The rain had eased off and the air was cool after the hail. In the end, the hunters had smoked three more cigarettes. Franck hadn’t had a single one, yet his head was spinning from the smoke and the stories and he was in a daze, like a child giddy from too many bedtime stories. He was moved that he could finally put lives, if not faces, to the house. And if there are places that mould you, places that are associated with your childhood and shape you in their image, then there are others you discover later in life, when you’re older, that change you. Franck could feel a common history linking him to two people he had only just discovered, two people he would never meet but who had lived within the same walls, two strangers whose first names and fates he now knew. He felt close to them for the simple reason that they had known the same landscapes as him and Lise, the same silences in the morning and evening, the same land. They were proof that when it comes down to it, peace is not possible in this world, and there is no such thing as a peaceful life. Half the sheep had thrown themselves off the cliff, Wolfgang had been forced to kill his lions, and the tigers had been lost. They must have been killed by other people, unless they were still on the run in the minds of some, as lost legends.

‘There are even some people who say they went down to the village the next day and ate everyone, and that’s why the village was burnt down. But that’s all bullshit; I think it was the opposite. I think the farmers around here ate the beasts.’

‘And the tamer? Did he stay here for the rest of the war?’

‘Yes, they both stayed up there. They bred sheep to build up the flock again, and the tamer took apart the cage near his house and built one in the igue, the one that’s still there now. He used to catch loads of deer and wild boar with it, and he fed the whole village until the war ended.’

‘And then?’