The village is less strange to me now. Its inhabitants too. I am beginning to know faces, names; the first secret skeins of histories twisting together to form the umbilical which will eventually bind us. It is a more complex place than its geography at first suggests, the Rue Principale forking off into a hand-shaped branch of laterals – Rue des Poetes, Avenue des Francs Bourgeois, Ruelle des Freres de la Revolution – someone amongst the town planners had a fierce republican streak: My own square, Place Saint-Jerome, is the culmination of these reaching fingers, the church standing white and proud in an oblong of linden trees, the square of red shingle where the old men play petanque on fine evenings: Behind it, the hill falls away sharply towards that region of narrow streets collectively called Les Marauds.

This is Lansquenet's tiny slum, close half-timbered houses staggering down the uneven cobbles towards the Tannes. Even there it is some distance before the houses give way to marshland; some are built on the river itself on platforms of rotting wood, dozens flank the stone embankment, long fingers of damp reaching towards their small high windows from the sluggish water. In a town like Agen, Les Marauds would attract tourists for its quaintness and rustic decay. But here there are no tourists. The people of Les Marauds are scavengers, living from what they can reclaim from the river. Many of their houses are derelict; elder trees grow from the sagging walls. I closed La Praline for two hours at lunch and Anouk and I went walking down towards the river. A couple of skinny children dabbled in the green mud by the waterside; even in February there was a mellow stink of sewage and rot. It was cold but sunny, and Anouk was wearing her red woollen coat and hat, racing along the stones and shouting to Pantoufle scampering in her wake. I have become so accustomed to Pantouffe – and to the rest of the strange menagerie which she trails in her bright wake – that at such times I can almost see him clearly; Pantoufle with his grey-whiskered face and wise eyes, the world suddenly brightening as if by a strange transference I have become Anouk, seeing with her eyes, following where she travels. At such times I feel I could die for love of her, my little stranger; my heart swelling dangerously so that the only release is to run too, my red coat flapping around my shoulders like wings, my hair a comet's tail in the patchy blue sky.

A black cat crossed my path and I stopped to dance around it widdershins and to sing the rhyme:

Ou va-t-i, mistigri?

Passe sans faire de mal ici.

Anouk joined in and the cat purred, rolling over into the dust to be stroked. I bent down and saw a tiny old woman watching me curiously from the angle of a house. Black skirt, black coat, grey hair coiled and plaited into a neat, complex bun. Her eyes were sharp and black as a bird's. I nodded to her.

`You're from the chocolaterie,' she said. Despite her age which I took to be eighty, maybe more – her voice was brisk and strongly accented with the rough lilt of the Midi.

`Yes, I am.’

I gave my name.

`Armande Voizin,' she said. `That's my house over there.’

She nodded towards one of the river-houses, this one in better repair than the rest, freshly whitewashed and with scarlet geraniums in the window boxes. Then, with a smile which worked her apple-doll face into a million wrinkles, she said, `I've seen your shop. Pretty enough, I'll grant you that, but no good to folks like us. Much too fancy.’

There was no disapproval in her voice as she spoke, but a half laughing fatalism.

'I hear our m'sieur le cure already has it in for you,' she added maliciously. 'I suppose he thinks a chocolate shop is inappropriate in his square.’

She gave me another of those quizzical, mocking glances. `Does he know you're a witch?’ she asked.

Witch, witch. It's the wrong word, but I knew what she meant.

`What makes you think that?’

'Oh, it's obvious. Takes one to know one, I expect,' and she laughed, a sound like violins gone wild. 'M'sieur le Cure doesn't believe in magic,' she said. `Tell you the truth, I wouldn't be so sure he even believes in God.’

There was indulgent contempt in her voice. `He has a lot to learn, that man, even if he has got a degree in theology. And my silly daughter too. You don't get degrees in life, do you?’

I agreed that you didn't, and enquired whether I knew her daughter.

`I expect so. Caro Clairmont. The most empty-headed piece of foolishness in all of Lansquenet. Talk, talk, talk, and not a particle of sense.’

She saw my smile and nodded cheerily. `Don't worry, dear, at my age nothing much ends me any more. And she takes after her father, you know. That's a great consolation.’

She looked at me quizzically. `You don't get much entertainment around here,' she observed. `Especially if you're old.’

She paused and peered at me again. `But with you I think maybe we're in for a ' little amusement.’

Her hand brushed mine like a cool breath. I tried to catch her thoughts, to see if she was making fun of me, but ail I felt was humour and kindness.

`It's only a chocolate shop,' I said with a smile.

Armande Voizin chuckled. `You really must think I was born yesterday,' she observed.

`Really, Madame Voizin-' `Call me Armande.’

The black eyes snapped with amusement. `It makes me feel young.’

`All right. But I really don't see why-' 'I know what wind you blew in on,' said Armande keenly. `I felt it. Mardi Gras, carnival day. Les Marauds was full of carnival people; gypsies, Spaniards, tinkers, pieds-noirs and undesirables. I knew you at once, you and your little girl what are you calling yourselves this time?r 'Vianne Rocher.’

I smiled. `And this is Anouk., 'Anouk,' repeated Armande softly. `And the little grey friend – my eyes aren't as good as they used to be – what is it? A cat? A squirrel?’

Anouk shook her curly head. `He's a rabbit,' she said with cheery scorn. `Called Pantoufle.”

' `Oh, a rabbit. Of course.’

Armande gave me a sly wink. `You see, I know what wind you blew in on. I've felt it myself once or twice. I may be old, but no-one can pull the wool over my eyes. No-one at all.’

I nodded. `Maybe that's true,' I said. `Come over to La Praline one day; I know everyone's favourite. I'll treat you to a big box of yours.’

Armande laughed. `Oh, I'm not allowed chocolate. Caro and that idiot doctor won't allow it. Or anything else I might enjoy,' she added wryly. `First smoking, then alcohol, now this… God knows, if I gave up breathing perhaps I might live for ever.’

She gave a snort of laughter, but it had a tired sound, and I saw her raise a hand to her chest in a clutching gesture eerily reminiscent of Josephine Muscat. `I'm not blaming them, exactly,' she said. `It's just their way. Protection – from everything. From life. From death.’

She gave a grin which was suddenly very gamine in spite of the wrinkles.

`I might call in to see you anyway,' she said. `If only to annoy the cure.’

I pondered her last remark for some time after she disappeared behind the angle of the whitewashed house. Some distance away Anouk was throwing stones onto the mud flats at the riverbank.

The cure. It seemed his name was never far from the lip's. For a moment I considered Francis Reynaud.

In a place like Lansquenet it sometimes happens that one person – schoolteacher, cafe proprietor, or priest forms the lynchpin of the community. That this single individual is the essential core of the machinery which turns lives, like the central pin of a clock mechanism, sending wheels to turn wheels, hammers to strike, needles to point the hour. If the pin slips or is damaged, the clock stops. Lansquenet is like that clock, needles perpetually-` frozen at a minute to midnight, wheels and cogs turning uselessly behind the, bland blank face. Set a church clock wrong to fool the devil, my mother always told me. But in this case I suspect the devil is not fooled. Not for a minute.