He returned to the business at hand. "They tell me you want a table."

I had made a detailed drawing of our table, marking all the measurements carefully in meters and centimeters. For someone with the artistic flair of a five-year-old, it was a masterpiece. Pierrot looked at it briefly, squinting at the figures, and shook his head.

"Non. For a piece of stone this size, it needs to be twice as thick. Also, your base would collapse-pouf!-in five minutes, because the top will weigh…" he scribbled some calculations on my drawing "… between three and four hundred kilos." He turned the paper over, and sketched on the back. "There. That's what you want." He pushed the sketch across to us. It was much better than mine, and showed a graceful monolith: simple, square, well proportioned. "A thousand francs, including delivery."

We shook hands on it, and I promised to come back later in the week with a check. When I did, it was at the end of a working day, and I found that Pierrot had changed color. From the top of his trilby down to his boots he was stark white, dusted all over as though he had been rolling in confectioner's sugar, the only man I have ever seen who aged twenty-five years in the course of a working day. According to our friends, whose information I didn't entirely trust, his wife ran the vacuum cleaner over him every night when he came home, and all the furniture in his house, from armchairs to bidets, was made from stone.

At the time, it was easy enough to believe. Deep winter in Provence has a curiously unreal atmosphere, the combination of silence and emptiness creating the feeling that you are separated from the rest of the world, detached from normal life. We could imagine meeting trolls in the forest or seeing two-headed goats by the light of a full moon, and for us it was a strangely enjoyable contrast to the Provence we remembered from summer holidays. For others, winter meant boredom or depression, or worse; the suicide rate in the Vaucluse, so we were told, was the highest in France, and it became more than a statistic when we heard that a man who lived two miles from us had hanged himself one night.