Mr Bernard pointed out to Mme El who hadn’t looked at it that way, was from a village on a local river, a post-Great war child, together with a sister, his other brother and sister predating the war, and Mme El thinks that her mother-in-law can’t have been best pleases, given the difficult economic situation, at this new arrival.
Still, there he was, a family member, hard-working like the others, a hard life in fact and never a penny in his pocket, Mme El’s father had to see to that. Mme El wouldn’t have had him, had he not accepted to come and live with them. She for one would never have moved into the rough surroundings in the hills, farming beef, selling it on the market in Mirepoix³Mirepoix is situated in the Hers valley between Carcassonne and Pamiers. Oc-name Mirapeis, meaning ‘look at the fish’, the city’s coat of arms carries a fish, later Frenchified to Mirepoix which associates ‘fish’ with darkness, ‘poix’ meaning pitch  (black)., working in the woods producing fire-wood for sale and gathering chestnuts for the same purpose.
Fortunately Mr Bernard didn’t mind adapting himself to a life of dairy-farming and cereal-growing. He was well-liked by Mme El’s father and especially by her grandmother who, she laughed, would have married him herself! However, on the one hand easy-going, especially in company, on the other as stubborn and as single-minded as anyone, doesn’t Mme El know! A former neighbour who had known them well told me that he was ‘hard’ on her. When I asked Mme El about that, she replied by referring to his penniless youth…
He had this in common with her father: the love of hunting.
Getting up at 4 am to do the milking, so that they could be in time at the hunters’ meeting place, chasing the wild boar in the woods up there, poaching not beyond them, but then nobody minded, as distinct from the small fry available in the fields down here which, however, was not to be disdained, I’m told, hares and young magpies a delicacy and why not thrushes and blackbirds? Her grandmother plucked them and Mme El fried them slowly in olive oil in the ‘cocotte’, the casserole.
No, they weren’t bitter – that’s what Jenny had reported after tasting them in the Dordogne – perfectly eatable, but people nowadays aren’t the same anymore and she cautiously mentions her early memories of catching larks in the fields by means of nets, but that was forbidden a long time ago, she hastens to add. Another point her husband had in common with her father: they were ‘coquins’, rascals, by which she means they liked to look at women! She makes clear that her husband, being provided with one for life, was less prone to this than her father who was unlucky with his marriage from early on, left as he was with a tiny baby daughter on his hands. Mme El is discreet, happy to drop hints, a joke more than anything.
We speak about Mr Bernard almost every time I’m there, for he is there, too, smiling from her wall on a portrait somebody painted of him, ‘béret’ in place, standing behind a ‘compôte de raisins’, the wooden tubs used for the grape harvest, for wine-making out of their own grapes was another thing he learnt from his father-in-law and very well so,
Mme El reckons, her son not as good at it as her husband,
she is sure. When we arrived in the village they had already separate bedrooms because she couldn’t climb the stairs any more. In the morning he used to come down and help her to get dressed and ready for the day. When he was gone forever, she poignantly confided months later that it was his tender morning-greeting which she missed most.
Both he and she had their own dog respectively, hers staying in house and farm-yard with her, his, Mirza, a mixture of all sorts, accompanying the lord and master on his tractor or following the bicycle wherever he went, two bitches with whom I got on very well. Mme El’s dog for all her barking wouldn’t have dreamt of biting me, although she had a reputation in that direction. Mr Bernard’s dog appeared to me in a dream after his demise, running to welcome me. I told Mme El about it in case it could be comforting. ‘C’est du passé, tout ça’, she says, a thing of the past; honestly, life, come to think of it… A film, I say. She still looks non-plussed and who wouldn’t?

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  Mirepoix is situated in the Hers valley between Carcassonne and Pamiers. Oc-name Mirapeis, meaning ‘look at the fish’, the city’s coat of arms carries a fish, later Frenchified to Mirepoix which associates ‘fish’ with darkness, ‘poix’ meaning pitch  (black).