Anybody who has travelled across the large, beautiful, essentially reclusive countryside of France has been to it, in one of its thousand variants. In the language of bureaucracy, it is the chef-lieu of a Commune: the basic, untranslatable unit of French local government that is presided over by its own elected mayor. The Commune is home to some six hundred people, but that includes the population of a dozen outlying farm-hamlets as well. In the village itself there is a fine church dating from the thirteenth century but much altered since, a Mairie built after 1870 which used to house the boys’ school as well but does no longer, and a modern primary school for both sexes constructed out of the girls’ school that was the latest thing in the 1900s. There is a diminutive post office, open four hours a day, where a new centralized computer performs manoeuvres to do with pensions and electricity that a few years ago were achieved just as efficiently with handwritten entries in small books.
