Secrets of the tomb....

Image by daisee via Flickr

The eve of All Saints' was not marked by trick or treating in my area of La France Profonde, not even on the little modern housing estate on the edge of the village.
No child in its right mind would brave the wrath of the farm dogs and no parent in its right mind would risk Papy - once apprised of what was required of him - 'treating' a child to a glass of gnole at eighty per cent proof.

Not that the day was unmarked. People who normally lived a troglodyte life behind their shutters were seen at the cemetery with cleaning materials for Tante's tomb....municipal employees were tidying up the alleys and the water tap was finally repaired in preparation for the avalanche of chrysanthemums to be brought by relatives on November 1st.
I liked the feast of All Saints. One week afterwards, the municipal employees would dispose of the wilted chrysanthemums and I would visit the dump to collect the flower pots which were, at that time, both hard to find and expensive.

Normally the cemeteries were deserted.....I could wander about looking at the tombs...everything from a simple slab with lettering half obliterated by time to gothic style mausolea with wrought iron and massive locks very much in evidence.
I often used to wonder whether it was to keep someone out or to keep someone in.
Celebrating the passing of mother in law by the purchase of a very sturdy iron lock in her memory...

In one graveyard a few villages away a stroll to the edge backing on to the fields would revel a heap of earth with bones....which used to set me thinking about the habit of only being able to rent a grave these days...forget eternal rest, when your thirty or fifty years is up, out you go.

Of  course, every commune would set its own rate for tomb hire, communes with old peoples' homes being particularly suspect...and that, linked to detailed study of the prices proposed by the funeral directors...the 'pompes funebres'....could give rise to unseemly incidents.

Thus the gendarmes who came across a van in a ditch before the driver could rouse a local farmer with a tractor to pull him out.
They were somewhat surprised and decidedly put out to discover a corpse neatly wrapped up in the back.
It would mean Paperwork on the grand scale.
Worse, when the driver appeared it was clear that he had been drinking.
He explained.
The corpse was his Tante Marcelle who had died at his mother's home, where she had been looked after for years.....but the price of a plot was exorbitant...and as for the price of the local undertakers!
So the family decided that she should appear to have died in her old village where she still had a house...and a plot, bought in the lifetime of her deceased husband.
And he had drawn the short straw to provide the transport.

Why didn't you just get the local undertaker to take her body there, then?
Well, have you seen what he charges!
Well, what about the undertaker in her village?
It's the same firm! They're everywhere! You should see what it costs for the refrigerated bed!
What do you want that for?
Well, it's hot, and people don't want funny smells when they're paying their respects...we can't do without the bed, but we thought if we could just economise a bit on the transport...

The gendarmes had alternatives.....one of which involved Paperwork and one which didn't.
A call to their barracks confirmed the family relationship of driver and corpse...and the van was allowed to go on its way.
And this is not back in the dark ages of Monsieur Untel...this was only a couple of years before I left France!

It's a good job the family were not thinking of economising on a cremation......in that department there is now a ban on bonfires in the garden.....all compostable items must be taken to the local recycling plant as it is euphemistically known.
How it is supposed to help the environment to use litres of fuel to drive kilometres to the gyppo headquarters...which is what these sites have become....to dump your prunings rather than burn them yourself and have the ash for your garden is beyond me, but, as usual with France, if there's a box it has to be ticked.

Being of a generation that saved its bawbees, I think I would definitely prefer to go up in a pyre of apple wood in my own garden than to form an element of a spontaneous combustion in the compost skip at the local dump, but, of course, no one will ask me.