If you came to visit us for the first time, you might think that our tiny village of Cansal in the Fenouillèdes, surrounded completely by sloping vineyards, is as dead as a dodo.  No shops, no café, no trains, no buses, no classified "Monument Historique" - nothing except the daily visits of the breadman (Mondays excepted) and postlady.

"Not very stimulating here is it!" said one of our recent townie visitors from England not long after his arrival.  He soon changed his mind - as soon,  in fact, as he had set eyes on the said postlady, Élise, whom he declared to be "seriously pretty". Admittedly Cansal (where my wife and I are the only permanently resident expats) does seem like the back of beyond.

"Voilà!" he declaimed, pointing to four small, neatly tended graves.  Lined up beside each other are his first wife, his first mistress, his second wife and his second mistress. The story goes that his third wife was 50 years younger than himself: anAlgerian desperate to obtain French residency and therefore willing tomarry him. Trouble was that when our Henri claimed his marital rights, all hell was let loose when she tried to refuse. She ended up spending a week in hospital. However, she didn't press charges against him for marital rape.

Henri now lives alone with a geriatric dog (permanently tied up in his garage, as is often the case round here) and one solitary surviving hen.

Almost as amorous, it seems, is Mme Boudau. She has three children each by a different man, though the third father now seems to be a fixture. It does seem that in general French women are much more direct than English women in broaching sexual relations. A local English friend of mine was staggered when, after inviting a French lady d'un certain age to lunch, he offered to take her out for a post-prandial walk.  "Is that all that's on offer?" she asked rather peevishly.  Any single man in his sixties round here is besieged with offers from rampant or money-loving mesdames.

There are many other tales of village love. Take Jean-Pierre, for instance, and his reported "trentaine de femmes" ("thirty women").

Then there's Maribelle, a high-powered academic, and her Jean-Paul, a quiet chap content to drift along through life.  Maribelle returned home from a summer conference to find him in bed with a young itinerant grape picker he'd met during the vendange.  Maribelle left, but things didn't work out with the grape picker, so Jean-Paul is now on his own, looking rather forlorn.

The locals here are very pragmatic about broken relationships.  When my second wife left me, the conversation in the bread queue went something like this:

Mme Deneuville: Where is your wife?
Me: She's left me.
She: Silly woman. You must find another wife soon to look after you.

As you can see, the older women round here are unreconstructed. They see their role in life as getting a good dinner on the table for their men at  noon sharp.

The village has the obligatory lesbian couple, one of whom was born here.  Her bewildered mother confided to my wife how sad she was when her daughter came home with a new girl friend rather than a nice young man!

The saddest tale of village love is that of Cyrile, a quiet man in his late forties. Born and bred in the village, he lived for several years with Janine, a northern "outsider", before they married about 6 years ago. Alas, she left him on a very snowy day in January.  A few days later, on a Monday morning, Cyrile went to work as usual at the winery in the next village, filling plastic bags full of wine and putting them in boxes. As usual he came back to Cansal for "le diner" with his mother soon after noon.  But when he didn't turn up as expected, she rang his house round the corner, twice. No replies.