The maid in the well

Monique pokes at the stone well with a stick. No buckets have been cranked down and back up its round walls for years. But boarded up it has proved a useful shelf on which she keeps a collection of cactus plants, a large glass jar, some blue string and a thermometer.

She tells us how all the local wells, some of which run tens of metres into the ground, have been covered over for years. Then she tells us a story.

It was the early 1900s and her grandparents had a maid - la bonne - a village girl who discovered to her horror that she was pregnant Not wanting to bring shame upon her family she decided to take her own life by jumping down a well.

“It was common,” Monique tells us. “The girls did not know what else to do.”

So la bonne found herself a well some way from the village. And one early summer morning she slipped off her wooden sabots, climbed onto the wall and threw herself down.

But she didn’t go far.

Her skirt billowed up like a parachute, jamming her between the stone walls. The terrified girl found herself suspended in the dark, dank vertical tunnel. Frozen between the blue sky high above and the dingy depths below.

Monique wasn’t sure how long she was there for, it could well have been all day. But labourers eventually heard her cries, saw her worn wooden clogs and hauled her out.

“So la bonne had her baby and went back to work,” said Monique. “And it was never mentioned again.”