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chat. That would help pass the time!’ Behind the joke lay the country assumption that the dead do not at once become physically remote and other as they do in cities. The transition from working the land to lying beneath it is natural, almost matter of fact, and there is a corresponding aversion to the idea of being buried far off in alien soil. In the days before the funeral the person continues to lie on his own bed – though in his best suit – and is brought to the burial ground on a hand-wheeled bier with a great, placid crowd of known people, in their own best suits and coats, following behind.
    Yet the realities of physical change and decay too are inescapable in the country. At some point the imagination has to relinquish the person, to consign him to a different dimension. Is this why rural French cemeteries are so oddly formal and, to English eyes, graceless compared with what lies all around them? The English notion of the graveyard itself as a place where sheep may safely graze, derived from centuries of Protestant psalm-singing, does not appeal to the Latin tradition. Chassignolles’ cemetery has a fine view down a small valley, across a rivulet, towards the setting sun, but it is an enclosure of dust, neatly raked, of stone chippings, polished slabs, dirty glass and rusting iron. Not only grass but free-growing plants and trees are taboo.
    Perhaps, simply, those who work close to nature all their lives do not prize it: for their memorials they want something more deliberate, some artefact. It has been explained to me that a sheaf of wild flowers, however exquisite, will not do to lay on the grave of old Madame Chose. The Chose family, if they are not to feel slighted, will expect a formal sheaf from the florist in La Châtre or, better, a plant in a pot. Or, better still, a brightly coloured artificial bloom that does not fade: the immortality of the spirit tastefully symbolized by cerise and viridian plastic. One may also contribute to a stone plaque, with a strut like a framed photograph, saying ‘To our beloved Aunt’, ‘To a much regretted Neighbour’, ‘In memory of a dear Godmother’, or whatever sentiment is appropriate. Some graves have a permanent array of these plaques as on a dressing-table and this has inevitably become a worldly status symbol of the respect and affection the defunct commanded in life.
    But some do not. ‘There is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at the last.’ It took me a long time to find the Chaumette family vault, mainly because the black granite slab with the names had become detached from its cross and was lying in pieces in the eroded, flowerless dust. Laboriously I reassembled most of the bits.
    Célestine was there. And Charles her son. And Charles’s daughter Zénaïde. Also mentioned were Célestine’s father and mother.
    Zénaïde was born in 1895 and died in 1954. So, as I had been told, she was not quite sixty when her Australian painter lost her. I remembered Bernardet saying to us with one of his elegant turns of phrase, when the old painter was still alive but becoming forgetful, ‘It would be best if he were to die here, really. The one who was his companion is in the cemetery’ – ‘Celle qui était sa compagne est dans le cimetière’. But chance fell otherwise, and the old man died at last a long way from the patch of French earth he had made his own.
    Zénaïde’s father was born in 1865 and died in 1934, so he too did not make really old bones. He survived his mother, but only just. For Célestine, I saw, almost reached ninety. Born in 1844, she lived on until 1933.
    It is a vertiginous stretch of time. Célestine entered a world where not even cart tracks but just narrow footpaths linked villages like Chassignolles to the outside world, and measures of distance were expressed in terms of how far