Solitude in France

The road to Bénivay-Ollon leads to nowhere else. It winds up the valley along the course of the shallow Ayguemarse river, between craggy limestone outcrops and emerald-green forest, to a village of 66 souls. In summer the cicadas are insistent and the warm air is infused with the scent of wild rosemary. In winter morning dew gathers on the grass, and Mediterranean pines gleam defiantly in the watery light. The village boasts no café, no shop, no post office, no boulangerie. Nobody passes through it by chance or even design. A visiting priest arrives up the road to celebrate mass at the church just twice a year. Once through the village, the road twists up to a ford over the water, and thenceforth turns into a dirt track that disappears into the forest. Perched improbably on a sheer-edged rock, accessible only by foot, the tiny 13th-century stone chapel of Saint Jean watches over the valley like a sentinel. On a bright June morning, Daniel Charrasse is to be found outside the mairie, or town hall. Aged 73, a slight figure with thinning silver hair, he is a retired apricot farmer who was born down the road and grew up in the village. He is now the mayor, a role treated locally more as an elder than a politician. At the most recent municipal election, 39 voters dropped his name into the ballot box. That was 87% of those cast. For much of the post-war period, Monsieur Charrasse’s father Germain, who also grew apricots in the valley, was mayor. And in the 1920s so was Germain’s uncle, Camille.
Tradition and loss are baked into the land in this isolated corner of France, which lies in the folds of mountains between the foothills of the Alps and the Mediterranean hinterland. Five years before the first world war broke out, Monsieur Charrasse’s great-grandfather Florent, born in the village in 1837, died, leaving his wife to run the farm with their four boys. When Germany declared war on France, all four sons were sent from the orchards and olive groves of the Ayguemarse valley to the mud and horror of the front, nearly 1,000km (621 miles) away. Paul, their second son, never made it back.
Paul was killed on the battlefield in the Vosges mountains in August 1914, during the first bloody weeks of war. He was one of six villagers who lost their lives, their names engraved in stone on the wall next to the town hall. Albert, Daniel’s grandfather, and his two other brothers, Elie and Camille, all returned home to the valley, married and settled there. Albert’s veteran’s card shows a dapper young man with neat hair, in a wool jacket and waistcoat. Today their graves lie in Charrasse family plots in the square walled cemetery, a quiet spot up on the hillside, lined by cypress trees.