'Tak-Tak'

Posters glued to lampposts, telegraph poles and the commune notice board have been advertising tonight’s performance for weeks. A string of coloured lights has been looped across the street, wooden fences bar the traffic and children run between two rows of orange plastic chairs reserved for the village’s elderly.

A travelling troupe from Nantes, two thin, wild-haired redheads, and two men in top hats, have parked their painted van in the square. The men wheel out a shabby upright piano. The women put on their make-up in front of a bed-sheet backdrop, changing into their costumes behind a wobbly clothes rail.

The commune has organised a make-shift bar and there’s tinny, taped accordion music coming from two speakers outside the church.

The show is lively; the men in the top hats perform magic tricks and the redheads belt out chansons and sing saucy tales about young country lovers.

Stephane rolls towards us, arms held wide. He’s pleased to stop and say hello, catch up with our news, tell us his own.

Wind-worn walnut brown, ash-haired and stringy-armed, he’s still a striking man.

He has lived in the village all his life; he’s been a postman, mechanic - he’s tried his hand at a few things.

He married Marie-Christine, a farmer’s daughter, and together they had four handsome sons. Like many Frenchmen of his generation, he wasn’t around for much of their young lives.

“It was the 1950s and the government kept sending me off to fight in Algeria,” he tells us. “Every time I came back on leave I only had to look at my wife and ‘tak-tak’; nine months later another one was born.”

Marie-Christine, a tanned, handsome handful of a countrywoman crosses the road. She still turns the neighbours’ heads, still raises a few elderly eyebrows.

Stephane’s eyes mist over as he looks at her; it could be one-too-many glasses of rough red wine from the make-shift bar. But we know that it’s love.

“Yes, she’s old: I am too,” he says. “But, what you young ones don’t understand is that there’s still many a good stew to be made in a old cooking pot.”

He winks at us, takes his wife’s hand and they dance away to the music and into the night.