Dumbfounded peasants watch them pass. They are thrown a handful of coins, which they fight over. Some of the inhabitants come up and kiss Gilles’s hand or foot. The troop passes by a group of children playing in the dust. Gilles watches them passionately, holding his horse’s bridle. He makes a sign to his servant Poitou. With the tip of his whip he indicates one of the boys.

‘That one!’

Poitou goes towards the wrong one.

‘The fair-haired one holding the ball?’

Gilles is getting impatient.

‘No, no, you fool, the red-haired one who is doing nothing!’

Next day, a horseman is seen giving money to some artisans. The young red-head is there with his bundle of clothes, happy at the thought of going away. The boy is helped up on to the horse. They gallop off. The weeping mother makes the sign of the cross. The father counts over the money again.

There was also talk of a kind of witch. She was called Perrine Martin. But she was nicknamed La Meffraye (she who arouses fear). Passing through a village, she attracted the attention of a young boy, luring him like a young animal with a piece of cake or bacon to some deserted place. There men in ambush threw themselves upon him, bound and gagged him, and carried him off in a sack.

Then there was the case of the boy who resisted and had a good pair of legs. His parents had sold him to Gilles’s men, but he ran away from home. They looked for him in vain. Gilles, bitterly disappointed, dashed off in pursuit, with a pack of hounds. What exhilaration he felt recapturing those former pleasures, but this time hunting a human prey! Indeed it was a classic chase, with breaking cover, beating, getting ahead, and finally the pack baying at the foot of a beech tree, with the little boy perched in its branches.

The most terrible of these stories that were passed on in hushed tones was later to become part of the treasury of French fairy tales.

It begins in the wretched hovel of a woodcutter and his family. This tiny space swarms with seven children, three pairs of twins and a last child, who is so puny that he is called Poucet, or Tom Thumb in the English version of the tale. The parents have the bestial faces that poverty gives to those who are not saints. The wife’s filthy apron fails to hide her swelling belly. The husband pats her belly and says with a snigger: ‘As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always been making us another pair of brats!’

The woman shakes him off.

‘So with these here we’ll have some more. And anyway you talk as if you have nothing to do with it.’

He laughs a self-satisfied male laugh.

‘With you, I only have to touch you and, hey presto!, that’s another two.’

‘Yes, and we then have to see how we are going to feed them,’ the woman reminds him.

‘They’re grown-up now, they can look after themselves.’

‘Poucet is only just six.’

‘Then the good God that sent them to us can look after them ― or if he doesn’t want to, then he can come and take them back!’

‘Leave the good God out of it, will you!’

Soon afterwards the whole family goes off to the woods. Animals, large and small, stand stock-still, on the alert, observing them through the copses and foliage. They wind their way through the woods to a small clearing, where, growling in the forest people’s dialect, the father hands round small baskets, plus a few clouts for those who complain of tiredness. They then disperse to pick mushrooms and bilberries. When the last of them has disappeared, the man makes a sign to the mother, who responds with a gesture of protest. He takes her forcefully by the arms and leads her off. Later, the children meet up again in the clearing. They are exhausted and hungry. They are surrounded on all sides by terrifying animal cries ― owls, foxes and wolves.