failures. Though she sometimes noticed that fate had not been kind to her, she did her best to live in the moment, like now, appreciating how lucky she was to be able to paint in this remote spot, to be alone, to look around and quite simply to breathe. Of course meditation is good, but it’s like a wall that always sends you back to yourself. On the other hand, painting for hours is a very real kind of meditation and at the end you have something to show for it. As she stood on the balcony of this house amid an ocean of hills, she realised that a house is a sort of living organism that feeds on the space around it. First it receives water, then it collects it in gutters and transfers it into a tank or pipes; in winter it feeds off the wood in the forest for heating, consuming entire trees year after year, as well as the fruit and vegetables growing around it. A house is a body that claims everything around it: rainwater, heat, sun, flowers, fruit. A house swallows everything up … At that point, Lise noticed the black cable that led to the house, coming from the wooden post next to it. It must be the electric wire. If it was a telephone wire, she would cut it …

Her obsessive fear of the telephone also stemmed from the fact that one day it had stopped ringing. People had stopped calling after her illness, and the phone had turned into a deadly, accusatory reminder of that. It had been quite the opposite before, when she had been fed up hearing it constantly ringing or vibrating. Then one day it fell silent. At least she was uncontactable here, happily unaware whether anyone was calling her or not. She felt a slight anxiety though as she heard barking again, coming from far in the distance this time. Were they being attacked by stray dogs or wolves? Did wolves bark like that?

They had almost finished the final ascent, taking them to the high ground above the igue. The strange barking returned. Franck wondered if it was coming from behind them, near the house. The worst thing about it was that the cries didn’t sound like anything, apart from perhaps a stray dog or a jackal, or a lynx even.

‘What’s that?’

‘Wolves! No, I’m joking. I’ve no idea – foxes maybe.’

‘Oh yeah, because foxes bark …’

‘Anything is possible around here. There were even lions once.’

‘Jesus, what are you trying to do? Freak us out?’